Resisting Digital Gentrification
Following the Met Gala, where the rich and famous paid $75,000 per ticket to see a “Sleeping Beauties” themed museum exhibit and paid unimaginable thousands more for their attire to match the “Garden of Time” dress code, there’s been a backlash against celebrities that has, amazingly, been expressed in tangible form through mass blocking that directly impacts these celebrities’ ad revenues on Meta’s social media platforms.
This is happening at the same time that Meta has changed its verification subscription service so that there are higher priced tiers which list “more” and “most” visibility in people’s feeds as a benefit of the subscription. So many small business owners and creators have been able to make a living using social media by reaching a wider audience that is no longer within reach because Meta’s algorithms push higher-paying clients. Now, if you want to be seen, you have to pay a minimum of $40 a month just to not have your content suppressed, and much more if you want to be featured “more.”
I’m bringing up both of these things because the current “eat the rich” sentiment is just the tip of the iceberg of what we could be talking about. When an Instagram influencer went viral for saying “Let them eat cake” at the Met Gala, I saw a lot of folks pushing back on the notion that this person should be grouped in with the “ultra rich” and “celebrities” because they were “just a regular influencer” who probably crowdfunded her $75K ticket and wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise. I notice this tendency to want to draw lines and create hard and fast categories everywhere. What’s the dollar amount that makes someone “wealthy”? How do you measure how “famous” someone is? What’s the cutoff between being a regular person who is social-media-famous and someone who is sustained by nepotism and major corporations? This need to know where the line is belies a secret belief that ambitions toward wealth and fame in moderation is okay; it’s only at a certain level that you become a villain. Interestingly, Black celebrities are villainized much more quickly than white ones, even though we might consider that wealth accumulation by someone Black is addressing a deep deficit of intergenerational inequality and disenfranchisement while white wealth accumulation is all on top of hereditary assets.
People on the Left were quick to label Kendrick and Drake as distractions from the genocide in Gaza while letting many other white performers off the hook, and then immediately heaped praise on Macklemore when he released a Free Palestine track, “Hind’s Hall.” Some were declaring that Macklemore “won” the rap battle between Kendrick and Drake – even though “who speaks on Palestine first” were not the terms of the battle at all. If they were, then Macklemore would be up against Lowkey, surely. This is something that white people do frequently in order to center themselves, and it’s something I talk about in my book in the context of manipulating historical narratives to make it appear as though white people invented Tarot. Nobody would say Macklemore wins against Kendrick on the grounds of artistry and wordplay, and nobody would say Macklemore wins against Lowkey on the grounds of support for Palestine, and yet Macklemore gets overwhelmingly more support than either Kendrick or Lowkey and is spoken about by white people as if he is superior to both. I certainly love “Hind’s Hall” and I respect him for using his platform, but that doesn’t mean I “stan” Macklemore and it certainly doesn’t mean declaring him the winner of a battle he has nothing to do with.
I can understand people wanting to “train” celebrities by withdrawing support when they don’t speak on genocide and applauding when they do. We’ve been told our role is to vote, and when that doesn’t work, to vote with our dollars, and when that doesn’t work, to vote with our “attention.” But there’s also a real contradiction in saying that “celebrity culture is over” and then uplifting the celebrities who say things you like. It’s reflective of the liberal position that climbing the career ladder and building up your own social and financial status is justified if you are philanthropic in the end. Never mind that “the end” gets pushed further and further off, because the more money you have the more you spend and the more you’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle that costs more to maintain. But getting rich is permissible so long as you are “a good person.” Eat the rich, except for the “good ones.” And that’s how we get so many people refusing to dismantle white supremacy while being performative allies. That’s how we get people who believe they can build personal wealth and security for themselves at others’ expense as long as they have a Black Lives Matter yard sign and rainbows in their social media bios. There are artists making essential contributions to the cultural landscape and we can appreciate them, engage with them critically, and ignore (or block) the ones we don’t care about without labeling whole categories of people as good or bad – because when we do this we tend to fall back on the categories of the overculture, making Black celebrities “more bad” than white ones when we say that anyone with commercial success is “bad.”
It's an old conversation: some people say that to really have an impact and dismantle systems of racialized capitalism, sacrifices will have to be made, and then others come back and say that lowering your standard of living isn’t virtuous and no self-sacrifice is needed, you just have to fight (vote, speak out) for what’s right.
I think a real barrier in this conversation is that very impulse to categorize. People want to know if they are lower, middle or upper class, and they want to know whether or not people mean the middle class when Leftists are talking about the bourgeoisie, and ultimately, they want to know that there is a class they can be in that will be seen as “good” without having to be in a class that suffers. We always want to be able to say that any person or country or company or organization is “good” or “bad.” We do the same thing with physical objects: types of foods, drugs, guns, all kinds of things.
What we most avoid doing is taking a hard line on behaviors. “Good” people can do whatever they want and still be seen as good, while no matter what “bad” people do, it’s wrong. We don’t take a firm stance on behaviors because we recognize that behavior is contextual. We are always justifying our behaviors in service to our identities, and if we can’t spin a behavior in the way we want then we might not be able to hold onto our identity as “good” when we mess up or cause harm. If instead we identify harmful behavior, and don’t make global assumptions about the person or entity doing that behavior, then the focus remains squarely on the behavior itself, and that means if the behavior is bad then it has to stop or be changed. Deflection away from behavior to identity is so common we barely notice it. Assuming certain identities are good and safe while others are bad and dangerous is so common, we barely notice it. And that’s how bombing, displacing and starving hundreds of thousands of people can be seen as “self-defense” against a prison break. That’s how trans men get invited to “women’s” spaces and trans women are excluded. That’s how white people are excused for not knowing any better no matter what vile and offensive things they say when they hold the highest levels of professionalism in their fields, but Zadie Smith is “too smart and talented a writer not to know exactly what she was doing” when she wrote an offensive piece about the student protesters.
So, focusing on behavior and not identity or status – what do we want to see artists doing? What do we want to see politicians doing? What are they actually doing? How are they accumulating the wealth they’re accumulating, if they are? What are they doing or not doing in order to be or become famous? Focusing on behaviors then, in turn, means taking a look in the mirror at our own behaviors. Are we doing the same unacceptable things that the rich and famous are doing, just on a smaller scale that we can justify to ourselves?
This leads me to the question of influencers on social media, and who we want to be in online spaces. People feel like social media made a rags-to-riches fantasy possible, and the more that “regular” people were able to make money, the more social media has started to gentrify, and push out those who aren’t as able to quickly rise to the top with their whiteness, youth, beauty, non-disability, gender conformity, and so on. Many people who had been able to scrape by as a creative person on social media find that they are no longer able to because of the changes to the algorithm, scammers, and the tiered verification subscription cost. I think we need to be examining how this mirrors what is happening in our material lives with housing and neighborhoods, and we can be considering what it means to displace people digitally. We might start to think about how we fight digital gentrification.
Certainly, blocking the accounts that are taking up the most space for actions we disapprove of (for example, union-busting Starbucks) is like refusing to shop at upscale boutique that pushed out the mom-and-pop convenience store. I think that’s a great start, and I love the idea of a “digital guillotine” for the people we don’t want to give space to. But in addition to making it harder for the gentrifiers to cash in on our neighborhood, how do we thrive here?
For some of us, it will make the most sense to leave, and others of us will feel that we can’t – we have no alternative because another platform with a subscription fee is inaccessible. In real neighborhoods, fighting displacement and thriving by staying where we are is not an individual endeavor. It requires communities coming together and doing things differently. I’m not sure exactly how that looks on a platform like Instagram, and there may come a time when the cost of staying outweighs the losses of leaving. Security isn’t only financial, and facial recognition technology, AI, doxing, and other concerns are all valid. At the same time, so many pro-Palestinian voices NOT leaving has overcome the algorithm in a lot of ways, and actual lives have been saved by the fundraising efforts there.
I know that if I stay, I may not grow a larger audience because my posts are so suppressed and I’ll never pay to boost them, but I’ve been thinking about the audience I do have. The folks who will make a point of looking at what I post no matter what. Just because I can’t grow doesn’t mean I don’t value the connections that I’ve already made, and I don’t want to just disappear. I had felt like I was done with “making content” to grow an audience, but I’ve started to think about what I would post if my goal wasn’t to grow, but just to connect more meaningfully and less passively with who’s already there. I don’t have answers yet, but I wanted to share my thoughts in case it sparks anything for you about how we might resist digital gentrification and displacement. I know I can’t just jump over to someplace with a paywall, and I won’t expect the folks who follow me to do that either. Maybe those who can will find a way to open things up and make other platforms more accessible, but in the meantime, how do we want to behave differently on social media in order to thrive in an increasingly policed and overpriced area of the digital world?