But is it, though? There’s this weird meta thing going on with ‘influencers’ where what people are really paying for is access to your life and everything that swirls around it. If you’re a car crash then that’s marketable, people will turn up to gawk at you wailing in the middle of it. Far more people know about Calloway now than before all this happened; certainly I didn’t know of her, and would’ve remained blissfully unaware of her if she was an actually competent social media grifter.
The article at the top nailed it when it said Calloway clearly wants to be a teacher, an author, a guru, somebody with experience who’s passing it on to her followers without ever having done the experience in the first place. Well, now she does have an experience: She was a social media disaster, she lost her dad in the middle of it, and she’ll do workshops about what she learnt from that.
But that’s the whole issue here, isn’t it? It’s the self obsession with social media and not really caring about shitting on other people in the process. As long as you get the likes, who cares!
I did a little digging and turns out she had posted a lot about her dad before being a hoarder, having mental health issues. She posted images and videos of inside his home, which as someone who is in that deep hoarding/not taking care of yourself state, it probably wasn’t a good idea to expose that to 750k people/the world. Very sad and makes me feel uncomfortable.
I can understand that- grief is personal and when you already feel disenfranchised through losing somebody you had no control over losing, it is unhelpful (and adds to feelings of disenfranchisement) for people to tell you how to grieve.
All of that, however, needs to be balanced against her recent ‘manic’ (and I don’t use that term lightly) meltdown over Instagram this week, where she has been posting literally scores of incoherent nonsense. In the wider context it’s very clear that she’s lost/ losing the plot and needs help.
I can’t imagine that her other family members, who will I imagine be similarly grieving, will be finding her cathartic outpourings very soothing or helpful.
If you feel I’m being brusque I’m sorry, I’ve no doubt at all she’s in a very bad place right now particularly with the howler monkey treatment she will be getting as a result of all those articles. She should log off and get actual help, and I hope that’s what she does. But she is who she is, and it’s pretty obvious where she goes from here, which is not to find an occupation which is healthier.
Obviously she’s a mess and a bundle of contradictions, but yeah one of the things to remember when you’re an influencer or aspiring to be one, it’s your life you’re sharing - you don’t get to share anyone else’s shit without their permission.
Oh I’ll read this. I actually thought your previous post was joke because I think of Idles as a wildly political band and just presumed they’d be pro-Labour. Wow.