All this, literally, because someone required a cute picture of him while he was looking the other way.
In the height of the #AlexFromTarget panic, there was even a false flag: Breakr, a social-media marketing firm based in L. A., claimed responsibility in a LinkedIn post as well as interview. But Alex and the girl who first popularized his picture each said they'd never heard of Breakr; apparently, the organization had taken advantage of the fact that, among rapidly spiraling #AlexFromTarget gossip, nobody could disprove the claim. “That’s exactly how terrorist groups work after bombings, ” another adult friend noted. Allow us to pause, now, to note the sheer number of adults who were, by this point, circling #AlexFromTarget in search of an explanation. News outlets initially seized and repeated Breakr’s present, perhaps because a hoax perpetrated by a shadowy cabal of marketers is, upon some level, more palatable than the truth: We live in an age of unmanageable fame, when a mob of strangers on the internet can turn you into the next Justin Bieber or the next public enemy without any effort on your part. You could go to sleep one night your regular self, and wake up to find you are an symbol - but you won't get to decide what you represent.
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Alex from Target is, on the whole, a positive tale. Everyone seems to like him; he seems to be enjoying his fame. But for each and every randomly beloved Alex, there is someone who wakes up one day, without warning, on the pitchfork finish of an internet mob: Compare Alex’s plight to that of video-game developer Zoe Quinn, who became patient zero in the hater-heavy Gamergate movement when a good angry ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post villainizing her sex life. His post gone viral, and months later, Quinn still wakes up every morning to a misogynist mob of haters who threaten her, ridicule her, harass her family members, campaign to destroy her career, distribute nude photos of her, as well as vow to kill her. She has described herself as “the internet’s the majority of hated person. ”
What Alex and Zoe Quinn have in common is that the general public acts that first drew mainstream attention to them were not their own. Fame is definitely fickle; but in the past, ascending to internet stardom involved at least some effort for a fame-seeker. Justin Bieber was singing at a talent show in the Youtube that caught Usher’s eye. Alex wasn't even looking at the camera.
Only a decade ago, “famous for nothing” referred to a genre of celebrity we have now view as a legitimate career for the hardest-hustling women in Hollywood: the Kardashians, the Hiltons, and all those oxymoronic “reality stars” who build profitable autorité by sheer force of personality. There may be “nothing” at the core of their fame -- a perceived lack of talent - but turning nothing into a multi-million-dollar business is, well, something. It takes time and energy. Today’s “famous for nothing” flash factors expend time and energy dealing with their celebrity - Alex did a photo op along with Ellen - but they do so in a state of triage after rising in order to fame. Zoe Quinn worked for years as a video-game developer, and enjoyed the modicum of renown commensurate to her work: People in the game community knew the girl, and she was once a reality-TV hopeful. But she was nowhere near to a household name until she became a flash point in debates about misogyny and the video-game industry.
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Fame has always been a reflection of some cultural need - all of us project our hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares onto celebrities. They become props for discussions that, ultimately, have nothing to do with them. Gwyneth Paltrow allows us to talk about corporeal discipline. Anne Hathaway lets us talk about female likability. But those individuals, at least, put themselves in the line of fire by choosing careers associated with celebrity. If the level of scrutiny they face is fair remains, of course , debatable. But a minimum of they knew that being turned into a symbol was a possibility.
When technologists very first lamented the internet-hastened end of privacy, they rightly concluded that everyone might someday be a tiny public figure - Andy Warhol’s “famous for 15 minutes” became “famous to 15 people. ” Missing from that calculation, however , was who does create the fame and whether there would be any way to avoid it. In the future, we are going to all be made famous by 15 strangers, for any reason, at any time, with or without our very own participation.
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Now compare Alex and Zoe Quinn to “Fine Felon” Jeremy Meeks, who was sitting in jail following an arrest for gang action when a reporter informed him his mugshot had been deemed so attractive which TMZ and the Daily Mail had posted it. If Alex is taking pleasure in a sort of fever-dream idyll of fame - and Quinn is suffering the nightmare version - then Meeks’s experience was somewhere in the middle. He grew to become a flash point in discussions about criminality, superficiality, race, class, and the presidio system. He got a modeling contract out of it, but his wife -- who is also the mother of his two children - was reportedly “furious. The girl man is in there and people are taking it as a joke, thinking it’s funny. ” The humor, meme, and discourse were all created by people who knew absolutely nothing about the situation. The rapidly expanding gulf between those who lived in Meeks’s world and the ones creating a second world, which quickly engulfed his public image, was past Meeks's control.
Newton’s third law of motion states that for every activity, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I believe the internet operates in a similar fashion: For each adorable Alex, there is also a tortured Zoe Quinn. The pendulum goes both methods, and in between are a thousand Jeremy Meekses. But on the internet, the pendulum’s golf swing is actually growing larger - the internet gets bigger and faster every day, meaning the fame-pendulum swings farther and faster, too. To enjoy fans, you must outlive others haters. To have your faith in humanity restored, you must first have it destroyed. It is really an extremely gloomy note to end an article about a wholesome kid who works in Target, though, so instead I will leave you with this tweet from Alex. It is often retweeted more than 40, 000 times since Sunday:
Yes, Alex. You are popular.
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