It’s like you write your first few books or albums about your feelings, your relationships, your childhood, your blues, your hopes and fears, and then you get it all out and there’s nothing left to write about besides what you’re currently doing: writing. Certainly Ariana Grande’s Petal and Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl fall into this camp, where it feels all there’s really is to say is “f the haters!” “i’m famousssss” and “it’s tough being a celebrity.” And I’m sure it IS tough being a celebrity, but instead of diving to those depths, we get defensive, surface-level tracks about being a boss babe no matter the hate.

And I think this ouroboros of situational, surface-level production is not just reserved for popstars and poets. This is an issue in music, in writing, and, now, in influencing.

I just recently wrote this article about the Nantucket ‘NO INFLEUNCERS’ sign, and, whilst doing so, reflected on a few of my old favorite influencers who have recently blown up to an uncomfortable (for me, the watcher, at least) level. I’ve begun to resent them and I wasn’t sure why, besides the obvious downward slope of braindead content and shallow, consumer-filled videos. But I think the real problem is that I’m sick of these influencers because they have nothing left to say. They now simply make videos about making videos.

Let’s take Alix Earle for a case study. She blew up extraordinarily on TikTok, taking the influencing world by storm so quickly that she reached that mythic space, I would argue, between influencer land and real celebrity. Earle is practically a household name, with Gen Z and millenials, at least. But her shine is starting to dull—she penned a deal with Netflix for a reality TV show, and when the YouTube trailer dropped, it only amassed 26k views in its first 24 hours. Every other day I see another video claiming that her fan base is eroding and that she doesn’t have much left to offer an audience.

We followed Earle for her college outfits, her makeup tutorials, her chaos and mess. She told a great storytime, she navigated her early 20s with wild nights out and messy apartments and fraught friendships. We followed her because she had a rich world, one that was strange and foreign to many of her followers who were not supermodel good looking, Miami dwelling blondes with fake boobs and a semi-famous family scandal (my dream tho tbh). And despite being made up of parts that usually cause mass societal jealousy and disdain, she was likeable in it all. She had star power. There was something magnetizing about the whole situation.

Now? Earle’s TikTok’s tend to follow a hallowed out formula.

Video 1: Get ready with me for [INSERT INFLUENCER EVENT].

Video 2: Get dressed with me for [INSERT INFLUENCER EVENT].

Video 3: Earle showing her outfit and makeup at INFLUENCER EVENT.

Video 4: Earle with a group of other influencers, dancing around at INFLUENCER EVENT.

Then, rinse and repeat all the way down the timeline.

Her videos now are not about being Alix Earle, the messy, dramatically dressed, eyelash-wand-wielding girl. They’re about being Alix Earle the Influencer, the cardboard cutout of herself dragged along to brand activation after brand activation.

I see the same thing again and again as influencers gain mass followings and go from creating the content that made them blow up to creating content about always blowing up. It’s a constant parade of Starbucks x Coachella parties, boxes and boxes of PR, and, if you’re lucky, videos with advice on how you, too, can go viral.

It’s interesting to wonder at what point you move from making art to making the product of the art to becoming that product yourself. I would argue that Ariana and Taylor and Alix have product-ified themselves so deeply that they don’t know how to be anything other than their cardboard cutouts, wilting softly in front of the public. With a poet, the money is shit and the roaring crowd is microscopic, but still they write again and again about the pen and the line.

How do we keep feeling, keep processing, keep creating as we go? Can you make art when you feel steady and safe? Can you refuse to lose yourself in the abyss of your career?

Is it okay to not release art, or OOTDs, until you have something good to share?

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The sign that launched a thousand think pieces.

This week, Four Winds Craft Guild posted a photo featuring the placard on social media (hmmm…👀) and was catapulted into the pop culture headlines when influencer and brand-founder of Dairy Boy (which just opened a shop in Nantucket 👀👀👀) Paige Lorenze responded on Instagram. Lorenze’s message?

“If you call yourself a feminist but proudly put up a ‘No Influencers’ sign, it’s worth asking who you are attempting to delegitimize, and why… Mocking women when they become powerful in a new industry isn’t new. It’s just a strange message coming from a store that celebrates a craft with such a rich history of women shaping the island and its economy.”

But what seems to be a vapid back and forth, a barely relevant beef, a laughable headline, or something to chalk up to rich peoples’ bullshit is actually an incredibly complex manifestation of our economy, our society, or beliefs about gender and class, our tiredness of consumption culture, and our collective laborers’ anger.

Whilst watching all of this unfold, a comparison struck me—this ‘No Influencers’ sign would be akin to 2000s era ‘No Models’ sign at, say, an ice cream shop. We are ireful of models because they are reminders that we are not thin enough, young enough, hot enough. They are physical manifestations of the anxieties heaped upon us, not by models in the grand scheme of things, but by the society around us.

Influencers, then, remind us of similar anxieties. Many of them are thin and young and beautiful. But, more than that, they are wealthy. And that wealth does not stem from hours upon hours in grueling blue collar, or even corporate, jobs. We hate them because they remind us that we are poor, and we labor and we toil, and we remain poor. The influencers sit on their big white couches with their big white teeth and press a few buttons and get a deposit for $60,000 for a video (or so we imagine—the truth, as always, is more complicated than that).

What’s interesting about the model-influencer disdain comparison is that models are easy vehicles for our hatred and our virtue signaling, despite the fact that most are being mistreated, starved, assaulted, and degraded, are not paid a living wage, are victims of exploitation, are hand picked from war or poverty torn countries, thrown through the ringer in a new and strange land, and spit out on their twenty-second birthday.

But the influencers, much more than the models, control their own income, their work flow, their hours, their availability. They are not just the actors in the industry, they run the industry. They have an agency that the models do not. And so, perhaps, we hate them more.

We hate influencers because we hate our jobs, our bank accounts, our wrinkled foreheads that we cannot use the expendable income to flatten. We hate them for their money, their ease, their luxury.

But this is why the sign is so interesting!! Because it is not hanging in the dollar burger joint down the road from you, not in the discount bargain store, not in the dive bar full of off-duty laborers working hard for not enough cash.

No, it is hanging in a store selling a $12,500 basket (no, I’m not kidding) on an island with an average home value of five million dollars. Nantucket doesn’t hate the influencers because they’re rich, they hate them because they’re not the right kind of rich.

What this is about is class. I recently spent the weekend in the Hamptons for the very first time (and, yes, it has inspired multiple essays to come), which is another incredibly wealthy and exclusive summertime destination for multi-millionaires. What I was surprised by, and what I think is the source of Nantucket’s influencer-anxieties, is how much the Hamptons seem transformed by online culture.

Where I expected a bunch of Ina Garten-esque, waspy millionaires luxuriating in linen pants and sunhats, I saw a bunch of wealthy people, both American and European, who looked like they were trying very, very hard for you to notice how wealthy they were. New money. GASP!!!!

With the aspirational culture we live in, everyone wants to look rich. And, yes, that aspirational culture is due, in large part, to influencers. And now the influencers are posting their Summer-in-the-Hamptons look books, and sacrificing their first borns for Surf Lodge VIP, and taking pretty sips of pretty drinks, and it’s all going online for millions and millions of people to consume and aspire to, including other influencers and newly-wealthy people looking to climb to the top—or maybe the better term here is to climb in front of the lens.

And, if you know anything about old, white, rich people, you know they hate it. They don’t want normies like you and I cluttering up their glistening white sidewalks. And they don’t want overly-loud, overly-blonde, overly-lip-filled influencers doing it either, no matter how much they Pinterest-ed “old money outfit inspo” before coming.

Nantucket sees what the Hamptons have become, and they are trying, in their own waspy, passive aggressive ways, to put their foot down.

Butttttt, Miss Paige Lorenze had a point in her feminist critique of the sign, because if new money is where the hatred is coming from, why not a ‘NO TECH BROS’ or ‘NO CYBERTRUCKS’ sign??

It is true that influencing, a multi-billion dollar global economic force, is run by women. It’s chock full of them!! And, unlike traditional business, it is meant for them. There’s no need to worry about rueful male bosses skipping over you for promotion. No need to worry about being fired over maternity leave. No need to put up with comments about your body from co-workers. There is no glass ceiling in influencing, there is only expansive blue sky—better light with which to post!

And look, I get it. We all have influencer fatigue. We’re tired of being sold, sold, sold. We’re tired of being reminded of what we do not yet have. We’re tired of consuming, even if, for most, that exhaustion is subconscious.

I, myself, have mourned a creator I felt a kind of parasocial friendship toward as she blew up and up and up and away to Surf Lodge and linking $900 jeans and becoming besties with other influencers who I find grating, at best, and downright immoral, at worst.

And it’s true that the internet is killing communities. That “run, don’t walk!!!” videos are keeping us all on a tight itinerary that includes restaurants, bars, and shops that pay to be mentioned online while small businesses shutter. Gentrification is a pulsing pain beneath all this. It’s messy and complicated and sad.

But, today, in this story, the victim is Nantucket. And those who summer on Nantucket are not at risk of being priced out of their second, or third, homes due to influencer culture.

Quick! A question for you, dear reader! Did Paige Lorenze’s impassioned reply to the sign kind of feel like a lot? The internet, of course, was split on whether to applaud or to eye roll. This, too, feels tense.

A better PR move may have been to visit the store, pose beneath the sign with a cheeky little face, post it with a simple caption like “rulebreaker,” and sit back as the “ICONIC!!!” comments roll in. Why do we hate when influencers are earnest? Is it because we believe money sanitizes you of fickle emotions??

It reminds me of a situation that happened with one of my favorite content creators, Caroline Crawford Patterson. Having always wanted to be a fashion designer, she decided to sew her own bridesmaid’s dress for her friend’s wedding. The result was…less than stellar. TikTok chewed her to bits. She responded back with a few self-depricating videos. Then, people decided to be a bit kinder because she could take a joke (comments like “the dress is bad but your face card is so lethal its okay <333” rolled in after. and also—true! her face card is lethal).

Later, she posted to her Instagram story a sentiment that really stayed with me—that she was anxious and hurt and upset, and that none of it was funny to her, but that she felt like she had to joke back to the angry mob so that she could gain favor. An influencer must not take anything too seriously!!!

In a quote to the New York Times, the owner of Four Winds Craft Guild, John Sylvia, justified his sign, saying, “I feel sometimes my store is used as someone’s background, a stage.” I would argue that a store selling baskets and labrador sculptures into the thousands of dollars is a stage, for most of us. A curated set of props moving from one carefully arranged set (INT. NAUTICALLY THEMED STORE) to another (INT. LARGE BEIGE FAMILY ROOM IN COASTAL ESTATE, CHAIRS FOR DECORATION ONLY).

Sylvia also told the New York Times, “I don’t have this hatred toward influencers… It was more of a joke. It is a problem we should look at as a society.” So is it a joke, or is it a problem with society? And are the influencers the societal problem, or is it the crush of inflation? The nonexistent job market? The widening wealth gap? The single basket that could pay down half my student loans?

Many of the quotes in the recent New York Times article about this debate remark on the influencers use of the island as a “prop”. One remarked that “a friend who lived near a particularly picturesque, hydrangea-filled wharf had told her about women showing up with racks of clothing to stage photo shoots.” Another that “a pop-up had brought in plastic, photo-ready hydrangeas, despite ample real ones on the island.”

But let’s not forget—before becoming an exclusive upper-class beachtown, Nantucket was inhabited by the indigenous Wampanoag people, by freed Black Americans who established the neighborhood of New Guinea, and countless working class people who still make their livings on the island, many of whom do so by keeping it pristine, comfortable, and running (here’s an amazing article all about it!!).

Perhaps the glitter and prep of the island’s summerers is doing just as much prop work as the influencers showcasing it. Let those in faux-worn nautical shoppes cast the first stone, I guess.

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Some thoughts and notes:

• I have no real idea who Paige Lorenze is—if she’s “good” or “bad” or “annoying” or actually evil with terrible stances and takes. What is written in this article is all I know of her. This is not me siding with her, praising her, standing up for her, or anything else. Just my thoughts as I turned the questions of this essay over in my brain. So if she sucks I’m sorry!

• I’m being a bit snarky about the price of the goods in Four Winds. I know that art is expensive, that handmade and vintage goods are important, that weaving a basket should be a protected art. I do also feel, in the context of class and labor, that it’s important to note what a dissonance there is between those who can buy a basket for thousands of dollars and those who cannot. And influencers aren’t really the problem there.

• I have takes on influencers that you may not love—I think it’s actually pretty hard work. Not that it’s hard TO BE an influencer at all, but that the work of turning every second of your life into content, setting up lights and cameras and recording and re-recording yourself from all angles, editing it for hours, posting frequently, and receiving super mean comments on the daily actually does seem hard. I’m nowhere near an influencer, but I do try to create content online and it’s genuinely so confusing and difficult to stay on top of. I’ve ALSO been an infant and toddler daycare teacher, so I do know what actually hard jobs are like. The tension, and where I think the anger and belittlement come from, is that the pay to work ratio is so skewed. Influencers make SO MUCH MONEY. When I worked at the daycare, my yearly pay was just over $16,000. WORKING FULL TIME!!!!!!!! It’s complicated and nuanced and we should talk about it as such!

• I really wanna vacation on Nantucket. Does this article bar me from that, do you think?? Idk, it’s mostly because I like their nectars.

I swear I’m trying to stop talking about it…

But Love Island USA just KEEPS giving us headlines.

The season 8 Islanders have left the Villa, but the season 6 and 7 contestants seem to be vying for the pop culture spotlight.

In breaking reality TV news, Nicolandria is dead. The Love Island season 7 couple, consisting of Olandria Carthen and Nic Vansteenberghe, announced their break up through People, which is interesting in and of itself. Watch this incredible breakdown by Tell the Bees to understand why!

I’ve always suspected this relationship to be one born for PR, BUT I also don’t find much wrong with that. The audience of their season really pushed for them to be together, instead of just letting them queitly exit the Villa. They seem to be good, supportive friends to one another. Is it really so bad for them to get their bag? Is a PR relationship inherently more immoral than a “regular” relationship featuring cheating, fighting, lying, and betrayal?

This topic does seem to really touch a nerve on the Internet. We don’t want to be lied to. We don’t want to believe that the people we’re fans of lie to us. We want to believe in love, we want hot people to stay together forever. It’s interesting just how much we want out of relationships we will never see in person. Who gets to grieve a PR relationship? The couple? The audience? The brands? The emotion of it all interests me to no end.

Let me know in the comments if you have strong feelings about Nicolandria, or their break up, either way. Let’s chat!!

And if that wasn’t enough Love Island USA drama for you, Kenny from season 6 went full cry-whisper narcissist on a podcast this week (not linking bc I refuse to drive engagement tbh). Kenny and Jana won third on their season, but wooed America with sweet conversations, TikTok edits, and the fact that they looked smack like Princess Tiana and Prince Naveen.

Buttttt it was all fake. At least from Kenny, that is. Directly after their season of Beyond the Villa aired, it came to light that Kenny has been texting with friends, alluding to the fact that he was faking his love for Jana in return for brand deals and clout, saying racist remarks about black women, and saying that he “thought he would get more money from this.” For two whole years :(((

ALLEGEDLY!

Now, Kenny has chosen to break his silence on a podcast, because of course! He alleges a whole lot about Jana, but his crocodile tears aren’t convincing. NEXT!

Our bi-weekly fashion, beauty, and wellness roundup <3

Readers, I’m happy to report a trend I’ve been noticing the shoe space lately, and it’s one toward cuter comfy shoes.

Exhibit A: Wedges are SO back.

It’s like they came out of nowhere, but suddenly every shoe-seller this side of the flagship Nordstrom is peddling wedges like it’s 2010 again. I recently thrifted a sky-high pair of cork wedges and noticed, after an entire night wearing them, just how insanely comfortable they are.

It’s no secret that the current shoe trends have been staving far away from actual high heels (cue the why are all the heels kitten??? conversation), but wedges are comfortable while still being entirely c*nty and putting you at least a head above your normal height. There are so many great options on the market right now. Here’s a peek at some of the ones on my wish list:

Steve Madden Sinai’s

Talk about a wedge that wedges. This versatile shoe is perfect for vaction, happy hour, a cute stroll through the neighborhood, or for verifying your tinder date’s height.

Sam Edelman Daxton’s

A shorter platform, but a strappier sandal—it’s a great compromise. These little beauties would be perfect for happy hour with the girls or date night with that special someone. The color is to die for, and, best of all, they’re from Sam Edelman, which means they’ll be incredibly comfortable (I always love the feel of an Edelman heel—wait, that rhymes, quick, trademark it!!).

Azalea Wang Zazzie’s

This is more a platform heel than a true wedge, but it’s just too good not to share. This is the epitome of the vacation heel—fun, flirty, sexy, and wedged enough to keep you standing after fifteen mojitos.

Annnddddd exhibit B: Ballerina Sneakers!!!!!

I have to say, I never got on the ballet flat, Mary Janes train despite the insane amount of TikTok peer pressure. They’re just not my style. Despite being a literal poet (the number one ballet flat-mary jane consumer group, I‘m sure), my comfy shoes of choice are my old air forces, still slightly sticky with the ghost of dive bars past.

But when you take the esoteric wisdom of a Mary Jane, marry it to the sensibility of a ballet flat, and then freak that shit real nasty with an athletic shoe…well, the cross-bred baby is admittedly stunning.

The ballerina sneaker trend feels very cool girl, but there’s such a lovely variance in looks, colors, and prints that it doesn’t feel too uniform or micro-trendy. I will be copping a pair as soon as I get a job (beauty and fashion magazines, if you can hear me, please pull my app from the slush pile!!!!), but for now, here are my favorites:

Adidas Taekwondo

Puma Speedcat

Repetto x Birkenstock

Charles & Keith

Vagabond

I’d love to track the shoe landscape over the next few months to see if this trend of actually stylish comofrtable footwear continues. For now I’m just insanely happy that we’re having this rare moment in women’s shoes where the comfiest options are also the c*ntiest.

Your weekly homework is some summer reading. July is slipping by fast (TRAGIC!!), and we need to keep our minds sharp in all this heat.

This week, we’ll focus on some “fun” reading—articles. There’s nothing better than a truly great, funky, engaging article. They don’t get the same shine as their novel or personal essay counterparts, but some of the magazine articles I’ve read have stayed with me for years. Here’s a few of my favorites, but my challenge to you is to read articles until you find a new favorite of your own.

The Joke Was Never On Jennifer Coolidge || Vulture

CRYING MYSELF TO SLEEP ON THE BIGGEST CRUISE SHIP EVER || The Atlantic

‘You Get The Face You Deserve’ || Flesh World

AND PLEASE!!!!!!! Share the links to your favorite ones in the comments so we can all be airhead academics together <3

Till next time,

Shannon xoxo

And, after a few hours combing through surveillance theory papers on JSTOR and peeling back layer after layer of Love Island surveillance methods, I looked like this It’s Always Sunny meme:

So let’s jump right in and you can tell me if I really do look that crazy.

You can also tip me!

A Russian Nesting Doll of Surveillance

I think it’s important, first and foremost, to map out the incredibly interesting layers, overlaps, and meta-plays of surveillance within Love Island, because it truly does feel like nesting doll all the way down.

On the most basic level, the Islanders surveil each other. Just as we do in real life, they gather information about the people around them through “chats,” games, proclamations and promises, and they watch one another closely to see if what they’ve been told matches up.

In the most current season, season 8, we see contestant Caleb keeping an active eye on his partner Kenzie as she speaks to Corbin on the dock. Seeing them sitting closely together and snuggling, Caleb stretches upward for a better view, then announces to everyone around him, “They just kissed!” (Kenzie and Corbin hadn’t actually kissed, but it’s a good example of some basic surveillance).

The Islanders also surveil each other through second-hand interactions. The contestants keep an eye on each other throughout the days, taking mental note of certain behaviors, conversations, and actions of the players around them. Even if they are not personally implicated in a part of the show’s drama, they may, at any time, decide to reveal whatever intel they have.

Like this season, when Titi pulls Amora to the side and, speaking of Melanie, says “We need to tell her everything.” There is a discrepency between her surveillance of Sincere within Casa Amour and the Villa, and so she decides to share her findings.

And now for the most obvious form of surveillance within Love Island—the camera. Or, should I say, the hundreds of cameras.

The camera surveils the Islanders day in and day out. Sometimes these cameras are obvious, like in the confessional room, when contestants speak directly to them, but, for the most part, Love Island’s cameras are meant to be as invisible as possible.

They are screwed into walls, plants, TVs, couches, appliances. They watch the Islanders in night vision as they sleep. They are meant to be unobtrusive and forgettable (this is important for our discussion of the panopticon in just a few moments). These cameras surveil and then broadcast the footage back to the audience, or America. We, then, become the main surveillers of the Islanders.

We’ll come back to the audience in a moment (it’s about to get juicy), but there’s another overt layer of surveillance in the Villa, one seen literally popping out of its walls.

The producers. They are watching, both in person, it seems, and through the hundreds of cameras, everything the Islanders do. This intel is what builds storylines, creates edits, and delivers us reality TV perfection.

And now it all gets very meta. The producers love to play with surveillance in very layered ways, turning the watched/watcher dichotomy into a real tension on the show.

Let’s take Casa Amour for example. This season, the men left the Villa to go to Casa and participate in the Heart Rate Challenge with the new girls. What they didn’t know was that the cameras filming them weren’t just for America’s eyes. No, every move they made was being livestreamed back to the Villa for the girls to watch in real time. America, then, watched the boys, watched the girls, and watched the girls watch the boys.

Casa played into these ideas a lot this season. The actual building of Casa Amour featured a large, faux grass wall surrounding its outdoor area, minus one removed section. A removed section the perfect size, scope, and placement to show the boat holding the twelve new Casa boys roll up to the Villa. The boys, this time, were the surveillers.

And, we CANNOT forget Movie Night in all of this, as it’s one of my favorite ways that production plays with meta-surveillance. On Movie Night, Islanders are gathered to watch videos of moments from the season that the audience has seen, but their fellow Islanders have not. It’s another moment where the surveillance of the cameras, the production, the audience (this year, the Love Island USA’s official Instagram account opened for audience suggestions of which movie night clips to play), and the Islanders converge, layer, and swirl around as if water in a drain.

It’s always a dramatic night, when contestants may suddenly watch on the big screen as their friends bash them, or as all of the lies they’ve been fed by their partner play in HD.

And now we can get back to the juicy bit: the audience, America, us—we are not just watchers, but watched as well. We, too, are surveilled. The audience surveils the Islanders (and the producers) and then takes that content to the internet, where we make edits, memes, think pieces (duh!), and more.

This interest is then monitored by the PRODUCERS of Love Island, who bring the knowledge of our favorite relationships, running gags, and memes into the villa and direct the contestant based off of them, like this season’s Bryce and Zach bromance, CorbinGPT jokes, and the resurgence of Carl, the soft-spoken Casa boy who got a second chance in the Villa, no doubt because production saw America’s indignation at KC and Aniya’s fiery de-coupling.

There is not a part of Love Island that isn’t touched by a two-way street of surveillance, which is mind blowing in and of itself. But I am interested not just in how surveillance shows up in Love Island, but what its uses are.

The Panopticon, and Surveillance as A Means to Behavior Modification

In “Surveillance as Cultural Practice,” Torin Monahan, a surveillance scholar and professor at UNC Chapel Hill, defines surveillance as “the systematic monitoring of people or groups in order to regulate or govern their behavior.” What interests me most in this essay is how surveillance succeeds or fails at behavioral modification within the Villa.

To understand this a bit more, we need to consult that all-encompassing, ever-present symbol of surveillance—the panopticon. Originally developed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791, the idea of the panopticon is as follows:

A circular prison, each inmate separated by walls to ensure strict isolation. In the center of the prison, a large watch tower with wide windows. The guard in the tower can observe every prisoner at once, surveilling with ease. But, to the prisoner who cannot see through the windows of the watch tower, the guard’s presence is unknowable. They are never sure exactly when they are being watched, when they are not. Surveillance, and therefore power, in the panopticon is “visible and unverifiable,” a kind of omniscience (sound familiar? perhaps like God, or Santa?).

As Foucault, the French philosopher who more famously revisited Bentham’s idea in the 1975 Discipline & Punish, points out, “the major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power…The surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.” For inmates, “visibility is a trap” (Foucault).

Of course I have to acknowledge the ways in which Love Island breaks the panopticon’s conventions. Perhaps most importantly, the Islanders are not prisoners. They chose to audition for a reality television show. They are allowed to leave whenever they desire. Similarly, unlike the inmates of Bentham’s prison design, they are not isolated. In the panopticon, prisoners are kept from seeing each other to keep them from developing plots to escape. In the Villa, the Islanders’ communication and interaction with one another encourages dis-order over Bentham’s order. This is important because it is reality TV after all! We want our spiritual-inmates to be messy!!

And, of course, “as opposed to the negative reinforcement rampant in Foucault’s theory, the prize money [and fame] are positive reinforcement” (Sherwin)!!

What makes Love Island’s production similar to that of the panopticon is its visible but unverifiable nature. There are cameras everywhere, and the Islanders know that they are being watched, but they never know exactly which moments will be seen by the audience (and their fellow castmates).

Bentham was not trying expressly to be an evil, evil man with the design of the panoptic prison. No, the panopticon was born from the idea that “discipline would be internalised and the need for the inspector, the watching itself, would be eventually exhausted” (Galič et al.). For Bentham, surveillance’s goal was to put a guard, an eternal watcher, in each inmate’s brain only so that they would behave. The panopticon was about reforming the prisoner.

My question is, does the panopticon of Love Island “reform” the Islanders?

To understand this better, we need to think about what this reform or modification may look like. In the paper Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation, authors Galič, Timan, and Koops state:

“When everybody can potentially be under surveillance, people will internalise control, morals and values…Foucault explains that a phenomenon closely linked and resulting from the disciplining process, is normation…In normation processes, the norm is central. It constitutes what one has to conform to and strive for; it is both standard and ideal…Through the shifting focus, individuals are continuously measured against the norm; they become fictional, representative, as they have to be registered and held against a fictional norm.”

And our Islanders internalize this norm in very interesting ways. Like the watchguards in the prison, the audience, or America, doles out punishment upon the Islanders. Inside the Villa, America does this by voting. Every few episodes, we get to vote for who gets eliminated from the show. Outside the Villa, we punish by way of hate comments, refusing to follow a contestant on social media, or engaging in mass unfollowings of that contestant. Our opinions about Islanders, if negative, will remove them from the Villa early, taking away their chance at the $100K prize money and keeping them from accumulating enough attention capital to utilize in their post-show careers. It will also punish them by making them brand-unsafe, meaning they will have less access to brand deals and influencer fame.

So, yes, if your career depends upon it, you would want to be on your best behavior for America. And, yes, you would think that knowing you were being recorded 24/7 would force you to be on your best behavior. And we do know that Islanders adapt, change, and reform their behaviors for the cameras, some for a ploy at a better edit. In a terrifying case study, we can look to Kenny from season 6, who left the Villa with Jana and dated her for TWO YEARS before it was revealed through his texts that he had been faking his affection the entire time, despite his loved-up edit on the show, a clear indication that the cameras and audience changed his behaviors (though, not truly for the better).

But the entire reason that I began thinking about and writing this essay was because of the season 8 Casa episode, where I kept thinking, “Have these men forgotten that they’re on camera?” or Movie Night, where it became glaringly obvious that you cannot hide things when surveilled continuously. Cameras or not, these people will still speak badly about other Islanders, betray and disrespect their couples, lie blatantly, and engage in unethical behaviors.

So, why? Why does the panopticon fail?

Perhaps Love Island’s surveillance is just too layered, too manifold, to keep up with. In the prison, you worry about the one guard tower. In the Villa, the guards are the hundreds of cameras, the slew of producers, the fickle, unknowable audience, and each and every one of the people around you.

The sheer omnipresence of the surveillance, and the seemingly “normal” surroundings of the Villa, may just make you forget you’re being recorded at all, like Corbin, who, on Movie Night, remarked “They be catching everything in this m*therf*cker. Voice clear as f*ck.” His incredulousness is almost refreshing. It’s also hilarious, considering he has been wearing a microphone the size and scope of a pitbull’s collar for a month straight. Of course the things you said are crystal clear!

Or, maybe the consequences of their actions comes too late? In the Villa, whatever punishment you receive for bad behavior caught on these cameras has the chance to come weeks after, or not at all (each episode is only around an hour—imagine how much gets cute!). And if you do start to get punished by America placing you in the bottom at a vote, you never know exactly why you’re being punished until you get outside. After movie night’s shocking revelations about Sincere’s, uhhhh, insincerity, Aniya tells Melanie, “I told you America didn’t hate you. They just saw something you didn’t.”

Also, we can’t forget that these people are most likely sleep deprived and sun-poisoned every single day, which can’t make you behave as rationally as you may in other situations.

And, like everything I study, I have to wonder about the gender of it all. Year after year, it is primarily male contestants who get themselves into trouble during Casa Amour and Movie Night. This season, especially, that is the case (the only female contestant who had to reckon with anything revealed to the Islanders through surveillance was Kenzie, though I’d argue that her behavior was much more mild than most of the male contestants, like Corbin, KC, Zach, and Sincere).

Why might the Love Island panopticon fail for the men, but not for the women? I asked this question aloud while writing, and it was my gorgeous, gorgeous husband who responded, “Do you think it’s because women are already so used to being watched?”

AHA! Yes, it would make sense. Everywhere women go, it feels as though eyes are upon us. Whether to catcall us, ask for our numbers, take photos of our bodies, to stalk and harass us, whether it is through hidden cameras in locker rooms and airbnbs, we are used to being attuned to the surveillance, even the invisible kind, heaped upon us.

There is even, of course, the surveillance of our own eyes a la that genius Margaret Atwood quote, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” Our behaviour is modified even in the confines of our own bedrooms, of course it would be so with the visible reminders of the real cameras.

And now this opens a whole batch of new doors to go down. Non-white, and especially black, people are more used to being surveilled than their white counterparts, in stores, neighborhoods, through police initiatives, really wherever one can be surveilled. Class would dictate this too—I would argue that those appearing to be from a lower socioeconomic class are more likely to be followed around a store than someone who appears wealthy. It’s certainly an interesting area for further thought.

I’M BASICALLY DONE NOW, I PROMISE.

In Love Island, the Villa is similar enough to the panoptic prison. When describing Bentham’s design, Foucault wrote of the inmates’ cells, “They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”

If Love Island has proven anything to me, it is that these Islanders are actors, performing. But there is a point in most of their performances when the mask must drop. My hypothesis may just be that the more numerous, layered, and, honestly, confusing the surveillance, the more the knowledge of it falls away completely.

And, when it comes to this Russian nesting doll of surveillance and observers, Foucault seemed to have watched a few seasons of Love Island himself when he wrote of the panopticon, “Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine.”

Foucault’s theory was that anyone could be a watchguard, and he was correct. I am one, you are (if you’re reading this and watching the season) one. Yes, even Megan Thee Stallion is one.

Are We the Surveillance State??

It was incredibly interesting for me to be thinking about, and reading literal theory on, surveillance for this essay. In a time when the surveillance state seems to be revving up to an unfathomable degree (I had to unfollow multiple influencers in the last few weeks for more-than-happily promoting Meta glasses and every headline I read about Flock cameras makes me feel physically sick) I have to ask myself—what is the end result of Love Island’s focus on surveillance?

I love reality TV! But what scares me in the study I’ve done to write this essay is just how deeply, passionately, and obsessively we as audience members have been swept up in the panopticon of it all.

We police the Islanders like we are in the watch tower. We rewind in slo-mo to catch hidden details, we read lips, we jump to conclusions. We vote the people we do not like off the show, and, outside of the agency of the Villa, we enact punishment on the Islanders through hate comments and mass unfollowings.

I love Love Island, but I do not want to be a prison guard. I love Love Island, but I wonder if it is, whether purposefully (tin foil hat but ok!) or subconsciously, making us all a lot more comfortable with, even loving toward(!!), surveillance and the surveillance state.

I guess that’s why these kinds of questions and musings and research-rabbit-holes are important. So, thanks for reading with me. I’ll leave you with a question, one I must continue to ask myself in these trying times:

If you are willing and eager to obsessively watch, police, and punish a twenty-two year old reality TV star in a Shein swimsuit, are you the same type of person who would turn over names during McCarthyism, get an old widow burned at the stake during the witch trials, or use your Kylie Jenner Meta glasses to hand over the facial data of every person you walk by on the street without consent?

If you would like to support my writing, and help keep Airhead Academic afloat, you can donate any amount here: https://buymeacoffee.com/shannonlynn_xx.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “‘Panopticism’ from ‘Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.’” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–12. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/25594995. Accessed 16 July 2026.

Galič, M., Timan, T. & Koops, BJ. Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation. Philos. Technol. 30, 9–37 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1

GOUCK, JENNIFER. “THE VIEWER SOCIETY: ‘NEW PANOPTICISM’, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE BODY IN DAVE EGGERS’ THE CIRCLE.” IJAS Online, no. 7, 2018, pp. 57–64. JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/26489193. Accessed 16 July 2026.

Monahan, Torin. “SURVEILLANCE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE.” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 4, 2011, pp. 495–508. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/23027562. Accessed 16 July 2026.

Sherwin, Michelle-Taylor. “The Evolution of Foucault’s Utopic Panopticon: Technology and the Creation of a Dystopia in Big Brother.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 83, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–9. JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/90022612. Accessed 16 July 2026.

I still have an essay discussing that topic locked and loaded (and am currently adding to it with the context of the last few episodes), but I thought it might be good to introduce myself and this publication to you, and talk about what exactly happens when you post a TikTok video thinking it might be seen by a thousand or two people, and Julia Fox reposts it instead.

Just a reminder that I’ve created a seperate TikTok account for my Airhead Academic takes, which you can find @/airheadacademic on TikTok and Instagram <3

Also, this is a free pub for now (although, if I monetize, I PROMISE it will only be on select pieces, so there will always be free reads available, and the price will be as fair and affordable as possible!), but if you’d like to support my work, you can tip me any amount at any time at this link. Your donations keep me fueled to fight off men like these:

Keep reading for it all, and, seriously, thank you for being here.

I’m Shannon, the Airhead in Charge

All my life, I’ve been obsessed with the glitter, glitz, and glam of the world. I love popstars, pink, influencer voice (within reason), and grew up a Real One—a child of the early 2000s with unfettered TV access and an affinity for TLC (and, yes, I have essays about Toddlers & Tiaras and Dance Moms in the personal essay collection I’m working on).

I’ve also always been an introspective person, an obsessive thinker, a voracious reader, and an intellectual. And it’s my personal dogma that none of these things are mutually exclusive!

I have my Bachelor of Arts in English, with minors in Creative Writing and Music. In undergrad, I was a sorority girl, an a capella group singer, and an editor of both the student newspaper and lit mag. A well-rounded girlie! I wrote my undergrad thesis on gender and consequence in renaissance tragedy, and, upon graduation, I won the largest undergraduate literary prize in America.

After graduation, and a gap year working as a daycare teacher for infants and toddlers, I went on to obtain my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Media Studies, where my focus was Poetry, but where I fell in love with writing personal-ish essays about pop culture, reality TV, and fame.

You can read some of my writing on my website.

I’m originally from Baltimore (the greatest city in America tbh), but moved to NYC a few months ago (if you’re in the area and want to be my friend, lmk!!). I’m kicking around the idea of a PhD. I love to sing and compose electronic music, take long walks, teach myself new and niche hobbies, watch TV all day, shop!!!!, play the Sims, and write, duh!

Well, that’s my life! Thank you so much for spending time with me. I hope you enjoyed it, cause I know I did.

Lol, but, seriously, love you all DOWN. If you have any questions for me, drop them below! Now, let’s talk about that video.

Post-Viral Sadness Syndrome

This isn’t the first time a video of mine popped off unexpectedly, leaving me shaken to my core. No, my villain origin story is that back when I had 400 followers (almost all people I knew in real life), I posted a video right before my bridal shower asking my friends to help me choose between two dresses. It got a hundred thousand views right away and seemed to really hit it off with the 60+ female demographic (EVIL!). The comments were literally so mean that I cried at my own bridal shower 🤠 (I talk about this a bit more in this essay about Hannah Montana and influencers).

So, let’s just say I have a little bit of post-viral stress disorder. Now, I’m back in the fast lane again with my latest Love Island TikTok, which, at the time of writing, has over 1.4 MILLION VIEWS. It’s been liked by Addison Rae and Julia Fox, who also REPOSTED IT?!?!?!?!

Honestly, I’m surprised at how many people understand and love the take, how many seem to be projecting their own opinions onto it, and how many incel men there really are out there.

First of all, some of my favorite comments I’ve received say something along the lines of “this reminds me of college!” or “I love to think this way!” It’s clear to me that there are many out there who desire to not just consume intellectual content, but to think intellectually. This is why, even though there are many, many, MANY issues with higher education, I will always be college’s number one fan: because it is often the first (and sometimes only) place where people discover and practice using critical thought.

You may have skipped college, or not gone yet, or graduated already, but the good news is that you can engage with the world around you, your favorite texts, and, yes, even your trashiest reality TV show with intellectual and academic rigor!!

I am working on putting together an Airhead Academic bookshelf with reccomendations for books, papers, and other things for us all to practice this. If you have any recs, please comment them below!

Secondly, it’s interesting how many people agreed with my video, but approached it from a much different angle (sometimes an angle I fundamentally DO NOT agree with). Comments like “you said it perfectly, girl. MONOGAMY. DOESN’T. WORK” and “this is why Kenzie saying ‘I could have danced better than that’ pmo,” or “YES! I tell everyone I know not to watch that show,” ticked up and up and up.

I don’t think we need to boycott Love Island, reality TV, makeup, low cut shirts, making out or monogamy. We live in the world we live in, and it’s my personal opinion that trying to fix the people around us by subtracting the things we love from our own lives is just going to torture us even more.

Instead, I think we can start by having excellent media literacy skills, thinking deeply about every single thing around us, and starting more conversations about othose things. Being smart, informed, and empowered is never going to be a bad thing (except sometimes it does suck to be aware of the general torments of the world…cue the famous Great Gatsby line, which Zelda Fitzgerald ACTUALLY said after giving birth to Scottie!).

I am incredibly sex-positive. I am a very crass girl. I am not shy about bodies, sexuality, or anything of the sort. I love to shake my ass and wear as little clothing as possible out to the clubs. I don’t think you have to be one kind of woman to have the same complicated feelings as I do about objectification and the tense reality of gender relations in the world at large. But try saying that on TikTok…

And, while we’re at it, can I say something that might make you mad at me? One of the things I find most relatable about Kenzie is the splits 🫣 I love to hit the splits. Here’s me doing a split at my wedding:

I think that you can love performance, ache to do the heart rate challenge, and still be upset by what you saw on your TV during that infamous episode. If I talked about this fully, we’d be here all day (but trust I AM diving into it in the manuscript for my first essay collection, POP STAR !!!!!), but the relationship between women and performance is one of the most tense, complex, interesting, twisted, BEAUTIFUL things in my life.

Gender is performance (Judith Butler !!!!), which is interesting enough, but what if you’re a woman who loves to be the center of attention? A woman who wants to be on TV, on a stage, behind a microphone, or hitting the splits for all of America to see? Can you still be upset at the ways that performance makes others perceive you, objectify you, jeer at you, harm you? I SAY YES BUT (SPOILER ALERT) MANY SAY NO.

And, of course, because my video mentioned the words men and capitalism, the incels came out, in force. Thankfully, most of their comments went to the filtered sections, where I deleted them en masse, or to my DMs, where they told me I was a “female toy,” typed the incel manifesto in long paragraphs, and called me my favorite ever moniker—“dumb blonde.”

I’m not going to spend much time speaking to this, as it’s A WASTE!!! But, isn’t it terrifying to know that a large number of the men you walk past on the street, you work with, you know and love, think you are actually not a human person? Always a shock to the system to remember that!

If I’m honest, that first day after I posted my video was very, very hard for me. I was shaking like a leaf. I felt paralyzed. I tried to get off my phone to push the anxiety away, but the knowledge that there could be any number of scary messages waiting for me when I opened it back up sent my heart rate through the roof (I have a janky old fitbit, so I could actually see the physical manifestation of this anxiety as a resting bpm of over 100 allllll day long). I thought that maybe I’m just not meant for this life.

BUT then I saw the subscribers to this Substack ticking up and up and up. We just passed 500. Five hundred people who saw the value in what I had to say, who decided they wanted to hear more. That alone is worth the slop DMs from people who can’t understand what media literacy means.

So let’s end on a high note. You’re here. I think you’re awesome. I can’t wait to write more for you. Addison Rae has heard me speak. The incels will not get us down. We’re airheads, we’re academics. Just as it should be.

Like my content? Feel free to subscribe for FREE. I’ll let you know before any paid opportunities are introduced. You can tip me here, if you’re just a sweetie pie like that. Love you, xoxo!

See you soon with articles about the 50 Day Bender girl on TikTok, the rental economy, Summer House, and (I’m sure) plenty on Love Island USA.

xoxo,

Airhead

When does summer begin? Calendars tell us the June 21st solstice kicks the season off. Some mark the start with an ending—the last day of school is the first day of summer, duh. Maybe it’s when you bite into that first ripe peach, or after the first flash storm where the hot pavement fills the air with a scent like static.

For the last three years of my adulthood, I’ve understood the first day of summer to be definitive—it’s the day that Love Island USA premieres. And so, it is officially summertime in the Airhead Academic cinematic universe.

And what a doozy we’re in for. Season 8 of the rabidly popular reality television series has already been embroiled in a controversy it’s becoming increasingly well-known for—a cast slur scandal.

Season 7 kicked off with an immediate expulsion of cast member Yulissa Escobar, who didn’t even make it to episode two before her widespread use of the N-word caused production to remove her from the villa. That same season, Cierra Ortega made it nearly to the end before she was “sent home for personal reasons,” the code phrase used after old screenshots dropped of her using a slur aimed at people of Asian descent.

And now, just days after the cast was revealed, and days before the show was set to begin filming, Season 8’s Vasana Montgomery has met the same fate after videos of her using the N-word came out on social media.

Love Island fans are at the center of this controversy, publishing reciepts, calling for firings, and, at the same time, drumming up much wanted attention for the new season. For reality TV, fan involvement, even when it centers something so serious, so harrowing, and so egregious, is…actually a good thing?

Free publicity, series-building lore, and, apparently, freelance background checks (seriously, who at Peacock is supposed to be screening these people???) are just a few things you can expect from a fanbase as dedicated and unhinged as Love Island’s.

I will have MUCH to say about this as Season 8 unfolds over the next six weeks, but because this is a weekly notes post, I’ll keep it brief today. What is unendingly interesting to me about Love Island is the role that the audience plays in the theater of it all.

Some of it is frightening—may I remind you that Love Island has had multiple cast suicides across the franchise? Most of which seem to have some correlation to fan perception!

Some of it carries a timely cultural weight. I don’t remember as many fan-led cast “background checks” in the reality television days of old. The Bachelor’s 2021 Rachael Kirkconnell Old South Frat Party scandal seems to have solidified it as a common practice. It’s hard not to see how this ties into the political landscape of post-2016.

And, of course, some of this fan craze is fun, too. Following the discourse of Love Island is as exhilarating as watching it. I’ve enjoyed seeing the colosseum’s audience react as the bikini-clad islanders perform for them (a frightfully fitting metaphor).

But, no matter the outcome, audience interaction is becoming increasingly more prominent in the reality television world. The question, then, is to what end it’ll lead (I have an answer involving Summer House that I hope to share soon).

Patrick Ta needs to shut his god damned mouth. This past week, social media was abuzz when Patrick Ta, founder of the self-titled makeup brand, released “transition blushes.”

His new product, and the way he approached its release, sparked controversy for multiple reasons. The shades and packaging were nearly identical to a product from Juvias Place, a black-owned makeup brand known for ultra-pigmented formulas.

^{Juvias Place Blush Duos, released 2021 (top row) vs. Patrick Ta Transition Blushes, released 2026 (bottom row). LOL.}

But that’s just the beginning. Beauty enthusiasts immediately noticed an eerie similarity between the transition blushes and the work of celebrity makeup artist (and mua of a generation) Ngozi Edeme, or Painted by Esther, who is known for popularizing (not inventing!) transition blush, especially on darker skintones. Her work has been on the MET Gala carpet and on the stages of stadium tours. Her looks on Olandria (I can’t stop bring up Love Island USA, can I?) changed my brain chemistry. And now Ta was releasing mutliple new products touting the technique’s name.

This could be explained simply enough. “Transition blush” is an age old technique and style. No one person owns the look (though Ta did try to trademark the phrase 👀now live, but pending). In fact, Kevyn Aucoin is seen as the originator of the technique, but some even argue that it’s been popular in Asian culture for centuries.

But here’s where it gets as shady as a walk through lower manhattan (seriously, it’s ten degrees colder here underneath the shadows of these cavernous corporate offices):

Esther admitted in a recent TikTok video that the co-founder of Patrick Ta Beauty recently booked a makeup appointment with her, then, at the last minute, asked to film it. Esther, with bountiful intuition, cancelled the appointment, but the duo behind the brand didn’t give up just yet. Instead, they turned to an already available video of Esther’s technique.

In one of Ta’s promotional videos for his new product, he seems to lift technique AND explanations verbatim from a video Esther made for Kosas.

Esther uses a powder puff for blush application, and so does Ta (a unique choice!). In Esther’s video for Kosas, she at one point instructs watchers to place the product on “the back of your palm.” In his video, Ta repeats it word for word, bar for bar. But that’s not a common phrase, and Edeme admitted that it was her misspeaking after trying to record the clip multiple times. It’s clear as day that Ta was copy-catting.

All of this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though. Ta has a track record of taking the work of black women. And (is this a safe space?) his face filler is high key terrifying!

Anyway, here’s a list of products that Painted By Esther swears by, if you’d like to achieve the blushed-to-perfection look without buying from Patrick Ta:

MAC Skinfinish Colourstruck Blush

Danessa Myricks Yummy Skin Blurring Balm

Dior Backstage Glow Maximizer Palette

In these Ditz Digest posts, I’d like to include exercises and breakdowns to help all of us practice media literacy and intellectual rigor together!

I’ve been thinking about takes lately. Hot takes, cold takes, subway takes…But what if I told you that it’s my personal belief that the takes are making us all worse thinkers, worse people, and a worse society?

It’s fun to craft a take (this Substack is literally take-crafting and take-crafting only), but the process of crafting should be a much longer one. A journey of winding roads, u-turns, and stops to appreciate the views on the other side.

Basically, I think that if we all had to craft an academic essay every time we had a take, we’d be better for it. Think about it—a good essay has a strong thesis, yes, and powerful evidence from both the source “text” and research, but it should also have a counter-argument. The other ideas about your topic should be brought up, listed out. They should be addressed. You should explain why they’re wrong, and also where they’re right.

I want us all to be doing more of this work, so, inspired by Subway Takes, I’m inventing my own game called:

NUANCES™

Here’s how we’ll play:

Follow the link to spin the Nuances™ Wheel. You’ll end up with a current hot button topic. Take a second to write down or think about some takes related to that topic.

Then, think deeply and critically about the different opinions on that topic (make this even more fun with some research, if you’d like!) and see where you can find the cracks and crevices of nuance in each argument. Follow those.

Build a nuance bridge, if you feel like it. You may walk away with better insight, or you may walk away knowing even more deeply that your original take is actually 100% how you feel. That’s great! Finding the nuance will just serve to make you original argument even stronger.

A few of my favorite nuances relating to the wheel topics?

• Homeschooling: The panic about governmental “brainwashing” of children in public schools is probably very rooted in common parental anxieties. Most parents, unfortunately, view their children as extensions of themselves. But, at some point, they start to realize that their children are fully human people who will develop their own personalities, beliefs, and opinions. The right’s panic about school teachers implanting information into their children against their will has a lot to do with parents realizing they cannot control their kids forever.

• Professional Athletes’ Salaries: Professional athletes do get paid an insane amount of money. As a former daycare teacher, I think that everyone who works in daycares should make the same salary as an NFL player (same with people who work in nursing homes, hospice, hospitals, etc.). At the same time, many professional athletes pay out astronomical fees to managers, lawyers, advisors, and family members they feel indebted to, leaving the actual gross income they recieve to be far less than the flashy number reported. Now think about the fact that they’re exploiting their own bodies for our entertainment, with the constant threat of career-ending injuries and the compounding damage to their brains and bodies (CTE is nightmarish), and are usually under the tight control of their owners, coaches, and managers (it feels a little pre-emancipation sometimes tbh), and…suddenly the vitriol feels a little different. If there’s anyone I want taking pay cuts, its NFL owners!

• Reality TV: As you know, I think Reality TV is one of the greatest sociological tools we have to examine our current culture. Everything on Reality Television, from the characters, to the fashion, to the conversations had, to the style of editing from producers tells a story about our world at that exact moment in time. Its a microcosm of society! And watching it with a critical, intelligent, and curious eye will yield you far more intelletually than ignoring it because you think it’s vapid trash or brain rot.

Let me know in the comments any cool nuances you got to, or any topics I should add to our wheel!

Well, well, well. That’s all for this Friday, folks. See you with another Ditz Digest in two Fridays (going to try a schedule of twice a month Digest posts and twice a month essay posts!!). Love you all a milli xoxo!

Corey’s book Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto has just recently been released, and I’ve ordered my copy posthaste. I’ve also just read this INCREDIBLE article by (who writes Flesh World, one of my favorite Substacks ever!!!) where she interviews Corey about her new book whilst inside the mannequin factory that is the NYC SKIMS store. What a perfect bit of writing by two of the most exciting brains of the century!!

This reminded me of an old grad school assignment, where I was tasked to write a controversial book, TV, or movie review for a nonfiction class (the same class where I wrote a personal essay about TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras that I’m hoping to share a link to one day if I can ever “get my ass up and work” and send it out for publication). I chose to write about the then newly formed Hulu show, The Kardashians. Here’s the article, which is wonderfully out-of-date now, three years later, which is kind of like the whole entire point!!

As I dive into Corey’s book, I’m sure there will be more Kardashain-inspired content in the future.

The Kardashians Can’t Keep Up With Themselves

In the first five minutes of the season two premiere of The Kardashians, a bombshell is dropping. The episode opens on a shot of the sky, bright blue with a blinding orb of sun. As the camera pans down to a lush yard filled with trees, somber piano music begins to play. The camera cuts to a sole purple flower and then artistically blurs the focus.

We cut to a bedroom and hear an instantly recognizable vocal fry—“How are you feeling?” We don’t have to see her to know it’s the voice of Kim Kardashian, but the camera is solely focused on her sister, Khloé, who sits anxiously on a bed and replies, “I mean I’m anxious, but…you know. I feel like it just has to be, like, time…to talk about [it].” The audience is held in suspense.

We cut to a confessional room, but, in a break from the show’s convention, the couch opposite the camera is empty. A producer says, “Hello, lady,” and Khloé Kardashian walks into frame. She sits and looks visibly nervous as the producers ask, “Ready?”

This break in regular editing, this supposed “backstage” look as Khloé prepares to confess about whatever it is time to confess about, serves to heighten the suspense and drama. She is wearing a skin tight, baby pink latex mini dress. Her bleach blonde extensions are crimped and falling out of view. The look, confusingly, seems more fitting for an Instagram sponsorship photoshoot than for baring one’s soul to a camera. But, alas, she begins: “Um, there is something that I do need to talk about.”

The problem, for both the show and the audience, is that the dramatic suspense of this excruciatingly slow opening scene, the shocking revelation that Khloé is having another baby with serial-cheater ex Tristan Thompson after news broke that he had just impregnated a mistress, was already revealed two months prior via TMZ. Here is where the tension lies for a show like The Kardashians.

It’s no secret that the Kardashian-Jenner family is a powerhouse of reality TV and pop culture, but they are also masterminds of contemporary media in general. The family’s original show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, was “canceled” in 2020, only to be repurposed into the Hulu-directed The Kardashians (a move that offered a rumored nine-figure deal, more creative control for the family, and a fast-acting injection of attention) in 2022.

When Keeping Up with the Kardashians first aired, it had a specific job to do—introduce us to the family, keep them visible in the pop culture space, and make us care about them. The care mentioned here never needed to be of positive connotation. In fact, the early episodes of the original show seemed to aim to make us care about them because we hated them, or at least because we thought them stupid. But the problem for the Kardashians now is that we already do that—care about them, or think they’re stupid, or maybe both. The TV show has lost its purpose, and you can feel that loss, that confusion, when watching The Kardashians.

The finale of the very first season of The Kardashians ended with an admittedly adrenaline-inducing shock. In a rare, but absolutely manufactured, break from typical shooting, we follow the camera crew as they unpack from a van, frazzled, confused, and energized. The message is clear to viewers immediately: something has happened—something big—and we are about to get a front-row, VIP seat to the drama.

What follows is shaky and frenetic filming of Kim in her home gym speaking on the phone to different members of the Kardashian-Jenner family, discussing a breaking news story from TMZ which details the fact that Khloé Kardashian’s boyfriend, and the father to her daughter, True, has been cheating again. But, this time, has gotten the mistress pregnant. The story also details that Tristan has known about the pregnancy and been hiding it from Khloé for months. The episode ends with lots of tears and slow-mo shots of Khloé and Tristan over sad music.

And that bombshell of the first five minutes of season two? It’s that everything was not as it seemed in the last five minutes of season one’s finale. There was more to the story, cut for suspense, and we are now getting to see it. We are shown the “lost” camera footage—Kim speaking to Khloé over speaker phone about the TMZ story. She starts, “But if this isn’t the biggest sign for you to not to have another baby with this human being—” but Khloé nterjects—“I have a little problem.”

And in Khloé’s latex-clad confessional, she now reveals that “little” problem—she and Tristan had actually done an embryo transfer, getting a surrogate pregnant, just a few days before the TMZ article broke and she learned about his infideltiy and its hidden pregnancy.

It’s juicy, of course. It’s also incredibly sad, but this is exactly the kind of insane drama that Reality TV is made for. But there’s a glaring issue. The show treats this as brand new information for the viewer, but it simply isn’t. TMZ broke the news that Khloé and Tristan were expecting another baby via surrogate on July 13, 2022, and announced that the baby boy had been born (birth date in late July) on August 5th of that same summer. The season two premiere of The Kardashians released September 22, 2022. This is old news.

The Kardashian-Jenners are an anomaly in the pop culture space. They have somehow remained not only relevant, but hyper-visible in American culture over a span of about fifteen years, even as they aged past thirty and then forty, ages where most famous women become invisible to popular media. This has been achieved, in large part, by absolutely brilliant marketing and PR schemes that involve a mix of shocking social media posts, magazine and television visibility, their own TV show, and breaking story after breaking story on gossip sites like TMZ. They are the saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” incarnate.

And now the Kardashians are inextricably linked to the very ways that we consume media and culture. Kim practically invented Instagram, propelling the app to mainstream relevancy by posting her infamous selfies to it. They are a major reason behind why we as a society cycle so aggressively through news. They break their own scandals and then post a bikini picture to Instagram, while we watch the same magazine post a “Kim Kardashian Uses Earth-Destroying Levels of Fuel On Her Private Jet” story and then a “Kim Kardashian Sizzles in Metallic Bikini” story four hours later. They invented this convention, and now they’re stuck on its hamster wheel. And they can’t keep up.

The Kardashains’ TV show is now a companion piece of sorts for the family. When a news story or a new business or an especially iconic photoshoot rocks the Internet pop culture space, audiences know that they will get to see a more in-depth look into it in a few months when an episode about it appears on Hulu. The problem with the new Hulu-backed show is that the episodes feel more devoid of substance than ever.

They don’t scratch the itch that they’re supposed to—one of a juicy and realistic tell-all about the stories that pique our collective interest most. That is because The Kardashians is perhaps less reality TV now than it has ever been before (and it’s never felt like true reality). Because the Kardashian-Jenner family, led by Kris, is just so good at controlling narrative, and because this new deal offers them more control than ever, the show now feels so calculated, curated, and staged that it’s almost unbearable to watch. If a viewer only pays a small bit of attention, the glaringly clear shadow of momager Kris Jenner’s hand appears in every scene, arranging every angle, fake eyelash, and crystal blue tear.

In season two, episode one, the artistic but empty-of-meaning camera shots of California scenery fill up full minutes of airtime when combined. These shots are paired with slow musical numbers with a female voice crooning lyrics like “Out of the ashes, we can be born again.” The viewer is being hand fed emotion.

The iconic members of the Kardashain-Jenner family have multiple confessional shoots where they cry at different intervals about how sad they are for Khloé, how much they wish she was enjoying her pregnancy (a pregnancy that is she is not actively partaking in, as she has hired a surrogate to carry the baby). They keep saying things like, “Khloé is just so beautiful,” and “Khloé is the most deserving of love,” and “Khloé is one of the strongest people I know,” which feels patronizing instead of emotionally poignant.

There is a real strangeness around the somber tone of the episode, and a tension I couldn’t ignore as I watched Khloé in seeming agony for the entirety of the forty-eight minutes. Everyone appeared to be in mourning, to the point that Kim’s speech at Khloé’s baby shower featured the sentence “I’m really sad for you” (or, was this just clip editing on the part of the show’s editors?). It felt like everyone was talking about a terminal cancer diagnosis, and not the birth of a new baby.

At the end of the episode, when we watch Khloé meet her new son in the hospital via home video-esque footage taken by Kim, things still don’t change. As the surrogate births the baby and Kim zooms in to watch his first breath in the outside world, she pans once to Khloé, who is holding her head in her hands, covering her eyes, and even turns around to face the wall. As the two drive home, Kim shows Khloé sitting next to her brand new baby in his carrier. She forces a smile and calls him “No Name Johnson” before staring off into space. I left the show feeling strange inside. The show’s narrative building work made me feel more sad for the new baby than fired up about justice for Khloé, which is what I think it was trying to get me to feel.

The scenes for the new season play at the end of the episode. We see Kourtney trying on wedding dresses. The problem? Her wedding took place on May 15, 2022. The photos were all over social media four months ago. The wedding was SPONSORED by Dolce & Gabbana. We’ve already viewed it, analyzed, and, frankly, forgotten about it. There are teasers for an inside look at Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson’s sizzling new relationship. But we all know they broke up back in August (coincidentally on the very same day that TMZ broke the story that Khloé’s son was born, a rumored genius PR stunt by Kris to hide the news about Khloé with media coverage about Kim’s break up instead).

As I exited out of Hulu, I couldn’t help but wonder why I, as an audience member, would feel any need to tune back in next week.

Thanks for reading! Luv u xoxo!

I’ve seen people posting about this trend through a nostalgic lens for a few years now, but the other day I stumbled upon this TikTok about its current iteration:

The idea that Tuscan Momcore is the life we were promised, a sort of comforting, realistic picture of the American Dream and its upper middle class, little luxuries, a life that now seems increasingly further and further from reach, felt incredibly poignant. But another thought stopped me in my tracks—this life feels aspirational now, but when I was a child, eating Barilla pasta in these very same Tuscan kitchens, it felt like the ground floor of aspiration, the very lowest common denominator of what I could dream to have, to be, to become.

What happens when financial strain, poor economy, price gauging, political unease, and new, broad, bold strokes of misogyny press down upon the young women of the country for years? Our dreams are the first budget cut.

Ask a room full of women what they dream for and, if the current cultural temperature is accurate, they will say “painted nails,” “enough free time to wait for bread to rise,” “a recurring hair appointment,” “a large painted jar and enough extra virgin olive oil to pour into it.”

I’m sad. I’m sad because the women of my generation are yearning for a life that is small enough to fit into a kitchen.

A cookie cutter suburban. Three kids who play sports or take piano lessons. A husband who is around, somewhere. A weekly coffee date with Maria from the PTA. Square french tips that get filled every two weeks. A kitchen with a rooster painting.

And right now, for most women, that does sound like a dream. To own a home. To have the resources to bring a child into the world, let alone multiple. A husband who isn’t an incel, looksmaxxing, or allergic to commitment. Enough money left over for an $8 latté, a nail appointment, and decor in a room where it could seem superfluous. I mean, spending money on a THEMED kitchen does feel like a luxury in this economic climate.

But I knew the Tuscan moms. And it’s not that I thought they were lesser, or useless, or stupid for being wives and mothers (the hardest jobs on the literal planet!!!!!). It’s just that there have always been cracks. I watched the women around me as I grew up worry about financial safety if things ever went sour in their marriages, get scolded by husbands for not dusting the woodwork or making dinner too salty, tell their children they “gave up their lives” to raise them, decorate one room and then another.

As a child, I dreamt of work that inspired and fulfilled me. I dreamt of a savings account bearing only my name. I dreamt of equal work within the home, a husband who knew how to make vacuum lines in the carpet. I dreamt of my name in lights, on dustjackets, CDs, desk nameplates. I dreamt of abundance, true joy, contentment, love.

When life is hard enough to make us feel like the banalities and abuses of suburban housewifery are aspirational (and, actually, a good trade off in exchange for our passions and dreams) simply because they come with enough money to eat lunch at Panera Bread multiple times a week, something is very, very wrong.

I’d be remiss not to mention the tradwife throughline in all of this (isn’t there always a trade wife throughline?). The social media guerrilla warfare of the tradwife movement was SO successful in getting millions of women to kick their wants, desires, and big dreams to the curb in exchange for pastel dutch ovens, overalls, and cosplaying a milkmaid.

And of course it was successful! Of course it looked glamorous to have a garden and make bread and walk barefoot in the sun during daylight hours. There are days when the psych ward could look glamorous compared to modern reality (I’ve been there, so I can say that).

When you spend your days working your ass off, just to go grocery shopping and learn that three apples is now the equivalent to federal minimum wage and, thus, an hour of your labor is worth THREE FUCKING APPLES, and then you’re like “How am I ever going to buy a house like this?” and someone’s like “Oh, don’t worry. Blackstone bought them all anyway, so you never had a chance,” and then your phone pings with a Hinge notification from a man who tells you that he heard on a Podcast that women’s eggs are basically scrambled by 22, so he’s actually looking for a child bride, thanks, it’s like OKAY I’M READY TO MAKE SOURDOUGH.

And within that psyop, women decided that it was enough, that it was good, really, to trade in their dreams, their stability, their agency, for an apron and a spatula, or a very, very yellow kitchen. Let the man go earn a grossly underadjusted salary! At least you have liesure time—to scrub the floors, bake the sourdough, and rear the children, of course. Don’t worry, you’ll still be in debt, though.

When the powers that be beat us down this badly, the bare minimum for what we once wanted becomes the ceiling. We don’t dream of becoming painters, writers, scientists, business owners, lawyers, directors, CEOs. We dream of uncomfortable comfort—a stay-at-home mom arranging the spice rack.

The boys of Silicon Valley have dreams. The boys of Wall Street have dreams. The boys on the Hill have dreams. They are not of kitchens—Tuscan or otherwise.

Hannah Montana started a renaissance in the type of media Disney produced for its young, mostly female, viewers. Hannah was a secret popstar with a double life as her “normal” teen girl self. Raven Baxter was a regular girl with a secret psychic ability. K.C. was an undercover spy and also an undercover high schooler, Alex Russo a normal girl and then not-so-normal wizard, even Lizzie McGuire left the confines of her incredibly conventional (and wonderfully boring) life to become a secret Italian popstar in The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

Disney Channel made one thing clear—you can ache for the extraordinary, you can dream of fame, without having to think about the scariest parts of it all. It’s interesting to track this shift as a response to the absolute slaughterhouse of celebrity media happening in the early 2000s. Young girls idolized Britney Spears and then struggled to make sense of the hairless, crying, baseball-bat wielding woman of the tabloids. They sang along with Mary-Kate and Ashley and then asked their mothers what anorexia meant in the grocery aisle, the thinned out twins on the cover of a magazine, the word brutally large and inconceivable. Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, even Miley herself, shone on stage and crumbled in the real-light of day. Young girls ached for fame at the same time that they flinched at its effects, so Disney built them the perfect fantasy.

The interesting part of it all? That fantasy is alive and well today. Welcome to being an influencer!

You may start your day early, film yourself whisking matcha before whisking yourself out the door to your morning pilates class, where you attend regularly and make friends with the girl next to you. Afterward, you stop at an expensive market to pick up a smoothie before you go home to edit videos on your phone while you lay in bed. You walk your dog like normal, and a woman stops you to ask his breed and walks away when you answer. Then you get ready for the night before a private car picks you up and delivers you to an all-out party for a popular brand, where you are lavished in free swag gifts, photographed on a red carpet, and are seated a table away from true A-listers (or at least B-plusers, okay!).

You upload the footage to hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. They shower you in compliments and ask for the links to everything you’re wearing. Don’t worry, their shopping of those links will yield you hundreds of thousands, so you never have to think about money. Tomorrow you’ll take a walk in the park and no paparazzi will stalk and harass you. One or two girls might shout that they love your content as they walk by, but for the most part, you’re a normal girl on the streets and a celebrity on the screen. You get the gift of standing up on a platform, but also being able to jump down to engage in regular society and community. Some might say you get the best of both worlds. Sound familiar?

In the shifting landscape of fame culture, some of those who yearn for celebrity are skipping out on the traditional routes altogether and deciding to just go for the Internet. Its barriers for entry are lower. Brittany Broski’s TikTok video of her trying kombucha has catapulted her to a kind of Internet fame so strong that “real” celebrities appear on her Youtube show Royal Court to promote their projects (Harry Styles did just this a few weeks ago and it was an incredibly joyful watch).

How do you become an A-list singer or actress? Connected family members, a lot of money, a once-in-a-million lucky break, and years of grueling work in the shadows. Or you could upload a video everyday and hope you go viral. The odds are a lot better, and now that we live in an Influencer economy, the outcomes might just be better as well.

Comedians are skipping SNL auditions for TikTok jokes that are now actually informing SNL episodes. Singers are skipping traditional recording deals to strum guitars in thirty second clips. Actors are deciding to up their follower counts instead of their acting classes for better chances of getting cast. Charli D’Amelio is opting for a quieter, less invasive life…on Broadway! (And she’s fantastic!). Addison Rae (another diva I don’t play about) got a record deal without showing the executives any music, just print outs of colors. Her position as influencer had enough promise for future profit that becoming an actual pop star could seem like a side quest*. If you can get famous on the Internet, who needs to spend all day on a set or hustle their asses off performing at small shows in seedy bars?

Online influencing allows people to brush against celebrity status, as well as its privileges, gifts, and abundance, without having to deal with the “Britney Spears treatment” of it all. The problem? Those fans that harass celebs on the street, the paparazzi who follow them everywhere, the media who are constantly critiquing, exposing, exploiting—the influencers don’t deal with them in real life, but they deal with a version of them on the screen.

Take a personal anecdote of mine for example—last year, when I had a measly 400 TikTok followers, a majority of them personal, real life friends, I posted a video before my bridal shower, freaking out about which of two dresses to wear. In the video, my makeup is half on, my hair a mess. I didn’t expect many people to see it. I show the two dresses, say that I’m in a hurry, and post it quickly, hoping that by the time I finish my mascara, a few of my friends will have given me their opinion. That’s not what happened. The video, somehow, someway, blew up. It currently sits at over 213,000 views. And, to my utter and complete shock, the comments were brutal.

Let me just say that TikTok decided to push the video to women over sixty (I can see the analytics) and they were meaner to me than any bully I’ve ever known (perhaps a topic for writing in and of itself…). Some of the comments and messages I received:

“Get that mole removed before your wedding..” “You look like a twelve year old.” “Wearing a dress if you have bruises on your leg is so inappropriate.” “If I was your mother, I’d be disappointed.” “Hideous mole, great legs.”

And some favorites— “horrible” and “NO!”

This was on the video of a random, regular girl with NO followers or platform. What are people saying to the real influencers? How much hate do they eat every day? And, unlike mega celebrities, their lack of ultra-stardom also means they have less defense against this hate. Celebrities can make their movies and albums and then try their best to stay out of the public eye, retreating to serene and private gated homes in exclusionary places. Their art, their creation, is technically separate from their status. Influencers have to log onto their phones every day or risk losing all of their career power. I’m wondering how the next iteration of fame will safeguard against this, because, if my hypothesis is correct, it will try.

As someone who has been obsessively tracking fame for as long as I’ve been alive, who is now retroactively tracing it through the years before I held consciousness, it’s easy to see how one decade’s handling of stardom effects, and sometimes completely revolutionizes, the next’s. The 2000’s hyperfocus on celebrity, and its subsequent battering of (mostly female) stars, seems to have directly inspired Hannah Montana and its “best of both worlds” ethos. The little girls who ached to be Hannah onstage and Miley at prom have now grown up and discovered their own way toward those two worlds—one is just behind a thin sheet of glass. So what will our current constructions of celebrity yield us next? I don’t care, I just hope it makes me a star.

***

Now, let me take a page out of Miley Cyrus’ book for a moment. The Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary special only happened because she began promoting it before it was even greenlit. Miley said, “I learned this terrible habit — but I actually think it was good advice — from Dolly. She told me that if you want something to happen, promote it before it exists. Then no one can say no.”

So, here goes—this essay is part of a larger piece I’m exploring, called “On Fame,” which will be in my forthcoming essay collection “POPSTAR.” It’s not done yet, and certainly has no publisher, so it’s not technically forthcoming, but it’s real and it will be in the world one day (soon!). Make sure to subscribe to Airhead Academic for updates <3

***

NOTES

*I do believe Addison specifically takes her music career, and the art of performance, more seriously than that. She feels akin to me in spirit: a life of Internet celebrity would never scratch the itch for us divas.

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Welcome to Airhead Academic!

This substack is the culmination of years of obsessive thought, voracious reading, endless pop culture immersion, and feverish writing (that feels, in the moment, more like yapping to a friend at a coffee shop).

My name is Shannon. I am an award-winning writer, a published poet, a personal-essay luvr, and a lifelong learner. I have my BA in English and my MFA in Creative Writing. I’m someone who cherishes critical thought, deep analysis, and good writing with every fiber of my being. I’m also someone who could give you an in-depth breakdown of every Sabrina Carpenter tour outfit, Love Island USA elimination, and 2010 trash TLC reality show at the drop of a hat. I don’t believe these things to be mutually exclusive.

I realized a few years into my college experience that, because of the way I fashioned myself, the interests that I had, or the way I babbled on and on about those interests, I wasn’t taken very seriously. I’ll never forget the first time I was sitting with a group of friends—friends who had known me for an entire year at this point!—speaking emphatically about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose style, and being told, “Wow, you’re, like, actually really smart.”

In the moment, I couldn’t decipher if I felt deflated and hurt by it, or secretly thrilled that someone had finally peeked beneath the intonation of my voice and the sparkly lipgloss on my lips to hear the actual words beneath it all. I do know that I’ve heard that same sentence countless times since then, and it’s the one that gave me the idea for this Substack.

I want to use my intellect, my research skills, my writing talent, my critical eye, my wit! I also want to speak to the things that engage me, obsess me, thrill me! The way a reality TV show fashions language, the way we speak about women in media, the way pop culture shapes our values and our worlds, the way fashion and hair color and makeup application signal identity, and what all of it means—those are the things I want to write toward.

And here’s the truth at the heart of Airhead Academic—those topics are just as serious and important as any other topic being written about. As we’ve seen, especially lately, social media has the power to write, and re-write, our values and politics. Reality TV has the power to solidify gender dynamics. Fashion has the power to shape our economy. Celebrity has the power to change the landscape of American career. All of this has everything to do with politics, ethics, power. Just because these realms of life are associated with “vapid femininity” does not make them unserious. And that’s Airhead Academic—the serious thought at the core of the glitzy, frosted, bedazzled, tacky.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, I hope you’ll stick around. I’m sure the scheduling and output of the Substack will change a bit as we all get situated, but I’m planning on releasing longform essays, shorter notes on current culture, musings on beauty, fashion, celebrity, and media, and more throughout each month. I’d love to have you as a reader, a commenter, an equally serious, unserious friend.

I’m Shannon, this is Airhead Academic, and I’ve always known you were smart.

Legally Blonde. Directed by Robert Luketic, performance by Reese Witherspoon, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2001.

(Is there a better patron saint for the vibe of Airhead Academic??)