Once upon a time, in a not-too-distant land, Caroline Calloway was an all-American young adult embarking on a degree at Cambridge University who saw an opportunity in the then-fledgling Instagram to create a personal brand.

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The now-27-year-old started sharing lengthy, fairytale-esque captions about her life and loves at the top-tier university from 2012.

Her aim, firstly, was to get followers, which she did (she now has nearly 800,000). But her "ultimate goal" in starting the account, she told Man Repeller last year, "was to get a book deal", which she also achieved.

What happened when the book deal behind everything fell apart

In 2016, she was awarded a $US500,000 book deal through Flatiron Books for a memoir titled, And We Were Like. The following year, it was dissolved.

She told Man Repeller last year that she had decided not to write the book, as "the boy-obsessed version of myself I planned to depict as my memoir's protagonist was not one I could stand behind."

But she told The Times last week the deal had fallen apart because she'd "got addicted to Adderall [a prescription medicine used to manage ADHD and narcolepsy] and sold a book I didn't want to write for half a million dollars".

With the book deal off the table, Ms Calloway continued sharing the content her audience had grown to love — until this year, when she decided to try something different.

In January, Ms Calloway announced a global series of "creativity" workshops where she envisioned attendees would "talk about feelings and share stories and eat vegan salad and take photos with flowers in [their] hair and talk about heartbreak and creativity and art," as she wrote in the event description.

Tickets were $165 a pop.

Several of the dates sold out, after which gossip started to circulate that Ms Calloway had yet to book event spaces past those for the first weekend.

Ms Calloway later dismissed this as rumour, but the damage was done.

Calloway first went viral for 'scamming' attendees

Despite it all, the first handful of workshops went ahead, albeit to poor reviews. Ms Calloway was criticised for a discrepancy between what was provided and what she had advertised.

She ended up cancelling remaining dates and all ticket holders, including those who had already attended the first workshops, were refunded through Eventbrite.

Ms Calloway built up a following for her fairytale-esque captions about life at Cambridge. ( Instagram: Caroline Calloway )

The public backlash to all of this saw her labelled a "Fyre Festival-like drama playing out in real time" by Business Insider — one of many publications to cover the workshops.

Of the backlash, Ms Calloway wrote in Refinery 29 last month: "It was not a scam. But ... my supposed 'scam' looked bad. There was evidence against me and it was enough to catch internet wildfire."

And so she leaned into the "scammer" descriptor as part of her brand. Her Instagram bio still reads: "No, not that one. The other scam. The one you love."

Ms Calloway leaned into the "scammer" description as part of her brand. ( Instagram: Caroline Calloway )

The backlash had begun

Then in June, she started selling line paintings of breasts over tie-dye backgrounds that she called Tittays and priced at $40, before upping the price to between $80 and $100.

The following month, Ms Calloway announced she would be running more creativity workshops, this time labelling them The Scam, in a move that made more headlines.

Ms Calloway started selling her art on her social media account in June. ( Instagram: Caroline Calloway )

And then a few weeks ago, she started making cut-outs in the style popularised by Henri Matisse — Ms Calloway calls them Dreamer Bbs — and charging between $180 and $220.

These actions were widely criticised online. Social media users accused Ms Calloway of selling unoriginal art, for lying about struggling with money — as she had said she was before she started selling the art — and for daring to put on more creativity workshops.

Some also took issue with her publicly criticising select journalists who had written about her.

Ms Calloway's Dreamer Bb cutouts set buyers back between $180 and $220. ( Instagram: Caroline Calloway )

OK, but why is everyone talking about Calloway right now?

So, after all that, writer Natalie Beach penned a tell-all article about her experiences as Ms Calloway's former friend, and as a ghostwriter who helped with the influencer's Instagram captions and book proposal, published for The Cut earlier this month.

The article chronicled seven years of intermittent friendship, went into great detail about Ms Calloway's former Adderall addiction, and claimed she had bought followers.

Natalie Beach, right, wrote an expose about Ms Calloway and their intermittent friendship. ( Instagram: Caroline Calloway )

Calloway shared dozens of posts in response to it.

And then, amidst it all, her dad died.

Still, she carried out the media interviews she had scheduled before receiving the news. And she continued posting. At the time of writing, 122 posts have been shared to her account in just under two weeks. This was in stark contrast to September 2017 to November 2018, when she posted nothing to her grid at all.

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The majority were screen grabs of the images posted to her Instagram account from 2012 to 2019. Her goal, she wrote in her 79th post of the fortnight, was to set the record straight about the work she'd had help with and the work she hadn't.

But she also shared screen grabs of some of the many articles published about her in the wake of Ms Beach's, interspersed with stories about her father as she travelled to Harvard, his alma mater, and imagined him as his student self.

She continued selling her art via Instagram DMs. And the day after finding out about her father's death, she shared a nude.

She wrote in the caption: "This nude is what I felt like posting because I'm drawn to content that is radical and lets me take up space in all my broken, beautiful, human ways."

Throughout it all the world continued to watch, to follow, to comment.

Why is the internet so fascinated by her?

While Ms Calloway may have leant into the "scammer" descriptor, there is no evidence to suggest she is one. She has not been convicted, or even charged, with anything.

But given the appetite for scammers' stories — we watched Fyre Festival and the Anna Delvey case unfold in real time; closer to home, we followed the stories of Belle Gibson, the Lincoln Lewis catfisher and, most recently, Lezlie Manukian — this distinction doesn't appear to have lessened the appetite for updates to Ms Calloway's.

Dr Paul Seager, a senior lecturer in social and forensic psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, told the ABC people can be drawn to tales of scammers, or those who people think may be scammers, because "it almost makes us feel good about ourselves because we think, 'well I haven't fallen for that'."

"But most of the people that have this fascination of scams are people who haven't fallen for them.

"If you talk to people who have been victims to con artists or scammers, they will probably have a very different view," he said.

Shortly after this article was first published, Ms Calloway directly answered the question it seeks to ask when she shared a screen grab of it to her feed.

Why do people follow her?

"I'm a good writer. I have a flair for storytelling. I'm talented at — and this is harder to articulate because we don't have a word for it — I'm talented at making internet stuff. Even people who say [my] account is trash can't stop consuming it, can't stop talking about me, can't stop spending their one wild and precious life obsessing over my every move while I don't even know their names."

She added: "If you make something that holds people's attention, some of it will begin slanting negative … but I guarantee you this: if my writing were all fluff and there weren't incredibly juicy, sticky posts waiting to pull people in, and keep them here the second they arrive on my account, nothing about me would ever have gone viral on Twitter — let alone the mainstream news.

"Part of my performance art is providing the dry kindling for fame to catch fire."

Do Instagram influencers owe us anything?

In less than two weeks, Ms Calloway's Instagram gained over 16,000 followers, according to social media tracker Social Blade.

Many of the people engaging with the influencer on Instagram, penning tweets and creating weekly Reddit threads to discuss her, now do so to dissect the myriad of things they perceive her to have done wrong.

Freelance journalist Amelia Tait is an exception.

Tait wrote about Ms Calloway as part of a wider piece about influencer culture for VICE in March, looking at how it feels when an influencer you trust leads you down the wrong path post-creativity workshops.

Ms Calloway's response? To call out Tait and other journalists for having written about her in an Instagram post.

The journalist told the ABC she had wanted to talk about people who "felt they 'knew' an online personality, but later felt ripped off by them".

Some social media users have discussed Ms Calloway's mental health. ( Instagram: Caroline Calloway )

"I think it's acceptable — and even desirable — to write about influencers when they've done something against the public interest.

"[But] I find it troubling that we've seen a recent spate of pieces that conflate the poor public actions of internet-famous women with their poor private, personal actions.

"[Reports Ms Calloway bought] followers is one thing, [reports she] re-gifted make-up is entirely another," Tait added, referencing the claim in Ms Beach's essay that Ms Calloway had once given her used makeup and a cheque that bounced for a birthday present.

The ethics of watching a person in distress online

What does our collective desire to witness the distress of an online personality such as Ms Calloway — and to react as if she ever owed us anything — say about us?

Trish Obst, an associate professor at the QUT school of psychology and counselling, told the ABC the way social media users engage online is indicative of the distance from reality social media allows.

"The fact that we watch things on screens and are distanced from the reality of things through using technology takes away some of the immediate impact [of what we're watching]," she says.

"We've become used to this, because that's what we use Instagram for ... It's an extension of using technology to have a screen between you and the actual humanity of the person."

As to the many who take to social media to issue so-called "diganoses" of mental illnesses they believe Ms Calloway has because of the way she exists on social media?

"Labelling people, and diagnosis, has many potential consequences," assistant professor Obst said. "No one, bar someone who is trained in the area, has the professional expertise in which to make a diagnosis," she said.

"And so, a diagnosis [from someone other than a registered health practitioner] can only be a negative experience.

"It's completely unethical."

Ethics aside, if Ms Calloway's reaction to all the past two weeks have thrown at her is anything to go by, the influencer isn't about to log off Instagram anytime soon.

The ABC reached out to a representative for Ms Calloway for comment, but did not hear back before the stated deadline.

