Which is probably why DigiTour is, crucially, still very chaste: Valiando Rojas says she aspires to a “PG-13 atmosphere,” and, by and large, she succeeds. Though the mind races at the prospect of what a good-looking 16-year-old boy might be inclined to do with millions of adoring girls wrapped around his finger, if anything untoward happens on the bus or backstage, I didn’t see it. Even the segment of the show devoted to a cast round of “Never Have I Ever” — usually played as a drinking game; almost definitionally a way for teenagers to brag about their sexual exploits — becomes, in the DigiTour context, sweetly tame, the kids offering up experiences like cow-tipping or skiing. Onstage and off, the boys are wholesome, athletic, polite, presumably straight (though I didn't explicitly ask), outwardly middle-class, and, with the exception of Tez, white — custom-built to be at once broadly irresistible to teenage girls and nonthreatening to their parents. And being everyone’s imaginary boyfriend simply does not square with being anyone’s real boyfriend.



“They’re definitely fuel for this fantasy machine,” Valiando Rojas tells me when I ask her whether DigiTour advises the teens to keep their relationship statuses quiet. She says they do not — and Spiegel makes the same claim about 26 — but she also implies that the boys are savvy enough on their own to know what’s good for their brand and what isn’t. “Even if they’re not super aware of it in an intellectual capacity, they know that girls want to marry them,” Valiando Rojas continues. “And, obviously, they can’t marry 20,000 girls. They realize what their fans want. And saying, ‘I have a girlfriend, I’m unavailable’ — they wouldn’t do that. That’s a death.”

Relationships aside, the fantasy machine breaks down sometimes. It did in June, when a video surfaced of Carter Reynolds, another Vine star (and former 26 client) apparently pressuring his underage then-girlfriend into oral sex. It did in March, when Cameron Dallas was busted for vandalism. And it definitely did last summer, when Nash released a Vine in which he implied that “fags” were responsible for the spread of HIV; the internet erupted. Any celebrity will land in hot water sooner or later, and any teenage boy will say or do something stupid if you watch him long enough. But the very qualities that make this type of celebrity — unvarnished, intimate, organic — compelling are also the ones that make it much more impervious to control or management.

“Social media today has the ability for people to expose their entire life,” Spiegel says when I ask him about this tension. “These guys put everything out there — their lives, their thoughts, their Snapchat stories. That’s why these kids really relate to the teen demographic. And when they go through a hard time, and regain themselves and explain it, that’s better than some PR firm doing it for them.” When I point out that Nash Grier’s homophobic rant wasn’t exactly a standard-issue adolescent “hard time,” Spiegel says, “He was being a 15-year-old kid who was being naive and looking for some engagement on Vine. There’s definitely going to be some mistakes.”



At any rate, in Jonah’s case, all the caginess makes for a short YouNow broadcast. He talks to the camera for a few minutes before ending the session. But first: a phone call to a fan, dialed, as usual, from a blocked cell phone number and shown, of course, onscreen. “Bye, I love you,” he tells his lucky interlocutor at the end of the call.

Ten minutes later, he sidles up for a late lunch at the bar, one of those neon-lit, conspicuously trendy things that looks grotesque in daylight and is favored by mid-rate hotels everywhere. It’s about 4 p.m. and this will be his first meal of the day. He orders a Caesar salad and wedges himself onto a stool between a pair of sisters visiting from Wisconsin and an elevator repairman from Phoenix. None of them have any idea who he is. Jonah makes easy small talk and minor headway on the salad before noticing the group of people standing in the lobby. It’s a mother, her 15-year-old daughter, the daughter’s friend, and a very bored-looking younger brother; the daughter figured out where the boys were staying via some complicated-sounding Snapchat sleuthing and begged her mom to drive to the hotel.

The social media celebrity machine is dependent on a carefully calibrated mixture of giving and withholding: Invite six girls onstage for the prom sequence, but not more than that. Follow a handful of fans back on Twitter, but not all of them. It’s a precarious balance that can quite easily get out of control — especially without any of the protections or layers of access afforded by major, pop-star-style celebrity. Jonah excuses himself and ambles to the elevator, politely avoiding the girls. He leaves his salad mostly unfinished.