November 4, 2014

Viral sensations are like terrorist attacks. Some group of scum will always take credit for them.

In this case, the scum is a company named Breakr and a dude named Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares. They wanted to explore the true power of “the fangirl demographic,” and they found that it is very powerful indeed.

They showed one of their fangirls (yes, Leonares actually claims ownership over a teenage girl) the photo of Alex and asked if she would spread it among her network. They then tweeted about it to “bigger YouTube influencers,” and the rest is history. Leonares writes:

After the dust settles, there is a lesson to be made here; from brands, talent agencies, music labels and influencer marketing companies: if you can earn the love and respect from a global community such as the ‘Fangirl’ demographic – you can rally them together to drive awareness for any cause even if its to take a random kid from unknown to stardom over night.

He’s right. Make them love you and they’ll hawk whatever crummy product you want. It’s positively Machiavellian. Breakr is now going to make a ton of money from “content creators” (i.e. websites and YouTube channels like this one), who want their content to go viral.

They have proven a very important point, though. We have no power over what becomes popular in our society. Most of us have known for years that the songs on the radio are not selected because they are truly the best songs, but because large corporations have decided that they are the easiest ones to sell.

But now, even the Internet, what was once thought of as a true meritocracy, can be manipulated as easily as the Twitter feeds of a few 14-year-old girls. Alex From Target became a meme because they wanted it to, and now I’ve written several hundred words about it. It takes up the time that I could have spent writing about a great short film uploaded to Vimeo, or a beautiful piece of music uploaded to an independent artist’s Soundcloud.

None of those things matter. Every website you go to, every article you see on Gawker, Buzzfeed and CNN.com, will be about whatever the marketing board rooms of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York want you to see. And poor Alex will sacrifice the next several years of his life attempting to squeeze whatever money he can from this temporary fame. He’ll grow up possibly thinking that he has a life of privilege ahead of him because children think he’s cute.

I’ll keep writing about the Alex From Targets of the world, no doubt. Some of them will be funny stories, some of them not so much. For at least a little while, I had hoped that they would be things that just happened — little sparks of signal among the rest of the Internet noise. Now I know that any signal we get has already been sent out in a press release, packaged for public consumption, and prepped to scan through the Target conveyor belt.

……

Oh, here’s a photo of Alex on Ellen: