I woke up this morning with a hangover, which somehow got worse when I saw that gawker.com was finally going under. Anyone who’s been following the story knows that this comes after a multi-year campaign of legal harassment by delicate billionaire Peter Thiel. That he’s been able to destroy a journalistic outlet this way is, of course, bad news for people who care about a free press and an open society.
One way to worry less about the precedent this sets is to pretend that Gawker, after 14 years of violating journalistic norms, somehow “got what was coming to it.” All sorts of people whose opinions I usually respect have made this claim or something like it in recent months. Even Gawker’s most ardent backers now sometimes preface their declarations of support with a caveat of the form, “I don’t agree with the way Gawker covers every issue, but…” I think that making this kind of concession is a mistake, and I’m going to try to say why.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the Bollea-Gawker case with a friend of mine. I was surprised to find out that he took Hulk Hogan’s side – although I shouldn’t have been, because he gets most of his news and views from reddit. He thought it was clear that Gawker had violated Hogan’s privacy by publishing the fatal sex tape. He also looked forward to the demise of the site and the “celebrity culture” that it represented. When I asked him if he’d read Gawker lately, he said no; in fact, he added, he’d never read it.
To say that Gawker is only, or even primarily, about “celebrity culture” is to misrepresent pretty badly what the site does. That point’s been made already by Gawker’s own staff writers, and I’m not going to rehash the argument here. Instead, the question I want to ask is this: what’s so bad about covering “celebrity culture?”
To my friend, it seemed obvious that gossip about the rich and famous was valueless in itself and did harm by distracting us from more important issues. A few years ago, I would have said the same thing, and I was surprised to find myself questioning what had been my basic position about entertainment news for most of my life. But something about me, or something about the world, had changed.
One way to get more concrete about “celebrity culture” is to characterize it as a set of beliefs about celebrities. The rich and famous have an interest in shaping what people believe about them, and they have outlets that allow them to do so: Us, Entertainment Weekly, People, and so on. Other outlets draw readers by puncturing the official story: they titillate us by giving us reason to believe that celebrities are worse, or at least different, than the way we thought they were.
Why pay attention to any of this?
A good reason to pay attention is that we might wish to be undeceived. We might wish to know truer things, in general, about the world in which we live. We might especially wish to know the truth about celebrities who have become, or are likely to become, political figures – people like Donald Trump or, in a more shadowy way, Peter Thiel himself.
The fact of the matter is, though, that every celebrity is in some respect a political figure. Or it might be that “political” is too weak a word: celebrities play an essentially structural role in our thought world, much as saints, gods, and totem animals did in the thought worlds of premodern cultures. Celebrities are good to think with, but not only that; we can hardly think without them.
Take, for instance, this mithra/varuna dyad of the modern age: Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston. Jolie, for us, represents pleasure and indulgence in pleasure; unrestrained fertility; the capture and subversion (in her avatar Brangelina) of man by woman; and, for those of us whose memories stretch back to the nineties, the spectral connection of all these things with death. Aniston, on the other hand, figures restraint; the danger restraint poses, that we might somehow miss the right moment; gentle kindness; infertility; and woman as at the disposal of multiple men. Each actress compresses a range of notions and sentiments into a symbol whose content may no longer explicitly be thought, even when it’s felt. Tabloids and the outlets of the entertainment industry have worked in tandem to make Aniston out as a more sympathetic figure, and that’s political work – a way of training us to know what a “good woman” should be like.
Which brings me to Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, whose privacy and its notional violation lie at the heart of this mess. Hogan began his career as a camp parody of a certain kind of masculinity, and he was going to end it – up until the release of the sex tape, which in its entirety showed Hogan using a variety of racial slurs – as an icon of that masculinity for real. In his second life as a reality TV star, he acted the part of a kind of father figure in whom there was always a potential for violence lurking just beneath the surface. This brutal swagger, we were led to believe, actually made Hogan a better father. His controlling impulses were all to the good, and the entitlement to control from which these impulses stemmed always seemed, in the end, to be justified.
A representation like that has cultural and political consequences, for sure, and ones that seem to me to be deleterious if not actually dangerous. When Gawker published Hogan’s sex tape, what was demonstrated was that the representation was not real. This wasn’t something we needed to be reminded of, perhaps, except that it was: we understood that Hogan’s character had always been a representation, but we didn’t know how poorly the face fit the mask, and a lot of people, for lack of energy or interest, had been willing to assume that face and mask were one and the same. Now, the icon of the violent and controlling but still in every sense “good” father has been shattered. It turns out to have been hiding a demented, hateful sex fiend, a glib hypocrite who denies pleasure to others while recklessly indulging in it himself. We thought he was a hero; all along, he was just a Florida Man.
This is important. This is work that needs to be done, and to conflate it with celebrity self-branding under the heading of “celebrity culture” is to confuse the solution with the problem. The stultifying thing about celebrities is that they can force us, through the sheer volume of their communication, to believe things about them that would beggar belief in a romance novel or an action movie. Gawker’s brand of rumor- and gossip-mongering revealed the real and much more interesting stories behind these serried facades. By doing so, it freed us to think.
Privacy was the moral standard under which Gawker’s assassins drove in the knife. What is privacy for the rich and famous but the privilege of lying, not only about themselves, but about the way the world works? Peter Thiel, for instance, would have us believe that he’s the protagonist from an unwritten Ayn Rand novel. Gawker’s sister site, Valleywag, was able to show up Thiel as not a genius but a buffoon who’d had a run of good luck. In outing him as gay, they revealed that Thiel’s personal behavior stood in conflict with the homophobic hate speech that he had, earlier in his career, done so much to defend and even promote. Peter Thiel’s “privacy” was a means of self-fabrication, and we’re all better off with the veil torn away.
It needs to be added that “privacy” is not a right that many of us enjoy anymore, at least not in a meaningful sense. We film ourselves, we record ourselves, our phones may even record us without our knowledge; someone, somewhere, already knows almost everything we might want to hide about ourselves. Peter Thiel’s silicon valley colleagues have every interest in intensifying this surveillance through devices like Google Glass, which is essentially an always-on mobile spy platform, and – further down the line – through the development of nano-scale intelligence-gathering technologies like smart dust. Already, privacy as we used to know it is in many respects the preserve of the wealthy, and this is only going to become more true as time goes on. Why should we fight to preserve as a “right” what’s really a privilege that most of us can’t afford, and that, in its exercise by those who can afford it, surely does us harm?
Why, indeed?
Everyone knows that wrestling is fake, but not everyone likes to be reminded of that fact. Much the same can be said of the personas that celebrities craft for themselves. Getting past the personas takes work – which, until recently at least, the journalists at Gawker did for us. Rethinking our world in the absence of those personas, though, also takes work, and that’s work we can only do for ourselves. It’s easier “not to think” about celebrities – which is really just to take them at face value. Surely, celebrities like it this way.