I came of age before the Internet and will always be a migrant to this new, digital world, likely wandering around with a heavy accent, astounded and slightly out of step with all the natives who were born here. The truth is that I probably live in the Internet more than I live in the Actual World, and see it as something mystical, a kind of oracle from which all wishes and impulses might be made manifest. It’s a dreamy, hazy place, and there’s an obvious danger in this, one that was recently brought into focus by the great nude celebrity hack that emerged on 4Chan.
I wanted to see the pictures, even though I clearly understood that they were stolen property. My desire to see Jennifer Lawrence nude was greater than my moral aversion to invading and violating her privacy. The Internet, as it always does, enabled my reptile brain, and in a way in which it’s very likely that I won’t suffer any consequences for my transgressions.
I don’t think twice about watching pirated TV shows or movies, have no qualms about downloading music without paying for it, and even though I work as a writer, I don’t pay for any subscriptions and get irritated whenever I’m asked to jump through a few hoops in order to get access to content. I guess I feel entitled, and instead of viewing things as private property, I see the online world as communal, shared property, imaging a friend loaning me something like it was a book or an album. My relationship to this material is ephemeral and abstract, and instead of taking solid form and becoming a part of my physical landscape, it passes through me and then drifts back into the fog from whence it came, having more in common with memory than actuality.
When it comes to the stolen nude photos I think I told myself that there was an element of performance to them and that they were the quasi-intentional outcropping of the exhibitionism that is celebrity and were part of continuing seduction, and that they kind of wanted them to be seen, even if this was clearly false.
The truth is that I see celebrities as a brand or corporation—an entity that sells rather than a person that actually lives. They exist as a kind of avatar, a very conscious construct, something symbolic, like a myth, and although our attention is constantly drawn to them, we will never know them. They’re projections, both of our longing and our resentments, and this created persona absorbs all of our vitriol and love, until the actual person at the core of it is destroyed and a new star has to emerge for public adulation and sacrifice.
The Internet accelerates this process. The celebrity is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and our appetite for them has never been so ferocious and predatory. We want all of them, all the time, and every once in awhile the real person behind the curtain gets revealed—vulnerable, flawed, even pedestrian or banal– and we all have to step back and ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re looking at, and what exactly the cost of that might be.
