It was always going to end like this. The truth about Duchess Kate’s absence is far less interesting, outlandish, and despicable than the endlessly suggested memes and conspiracy theories. In a video recorded and broadcast by her BBC, the princess said she had cancer herself and to protect her children from the spotlight, she took herself out of the public eye to deal with her illness. She said she was staying away. Instead, she had to fight for a laugh on the internet about whether or not she had a Brazilian butt lift. My colleague Helen Lewis put it succinctly this afternoon: He said, “I hope you all are feeling terrible right now.”
What can we learn from such a sad situation? The Internet is made up of people, but its architecture abstracts this fundamental truth. As I wrote a few weeks ago, at the heart of the story over the last few months has been essentially “a wave of people having fun online as the well-being of celebrities is unclear.” There’s always been something a little gory and indefensible underlying the meme.
Maybe humans are just wired to stare and gossip. Tailing members of the royal family or violating the privacy of celebrities in order to sell tabloids or spread the word online is nothing new. You don’t even need to be reprimanded about it. Celebrities are wealthy and beloved, at least in part because they’re fun to talk about. What we know and don’t know about their inner lives is precisely part of the appeal. To some extent, it involves discussion of that area.
However, Duchess Kate is of course also a human being. During this story, I kept thinking about her 2021 reappraisal of Britney Spears and the backlash to past media and tabloid coverage of her rise.a new york times The documentary dredged up old press coverage of Spears from the mid-2000s, showing a young woman in obvious distress as she was torn apart by a glossy magazine. Her suffering became entertainment. Reaction to the film was swift. Some people and organizations that shamelessly rejoiced in her suffering have recanted. Glamour publicly apologized to the pop star on his Instagram account, saying, “We are all responsible for what happened to Britney Spears.”
Comparing the drama between Spears and Middleton, if we’re generous, we can see some of that new attitude in the media. I was struck by Lewis’s point that throughout this turmoil, “British tabloids have shown remarkable restraint.” Perhaps it’s progress, but at the same time, they didn’t really have to do the dirty work. Random people on the internet were doing it for them. They recklessly speculated, created memes, and used amateur detectives and networked fake expertise to concoct elaborate, semi-plausible explanations for her absence. Was Kate’s face actually edited from a photo? trend Spread it? It wasn’t, but it was conspiratorial Tweet Anyway, it got 51.1 million views. Much of the discourse lacked the idea that the protagonist was perhaps someone who was struggling. Essentially, the internet has democratized the tabloid experience, turning the rest of us into paparazzi, workshopping headlines and cover images not to sell magazines but to garner some kind of ephemeral online popularity. It bothered the editor.
When I’m not thinking too much about philanthropy, I see this pernicious dynamic as the enduring legacy of social media, a giant experiment in injecting metrics in connectivity that has flattened and had pernicious effects. thinking about. In 2021, I interviewed journalist Elle Hunt. She tweeted a bland opinion about a horror movie one night and when she woke up it was trending on Twitter, her feed choking with thousands of furious replies and threats. When I asked her to describe her experience of becoming her Twitter hero of the day, she summed it up like this: “It’s being reused as fodder for content generation in a way that’s so inhumane.” Three years later, those words resonate even more strongly. What Hunt described to me at the time as a “platform failure” now feels like learned behavior of the internet. There, people, famous or unknown, are reused as raw material for content generation.
This cycle repeats endlessly. This afternoon, the memes about Middleton went from jokes about her whereabouts to jokes about how awful it is that everyone is making fun of cancer patients. Feeling bad about of meme The tweet quickly became a meme. Despite the change in tone, the reason for these posts is the same. It’s a way of taking a person and repurposing his life for entertainment and engagement. If this sounds exhausting and depressing, that’s because it is.
But the Internet is too big to be one thing. As I clicked through social media this afternoon, I saw dozens of heartfelt testimonies, apologies, and well-wishes for the princess. From my perspective, for a moment it felt like I was watching a group of people come to their senses. Perhaps it is recognizing the humanity of the person at the center of the maelstrom.
And then, just a few seconds later, another post appeared.It was so screenshot It’s from Solana, a blockchain platform that allows users to create their own crypto tokens that others can invest in. The name of the token in the screenshot is “kate wif cancer” and its logo is a still image of a princess sitting on a bench. From this afternoon’s video. The coin’s market capitalization at one point exceeded $120,000. Just six minutes later, the price skyrocketed. This is the result of a standard meme coin decline. Something terrible happened. Some joked about it. Others made money. And everyone moved on.
