Thermostats Go Up or They Go Down

"people should be obsessed with celebrities, but only in the good way" is not a reasonable thing to demand

Recently I clicked over from maybe the last podcast I like (RIP Cumtown) to one that was new to me, Every Single Album. Hosted by Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard, it’s a pop music podcast that I believe started as a specifically Taylor Swift-fixated project and which still maintains a heavy focus on the most famous person in the world. I’ve only listened to this most recent episode and can’t comment on the podcast as a whole. It’s also the case that (even restricting myself to this one episode) this is all very very much Not For Me, and so you might be skeptical of the utility of me commenting on it. But I do think their conversation is indicative of a broad refusal to understand a blanket fact about celebrity: fame and attention carry with them good and bad things that cannot be separated from one another. “Leave Britney alone!” is a fair thing to feel and say, but if everyone had truly left Britney alone, there would have been no crowd fighting to spring her from her conservatorship. The light of celebrity is also its glare; the fire that warms is the fire that burns. This has always been true and will always be true, and whether or not this is fair or good or right makes no difference. Even Swift is not so godly as to escape this reality. Ask Isaiah Berlin.

Which is not to say that Princiotti and Hubbard’s angst is not understandable. It seems that the celebrity obsession Borg has been speculating a great deal about whether Swift is pregnant, presumably with her boyfriend, NFL tight end and $4,000 turtleneck enthusiast Travis Kelce. I guess the fans and the many parasitic celebrity publications they enable have been going full-on Zapruder film with random video clips of Swift, who’s somehow still on her relentless Bataan death march of a tour. (Eras indeed.) Is Taylor pregnant, or is it a burrito? The people must know. Princiotti and Hubbard are right to call this all unfortunate and untoward, and I support the criticism. But they also fail to understand that good and bad attention for celebrities have never been separable.

Near the end of the episode, Princiotti says “Why does anyone care if Taylor Swift is pregnant?” Which I find a surprising thing to ask! Princiotti is a very talented NFL analyst and clearly no dummy. But it seems genuinely not to occur to her that she is asking why some people have an unhealthy level of fixation on Taylor Swift on a podcast that exists as a statement of unreasonable levels of fixation on Taylor Swift. It’s like High Times magazine running a cover story asking why everybody’s a pothead these days. It's a fun and self-aware expression of devotion, but it still demonstrates near-religious fervor. And of course the podcast is just one small piece of this broader reality in media right now, the monetization of ever-deepening fan obsession by telling fans to go even deeper. This is what TikTok and poptimism and Twitter and the gradual colonization of women’s media by celebrity media have all been pointing towards - the attitude that says that there is no such thing as an excessive level of devotion to a star, that the concept of restraint in fandom is an elitist anachronism, and that anyone suggesting such a thing must really be motivated by sexism and racism. (This is yet another aspect of poptimism, for the record, that wasn’t implied by Kelefa Sanneh’s original essay but which has been grafted onto the ideology over time.)

And certainly Swift and the entire vast economy that swirls around her have benefited from the death of the very concept of going too deep. The podcast episode begins with a discussion about Swift fans who buy every physical variant of a Taylor Swift album (all the records, CDs, tapes), to boost her Billboard rankings. This grows a little more deranged when you realize that her latest album came in nineteen goddamn different physical variants. That’s part and parcel of a fandom where people have literally mortgaged their houses in order to afford concert tickets, the kind of behaviors which have been bizarrely represented in the media as charming human interest stories instead of as disturbing and sad. Well, guess what, guys - people aren’t inspired to spend that much money by regular levels of fandom. They’re not inspired to do that by a healthy degree of devotion to a celebrity. So Taylor Swift Inc. (which Hubbard calls one of the most savvy media operations around) has clearly made the affirmative choice to inculcate slavish levels of fan commitment. Unfortunately, once generated that devotion can’t be controlled. It will always result in behavior you don’t like as well as in behavior you do. I’m not justifying any bad behavior on the part of Taylor Swift fans; I also don’t justify the sharks that bite your hand when you chum the water. I am saying… you chummed the water.

Princiotti (who is USA-based) mentions that she and some friends are flying to Edinburgh to see the Eras Tour. (Again.) And, you know, it’s your life, it’s your money, cool. But what I would suggest to Princiotti is that the devotion that compels you to fly to Scotland for a repeat viewing of a concert is not, actually, that different from the devotion that compels someone to obsessively comment on Instagram posts about Swift’s body fat percentage. I will certainly concede that traveling to the concert is more justifiable and more prosocial, but again, the tools that inspire unhinged feelings of one type must necessarily inspire unhinged feelings of another. Modern fandom culture is like steroids. There are many people who take steroids and use them to lift heavier weight and get bigger muscles. Only some of them are go home and beat their wives out of roid rage. The point is not to call both behaviors morally equal but to suggest that when you’re handing out those drugs to all kinds of people you must accept that you’ll see both kinds of behavior in response. Once you do that, you are indeed hit with a moral question that’s quite a bit trickier than asking whether good and bad things are the same.

Consider the fan harassment of Joe Alwyn, Swift’s former boyfriend. He’s experienced awful behavior from unhinged Swift stans for years and still receives a lot of it. What kind of bad behavior? Well, to give you a little flavor, some Swift fans knowingly circulated a fake AI video of Alwyn insulting Swift, a profoundly provocative thing to do with the woman who has become the most zealously-protected celebrity in the history of modern fame. It’s knowingly, intentionally angering a bear to provoke it to attack someone who didn’t do anything. And a lot of them didn’t feel particularly bad about it!

I call this exchange “the 21st century”

There are, I’m sure, loud wars waged over the question of how much to blame Swift is for this behavior and whether she’s done enough to discourage it. Certainly I’m not the right person to answer that question. But one thing that’s indisputable is that Swift has made personal vengeance a bizarrely central part of her mythology, writing song after song and making video after video that amount to an effort to destroy her enemies. That she has been wronged by someone (perhaps an old boyfriend, perhaps Kim Kardashian, perhaps the next linebacker to concuss Travis Kelce) plays an undeniably large role in her lyrical repertoire. And her fans love it! How often has it been said that Swift’s music helps young women take ownership of their own feelings of resentment, rage, and desire for petty revenge? Well, again… maybe that sort of thing is just inevitably going to result in awful behavior, when you spread it around this incredibly vast collection of humanity, deliver it through a constant drip of propaganda through their smartphones, and tell everybody that it’s sexist to have limits. I like music that has dark subject matter, I like ugly emotions admitted to in art, and I don’t want Swift to censor herself. But once upon a time people got really into the music of Hole and its dark, vengeful themes without anybody getting doxxed.

Of course, Hole fandom didn’t exist in the slaughterhouse that is modern stan culture. Perhaps it’s unfair that Swift’s has to bear that new layer of responsibility, but again, who has worked harder to create those exact unhealthy conditions? Monia Ali, one of our great chroniclers of the sickness of stan culture, wrote

Stans are too reliant on industry feedback and too aware of the zero-sum nature of the present cultural ecosystem to take their toys and go home. They now rely on cowing dissenters into submission, no matter the cost.

In theory, you can dislike something, but you shouldn’t make it known because it immediately becomes more than just your personal opinion. It taints the climate, and that is unacceptable.

There is a recognition that there is a zero-sum culture with limited attention and coverage. If there isn’t endless praise and acceptance, what you love will be taken away from you.

Under such conditions, no, I’m not surprised people think it’s their business whether Swift is pregnant or not; I’m not surprised that the loyal soldiers in this endless war think they’re owed a little piece of the princess. It’s not good. It’s just also not surprising. And if the attitude is simply “we should have the good parts of things, but not the bad parts,” well. Yeah. Sure. Sounds nice.

The only way to get people to stop obsessing over Taylor Swift’s uterus is to get them to ease way down on obsessing over Taylor Swift in general. And I suspect the only way to do that is to restore some semblance of a communally-shared vision of personal success that’s not based on money and celebrity, to give them a target to hit other than wealth and virality and adulation. As you know, that’s my diagnosis for where this all comes from, the death of meaning, the fact that young people don’t believe in the American dream, or Baby Jesus, or the Stars & Stripes, or in spending time with others, or in identifying with their jobs, or in the centrality of family, or in themselves. I hate most of that shit; is’s just that those were actual things to center your life around. It’s the same reason true crime fans turn into junior detectives and harass the families of murder victims - nothing else to believe in. You’d like to give everybody something to live for other than money and fame, given that those things are never going to be widely accessible. You’d like to replace it all with something better. But nobody knows how to do that, and most everybody seems too dedicated to keeping the fantasy of their own eventual ascension to celebrity alive, so we’re stuck. I still believe Swift herself will begin a strategic retreat from her current level of fame, probably after this tour is finally over - this is another of her many privileges, the right to leave when she wants to - but in general the celebrity obsession is only going to get deeper and deeper. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. As far as being annoyed at speculation about her womb, I dunno. Be the change, I guess.