I did not know anything about the person known as Perez Hilton but his name occupied the periphery of my consciousness because of its occasional appearance on the splash pages of the news sites I frequent. His real name was Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. but he adopted his pseudonym deliberately because of its similarity to the better known Paris Hilton, so that it would be catchy.
He suddenly vaulted into the mainstream news when a few days ago he live-streamed harming himself in what looked like a suicide attempt, that resulted in a rescue team being called in and him being taken to hospital.
So what was his claim to fame before this? Brady Brickner-Wood gives some background into what seems like an odious person who achieved celebrity status by viciously gossiping about other celebrities.
Before “troll” became commonplace in the internet lexicon, Hilton embodied the definition: a prurient, prolific shitposter who drew dicks and semen on paparazzi photos, called Adam Sandler’s two-year-old daughter “ugly,” and, after Heath Ledger’s accidental overdose, sold T-shirts with the slogan “Why couldn’t it be Britney?” On his website, which at its peak, around 2007, received as many as eight million hits a day, he outed celebrities, picked apart stars’ appearances, and mocked their addictions. He cloaked his cruelty in camp, suffusing his blog posts with exclamation points and cheap puns.
He posted prolifically, reportedly up to 17 hours a day, with details of the problems of celebrities like Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, and Lindsay Lohan when they were at low points in their lives and the last thing they needed was for others to gleefully publicize their difficulties and make them targets for amusement. Brickner-Wood says that he was on the cutting edge of the live-streaming trend, where the camera is always on.
Many people now use live-streaming to inform others of the minutiae of their lives.
Since the covid-19 pandemic, however, the medium has become a major form of mass entertainment and a foundational way in which many people experience and interpret reality. The live stream promises boundless access and constant visibility, collapsing the boundary between the real and the performed, the private and the public, until living a life and broadcasting one become virtually indistinguishable. We can now watch people from around the world put on makeup, eat lunch, shop at the mall, ride in taxis, hang out with friends, smoke weed, work out, read bedtime stories to their children, record music, clean their kitchens, mow their lawns—you name it.
Although it seems a little weird to me, there is nothing wrong with people livestreaming the everyday aspects of their lives. Problems arise when they desire to increase their viewership because that can lead to them taking unnecessary risks or, worse, targeting other people. Inevitably, the efforts to monetize this results in the desire to get more and more clicks, leading to ever-increasing outrageous behavior.
Some people, however, turn to live streaming specifically to showcase their lowest, darkest moments. Chud the Builder, a streamer who now faces prison time for attempted murder (he argued it was in self defense), grew his audience by live-streaming racist confrontations that he instigated with Black people in public. A streamer known as Ice Poseidon, who transitioned from a video-game streamer to an “I.R.L.” streamer, filmed himself kicking trash on the street and mocking an elderly taxi-driver in South Korea. Multiple school shooters have attempted to live-stream their attacks; other people have broadcast their suicides.
But the law of diminishing returns eventually kicks in, as these people start to become yesterday’s news and are overtaken by others. Live-streaming a suicide attempt may be seen as the ultimate attention grabber. It beats me why there might be an audience for such things but apparently there is.
Recently I had an experience that made me understand a bit better why watching a live-stream might be compelling. I was watching a live news clip on YouTube from a local Miami TV station when the anchor suddenly cut to live coverage of a car-jacking. Two men had seized a car from someone at gun point and driven off at very high speed. The driver of the stolen car weaved in and out of traffic, on highways and city streets, sometimes in the lane opposed to the traffic flow and sometimes on the shoulder of the road. While he was undoubtedly reckless, the skill and the nerve of the driver in avoiding any accidents was quite impressive. The TV station had a helicopter following the car so viewers had an aerial view while police cars tried to catch up. This went on for about twenty minutes!
Why did I watch something for so long that was purely a local news story in a distant town that had no major consequences? As I watched it, I knew it was a waste of my time and that I should move on to something else but I could not cut away. I wanted to know how it would end. Would they crash the car? Would there be a shoot out with the police? In the end, the police rammed the car and the two people jumped out and ran in different directions through people’s backyards but were caught without any gunfire or violence.
And perhaps that is the appeal of watching a live-stream. Because it is live, we do not know where it is going and how it will end and that alone is enough to garner attention, especially if there is a possibility of a dramatic denouement.
i like that you described the car-jacking “Two men had seized a car from someone at gun point and driven off at very high speed.”
…a very high speed, not a very high *rate* of speed…
a physicist’s pet peeve!
(a high *rate* of speed implies an acceleration, since a rate is a derivative, and the derivative of speed would be an acceleration)
Sometime near the beginning of the Iraq war, the military, for some reason, let CNN livestream some troops in the field in Iraq (you’d have thought the military would have learned its lesson from TV coverage of Vietnam.)
The general that was there as a guest was chatting away about where the troops were and what they were doing, but the host finally issued a warning to the audience: “This is live and this is war, and anything might happen.”
I definitely did not want to see what might happen, so turned it off, but am sure that some kept watching, because, as Mano says, no one knew how it would turn out. Anything from complete boredom to unfathomable horror was possible.
I work in a medical clinic, and one of our office assistants was recently fired for live-streaming Tik-Tok at work. She was repeatedly warned, because people had noticed before, but continued to do it, so they had no choice but to fire her (the privacy implications alone are insane). I’m not entirely sure what kind of audience she had, and why they were interested in whatever she was saying when she should have been working (she was not a very good employee in a host of other ways, so nobody was surprised to find her gone), but I think this situation is emblematic of the issues Gen Z has in the workplace. They’ve spent their whole life sharing almost every aspect of themselves with others that they believe this is just…what normal people do, at all hours of the day, no matter what their other responsibilities are. I really wonder if this trend is going to continue, and if new norms are going to end up in existence, where to NOT be constantly sharing your life with others will be seen as unacceptable. Or perhaps the pendulum will swing in the other direction, and we’ll end up in a world where you again keep to yourself, sharing little or nothing online. Hard to know for sure.
Just today comes this report of someone pleading guilty to kicking a sea lion four times, while pretending to be martial arts fighter, while someone else recorded it.
I can only assume that this person was hoping to get attention on social media.
Perez Hilton is very much the gossipy part of gay culture writ large, and started out as a gossip columnist. Remember those?
You may have become recently aware of him but he has been around for decades, at least thirty years in my memory. He is… kinda *normal*. IME everything about him, including the apparent suicide attempt, is just what is expected from him by me, based on my lived experience as a gay man. I have been part of or witness to dinner party conversations and BBQ party conversations etc. similar to this.
The difference is that he publishes it.