CJ Rivera/Invision/AP
Haley Kalil departs The Mark Hotel prior to attending the Met Gala, May 6, 2024, in New York.
It was strange, creating my first profile on TikTok in order to explain to other gray-haired TikTok virgins a certain new development that I hadn’t heard about until that very day, but which feels like it might be the freshest innovation in social change strategies since the picket line. But these are strange times.
The story starts at my barber shop, the one next door to the hipster taxidermy store, around the corner from the improv troupe that invented the 30-plays-in-60-minutes format and the T-shirt shop specializing in NSFW gay double entendres. I mention this to establish that its clientele is mostly far younger and cooler than I, as is my barber, Jay, a tattooed, multi-pierced, and well-read young woman of whom I am quite fond.
I had just spent an unpleasant morning getting called names on former-Twitter, in response to my post about why it was still so important to vote for Joe Biden for president. My argument was a Ghost of Christmas Future sort of thing. I projected how much worse Gaza will look following the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second term in 2025. One not-atypical response: “You are a genocidal racist and it defines your politics, your character, and your scholarship.”
Mid-snip, I asked Jay what she and her friends thought. Did they consider Biden so monstrous because of what he had allowed to happen in Gaza that they might not bother to vote? In the discussion that followed, she made clear that she was so sick of all politicians and their games that she didn’t want to have anything to do with any of them right now. I replied that I respected that, and proposed to take up the conversation again next fall. She agreed.
But she wasn’t done with politics, that was clear. Unbidden, she brought up something that was engaging her: “the way everyone is unfollowing celebrities on TikTok.”
I was flattered that she presumed me with-it enough to know what she was talking about. Of course, I had no idea.
“Celebrity celebrities, or influencer celebrities?” I asked.
“Both,” she firmly replied.
It started, I learned from her and then confirmed, with the Met Gala on May 6. Tickets cost $75,000. A TikTok user calling himself blockout2424, posting from bed with a five o’clock shadow, showed a snippet from the gala, then one of news from the Rafah crossing, then barked: “Block celebrities on social media so they don’t earn ad revenue from you. Do you know the last time Kim Kardashian made money from me? It was December 13th of last year. It’s when I blocked her.”
The manifesto lasted all of 15 seconds; that’s TikTok. By the time I saw the post, 373,900 people had clicked the “like” heart, 17,300 bookmarked it, 9,318 shared it. It’s been viewed more than two million times.
I turned over my Social Security number to the People’s Liberation Army (kidding!) to read some of the 7,075 comments. The second one read, “I just blocked Hayyleebaylee, she’s always annoyed me but let them eat cake while she’s at the met gala video was my last straw.” The fourth said, “So disappointed in Tyla”; the sixth was “sad Zendaya attended.”
I didn’t know who any of these people are. It turns out that “Hayyleebaylee” (don’t forget the second “y”) is Haley Kalil, model and influencer, who swept across the Met Gala red carpet bedecked in a long-trained flowered gown, to the theme music from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and pronounced, “Let them eat cake.” The response, my barber Jay explained, often references the dystopian young adult series The Hunger Games (over 100 million books in print; three record opening weekends in a row between 2012 and 2014 for the first three films). In the world of the series, children from impoverished Districts Two through Twelve fight in televised death matches for the delectation of the colonial overlords of District One. Yes: An epidemic of class consciousness has broken out on TikTok.
The Blockout2024 hashtag has sprouted at least 11,000 messages—as well as an actual political campaign, with an understanding of political leverage far more sophisticated than any of the protests I took part in when I was young. “When we hate on them, they make money,” the guy posting from bed said in a follow-up. “When we praise them, they make money. But when we block their social media accounts and completely forget their names, they lose it all.”
How much are the celebs of District One losing? 100,000 followers in the day after the original TikTok post in the case of one target, Taylor Swift, still leaving her with an impressive 33.4 million followers, to be sure. But Swift was previously averaging a gain of 270,000 daily. Also, I read on the website of USA Today (God, do I feel old …) that Blockout2024 hashtag-slingers are seeing “ads from Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian after blocking both pop stars,” where they never saw ads for celebrities before—brand managers throwing bad money after good, it appears, in attempts to recoup that lost revenue.
Not a bad return on political investment for 15 seconds of work and an ask that hardly takes longer than that to fulfill.
The likes of Haley Kalil are hit even harder. She quit working with modeling agencies in 2023, citing negative experiences with them; for someone like her, posting videos of her everyday life looking diaphanous is pretty much her entire business model.
The threat is real. And like any good campaign, constituents have been laddering up demands. When Lizzo apologized for not speaking out about the mass slaughter by promoting a GoFundMe campaign to help families leave Gaza, people were pissed. “We can’t afford it! … Why are you asking us to donate? Pay the whole thing! Or split it with three of your very rich friends,” as one forma_leigh_nonaz said, to 75,400 likes. Watch this space. Lizzo also has powerful friends, and a knack for the attention economy.
For those old enough (like me) who can remember when “call-waiting” was the exciting new thing, it can be hard to grasp just how deeply social media defines the fundamental terms of reality, including political reality, for those of an age who stare blankly when you try to explain what a busy signal was. Building followship is this generation’s currency of power. Deploying this logic for transformational ends is an interesting thing.
It also seems a useful spur for establishment organizations working for social change to open themselves to hiring and listening to younger strategists. I hope unions and progressive Democratic electoral campaigns have organizers a fraction as creative and persuasive as that unshaven dude who kicked this whole thing off.
Think of it, maybe, as something comparable to Cesar Chavez’s nationwide call for a boycott of grapes to pressure growers to recognize his United Farm Workers—another campaign that deployed the coin of celebrity boycotters to prevail. And wipe that smirk off your face, gramps. Perhaps I’m suffering a political version of the overenthusiasm known as “recency bias.” But I’m pretty confident the notion of boycotting grapes once sounded like a pretty ridiculous way to try to change the world, too. And what is happening on TikTok certainly seems more effectual than blocking a street for a few hours, as people did in 2003 to try to stop the onrushing train that was the Iraq War.
For some people, indeed, this single tiny political intervention has them rethinking the terms of their engagement with the attention economy altogether. Jay has started knocking all celebrities off her follow lists, whatever their politics. “I just started thinking,” she told me, “Why was I caring about them in the first place?”
Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.
