Let me explain to you what it is like to go viral. It is… mesmeric. Hypnotic. It’s…twitchy. It is consuming. It is obsessive. It is compulsively refreshing a screen to watch digits climb. A hundred a second. Two hundred. A thousand. It’s an avalanche. It’s an addiction. It’s a feedback loop that will consume you for hours. Days, maybe. You might think you’re immune, but you are not. You’ll watch, and you’ll watch, with each climbing digit drip feeding dopamine straight into the veins of your ego. And it just keeps going…by the hundreds of thousands. You refresh, and refresh, and refresh until it stops. Which it will. Which it always does. Often it stops just as abruptly as it started, leaving your ears ringing with the absence of a sound that never even existed in this dimension.
What was that?
I have ~no idea~ how the machine decides why or when exactly to take content stratospheric, or how it determines that enough is enough. All I know is that algorithms have the power to share our work to far higher numbers of people than we could ever conceive of, the kind of numbers that can, undemocratically, ordain us as authorities when we are not. Then what?
On cue, the machine can exclusively pass us a gilded platter, piled high with the sherbert lemon of instant fame, hand us a golden straw, and declare: “SNORT IT, BABY”. We’ll do as it instructs. It knows we will. Who are we to argue? Didn’t we want this? Isn’t this what we came for?
The comedown is sobering, of course. Who can ride the zephyr of inflated self-importance and be expected, upon landing, to resume their title as an ordinary civilian? The sky is the limit, but it belongs to big tech, and they’ll decide just how high you can fly and how often. You’ll never forget the time you licked the ozone layer; it will become the benchmark for your self-worth henceforth. And, yes, while it is increasingly likely that eventually one will be dulled into a complete lack of sensation by the rollercoaster ride of virality, nobody, absolutely nobody, forgets their first million.
I’m sorry to ask, but do you know the value of a million? Like, can your brain fathom just how vast a million pieces of anything actually is?! One of the symptoms of the post-shock digital age we’re living in is that our comprehension of enormity is somewhat compressed. SCALE, SPEED, and SPECTACLE are trivialized to fit screens. We have been shown that anything is possible, rendering us less and less inclined to muse upon magnanimity.
To give the number a body: counting to a million would take approximately ten days of uninterrupted time. If you paused for breath, food, thought and sleep, counting to a million would be over a full working month of 9-5 labour. A million is Madison Square Garden sold out fifty times over. It is more than 11 packed-out Wembley Stadiums. A million is, frankly, a shit load of eyeballs. Two million eyeballs, more or less. When my first video for The Channel tipped over the million-view marker, I began to be convinced I could feel them on me.
My first unequivocally viral video was a reasonably puerile upload, in keeping with The Channel’s trend-centric tone. I had been assigned a video detailing the “Shocking Facts About Disney”, which was published alongside a completely inappropriate clickbait image of Princess Ariel being fingered in a bathtub by Prince Eric. Yes, you did read that correctly.
Isn’t that a little…um?
Right, no totally, of course…
Anyway, on with the show.
As deeply unwatchable as I find this video ten years on, it climbed to 15 million views.
F i f t e e n million. 750 packed-out Madison Square Gardens. More than all of the Eras Tour live audiences combined. 15,000,000 was over 833 times more views than my first video for The Channel had garnered just a few months prior,
Whattheactualfuck?
And there I am: shrill, young, awkward, and immortalized in a frothy video, the journalistic high of which demonstrated some well-placed concern surrounding children snogging frogs, while the low focused on the multitude of phalluses sketched into cartoon frames. It is, in my opinion, bad. Really bad. Yet it remains in the top 0.1 percentile of all YouTube videos, ever.
Right.
Sure, the video has not aged well, and I am, thankfully, altogether a far better performer at this juncture of my storytelling career; however, in complete truth, the real problem is that even in the moment, I knew the video was bad. I was cognizant of the fact that I was punching well below my education and pay grade. But that didn’t stop me from hyperfixating on an exponentially increasing number and announcing it, frequently, to my exasperated then-boyfriend. It didn’t stop me screen-shotting it at intervals as it grew, and it grew, and sending it to my friends and family as some kind of validation for my transatlantic move and onward career choice.
GOODNESS ME, AREN’T I THRIVING IN CANADA? 15 MILLION, GOSH, GOSH, GOSH. WOW, WOW, WOW. Nevermindthethumbnail.Nevermindthefrogsnogging. Nevermindthephalluses.Justignorethetitsandsharks. Shhh,baby,buryit.
LOOK HOW FAST WE’RE GROWING!!! LOOK HOW WELL I AM DOING!
But I wasn’t well, or I wouldn’t be, and virality was one of the magic beans sown by the machine that implanted itself in my mind, growing a beanstalk of pure delusion, straight on up into the sky. Who needs a zephyr when you can climb your ego all the way to the top? Now show me where you keep your sherbert.
The thing about virality that I have noticed over my decade of feeding the machine is that the honour of hypervisibility is almost always bestowed upon something we might generously describe as “mid”, but may better be termed “basic”. Observably, content that carries a low cognitive load is typically the piece that will break the sound barrier of the ever-noisy internet. Questions I have now are: “what’s that about?” “Who is dictating the dumbification of thought and the numbification of intrigue, and for what purpose?” “Whomst does it serve?” and, crucially: “what is participating in this doing to me as a human?”. These, however, were not questions I asked back then. I didn’t query much for years, and that must have been very grating on the real-life people who had loved me for my curiosity. The Channel told me to jump, for a long time, all I asked was: “How high!”, eager for my face to be the one at the forefront of the charge to the moon. But then what? What happens when you get there?
Baby, there is no “there”.
There is only your first million, and a life spent chasing infinity.
This is how I ended up fronting videos with rancid titles, including, but not limited to:
“Top 10 Sexiest Gifs on the Internet”
“Top 10 Sexiest and Wildest Scenes In Movies (parts 1-3)”
“Top 10 Shocking Celebrity Wardrobe Malfunctions”
“Top 10 Child Stars Who Grew Up To Be Hot”
There is no endpoint when it comes to virality; there’s only the endless quest for more, more, more. The joke is that the beanstalk was a treadmill all along, and the gradient just keeps on getting steeper. If you want to be famous for longer than fifteen minutes, you'd better learn to climb.
Oh, and the thing about sherbert lemon is that, yes, it will keep you in kinesis, but it will rot little holes in your teeth, meaning you couldn’t chew on a thought even if you tried.
To be continued
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