PicoBlog

Every now and then, usually late at night, I will find myself looking up old YouTubers on social media. A lot of the original YouTubers who defined my younger Internet life no longer post or I just no longer follow them, but to me they almost feel like distant acquaintances. I hope they’re doing well, and it’s mind-boggling to recognize that many of them were my current age or younger when they became Internet-famous. Many of them still have some presence on social media, and it makes me happy to see their spouses and families, their career pivots, their growth over time. Then I, a relatively normal person, go to bed and move on with my life.

The early YouTubers rose to prominence at a time when cannibalizing your entire self wasn’t ubiquitous on social media. When normal people didn’t walk around making jokes about sponsorships and being an influencer while posting in bland ad-friendly influencer fashion for free. The idea that a third of children could aspire to be content creators was laughable.

As I grew up, I kind of lost track of YouTube. The most recent YouTuber I found and became a devoted fan of was Ashley, better known as Bestdressed, a fashion and lifestyle YouTuber known for her excellent fashion content, her relatable and straightforward vlogs, and her immaculately crafted videos. I found her in early 2020, and rapidly, I joined her now-3.75M subscribers in raptly awaiting her weekly Thursday uploads. I went back and watched her videos throughout film school in LA, took note of her recommendations for outfits, observed the trajectory of her now-ex who sometimes appeared in videos, was in awe of her thorough apartment makeovers. She shared a lot of herself and her life, accompanied by wry, frequently self-deprecating humor and brief but thoughtfully serious takes on feminism and capitalism.

Ashley never obscured her mental health struggles and the way her own mental and physical health would sometimes be sacrificed in service of her impeccably high standards for her own videos. I think often of this brutal 4-minute video she posted on her second channel, in which she redoes the same few lines of vlog over and over again like a malfunctioning robot.

It can be easy to suggest she puts herself through that, but it’s worth considering how much more complicated it is than that. YouTubers who edit their own videos (in genres that feature themselves, especially vlogs) spend hours upon hours staring down their own faces, hearing their own voices, scrutinizing every frame. The analytics that come back after a post can feel like a judgment on not just hours of your own effort, but on your whole self as you’ve presented it. Plus it’s a significant stream of income for professional influencers. And the toxicity of YouTube comments have been discussed often enough that I don’t feel like I need to elaborate on that. It is not emotionally healthy for anybody to deal with all of that.

People often underestimate the effort and the psychological toll it takes to be a public figure. Sure, it’s not the hardest job, but the urge to set up a “you must suffer this much to deserve sympathy” sign in front of the carnival ride is a dangerous one. And what traditional celebrities have whole teams to deal with, many YouTubers, unless they’re at the very top, deal with alone. In some ways, it reminds me of the underlying logic of the gig economy—having people do the same tasks they once did but without nearly as much support or protection. 

Bestdressed left YouTube without announcement or ever addressing it. Her last video was a New York City apartment tour in December 2020. In it, she mentions that she experienced a stalker incident and was laughed out of the police station when she went to report it. That alone makes her shift towards vague Instagram influencer totally justified in my book.

Perhaps some of the signs that this was coming were there already, prior to the stalker. It is easy for people to view a stalker as crossing a line, of having a terrifying level of entitlement and obsession. It should also be easy to see that a lot of rabid fans tend to be, well, rabid. Their obsession and entitlement is also a problem.

Before that last video, Ashley posted a video titled “how 2020 has me feeling” filmed on a vintage Super 8 camera, reflecting on her personal experience of the first six months of the pandemic. In four pages of voiceover, she reveals a new relationship, contemplates her constant sense of feeling behind, and tries to explain the bizarre energy of summer 2020. There’s a semi-cliche meditation on whether life is ever easy, where escapism comes from, what it means to feel belonging and love with her hometown friends. She expresses a hesitant sense of optimism and the crises bubbling underneath.

I do have to note that there is a clip of her blowing out birthday candles, and clips where not everyone is masked at a gathering. She makes a not-great joke about being fed up with hearing phrases like “the new normal” and wanting to have someone cough on her. These are important details because the comments section when this video came out read like Ashley had personally and explicitly wished death upon everyone.

This can feel depressingly anachronistic given where the pandemic and masking specifically stand now, in 2023. And I do not wish to downplay the millions of deaths and sufferers of long COVID, or the fact that most people have decided to “move on” and accept a sociologically produced end to the pandemic. 

But Ashley was one 22-year-old who experienced the first three months of the global pandemic cooped up alone and posted this video as a way to share with her audience how she had been feeling. I don’t think that exonerates noncompliance with pandemic safety, but also the expectation has never been and can never be that everyone must follow all the rules perfectly and if they don’t they ought to be publicly shouted down. That is not a politics that builds solidarity, or even offers a shred of hope.

I understand that there is so much anger and rage that has built up over the course of the last several years, about who and what we’ve lost, about the lack of recognition of that. People had deeply different experiences of the pandemic depending on their location, class, and other demographic factors. Trauma comes in many forms. To take the anger and rage out on an individual influencer as opposed to the people and institutions without the power to enact material change is misguided.

That was not the first or the last time Ashley was subject to a disproportionate level of vitriol for her behavior. Part of it was a paradox many influencers face; they gain a following through being relatable, but that following makes them less and less relatable. The audience can feel they made the influencer’s life possible, and are thus entitled to cast judgment on it.

Bestdressed’s comments have been brimming with people who are quick to announce that they used to be fans, but that now they’re so disappointed, they can’t believe she would do this. Again, not everything she did was ever perfect, but that does not make sense as the bar unless you’re looking for a reason to punish, ridicule, and hate.

It reeks of what cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann has termed, being “woman’d.” Instead of genuine constructive criticism or allowing space for redemption, Ashley was and continues to be dogged with bad-faith critique that purports to be about politics and ethics. Wrapped in the language of social justice, the core of it remains sexism. Audiences are always eager to find reasons to hate a woman, to take her down a peg.

With Bestdressed’s rise came more and more critics ready to jump on every moment she didn’t fully live up to her professed ideals and political views. Video after video can be found with some title along the lines of “The Problem With Bestdressed,” as other content creators rushed to feed off of the controversy. As Fisher-Quann puts it, “It’s a system that builds women up into untouchable fantasies just so we can watch in glee as the facade inevitably crumbles.”

Ashley even gestured at this misogyny herself a few times, like in this TikTok where she notes how women can be expected to demonstrate “sustainable behavior” all the way down to washing blood out of their own period underwear, whereas men can buy entire new cars without any real questioning.

It is fair to point out that Ashley made a left-leaning politics a part of her brand and something that she regularly discussed on her YouTube channel. However, there has never been and will never be a successful social movement built upon the urge to punish and shame every person for every bad thing they do. People will fall short of their ideals. They should be held accountable for their actions. The impulse to “cancel” as it has recurred when it comes to Ashley, however, seems to stem from a much harsher and more unhelpful place.

Constantly searching for the flaws and political failures in other people also promotes or is perhaps inevitably entangled with constantly searching for the flaws and political failures in one’s self. These interlocking anxieties do not lead to forward progress; they lead to paralyzing stasis. As P.E. Moskowitz writes, “It is easier to live in a morally clear world in which no actual change happens, as long as you have moral authority in that world, than it is to commit to the messiness of true radicalism.” Fear of making mistakes, at its most concentrated, becomes a fear of doing anything at all. While Ashley experienced this at a large scale, it’s worth considering how that kind of surveillance and judgment on behavior is happening all the time now, and how this reflects a broader collapse in understanding how to process individual transgressions.

The most recent example of the intense scrutiny of Bestdressed happened on her February 16 Instagram post. The first slide shows her lighting a cigarette, and the caption is “fashion & other drugs.” Opening the comments section reveals several comments, each with two to three thousand likes, criticizing her for “romanticizing smoking.” Is smoking cigarettes good? No. Is Ashley smoking cigarettes personally offensive to me? ALSO NO. While some public figures certainly play dumb when it comes to how they use their platforms, putting someone’s every choice under a microscope and criticizing them for it is unreasonable and unhealthy for all involved. She is not the one responsible for the proliferation of cigarettes in our culture. I think that another reason for this type of fixation is that we feel powerless in the face of the actual forces that shape our culture and our world. There is no direct way to express my rage at faceless corporations or governments. Ashley is easier to openly, directly detest than Philip Morris International.

The pile-on each time seems more intense than for other influencers doing similar things. I wonder if this is because Ashley never really apologizes or addresses these situations; she simply moves on without engaging. Though I’ve never been impressed by anyone’s notes app post or melodramatic apology video, perhaps there is something to seeing the person at least try to feign admitting guilt in an effort to placate their audience. Instead, for Ashley, it seems like her critics keep score and continue to sharpen their knives, alert to every potential violation of imagined yet strict rules.

You can also find more banal comments littered across Bestdressed’s Internet presence now, questions about if or when she’ll return to the platform that made her famous. I’m not sure that these are the same people who were jumping at every misstep Ashley made, but I am baffled that anyone could expect her to want to come back to YouTube after the level of aggressive moralizing she’s been subjected to. The thing about the dehumanizing nature of fame is that it dehumanizes both the famous person and the audience.

If I could reclaim my private life and continue to make my livelihood by posting brand deals on Instagram after going through even a fraction of what Ashley has online, I would probably do it. I feel about her as I do the other YouTubers I watched growing up—grateful for how their videos shaped me, and every now and then curious about what they’re up to now. I hope Ashley’s doing better now. She doesn’t owe me anything.

Share

Okay so here’s my fleeting moment of self-promotion, I reviewed Delia Cai’s debut novel over at The Rumpus!

Recently read All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews and really appreciated this honest behind-the-scenes look at her writing process!

Can’t stop thinking about ‘layoff brain’ and how that shapes recent economic forecasts

Rihanna the billionaire as opposed to Rihanna the singer

Wish I could have seen Rayne Fisher-Quann’s first live talk but had to settle for this well-written review.

Prison abolition is in fact pragmatic

Okay, but what happens if a bear does cocaine in real life?

With recent publication layoffs and closings, it was interesting to listen to this conversation about the attention industry, AI, and ads

Why is the US Surgeon General doing meditation app spon-con?

Best take I’ve read on the recent spate of anti-rich content, service work, and family

ncG1vNJzZmismJ6%2FpcDHoqWgZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe8Cbpq6sXZeytMDDq5ysq5WZ