Carte blanche to Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard | Watching is voting

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world around us. This week, we give carte blanche to the novelist, playwright, actor and director Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.

There was a guy in my high school, I don’t remember his name. I guess I never knew. Everyone called him Celine Dion. I don’t know how it started, but he got that nickname because he sang for money. He would sing and people would throw coins at him. Violently, sometimes. It made people laugh. He would pick up the coins off the floor and keep singing. It was problematic in many ways, but it made him make ends meet and his patrons were entertained. Win-wini guess.

It was a version low-tech of the show that has fascinated me for a little over a month on TikTok. I discovered this while chatting with a Gen Z who couldn’t believe that I had never, in the year of grace 2024, heard of Florence and her troll.

This Florence began to enjoy some popularity in mid-2023, when the black magic of the page algorithm For You TikTok made her appear in the feed of many Quebecers. At first, we mainly saw her doing karaoke in her live broadcasts. A bit like Celine Dion. The one in Charlemagne or the one at my high school.

She eventually built a sizable following, watching her sing and paying $5 in TikTok currency for special requests.

Sometimes, as an extra, they made fun of her, her dilapidated apartment, her strange relationship with her “troll”, this buddy who sometimes hovered around, who put pressure on her to continue streameror who urged spectators to give even more money, and who could sometimes be heard making misogynistic, sometimes borderline violent, remarks.

They ended up exposing more and more aspects of their private lives, from the trivial to the essential. On an excerpt from a live preserved on TikTok by another user, someone who is having fun at their expense, we see the couple in the hospital. This is the buddy Florence holding the camera, very proud to announce that their baby is on the way. Florence moans, in labor. It’s sordid, there’s no question about it. One can, as many spectators of Florence’s very public slow-motion car crash did, revel in watching poor people struggle in front of their phone cameras in the hopes of garnering enough attention to engage in a modern and extremely twisted form of begging. One can question the judgment of two people who are willing to expose a precious moment like childbirth to sustain their community (and extract valuable TikTok coins from it). One can speculate that one of them may be exerting an unhealthy force over the other.

But one can also ask who benefits from all this, in the end. Who benefits when someone living in relative material poverty sees a possibility, even an extremely sordid one, to escape from misery?

Privacy is not the same value when the bailiff rings the doorbell and threatens eviction. It is for sale, just as you can sell your TV at the pawn shop if we are in a very bad situation.

At least the TV can be bought later, if we’re lucky. In the case of privacy, there’s no going back.

Who benefits when TikTok takes a 50% cut of the coins viewers give to creators?

I am old enough to have known the early promise of digital platforms that promised to facilitate human connection, at a time when I was squandering my own privacy on unsightly photo albums of my friends and me in situations of party often annoying. By design or by accident, the time spent on these platforms has instead ended up being mixed with the magma of everything we call “content”, products that demand time and attention, all of which compete fiercely for my eyes to lay my eyes on them: books, films, series, video games, pornin-depth articles on essential topics, a new idea for side dishes to enhance a burrata, Charli XCX’s album, a photo of a dismembered child in Gaza, mountain goats climbing a dam, a podcast about Ukrainians patenting autonomous weapons, the groundhog disrupting the Montreal Grand Prix, Orville Peck in chest at the Jazz Festival, a photo of a girl I had a literature class with at CEGEP with her buddy during their trip to Barcelona.

TikTok could spend $850,000 per hour of content to produce an hour of TV (that’s about it, an hour of heavy TV, yes) and hope to generate enough attention to compete with all that, enough to generate just enough ad money to break even. But, economically, it makes a lot more sense to let Florence turn on her camera, at almost no cost, and collect half the tips she gets.

It is win-winI suppose. It’s problematic in many ways, but Florence makes ends meet and her patrons are entertained.

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