The digital guillotine | The Press

The #Blockout2024 digital campaign is currently encouraging Internet users to block the accounts of stars, such as those who participated on May 6 at the Met Gala, a most extravagant social event. This year, the splendor of this highly publicized ball clashed with the images of the massacre in Gaza.

Such a juxtaposition has for many sounded the death knell for a “modern aristocracy” which, despite its extreme privileges, has chosen not to denounce the crimes against humanity of which we are all witnesses.

Online, the lists of people to be “guillotined” are multiplying: those who have remained silent in the face of Gaza and other glaring issues are tossed aside.

On TikTok, we are delighted to observe the number of Kim Kardashian’s subscribers falling in real time, as if we were seeing the outlines of a revolution emerging on the horizon. And besides, there is no shortage of nods to the French Revolution. This massive blockage is even considered as a sort of digital guillotine, a digitin silencing those who chose to remain silent anyway.

For some young people, celebrities simply represent a new iteration of royalty. Anne Larouche, aka @annelitterarum, a 20-year-old Quebec content creator who herself published a video criticizing the Met Gala, explains to me why the royal metaphor seems relevant to her. “We always say that there is no more royalty, but […] she just has another face. Using that term speaks volumes. It highlights the reproduction of a dominant social class which has all the characteristics of a modern aristocracy. » For Anne, meritocracy is therefore a myth, while privileges are often passed down from generation to generation.

Si la campagne #Blockout2024 est publicisée comme un acte de résistance consumériste, elle permet aussi de se réapproprier la culture populaire. Dans sa vidéo sur le Met Gala, Anne Larouche affirme d’ailleurs que cette culture devrait nous appartenir. Elle cite la samba brésilienne, l’humour absurde québécois, ou encore le rap français comme autant d’exemples de phénomènes culturels qui émanent directement du peuple. Si « [la culture populaire] is not something imposed on us as an ideal”, so perhaps we could make it our own and reinvent it?

We now operate in an economy where our attention is a currency that can destroy or elevate careers. It is not crazy to believe that we have a certain power over the stardom. By choosing to whom we give our eyes, we redraw part of our cultural landscape.

Proponents of #Blockout2024 claim, for example, that blocking the profiles of silent stars contributes to undermining their visibility and discoverability online. This would directly affect the reach of their sponsored posts, and therefore, their revenue.

The movement, however, risks running out of steam very quickly, in that it does not seem to have a clear objective. However, in the eyes of Anne Larouche, it represents a way of forging links with a digital community which thinks like her that “capitalism is in the legs of the future”. The one who grew up with the social web tells me that “social networks allow you to develop an international class consciousness”.

If the Met Gala ignited the powder, many ingredients already seemed to come together to fuel our feeling of injustice. Remember that the costume ball serves as a fundraiser for the Anna Wintour Costume Center and that the price of an entry ticket is US$75,000. The event’s chair, Anna Wintour, is also the creative director of Condé Nast, a media titan that recently announced massive layoffs. It is said, particularly in the magazine Varietythat Wintour would not even have deigned to take off her sunglasses to dismiss the journalists of the music magazine Pitchfork.

But the straw that really broke the camel’s back was a video published by influencer Haley Kalil, present at the Met Gala. She repeated the insolent quip that is wrongly attributed to Marie-Antoinette, dressed in a Bridgerton-style couture dress: “Let them eat cake!” ” (Let them eat cake !). While students protest against the tacit complicity of their university in the crimes committed in Gaza and face threats of suspension and police repression, the silence of those who already have everything and risk nothing, aggravated by the affront to this wannabe Marie-Antoinette, appeared murderous.

If #Blockout2024 is not strictly speaking a revolution, it has pushed several public figures to speak out in recent weeks. And above all, it allows new generations to send an unequivocal message to the rest of the world: remaining silent is no longer an option. Or rather, silence is never apolitical, and it is on these bases that it will be judged.