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We are all Britney now The collapse between public and private spheres has left us all trapped

Why does the caged bird sing? Credit: Noam Galai/FilmMagic

Why does the caged bird sing? Credit: Noam Galai/FilmMagic


July 14, 2021   6 mins

Where were you when the End of History ended? I don’t mean 9/11 (I was up a hill in Scotland) or when Lehman Brothers collapsed (drunk in a bar in Covent Garden). I mean in 2007, the year the iPhone came out, when Chris Crocker had a meltdown about Britney Spears on YouTube, and the internet ate reality.

Crocker’s meltdown racked up more than 2 million views in the first 24 hours, and scored him appearances on CNN, MSNBC, The Today Show and the rest. It was in response to another, far more high-profile breakdown: the public psychiatric implosion of Britney Spears herself, whose forensically-documented mental health issues dominated celeb gossip for years, and culminated in the imposition of a “conservatorship” in early 2008.

Spears is now contesting the conservatorship, with another hearing scheduled for today. But it’s perhaps less a question of whether Britney can escape conservatorship, than of whether any of us can escape a culture and politics now dragging us all into a similar state.

Britney Spears first entered the public eye aged 11, as a star on the Disney Channel’s The Mickey Mouse Club alongside Justin Timberlake. She was 16, in 1998, when she donned a schoolgirl outfit straight out of a porno-flick for the video to Hit Me Baby One More Time. The song shot to no. 1 and catapulted Spears to megastar status, right at a hinge moment in our celebrity culture: the transition to the digital era.

But as the internet became a mass social phenomenon, the certainties that seemed so solid at the End of History began to melt away, even as the web sent the culture that promoted them roaring into overdrive. Britney’s megastardom and mental breakdown encapsulated that moment: a sweet, heady, fruit, perfectly ripe and moments from rotting.

Her Noughties videos drip with baroque, jaded eroticism: a pure End of History vibe. From XXX schoolgirl she blossomed to bondage-gear comic-book villainess; rubber-clad space vixen; dive-bar stripper. The images play with innocence violated, kink and commerce, class inequality and love and uncontrollable desire.

It’s all overlaid with a glossy knowingness that suggests for those who only know how to play the game, everything is within our grasp. We all have freedom, this imagery hints, to warp and disrupt every imaginable social and cultural norm. We can do so because we know liberal capitalist democracy has triumphed, history has ended, and the world has been flattened to a giant playground for freedom, sex, and shopping.

But even as the pre-internet music industry was manufacturing Britney Spears as a global megastar along well-trodden entertainment-industry lines, this entire approach to celebrity was under attack by something new: the attention economy.

Internet-dazzled futurists at the time pointed to the emerging landscape of social media and virality, the self-creating media stars of YouTube and the like, and extolled the promise of ‘disintermediation’ to give the whole world a voice. But if the digital revolution created new ways to find an audience, it did so in no small part by destroying and replacing the “legacy” media.

As reporters gave way to “citizen journalists” and vloggers, the once-clear boundary between celebrities and their audience wavered. Crocker himself epitomises this shift: he is one of the first individuals to become internet-famous, rather than having acquired fame offline. He initially went viral on MySpace, before his weeping YouTube defence of Britney took off.

The emergence of figures such as Crocker drove an appetite for intimate-feeling, rough-and-ready voyeuristic material. Meanwhile, the sheer endlessness of the internet drove a suddenly bottomless hunger for content, whether true or not, which put paid to any residual self-restraint or journalistic integrity in the brutal contest for eyeballs.

Though Spears had been famous for years, digital-age celebrity was something new. Publications such as Valleywag and Popbitch spawned a thousand imitators all fighting for clicks. Paris Hilton, who (along with Spears and another former child star, Lindsay Lohan) formed the Holy Trinity of Noughties celeb-gossip, describes the paparazzi in this era as “out of control”. “Fighting over getting the shot, pushing each other against my car, scratching it with their cameras. It was overwhelming and frightening.”

Many of the songs on Blackout, the 2007 album Spears released shortly before her breakdown, convey a sense of relentless exposure and — as in “Piece of Me” — of being devoured, bite by bite.

In February 2007, Spears appeared at a hair salon. As a mob of paparazzi hammered on the salon doors, Spears demanded the stylist shave her head. When the stylist demurred, Spears grabbed the clippers and did it herself. According to the hairdresser, she declared: “I’m sick of people touching my hair”: as though making herself ugly might stop people touching her, staring at her, wanting a piece of her.

It didn’t work. Later that year, another swarm of paparazzi photographed Spears strapped to a gurney, being wheeled away into an ambulance.

But her longing to re-assert personal boundaries, and some measure of private existence, wasn’t in the interests of those around her. Following a similarly public breakdown over roughly the same period, Lindsay Lohan more or less abandoned celebrity, and has since largely disappeared from the limelight. But rather than allowing Spears to withdraw like Lohan did, the Britney-industrial complex sent her to rehab, then deprived her of personhood with the “conservatorship” legal arrangement — before putting her back to work as Britney Spears the celebrity.

Since she was deprived of control over her own affairs, Spears has released three albums and undertaken four stadium tours. We could debate whether or not this is an ethical thing to ask of someone who is deemed by the courts not to have capacity to manage her own affairs. But from the point of view of the fame machine, Spears’ inner life and personhood are largely beside the point. For there’s no money in privacy.

Lohan retreated into private life, and has been (by celebrity standards) skint ever since. Spears made, or was forced to make, the opposite trade – and the Britney-industrial complex has cashed in. Where she was reportedly down to her last few million at the point of breakdown, the New Yorker reports that she’s worth more than $60m now.

In the intervening years, the collapse between public and private that drove Spears and Lohan to breakdown has come for all of us. Every public social media post positions us as our own paparazzi: curators of our own micro-celebrity mythos, in exchange for the dopamine hit of one more “like” or “share”.

And in a world where privacy is increasingly meaningless, the fantasy-worlds of movie and music seem increasingly don’t cut it. Stronger, more intimate stuff is what garners the clicks. We’ve moved on from voyeuristically documenting the mental health difficulties of attractive young celebrities; now, it’s a race to give a platform to whatever is darkest and most baroque in the human psyche.

Chris Crocker’s own career trajectory epitomises the insubstantiality and sleaze of this new environment. Since 2007, he has cycled through every form of digital-era micro-celebrity imaginable, including attempts at reality TV and a music career, a stint in porn, and recent migration to — where else? — the intimate-seeming subscription porn website OnlyFans.

The hunt for dark, intimate, click-worthy curiosities has spawned a whole genre of (often female) confessional, including an entire sub-genre devoted to women losing things up their vaginas. If it’s not confessional, it’s grotesque: a Netflix dating show dresses contestants in given prosthetic makeup so a shark and a devil can go on a date. Drag queens read stories to children in public libraries. A male who identifies as a woman “breastfeeds” a real newborn baby on US television, and it’s treated not as child abuse but entertainment.

More subtly, every time we post, like, or share, we’re part of it. We’ve all acceded to the trade that was forced on Spears: hyper-visibility, at the expense of a private inner life. What does “privacy” even mean, in a world where hundreds of millions of people are happy for Google to index the content of their private emails in exchange for bottomless email storage?

It’s ironic, then, that Spears should have launched her legal campaign to end her conservatorship in 2020. For the pandemic has given us all a taste of the Britney lifestyle. Under Covid we were all suddenly in conservatorship: mediated, surveilled, shorn of autonomy, every movement controlled. And, also, pressured to go on working even as the norms of what we thought about citizenship dissolve around us, real-world social institutions collapse, and we transfer ever more of our inner lives into the attention economy.

The end of history, it turns out, actually was peak liberal democracy. We all laughed at Crocker, but he wasn’t just complicit in the new economy. He was also right about its tradeoffs. “All you people care about is making money off her,” he sobbed. “She’s a HUMAN!!!”. Crocker recognised the way Britney Spears’ personhood was already collateral damage, in the rush to transform her into a never-ending source of lucrative content.

Her song ‘Gimme More’ was fitting, Crocker declared, because “All you people want is more, more, more. Leave BRITNEY ALONE!!!” But instead of listening, we turned him into a meme. And now it’s too late: we’re all memes as well, passing figures in a parade of grotesques, our personhood discarded in exchange for free apps, hygiene theatre or a moment in the online limelight..

We need to reclaim a sense of what we won’t offer up to the entertainment machine: to find a way back to some measure of private life, as Lohan did. For it’s already becoming clear that a culture willing to replace private life with never-ending public carnival will be governed as Britney Spears is governed. It will be run as a therapeutic conservatorship by those who know best, whether we like it or not.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

I’m always impressed–amazed might be more accurate–at Mary Harrington’s ability as a writer. She seems to brim with words and ideas on any subject related to popular culture.
The internet has doubtless exacerbated celebrity exploitation (although the author doesn’t consider the extent to which some celebrities are complicit in their own exploitation, for example with strategically timed ‘breakdowns’), but it’s far from a new phenomenon.
Google the sad lives and careers of the massively talented Judy Garland and her fellow child star Mickey Rooney. They started their careers in the 1940s as teenage performers in the popular ‘Andy Hardy’ movies. To keep them at peak efficiency, studio doctors prescribed uppers (amphetamines) then downers (barbiturates) so they could work long hours then sleep. These were licensed physicians (“First, do no harm”) prescribing addictive drugs to children for commercial gain. Garland became a lifelong drug addict and died before the age of fifty. Rooney lived longer but with a troubled life.
We’re all complicit in the public treatment of media stars, and in our own treatment if we agree to be part of the social media circus.

Last edited 3 years ago by J Bryant
Aidan Twomey
Aidan Twomey
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

it’s already becoming clear that a culture willing to replace private life with neverending public carnival will be governed as Britney Spears is governed. It will be run as a therapeutic conservatorship by those who know best, whether we like it or not.

I agree with you about the quality of the writing. This is the most important point that I have read all year: yes, those who are public commodities have always been exploited. But with a movie studio, marketing department and GPS tracker in our pockets, we in our own way risk becoming public commodities as well.

Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Don’t Google anything ever.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

“We’re all complicit in the public treatment of media stars,

No we are not.
I am always amazed at silly things people say.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Thanks for your Constructive contribution to this discussion…

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 years ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

It is perfectly constructive to suggest avoiding lazy generalisations like “We all ..” and “ Why did nobody foresee … “ etc.
What follows statements like this is often poorly thought out.
Fortunately Mary seldom uses these structures …
Clickbait titles like the one given to this article are pretty moronic … and it’s important to discourage them.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Barton
David Simpson
David Simpson
3 years ago

When I rule the world, or at least the UK, if it still exists (yes, I have been driven mad) I will ban Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram and Amazon, and nationalise Google. There will be howls of outrage, and then everyone will go back to using their phones for talking to friends, pubs for meeting them, and maps for working out where they are. Simples.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
3 years ago

Really good article – as always Mary.
My one criticism though is that the ‘music’ has always been part of the whole charade.

Many of the songs on Blackout, the 2007 album Spears released shortly before her breakdown, convey a sense of relentless exposure

The music as fake as the hair extensions and over-produced videos. She is not a musician in the traditional sense and her songs are written by others as part of a committee – like most pop music in the past 15-20 years. They are deliberately written to reflect whatever hell she may or may not have been going through as it’s all part of the same marketing. Boom or bust they will try and sell it and her product.
I don’t say it to be a music snob – each to their own – but this is the undeniable truth. It’s not the artist revealing her true feelings, it’s part of the marketing machine to sell out tours and sell records. Capitalising on her misfortune as if she wasn’t a real person but a character in a soap opera.

Last edited 3 years ago by A Spetzari
Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago

I was intrigued this week that Facebook was deemed not to be a monopoly because the definition only applies financially. But what I think they were going after with Big Tech was their ‘monopoly of efficiency’. These tech behemoths provide whatever you need in the quickest and most effective way possible.
This suits our time-poor life experience and effectively hooks you in. I wanted to look at a brand new website but DuckDuckGo (which I use to keep some privacy) couldn’t find it. Google had it instantly. It’s tough for humans to break out of the addiction of instant response or gratification. It’s actually hard work supporting local shops or taking the trouble to buy a card, write it and post it in good time instead of messaging HBD! I don’t want to give up on this unequal struggle.

Eddie Johnson
Eddie Johnson
3 years ago

Mary at her very best. Always worth a second read.

Arild Brock
Arild Brock
3 years ago

TRY TANGO!
Like other comments to the article I find the author’s description of “The End” accurate- the disastrous breakdown of privacy (and authenticity) with Britney Spears as the obvious example.
The fact that Spears’ story can take place shows the crudeness of the “cultural movement” behind – a celebrity person cuts her hair off in order to become ugly – a desperate attempt to save remnants of personhood – leading, however, to no change.
I am not sure if I agree with the article’s conclusion, though. Or is the conclusion just “We are all Britney Spears now”? I agree that we are all surrounded by this “culture”, but do we have to join it? Can’t we fight against it and at the same time find some fragments of real life to take part in?  E. g. to endorse Harrington’s article verbally or even with a “like” I hold for resistance – not joining.
Regarding fragments of real life – let me tell about an improvised tango scene I visited last night here in Berlin, outdoor in rainy weather under the corona restrictions. That little scene has its “likes” and its vanities like other human arenas. But the people you meet are not dead! You can seek contact aiming at friendship, a relationship or just a dance. It takes time and it is a bit awkward. Being somewhat open and authentic is now more risky than ever thanks to the circumstances so accurately described by Harris, but people are not dead! You can always try to reach out. 

Terry Needham
Terry Needham
3 years ago

Mary Harrington goes into this, and more, in an interview on Triggernometry broadcast a couple of days ago, Well worth a listen.