Don’t You Forget About Me

Toxic fandom, the Internet, and mid-life

Photo by Franck on Unsplash

Thanks to Rusty Foster’s addictive and hilarious newsletter, Today in Tabs, I just read this completely bonkers story about TikTok influencer William White**, a 22-year-old who sings 80s songs, and whose primary fan base is apparently women of (more or less) my demographic: middle-aged moms. You really have to read the story to understand how over-the-top this situation is, but the short version is that White has a huge fan base of women old enough to be his mom who send him gifts and money regularly and have developed a toxic parasocial relationship with him where some of them wreck their own lives if he doesn’t acknowledge their gifts or takes a day off from the Internet. Some of them have been stalker-y and crossed obvious boundaries — showed up at his house, etc.

I don’t have a coherent thesis about this, but I have some thoughts, and many, many questions. I cannot relate to obsessing over any total stranger on the Internet (Hollywood celebrity, TikTok influencer, whatever) but since I am in the 40 to 55 year old mom demo, I’m trying to understand what is going on here. Some hypotheticals:

1. There are people my age who still don’t fully understand social relationships on the Internet because we didn’t grow up with smartphones glued to our palms. I’m 45, and the first time I logged onto Al Gore’s Internet, I was a matriculating college freshman. I’m part of the weird in between late Gen X/early Millennial “Catalano” generation, and well, some of us are more Internet savvy than others. (I also think of this is at the “porn sex ed” cutoff, where people either did or did not learn about the specifics of sex from Internet porn, and it affects their tastes and understanding of it.) I think some people in my generation just haven’t internalized the fact that what people present online isn’t their whole self, or in some cases, any real part of themselves. They know it academically, but it was not drilled into their heads at an early age, so it’s easier for them to develop weird parasocial relationships with people they don’t know.
2. There’s a sadder element to this story: one of the women talks about how this kid makes her feel less invisible, and a lot of them talk about being lonely and depressed. Research says that happiness more or less…