Caroline Calloway and Capitalism’s Next Frontier
What does the story of a controversial influencer tell us about the future of capitalism?
Full disclosure: I work in social media for a living. A large part of my job consists of engaging with influencers to bring attention to my company. One thing that has always struck me most about dealing with them, was that all of them managed to separate their personal lives from their professional ones. Whatever their chosen domain was, whether it be mental health, education, political awareness, fitness or travel, they always managed to draw the line somewhere. But then, just when we think that we’ve seen it all, something new comes along.
Enter Caroline Calloway.
For the uninitiated, Caroline Calloway is an instagram influencer. Active since 2012, she has since been a lot of things to a lot of people: fresh, feminist millennial saviour to some, incompetent, elitist scammer to others. She came into the public eye most recently in September 2019, when her erstwhile best friend and claimed copywriter Natalie Beach wrote an exposé on her in The Cut, which lifted the lid on who she really was and what she stood for.
So far so good. You’re scoffing, thinking she’s just like every other B-list influencer you’ve read about. Right? Not quite. As someone who hovers at the intersection of apology and contrition, truth and opinion, morality and malevolence, Calloway marks a watershed moment in the history of social media, influencer culture, and capitalism. She manufactures authenticity for her audience and packages it brilliantly-with feminism through her body-positivity; environmental consciousness with her metal straws; mental health awareness with open displays of tears on-screen and confessional-style writing about her addiction and other traumas; and finally, about race issues, by purchasing and promoting a book titled Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad while talking about how liking the Queen’s hats brings her to question her own white privilege.
Except that she isn’t any of these things.
Caroline Calloway isn’t celebrating body-positivity. She’s celebrating Caroline Calloway’s body. Her feminism isn’t celebrating women. It celebrates herself, who just happens to be a woman.
Scratch a little beneath the surface and you begin to see through the cracks: Caroline Calloway isn’t celebrating body-positivity. She’s celebrating Caroline Calloway’s body. Her feminism isn’t celebrating women. It celebrates herself, who just happens to be a woman. Her environmentalism holds no weight, except for a bunch of potted plants and metal straws. A cursory glance through her instagram handle reveals that the people of colour we see on her feeds are few and far between. And of course, she has mastered the art of gaslighting in the 21st century, taking criticism and either deleting it (I have been blocked on her instagram account after liking a comment that said, “Why don’t you leave Natalie alone?”) or reclaiming it, like with giving her memoir, (a work still in progress,) the title ‘Scammer’.
Calloway, then, is worth paying attention to for what she represents; the co-opting of the key movements of her time (feminism, race-equality, mental health awareness and environmentalism) to fund herself. Thus, she is an excellent example of what the influencer of tomorrow will look like. By constantly owning her flaws and leveraging troll culture, she nods at her incompetence and the damage she is constantly causing the people who choose to engage with her, while never concretely doing anything about it. But this, too, is part of her brand: a claim to feminism and the necessary infallibility of women who are just choosing to be. By reclaiming insults levelled at her, she is aping feminists that have traditionally done so in the past (think of the words: “loud,” “pushy,” “bossy,” or “angry”). Riffing off of another important counterculture movement that is going mainstream, she casts herself as the unapologetic anti-heroine.
The anti-heroine movement in film and TV began with 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon, continuing with Veep’s Selina Meyer and has come most strongly into the public imagination with the eponymous Fleabag. Note that all the anti-heroines we have in popular imagination are-yes, you guessed it- white. Issa from Insecure and Tracey from Chewing Gum have never received the same level of exposure. No points for why. Calloway takes cues from their deeply relatable messy awkwardness and merges it with the buoyancy of the early 2010s American teenage dream while throwing in a dash of the millennial quest for authenticity. Thus, she isn’t Regina George from Mean Girls, but Cady Heron as Prom Queen, a reformed mean girl: reflective and empathetic, she will sit down with you and braid your hair, helping you become like her. Calloway thus crafts a very thick armour for herself; in an age of moral bankruptcy, she has hoodwinked her audience into accepting her acknowledgment of her errors as apology. Those of us who have been gaslit before know how woefully inadequate this is. “But”s after an “I’m sorry” are nothing but a displacement of responsibility.
The point of Caroline Calloway is then this: not to stand for any movement or group, but to sell more of herself as a brand. Having converted her entire life into content, it is no longer clear where one begins and the other ends. None of us can stop looking at her as she apparently whisks together chaotic good with a smidgen of millennial aesthetic, a dash of easy wish-fulfilment, adventuregrams, sprinkles of race and environmental consciousness, feminism, and mental health awareness. All this, regardless of the fact that her foundational myth, ie., living a publicly authentic life, is constantly challenged by details she chooses to leave out, such as when she broke quarantine in her grandmother’s house for a hookup.
In this, she is capitalism’s latest and most salient mutation: a system that furthers the bounties of privilege. More importantly, Calloway’s toils are alienation personified as defined from a Marxist perspective. Melvin Seeman expanded on Karl Marx’s definition of social alienation. To him, the key results for the worker under capitalism are as follows: powerlessness, meaninglessness, social isolation, and self-estrangement. Calloway ticks all these boxes. She is powerless in her own autobiographical narrative. She seems almost unable to control her own prolific production; she doesn’t proofread; typos litter her social copy often. Meaninglessness is critical to her work; as most readers can testify, her feed is a chaotic mix of selfies, emotion porn, inside jokes for longtime fans, potshots at Beach, calls for fundraising and what she calls “dreamer bbs” and “tittay paintings” (art that she sells at incredibly high prices). Beach’s essay, linked above, already indicates the level of social isolation Calloway faces. As for self-estrangement, apart from writing, selling various forms of the same art, her new Only Fans page and travelling, the latter of which she hardly does much of anymore, what exactly does she do?
Only another privileged white woman could reveal more of Caroline Calloway to us than any of her OnlyFans nudes.
She fetishises her life before it even happens; sometimes, even when it doesn’t.
Calloway snubs the effort it takes to create actual art, whether it be a book or actual paintings. She has been able to create a narrative for herself and her followers that has convinced both that she has actually already made it, and how. She fetishises her life before it even happens; sometimes, even when it doesn’t: lies, as it happens, are not beyond the pale for her. She has been able to establish herself as a writer when most of her content has errors in it, an artist when most of her work consists of two strokes of paint on pieces of coloured paper, a feminist icon when she consistently coopts sex work. And only extreme privilege can allow such a thing to happen.
As I work on social media content everyday, part of my lived reality includes constantly attempting to leverage the idea of emotional capitalism and humanising brands in an attempt to sell more, especially as the global mental health awareness movement gains speed. Doing so at an influencer level, and getting away with it, however, requires a degree of privilege, because autobiography cannot, indeed, must not, be spared from blushes. Calloway’s raison d’être is a testament to this: how many people of colour today would get away with slipping up as many times as she has and would still have the presence she commands online? Pulling oneself out of the vortex that is Calloway means understanding that human beings are deeply flawed and that wokeness is a constant journey, filled with occasional errors and mess-ups. Calloway did not, indeed, calibrate this into her equation, if and when she ever considered her brand positioning. What she did, however, was her ability to get away with it.
And why does she get away with it?
Why does someone like Calloway, who consistently treats everyone around her like they exist solely to be lightning rods for her ineptitude hold so much space in our minds?
Calloway’s approach to complex questions of race, privilege, and mental health includes twirling around wokeness, sidestepping, and parrying real questions that her very presence raises. As she gaslights and condescends critics while snarkily pretending to promote them, we see the usual excuses being made for white women coming to the fore: though done badly, she is raising awareness about issues that must be spoken of. The white saviour myth surfaces: we should be grateful that someone like her even thinks, however vaguely, about issues that impact us everyday. We have to be thankful for the very fact that she is even present on the battlefield, even if she isn’t lifting a finger. This is the reason why the Calloway phenomenon flies. This is what permits her to consistently drown out voices of criticism and continue along her charted path: because her voice will always remain the loudest and most important in a room.
But if there’s one thing we know about her, it is that she must be the sole person to have control of her narrative. And this is precisely why Beach’s essay tipped her over the edge: though Calloway was able to absorb and distend every critique levelled at her until that point, her ex bestie’s take on her hit home because it upended her carefully crafted narrative of an emotionally connected, awkward white girl to whom magical things happened. With laser-like precision, Beach targeted all of Caroline’s foundational myths while revealing the now-familiar yet oft-repeated story of the unpaid labour on which figures like her rely. It’s rather fitting, in a way: Only another privileged white woman could reveal more of Caroline Calloway to us than any of her OnlyFans nudes.
Calloway has recolonised influencer culture and social media and has co-opted almost all the movements of our time to sell more of herself. This is emotional capitalism at its finest.
Why does someone who consistently treats everyone around her like they exist to be lightning rods for her ineptitude hold so much space in our minds? Because Calloway draws her audience into her orbit by talking about issues that are the cause of the greatest angst of our time: mental health, feminism, green living, race issues. And once you’re in, there’s no way out. You’re trapped by a vortex of manufactured content and pain that echoes your own. But her aim is not to grapple with her demons, let alone your own.
A love child of Donald Trump and Taylor Swift, she creates a space where time, fact and information have ceased to hold any meaning, while peddling tales of feminism, mental health, and queer rights in order to sell more of herself. Calloway is constantly in a rush against time and her own lived reality as she tries to write autobiographical fiction. Singing a siren song of pain that tingles our sympathies, she winks at call-out culture by openly admitting how deeply flawed and incompetent she can be and how she’s just here to learn, “like the rest of us,” while brazenly embracing her toxicity and being ‘feminist’ by not issuing honest apologies for any of it.
The most salient feature of the phenomenon that is Caroline Calloway is the questions she raises about the society and world we live in.
Celebrate the anti-heroine as a success for feminism we must. Celebrate Calloway and her brand of surface-deep white feminism? Perhaps not. Celebrate her as the new anti-heroine in the capitalist agenda? One hundred percent. Calloway has recolonised influencer culture and social media and has co-opted almost all the movements of our time to sell more of herself. This is emotional capitalism at its finest. Her attempt to cast her OnlyFans account as “emotional, cerebral porn” is an attempt to up the ante: in the face of growing backlash, she is once again staking claim to third wave feminism and body positivity by saying she can do whatever she wants with her body while undermining sex work at the same time. Calloway, thus, holds a deep mirror to the times we are living in.
The most salient feature of the phenomenon that is Caroline Calloway is the questions she raises about the society and world we live in. If she shouldn’t be allowed to peddle feminism, are the anti-heroines we celebrate for representation any better? If we don’t give her the space to grow and improve as she seeks therapy, what values do we believe in? What do you do with narcissists when we, as a society, cultivate and reinforce them? What sort of rehabilitation do we give someone with the very distinct streak of personality that is celebrated in a hyper capitalist society? How do you measure the authenticity of tears on social media? Is it a problem that she is posting near naked photos of herself hours after sharing a photo grieving her dead parent or should we know and recognise this as an attempt by her to reclaim control of her narrative? How do we manage her devaluation of the sex work? More importantly, can we condone her constant need to disrupt other narratives and prop up her own as the absolute truth, as best witnessed by her over six month long obsession with Beach’s essay? How do we fault her if she is simply being what she claims to be: a businesswoman ahead of her time? Or what if she is, as she says, simply trying to find herself through her autobiographical fiction and believes this is the right way?
What can we expect from her next? As she says, herself, she loves to be written and talked about. And the way she has decided to do so is by courting controversy. Look for her at the intersection of the acceptable and the forbidden; a space where she inverts criticism levelled at her, always spinning it as an anti-feminist (and now, sex negative) by-product of call out culture. And know, always know, that when you do critique her, she will talk about you. She will dedicate months of her time and even relief efforts in your name. Be prepared. I know I am.
