NOTE: On November 12, 2014, Paper magazine released a photo of professional celebrity Kim Kardashian, stripping out of a dress with her bare, famously gigantic posterior pointed at the camera. Your regularly scheduled Blerd Vision column is on hiatus, as your humble author fell into catatonic shock upon viewing the photo. Luckily, sources close to the Kardashian photoshoot have sent BV this inside look at the conversations that led to The Day The Internet Was Broken.
“I know how we’ll break the Internet,” Kim Hastreiter, the editor-in-chief of Paper magazine, said in a nondescript conference room.
“I know how we’ll break the Internet,” Kim Hastreiter, the editor-in-chief of Paper magazine, said in a nondescript conference room.
Kim Kardashian and Jean-Paul Goude, with their entourages, sat with her at the long table.
“Jean-Paul, take some of those striking photos of a fetishistically powerful women of color, her features further enhanced by your technical manipulations, that you love to take. Such excellent work with Grace Jones all those years ago.”
“Thank you,” Goude replied.
“Your combination of high and low art, along with celebration and exploitation, are so perfect for these times when no one knows what anything genuinely is any more.”
Hastreiter adjusted her trademark aerodynamic clear-plastic spectacles in deep red, and continued. “Kim, we know your body is your product, so come on board. We kinda love that you embody the nexus of Los Angeles starfucker culture, gossip rags, American culture’s labyrinthine concepts of the female gender, and the hate-envy of the classless, idle rich. You’re perfect for this.”
“You’re welcome,” Kardashian said. “I’ve worked very hard to cultivate and maintain my brand for more than a decade. I didn’t accomplish that by standing still.”
“Exactly,” Hastreiter said. “We need the next level. You breaking the Internet will be a new legacy item.”
Kardashian reduced her doe-like eyes to slits, feeling the notoriety be so close.
“You’ll have the people who just want to look at a large, shiny butt. Which, in of itself, can be a perfectly fine thing. They will cheer in their prurience. Others will feel shame, or a mixture of that and ebullience. Many of these viewers will be underage, after all.
“Through them, the cracks will first appear.”
“Wow, this sounds pretty good!” Karsashian said as her mother heated the baby oil.
“There’s more,” Hastreiter said. “The Internet can’t survive by lust and pornographic impulses alone, contrary to popular opinion. We must strike at the very heart of the Internet.”
“How?” Goude said. “I’ve been outraging people since the 1960s. The Internet knows no limits!”
“But it does,” the editrix said, refashioning her salt-and-pepper hair into a ponytail/bun mixture.
“You don’t break the Internet by shock, or awe, with creating something beautiful, amazing or horrifying and cruel. You can break people that way, but not the Internet, which is the best medium so far to convey the unfettered ideas and whims of people more than depicting actual humanity.
“You break the Internet, that ever-enlargening maw of self-reflected need, by feeding its gluttonous piehole with so much poisonous self-satisfaction that it bursts and deflates under its own weight.
“Think of the endless thinkpieces and open letters, both for and against the photo? Think of the paroxysm of madonna-whore complex freshly unleashed?
“There will be those who shame Kim for, once again, throwing her body at them. They will shame her as a slut, for willingly displaying herself. They will shame her for having no talent, as if the desire to look at someone pretty and naked requires talent.
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| We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious... |
“We’ll also engage the people who will shame Kim because how dare she, a mother, do such a thing? Think of your daughter, they will say, in the type of concern you have only for someone you don’t know and about whom you don’t really give a sewer rat’s decomposing behind. Brilliant, I say.”
Goude and Kardashian sat rapt in attention, ready to applaud, ready to be carried away in ecstasy over the frightful vision they will soon wreak, aching to be delivered by a soaring aria. Even the baby oil warmed a few degrees.
“And yet!” Hastreiter said with an arch tone, letting the sound of her voice ring through the room. “And yet … there is still more. The mother lode – yes, the purest vein – will come as social media is flooded with those who need to show their friends that they don’t care about the photos.
“Their publicly registered displays of Greek chorus-level hostility and passive-aggressive disgust – for many of them won’t even name you, Kim, to avoid trending – will be applauded by their friends, creating an exponential echo chamber of self-satisfaction!
“Such self-satisfaction will be a Pollock masterpiece drawing on many sources.
“Among them, we will draw on the general disdain that many older white people show toward hip-hop, which is overwhelmingly black. This dislike of rap, and particularly of your jackass husband, Kanye West, for both his personality and his music, will further intensify their self-congratulatory disdain. This may dovetail with the racial resentment lurking behind every joke about how you Kardashian girls like black men.
“Even if there is zero racial element to the dislike of you and your husband, at the very least the majority of rock fans – who are overwhelmingly older, white and male – still will disparage you two because of the hip-hop thing, overlooking that many of their rock favorites are just as egotistical, vain, misogynistic and borderline-crazy. They’ll love Mick Jagger and Morrissey, but won’t accept Jay-Z, who hangs out with the President of the United States. ‘Well, they don’t play instruments.’ ‘This music is what’s wrong with people today.’ Rich!
“In the end, those poor old smug rockists will look just like the folks who give in to America’s deep-seated racial heirarchy, which we’re clearly playing with here. Which Kim plays with all day long, without even trying.”
“That’s how we do,” Kardashian said. “It’s, as they say, on fleek? Can we say ‘fleek’ yet?”
Hastreiter nodded. “And you, Jean-Paul: if you make the photos look even more like an urban lad mag shoot, even better. I know you can do this. I believe in you.“
“Oui, mon capitan,” Goude said, readying his lenses.
“But to completely break the Internet, we will have strike at the heart of darkness itself with one more blow!
“How?” Kardashian asked, ready to erupt from the anticipation.
Hastreiter stared into the faces of Kardashian and Goude, an eyebrow curled. “We release the butt shot … on the same day … that the European Space Agency lands the Philae robot on the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet 310 million miles away!”
Kardashian and Goude leapt to their feet in applause.
“If there’s anything that fuels Internet self-satisfaction greater than erroneously pitting something totally unimportant against a very serious thing, I don’t know what that is!” Hastreiter exclaimed. “What’s bigger than humanity flying a robot onto a comet, and what’s more unimportant than seeing Kim Kardashian naked again?
“Oh, the self-satisfaction as people who consider themselves smart will do their best to place themselves with the signifiers of intelligence such as space travel. The very people who haven’t picked up the phone or written one email to their Congress to decry the defunding NASA, will suddenly act like they care about space research just to spite ‘Kim Kar-TRASH-ian,’ as if they know you or are wronged by you personally.
“They could just ignore you, Kim,” Hastreiter said. Kardashian gave an expression of fake-shock and brushed it off like a bad thought.
“They could just post nothing about the photo. But they can’t help themselves. People love to feel smart, and it’s so easy to feel and look smart by piling on whatever is deemed low culture, yes? Oh yes. So easy to make fun and say things they’d never say to your face if they sat in the same room with you.
“With every status update about how the photos are fake! With every photo of Kanye West saying how he’s Kim’s real ass! With every Captain Picard meme with him fake-yelling ‘Why the fuck do we care more about a butt photo than a space probe on a comet’ in his imagined past! The self-sastifaction reverberation will amplify exponentially until – POP!”
“And so … the Internet breaks,” Goude said, a single tear trickling down his face.
“Yes. They’ll tweet about you 200,000 times in one day, Kim, up from your average of 12,000. You’ll trend on Facebook for at least three days. My phone will melt from the sheer volume of messages I’ll receive.
“And as the self-satisfied smarty-pantses laugh and rage together amid the deflating Internet, they will never know that by continuing to talk about Kim, whom they say they don’t care about, rather than just not talk about you, they have only kept the cycle going.
“Kim, you will have won.”
“Yes,” Kardashian said as she dipped her arm into a drum of warm baby oil. She lifted her glistening, caramelized arm.
“I always win.”
