Politics is Downstream from SCAMMER
Instagram influencer, Caroline Calloway foreshadows 2024 redemption arcs in her new book, SCAMMER
First of all, welcome to my brand spanking new substack. More about its theme here. After getting this piece commissioned then cut in the final hour by a more mainstream publication, I finally took the advice of mentors and friends to start a bi-weekly substack! Welcome to the first edition!
If politics is downstream from culture – as Andrew Breitbart, quoting 20th century Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci, said – then “It Girl” culture is cueing those of us in politics to move on from utopian exaggerations and “too-good-to-be-true” aspirational identities. Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway’s new book SCAMMER offers a deeply personal look behind her picture-perfect rise, public fall, and earned redemption. Now expect political grifters caught in the act to prove their authenticity by following Calloway’s playbook of laying out their sins and salvation arc for the world to see. It’s time to get real.
What am I — someone dedicated to the academic study of culture and politics — doing reviewing a $65 self-published “luxury first edition” from someone stereotypically of interest to the readers of Vanity Fair or Cosmopolitan? Calloway understands the rules of internet performance art in the same way that Steve Bannon understands the rules of political performance. The two even share similar maxims. “Flood the zone with shit,” says Bannon! “The rules for being canceled are the same as surviving a riptide,” writes Calloway, “Follow the current. Name your next book Scammer! Use the same material people used to tear you down for pulling yourself back up!” Like Bannon, Calloway understands how to survive and even thrive in the capricious preferences of a public trying to make moral sense of the outrage-driven attention economy. Her book is a vanguard of the next phase in what a successful public persona looks like in a world of post-purity politics.
“Flood the zone with shit,” says Bannon! “The rules for being canceled are the same as surviving a riptide,” writes Calloway, “Follow the current. Name your next book Scammer! Use the same material people used to tear you down for pulling yourself back up!”
But who is she? Caroline Calloway, who pioneered the instagram influencer model (and the term itself) in the 2010s while she was a student at Cambridge, was both dubbed –and later embraced– the “scammer” moniker after failing to deliver on a $165 creativity workshop and not finishing a book she received a $500,000 advance on–in part due to a debilitating Adderall addiction. The public shaming hit a low when her former classmate wrote a cutting exposé of how the Calloway sausage was made: ghostwritten book proposals, purchased followers, and a dose of gal-pal manipulation. Adding to the drama that unfolded in major outlets, Calloway’s father passed by suicide a week later. None of Calloway’s transgressions were criminal (or even abnormal) but the piece was The Cut’s most read article of 2019– underscoring the public’s obsession with revealing hypocrisy of the beautiful, powerful, or famous, and “cancelling” them.
Yet with parts of the public tiring of cancel culture – be it cancelling politicians or influencers – Calloway’s book comes at a timely moment. She admits that getting famous on the Internet incentivized and required some inauthenticity to begin with, but she claims she’s paid her debts and done the work – financial, literary, and spiritual – after a long period of self-reflection. Her nuanced admission of complicity in early internet fakery feels the most human.
With international media coverage and 5,000 copies sold, Calloway has proved to the world that people love a good confession and a public redemption arc – not to mention something that feels real. The hardback book itself swims against claims that culture is trending towards digital facsimile: it is hand-lined in marbled Italian paper and comes in a hand-addressed envelope—artisanal in a world of Influencers drop-shipping their merch and using ChatGPT to generate content. Her book comes at a time when authenticity is the most prized trait of politicians and people bemoan the out-of-touch establishment.
If the internet’s favorite scammer can revive a ruined reputation with vulnerability, human-touch, and relatability, the political world – which is always one step behind arts and culture – will feel the trend take hold.
In 2024, political figures caught in deceptions or scams may learn from parts of Calloway “riptide” rules: embrace the accusations, claim humanity, and do longform screeds exposing the institutional or cultural incentives that made the scam possible. Rep. George Santos will not resign but admitted lying, “My sins here are embellishing my resume. I’m sorry.” Acknowledging “we do stupid things in life” was a way to seem relatable while assuring constituents he “campaigned talking about the people’s concerns, not my resume.” A DeSantis surrogate, whose anti-Semitic text messages were leaked in Breitbart recently, admitted guilt in a long Twitter reflection, claiming fatherhood had made him move on from such hateful opinions while blaming them in part on the MAGA movement he once championed. Even after Tucker Carlson’s subpoenaed Trump-doubting text messages exposed him as a hypocrite, Carlson offered a confession of how Big Media fixates on inconsequential debates to avoid real issues – “trust me as someone who has participated.”
These personalities can fess up and reveal they engaged in exaggerations or deceptions because of the perverse incentives of our political or media system. Drawing from the deeply humane Calloway confessional style, political figures drawing on this trend now in the zeitgeist will win empathy and favor from the public. Performing scammer-redeemed with revelatory exposés will be a powerful part of the political playbook moving forward.
The only stop-gap to performative apologies where consequences are not faced, as Calloway mused in a phone interview, is courts and karma catching up.
The Origins of Deception
Calloway came to mainstream attention during a “reckoning” with millennial Insta-scams in 2019, alongside Billy McFarland’s failed promises of Fyre Festival and con artist Anna Delvey. Yet unlike McFarland or Delvey, Calloway did not commit any felonies-- aside from not delivering as robust a “creativity workshop” as advertised, she got a few FTC complaints for not sending some of her Snake Oil skincare orders. (But is ordering Snake Oil engaging in regular commerce, or participating in a performance art piece… I mean come on). Her main transgression was being part of a generation of influencers who exaggerated their lives, feeding hope to the masses who desperately wanted “too good to be true” to be real–then not getting what they thought they paid for.
Much like the culture-scammers, political personalities thought they could build an influence-empire by offering a new breed of irreverent populism, something different and promising. Yet the second reckoning of scam culture would come later after 2020, and particularly when the Fox News texts about election fraud came out in court subpoenas. This time, America started realizing that what its favorite celebrities said on screen was very different from what was offscreen. Were they guilty of a crime? Or just doing their jobs in the institutions that demanded a very specific type of entertaining deception? Be it influencers or political personalities, both had met the limits to the incentives of the attention economy: We can all exaggerate reality to get clicks but eventually nuance and revelation will take hold. Like Calloway, these figures would suffer tainted reputations and wait for the right opportunity to reclaim the narrative.... But would they do “the work” in the meantime?
A Formula for Redemption Arcs
So what to do when the “jig is up” and the truth comes out? Our own political leaders may follow the spirit of the time, and try to follow a formula from the internet’s favorite “scammer:” Confess. Analyze what went wrong and why. Perform a kind of authentic, nuanced humanity.
Calloway exemplifies this method in her own book, refreshingly saying what many have wanted to hear: We make mistakes – bad ones – but to place our collective shame on one person (“scam” possibly comes from Danish for “dishonor” or “pity,” acting in English as a doublet for “shame” and “sham”) rejects the reality that institutions and systems have incentivized these deceptions. Calloway took responsibility for her mistakes, making good on her wrongs. The compelling thing about her book is that she did so with such a pithy analysis of the culture that conditioned her. (Politics aside: the book’s page-turning writing trains the internet-addled brain to read again. Its internet Sun Tzu aphorisms are deep: “When other people perceive us the way we want to be perceived, we think we are getting one over on them. But really we are just scamming ourselves out of ever truly being known.”)
However, even if Calloway “did the work” and repaid her debts, not everyone will want to face responsibility. They will want to look like they did. Understanding the ways media, politics, or life incentivizes deceptive behavior can also help some scammers dodge responsibility when owning up.
Such shifting of blame during a confessional — using the structural incentives of one’s former institutions or communities— is a tactic we’ve already started seeing in politics. Recently, a former MAGA and current DeSantis influencer Pedro Gonzalez, was attacked in the Trump-DeSantis proxy war: Bretibart published his anti-Semitic text messages. In a Twitter missive, Gonzalez admits he “said nasty things about race and Jews.” But, he inculpates his association with the MAGA movement through which he found fame: “I also don’t expect Trump’s people to stop trying to tie my future to who I was yesterday when I was, ironically, closer to them.” Admit fault. Claim human growth. Analyze and inadvertently blame the system he was complicit in.
Calloway told me she doesn’t believe her brand of scam redemption will be replicable among real-world political scammers absent facing justice – although she may be wrong there. They may successfully perform their redemption–without the consequences part. Tucker Carlson has managed to deliver a performative apology when texts exposing his hypocritical politics came to light. In his own version of a confession, he “exposed” the hypocrisy and incentives of a media and technology environment designed for hyperbole – all while failing to acknowledge the harm he may have caused, the duplicity he showed, the amount of money he made while doing it, and how he might prevent causing such a thing again.
Both Calloway and Tucker’s re-emergence proves one thing: Even as we realize the fakery out there, we have begun to embrace it—accepting the scammers we loved because we know in some way we wanted them to do it. Tucker Carlson has been rewarded with over 20 million views on his first episode of “Tucker on Twitter,” despite being exposed as a hypocrite. After Gawker's lawsuit, we know Hulk Hogan is really Terry Bollea and that is okay. We still watch WWE. Ozempic is making skinny fashionable again and Gen Z is open about their fillers, injections, and BBLs. It doesn't make us think less of them.
The book is immensely intimate– about sex, elitism, addiction, suicide, lies, and healing. For those intrigued by Internet culture and its Marquess of Queensbury rules, there are Instagram Sun Tzu maxims with both strategic and tactical wisdom.
“When other people perceive us the way we want to be perceived, we think we are getting one over on them. But really we are just scamming ourselves out of ever truly being know.”
“If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever inauthentic? A grift?”
“Courage takes courage, but you can always substitute self-delusion if that’s all you have in the pantry.”
“Attach your first and last name to cultural concepts on the come-up.”
“I always had to aim for the peak of a parabola on this graph – X Axis: What would perform well online. Y Axis: What was real.”
Authenticity is Everything
Calloway’s book comes out at the same time as her arch-nemesis’s book, Adult Drama. Natalie Beach wrote a the most popular piece in The Cut in 2019 titled “I was Caroline Calloway.” Beach describes the work she did to write Calloway’s instagram captions and book proposal. A week after the article dropped, Calloway’s father died by suicide. Years later, being a “Natalie” has become a kind of Internet slur — someone who found their success on the coattails of someone else, fashioning themselves as more “real” or honest than the character that gripped us in the first place with their utopian presence, and then their manic messiness.
We simply don’t like it when people copy someone else’s truth or exaggeration. For instance, Ron DeSantis may be Trump’s “Natalie” — once friend and now foe, trying to copy the President. When DeSantis tries to actually enact a Trump-style agenda in Florida -- be it "Don't say gay" laws or fighting Disney wokeness -- he is met with resistance from even his own base. Really what we wanted was not the authentic policy of undoing government, but the authentic performance of transgressivity. Being that kind of transgressive is Trump’s truth–not DeSantis’s. It just feels like copying, not exaggerating. We want leading liars, not facsimile followers.
Really what we wanted was not the authentic policy of undoing government, but the authentic performance of transgressivity.
Politics will continue to deceive but instead of trying to cover up a "gotcha," more people will lean into the confession in a culture starved for nuance. Instead of simply continuing to fake it, we'll see self-reflective essays on it, turning it into a new way to embrace authenticity on the Internet. They will look like confessions like Santos’. Longform screeds from Carlson about the desire for hard debates. Twitter missives like Gonzalez’s about the lure of extremism. If anything, these confession-analyses can be a source of trust or power: Calloway finds that people who once loathed her now respect her with a “Yas! Queen! Slay!” positivity for alchemizing scandal into power. We like to know that other people push the limits of reality to get ahead– we are not alone in our white lies.
Yet politicos be warned! This playbook of enlightened scammer only goes so far; politicians must work within the boundaries of the law, or only commit crimes they know they can be acquitted of if accused. Calloway has made a concerted effort to make good on her material wrong-doing – and in any case, art incentivizes spiritual development and cosmic justice. On the other hand, politics often incentivizes a twisted simulacrum of those ideas in order to get and keep power – real consequences may never be faced unless the legal system is up to it. And let’s face it, many things some people consider “skeezy” might not really be illegal. There is no court to adjudicate those wrongs except the court of public opinion.
Carlson might have lost a significant paycheck as a consequence of his duplicity, but will that be enough? Does it matter? Santos has had family pay over half a million dollars in bail — but will that ultimately serve justice and let him keep his seat? Nuanced admissions of guilt may be enough for a public who loves a scammer or a performer, but our courts and our laws can think differently. The incentives of the attention economy must not outweigh the consequences of breaking laws.
We have sinned. Now we will confess. It only makes sense our main Internet characters would publicly broadcast their redemption arc in “Season 2024” – right as Donald Trump claims: “I am your retribution.” We all want revelation, to see behind the veil, and these scam confessions might be our closest look.
You can buy Caroline Calloway’s Luxury First Edition of SCAMMER here. I recommend it!