By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, September 14, 2026
Owing to my occupation, there are some things I keep up
with very closely. But my natural temperament is something more appropriate to
a Georgian rural clergyman—one of those unprepossessing characters in a Jane
Austen novel nobody is rooting for. Or, more to my point today, never mind the
Jane Austen novels and think instead of the films based on them: I know that
the thing about actors is that they act, but how remarkable it is to someone
like me, without the dramatic gift, that David Bamber made such a rueful and
impressive Cicero on HBO and such a sniveling and repulsive Mr. Collins in the
1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries. I should be grateful that no one is
likely to make a movie about me and that, if someone did, Rowan Atkinson
probably will not be available to provide a portrayal that is spiritually true
if physically somewhat off the mark. Sitting around thinking about who would
play you in the movie is a very dumb 21st-century thing to do—but,
in these times, it is difficult to live a less mediated kind of life, to escape
from the trap of thinking of oneself not as a human being in action but as a
human being under observation.
As I was saying, there are many things I do not keep up
with all that closely. E.g., at the gym (stop laughing) the other day, I
noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to
my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years,
but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising
on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things
that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television,
where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and
erectile-dysfunction advertising. Many of you are perplexed right now,
wondering why I have imagined there is some kind of ban on liquor advertising.
There was, for many years, but the industry’s voluntary forbearance was lifted
way back in 1996, and liquor ads returned to television no later than 2001,
with a Smirnoff spot on Saturday Night Live. I somehow missed that. Or,
if I knew that the prohibition had been lifted, I forgot that I ever knew it.
Another related thought I had during the same visit to
the gym: Who is this schmuck with the camera on the tripod?
Influencers and the broader social media-driven culture
of self-promotion are a plague on modern life and, in particular, a plague on
public places, especially the fancier or more famous kinds. But they work their
way down to the less rarefied levels of American life, too. I do not go to a
fancy gym in Manhattan or Beverly Hills or even one of the more glittering
parts of Washington, D.C. Where I live is several hours’ drive from any major
metropolitan area. It is not the sort of place that attracts celebrities or
that produces many of them. I am not fundamentally opposed to that sort of
thing—I used to go to a Bikram class in Union Square where the usual
participants were three or four gentlemen employed in various capacities on
Broadway, about 20 models, and … me, which worked out about how you’d expect it
to—but it is not the sort of thing I go out of my way to encounter, either, and
it wasn’t exactly what I signed up for when I moved to a small town that is not
very close to much of anything.
The fellow with the camera on the tripod—and another
camera pinned to his stars-and-stripes headband—was an influencer of some kind.
I don’t know him, but, then, I wouldn’t. Many of the young men in the gym did,
speaking in low voices to one another about how so-and-so was here.
The financial incentives are easy enough to understand.
One survey estimates that social media influencers with more than 1 million
followers typically earn about $14,000 a month from their online activities,
with elite influencers earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Set
that aside, for now. Most of the people engaged in cultivating a social media
audience make little or no money at all from doing so—they are in it simply for
the pleasure of being observed. Wimbledon has just announced that it will ban
influencer shenanigans after complaints from players at the U.S. Open—ring
lights and such will be disallowed, and influencers will not be given press
credentials. Good on the All England Club. But such steps mainly cover the
professionals, whereas observers say that most of the disruptive behavior comes
from the amateurs.
You know: schmucks.
The novelist David Foster Wallace was a pretty good
psychoanalyst, in his way (but, you know: “Physician, heal thyself!”), though
there is one passage in Infinite Jest that I keep coming back to, trying
to decide whether he got it right. In the scene, a guru advising young tennis
stars aspiring to the professional tour informs the young athletes that the
envy they feel for star athletes is a one-way relationship, that envy is an
unpleasant feeling with no pleasant reciprocal feeling of being envied.
Of course, we all know people—not only the influencers and that sorry set—who
spend a great deal of time and effort setting themselves up to be envied, and
there is something about that in our time that is distinct from mere boasting.
E.g., how much money does one have to spend to make a wedding at Lake Como
positively tacky? This much, as may be estimated from a report about the
recent wedding of former Call Her Daddy co-host Sofia Franklyn. (Getting
the blessed occasion into the New York Times confirms the tackiness of
the affair.) I suppose that the difference is that boasting—and the Age of
Trump is the golden age of boasting, at least—involves asserting one’s own
virtue or success or status, whereas the desire to be envied, and the consequent
need to place oneself on display for the observation of others, is a slightly
subtler thing, an invitation for others to assert, if only implicitly, one’s
virtue or success or status.
But the need to be observed and to have one’s status
confirmed by strangers is, of course, a confession. I am reminded of the
football coach who advised against end-zone celebrations on the grounds that
players scoring touchdowns should act like they’ve been in the end zone before
and expect to be there again. “Look at me!” is shorthand for “Look at me—I’m a
fraud!”
Envy me—I need it!
My wife once had a pretty large social media following,
into six figures. We took a pretty fancy honeymoon (in lieu of an expensive
wedding; we got hitched at the take-a-number wedding bureau in New York; Mrs.
W., being bold, wore a white dress on the subway), and I do not believe that a
single picture from it ever made its way onto her social media account, which
was focused on some pretty obscure physics-related stuff rather than pictures
of her on boats or on airplanes or in nice hotel suites. I do not know anybody
who loves a first-class hotel breakfast as much as Mrs. W. does, but I cannot
remember ever having seen her take a photograph of a waffle, and she is a very
able photographer.
Not everybody needs to be seen to enjoy themselves. As it
happens, I was at Lake Como for an entirely different wedding a couple of years
ago and spent a few minutes chatting with a very nice woman where we were
having lunch. She asked me what I did, and I told her I was a writer, mostly of
political journalism. She told me she was a writer, too. “What do you write?” I
asked. Not political journalism: Sex and the City. (Not Candace Bushnell
but a writer on one of the films, I believe she was.) She did not, as far as I
can recall, photograph her cocktail or her sandwich for Instagram—she acted
like she’d been to Villa d’Este before and expected to be there again whenever
it suited her. Spike Lee doesn’t need people on social media to appreciate his
courtside Knicks seats for him—he’s been there before, and he expects to be
back next season. Not so, I think, the people who disrupt Wimbledon or the U.S.
Open with the creation of their “content.”
The need to be observed—it is a curious thing. A woman
just walked by me with an adorable little toddler on her hip. She was wearing a
T-shirt reading: “God Hears Your Prayers.” I believe that God hears our
prayers. (I also believe that He often has a good laugh about them.) I have no
doubt about the sincerity of the woman wearing the “God Hears Your Prayers”
T-shirt. But I do wonder what it is in her that makes her desire to be seen
as someone who makes a point of communicating her belief that God hears our
prayers. I do not think that anybody who is not mentally damaged in some way
really believes that putting a bumper sticker on a 15-year-old Subaru is going
to help us “Free Tibet” or “COEXIST” or combat climate change or whatever. But
I see many, many of those stickers, and they all read the same way to me: “Look
at me caring about the poor and the oppressed more than you do!”
Esse quam videri. It was good advice when Cicero
said it. It is good advice now.
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