“Real life horrors are on your phone instantly”
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From the sublime to the less sublime. So Dave Hanratti, host of the No Encore podcast. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. And Dave, I feel we always bring you in when there are kind of grimy things and awful things happening on the internet, even by the lofty standards of the internet. People were pretty shocked by a live stream on TikTok on Tuesday night. So without going into too much detail, what did the celebrity bro blogger Perez Hilton broadcast on Tuesday night?
He was undergoing a TikTok live stream and appeared to self-harm. And this was rather distressing imagery of what appeared to be a rather distressed man and has caused itself widespread distress to anyone who's seen it. And there's a lot of fallout from this in terms of Why was this available online to begin with? Why w why did it go on for so long?
Yeah, okay. I mean come back to some of those questions, but I think Part of the reason this became a big story is that Perez Hilton is kind of a huge history in in a a huge figure in the recent history of the internet and of popular culture and everything. Remind people who exactly Perez Hilton is, was.
Yeah, as listeners will likely have guessed already, if you don't know him, that is not his real name. It is a takeoff on Paris Hilton, of course. And he himself was a guy who came of age in the mid-2000s when really all bets were off when it came to internet culture.
What triggered the discussion about Perez Hilton’s TikTok livestream?
I know we look at social media now and there's an awful lot of kind of commentary that might not be uh edifying, really, or empathetic, but this was also itself a bit of a wild west of a time. His initial ambition was to be an actor. That didn't really work out for him, and he saw gap in the market when it came to celebrity culture. He set up his own website called Perez Hilton.com. And on that it effectively was a national inquirer for the digital age and for the indie sleaze age. And in doing so, celebrity gossip, muckwreaking, but also kind of a fixation on celebrities like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus and so on, and never really presenting them in a very, very nice light.
It was usually like these people are like look how vulnerable they are. I will exploit that for my own gain. And gain he did because this stuff was extremely popular.
Like he was huge, wasn't he? He was co was he kind of one of the few people doing that kind of thing at that point in the internet.
Yeah, in like I say, gap in the market. It's interesting 'cause you look at YouTube culture now and even something as, you know, much more like less, I guess, toxic than this. Like film reviewers, the reality is there are a lot of film reviewers who have massive audiences on YouTube right now. They're not necessarily very good, but they were there at the right time. And Perez Hilton was there at the right time. He himself was kind of like Instagram and Twitter before Instagram and Twitter. Now Twitter was around a little bit at that time, but it wasn't the kind of behemoth they would get into. So by and large, if you wanted celebrity culture, celebrity gossip, and in fact photographs of celebrities falling out of nightclubs, Perez Hilton dot com was the place to go.
And he probably intersected with a particular time in celebrity culture as well and a particular cast of of people and who s a lot of them kind of troubled and messy. Yeah.
Yeah, this is the thing. I mean, it effectively was like the kind of the gossip pages in the tabloid newspaper that we would be very familiar with in the nineties and early two thousands as well. But this was kind of writ large. And at a time, I think that at its peak in the mid to late two thousands, you're talking seven or eight million people like hits on his website a day. And there's advertising on that website, so it makes an awful lot of money. So he did capitalise on this and he showed no remorse. It should be said that this was, you know, it was a case of punching down. Even if these people were big names in celebrity, we all saw what happened to the likes of Britney Spears when she had a public meltdown.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:18
2
What triggered the discussion about Perez Hilton’s TikTok livestream?
1:18–3:26
3
Who is Perez Hilton and how did he become a celebrity‑gossip pioneer?
3:26–5:37
4
How did Perez Hilton’s site dominate early‑2000s celebrity gossip?
5:37–7:47
5
Why did Perez Hilton’s influence wane with the rise of social media?
7:47–9:23