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Essentially Emily is a new blog by Emily Brill, the newly-thin ’socialite’ daughter of Steven Brill, the erstwhile founder of multiple defunct enterprises you’ve likely never heard of. Perhaps you remember his ‘media watchdog’ magazine, Brill’s Content, if you’ve got a maddening memory for the irrelevant like myself.

Excited yet?

I hope not. This should be about the least exciting thing imaginable, and in a more rational time it would be indeed. And yet I, in absence of any attempt to do so, have somehow come upon this woman’s blog. Most disconcerting is the fact that, as Nick Denton of Gawker claims, Emily has “been barraged by interview requests from, among others, the New York Observer.”

Let’s think about this for a second. Vaguely rich girl loses weight/gets surgery/was always vaguely telegenic, and starts a blog/stars in a widely-circulated pornographic film/crashes cars/goes insane/etc/etc/etc… A flurry of well-managed media attention now seems to be the logical consequence of this situation. Thanks, Paris Hilton. I think there is a really deep reason for the profound loathing everyone really feels for Paris Hilton, which goes far beyond the simple fact of her relatively pointless existence. This stems from the fact that she really represents the watershed, from an era in which all of our ‘celebrated’ individuals had some sort of distinctive talent (however much our supply might dwindle), into a time when, as Denton says, “it is indeed enough to be a rich man’s daughter to gain public attention.”

Think about this! What does this actually mean? Really, it’s just another step down the long and tortuous road to oligarchy. To put it maybe a bit less polemically, Paris was simply a concrete manifestation of the ephemeral quality of the barrier between wealth and celebrity. Face it, we’ve always venerated people who did more to exude the image of wealth than to actually have or earn said wealth. And so, Paris really just inherits the mantle of Donald Trump: vaguely wealthy but largely unsuccessful realtor is decidedly less photogenic than ‘heiress’ to, well, really little more than a name. Donald was, for most of his so-called ‘career,’ however, largely just a figure of fun, a go-to rich idiot for late-night talk show hosts to mock. Paris, however, showed that there was a business model underneath all this nonsense: she managed to transmute her status as unknown somewhat-rich man’s daughter into some concrete earnings. (Who actually buys her shit?!) This is not a new trend – there is of course a long history of people who are ‘famous for being famous,’ who seem to have climbed into the public consciousness for no good reason and then fought tooth and nail to stay there. (Speaking of which: Why the fuck does Carmen Electra exist!?) But in any case, Paris took this bizarre postmodern phenomenon to a very new level, both in terms of her ’success’ and susbsequent pervasiveness, and so she has inaugurated the era of the ‘celebutante,’ the internet ‘it girl,’ the moronic ’socialite’ who attempts to breathlessly chronicle her drunken whirlwind of a life for people (that is to say, idiots) who suck it up in a little perverted American Dream love-fest. Paris hilton truly inaugurated the era in which attractive rich people are inherently famous: no longer must they pretend halfheartedly to have a talent!
Why do rich people get this sort of attention for their eminently subpar everything? The media outlets which perpetuate these phenomena (including, implicitly my own, right now, and Gawker as well, no matter how much we might like to think otherwise) are just proceeding to further and further distort the American ideal of ‘meritocracy:’ once upon a time, there was a distinct belief and an institutional practice, that if one had merit, one would attain a level of compensation and renown commensurate with one’s talents. Think of it what you will, this was a fundamentally democratic ideal; we ought not, however, congratulate ourselves that democracy is the first to develop the ideal. Power has always congratulated itself that it was obtained by merit. Undemocratic political ideals all have their corresponding notions of meritocracy, they simply feel that merit is the exclusive province of a certain caste of society. This is what happens today, as the implicitly democratic structure of a culture which celebrates talent is subverted by the increasingly cultlike celebration of celebrity. And who has the means to hire a PR agent and spend their days shopping and blog about parties? Rich spoiled girls! (Because let’s face it, in the conservative world of rich folk, these girls are not going to be pressured into getting a serious education or taking the reins of the business as often as their male kin.) Thus every rich spoiled girl gets the idea that they can get richer and more spoiled and girly by making themselves famous, just like Paris! And they succeed at an alarming rate! This awful gossip machine that is taking over a large swath of ‘informational’ media simply accepts whatever it’s fed, whatever is easiest to obtain and least offensive to anyone with the will and means to complain. Therefore, we can see that the once somewhat ‘democratic’ cultural meritocracy is being progressively supplanted by an oligarchic conception of merit: rich people inherently merit attention, no matter how talentless they may be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this is a phenomenon which is just going to disappear, although we can hope that as enough people express their fervent loathing for this inane gossip which infiltrates their media, the bureaucrats running these corporations might get it through their thick heads that their business model is flawed. As much as these bitches might want to gussy it up by pretending to sing/write/act/etc., let’s just not lose sight of what their celebrity really ‘is:’ fodder for a profit-minded media machine without any critical standards, which thereby manufactures an enormous cult of celebrity composed of consumers too dull to construct any individual tastes extending beyond what’s within reach at the checkout counter. Yech. I can’t write about this crap anymore.