The Society of the OnlyFans Girl Flashing the Portal

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord observes that the modern world has replaced genuine social life with mere representations. As a result, he writes, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.”

It’s easy to see how this concept extends to the internet and social media. As one article on this topic notes, “Debord would have been horrified by social media companies…which monetize our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets.”

This week, there was a tech-related incident that particularly calls out for a Debordian analysis:

New York City recently unveiled a portal linking the city to Dublin. Anyone standing in front of the portal in NYC will be seen live from the sister portal in Dublin, and vice versa. It’s effectively a window between two cities located on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

But it’s not a real window with real people occupying physical space as they appear to be on the other side. Rather, it’s a solid, non-see-through surface that displays pixels representing video footage captured thousands of miles away.

But, more to the point, people don’t treat it like a window. They don’t really treat it like a portal, either. Instead, predictably, they treat it like a movie camera. When standing at a window, you present your real self. When standing in front of a movie camera, you market an image. You become a representation of yourself. A product. A spectacle.

At the same time, this movie camera is not the real camera. When people perform for the portal, they’ve got to be aware that they’re actually being filmed by onlookers’ smartphones—on both sides of the portal. So in a way, the portal is back to being a window again.

And in this situation, the actual audience is everyone who views pictures and videos uploaded to social media. The images are removed entirely from the immediate situation, stored in the cloud, and disseminated globally.

All these various layers of representation are more than Debord ever accounted for. Yet, even looking at this situation from the grave—assuming he knew anything about Americans when cameras are involved—he almost certainly could have anticipated what happened next:

The story quickly went from “people in two cities interact in real time” to “OnlyFans model flashes breasts to the unexpecting people of Dublin.”

The model was Ava Louise. In 2019, she appeared on Dr. Phil to say that she’d rather “die hot than live ugly,” and that fame was the most important thing in the world. Given that she once licked a toilet seat on TikTok as part of a “coronavirus challenge,” she seems quite serious about the getting famous thing. You can judge for yourself whether she pulled off the goal of living hot.

As a Frenchman, no doubt Debord was a fan of—as one commentator phrased it—"bouncy Big Naturals.” But French philosophers are notoriously critical of pornography. Jean Baudrillard, for example, argued that pornography doesn’t depict real sex, but rather constructs a hyperreal scenario where sexual acts are staged, exaggerated, and mediated, creating a reality that doesn’t exist outside the images. When sex is reduced to a mere image, the image itself becomes the reality.

Debord didn’t write specifically about pornography in The Society of the Spectacle, but his general critique easily applies. Pornography, he might say, turns intimate human experiences into products for consumption. This in turn alienates individuals from their own desires and bodies—and also from each other.

Debord was equally critical of the pursuit of fame and the persona of the celebrity. He writes:

“The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society—unfettered, free to express themselves.”

There’s something compelling about Debord’s analysis of modern life as a spectacle. Our digital age—with online avatars, virtual worlds, and now city-linking portals—is just weird and alien enough to actually warrant such stilted language.

However, as a counterpoint to Debord’s analysis, it could be observed that—dropping all intellectual pretensions for a moment—it’s simply fun to be a hot model flashing your breasts to the world. And the social media attention that follows results in real-life increases in dopamine. And no doubt there are significant monetary rewards, which improve the quality of your real life. And even if participating in this charade is supposed to somehow make you feel alienated from yourself and society, or whatever—well, fuck it. And if somehow other people’s real sexual experiences are tainted because they saw images of your breasts, well—who cares? Deal with it.

I mostly agree with this counterpoint perspective. But I’ve got to admit: it sounds an awful lot like something the society of the spectacle might have us unwittingly buy into, and not to our benefit.