How to Control a Celebrity Like a Puppet

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/arts/celebrity-fans-online.html

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We commoners have always had an ambivalent relationship with celebrities. We admire them, and we resent them. We want to be more like them, and we want them to be more like us. We want to somehow close the gap between them, the stars that produce culture, and us, the audiences who consume it. Now the internet has given us unprecedented tools to exert control over celebrities, in increasingly creepy and invasive ways. Take on Hollywood with “Internetting” Episode 9.

Aim for the stars,

Amanda

You can request your own personalized message from a celebrity here. Check out these hot illustrations from early “Star Trek” fanzines. Read The Ringer’s Alyssa Bereznak on the cutthroat online communities dedicated to monitoring celebrity photoshop fails, and my colleague Kevin Roose on the rise of “deepfake” videos. I previously wrote about Cameo for The New York Times. Many years ago I wrote about the girls who imagine that the boys of One Direction are gay for each other, and that’s still my favorite internet community ever. The greatest chronicler of the modern celebrity era is, in my opinion, the “Who? Weekly” podcast.