Edel Coffey: Scams, socials, scandals - and the nature of humanity
The icons of social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp, are displayed on a mobile phone screen, in London.
IN 2019, the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino published her essay collection, which included one called ‘The Story Of A Generation In Seven Scams’.
It’s an impressive work that uses examples of scamming from the disastrous Fyre Festival to the subprime housing collapse to the Trump election itself to interrogate how American Millennials and Gen Z-ers have come of age on a dangerous assumption — that scamming is a way of life.
By the end of the essay, a distinct theory emerges — that instead of being the snowflakes we thought they were, Millennials and Gen Zers have come of age in a cynical and opportunistic world that has influenced their own worldview.
The essay came to mind again over the last few weeks as I watched a long-running internet story come to a conclusion of sorts as the influencer Caroline Carroway finally self-published her long-awaited memoir, , just a week after her former best friend and now nemesis, Natalie Beach, published her own memoir,
For those of you who don’t spend hours down gossipy internet rabbit holes, Calloway and Beach were the subject of a very public friendship breakup that has been played out online since 2019, when Beach wrote a tell-all essay for claiming to have been the genius behind Calloway’s influencer success.
The pair first met, appropriately enough, at a creative non-fiction course at NYU in 2012.
They became fast friends with a dangerous power imbalance — Calloway was the beautiful manic pixie dream girl who wore orchids in her hair, and Beach was the sensible grounded plain Jane. Both appear to be talented writers.
Calloway had always wanted to publish a book and when she went to study in Cambridge, England, she started a blog and Instagram account focusing on her life as an American student in England (she admits to having lied on her application to get into the college).
She subsequently bought 40,000 followers on Instagram and began building on that following with romantic photos set against the picturesque steeples of Cambridge and pithy, arch captions.
Beach claimed she ghost-wrote or co-wrote or edited many of the captions and also co-wrote Calloway’s book proposal that went on to sell for nearly half a million dollars.
According to Beach, while high on Adderall, the pair agreed she would get a 35% split for the book. But things fell apart.
The friendship was chaotic and despite several efforts, Calloway failed to deliver the book and ended up running a literary soft porn OnlyFans account to pay back the advance.
Beach’s 2019 essay was an extract from her memoir and it turns out it was the motivation Calloway needed to get her own memoir back on track.
The two books eventually came out last month, just one week apart, and many papers reviewed them comparatively, describes the pair thus: ‘Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece.’
The story of Calloway and Beach is a relatively small internet scandal but it’s also a big story about bigger things, which is why it took on so much momentum.
It represents so much of the phoniness of social media and of achievement in general in our modern world — you can scam your way to university, to a six-figure book deal, to fame.
It also has all the hallmarks of a good old-fashioned story — love and betrayal, envy and obsession, achievement and failure, fame and obscurity.
It really does feel like a modern-day Gatsby, which Calloway regularly compares herself too (even her adopted surname Calloway has echoes of Nick Carraway from the book, and echoes of her behaviour too).
So is Calloway a scammer or is she just your average Instagrammer — a person turning her life into creative non-fiction, which is what most Instagram accounts are anyway?
Or is she just working within the system she has grown up with? A system that told her how to hustle, how nobody would want to read a book written by a person with no fanbase so she bought 40,000 fake followers instead.
In a interview in May, Calloway put a finger on the scamming that has become an ever-present part of her generation’s world; ‘Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal. Whereas if you have one scandal, people remember, and it defines you.’
Calloway has finally achieved the thing she set out to do — to publish a memoir, and one can only assume she did it on her own terms as she has self-published it.
She has become not just internet-famous but mainstream-famous. She now has over 600,000 followers on Instagram and has received reviews for her book in and more.
And what has she learned? Like many people, to use Jia Tolentino’s words, she has been ‘raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.’
