Activists often use an analogy called the “dollar vote.” Sustainable food advocate and author Anna Lappé describes it as: “Every time you spend money, you are casting a vote for the world you want.” Basically, we get to choose how we spend our money and where the money goes—and that choice has consequences.
In the digital world and its collaborative attention economy, we spend so much time online that we don’t necessarily spend our own money, but others still profit from us. Every view of a TikTok video, follow on Instagram, or like on X can increase someone’s net worth. We effectively pay creators and influencers with our views, and when content creators don’t support the content we want to see, there are growing movements to pull our views, likes, and attention. It’s called digitalis.
TikTok creators don’t believe ban is coming
A TikTok creator with over 56,000 followers, @ladyfromtheoutside, Posted a video The term was coined on May 8th.
“It’s time for people to do what I call the ‘digital guillotine.’ Digitalis, if you will,” said @ladyfromtheoutside. “It’s time to block all celebrities, influencers and wealthy socialites who don’t use their resources to help those in dire need. We gave them the platform. It’s time to take it back and take away our perspective, Our preferences, our opinions.
Popular stories that can be mixed and matched
The first creator she believes should be digitized is @HaleyyBaylee, aka Haley Kalil, who uses audio of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette , said “let them eat cake” when she wore a dress to attend the MET Gala. The infamous “let them eat cake” line refers to the French queen’s reaction in the 1700s when she heard that her hungry peasant subjects had no bread to eat (maybe it’s true? Maybe it’s false?). Khalil later deleted the video and apologized.
In a TikTok video calling for the guillotine, @ladyfromtheoutside reads out a mock scroll: “@HaleyyBaylee you ignorantly decided to attend the $75,000 ticketed MET Gala and recite ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ and you did nothing to of 10 million followers do anything.
She showed a video of her blocking Khalil and said: “Long live the revolution.”
Comments are closed on @ladyfromtheoutside’s video and she hasn’t uploaded any videos since, but there are still quite a few that have been manually retweeted and stitched. Many people support taking steps to actively protest the decisions of creators that don’t align with their political views or morals, just like some people don’t buy Chick-Fil-A because of its price. anti-LGBTQ movement. Others, like many of the commenters on this TikTok post, argue that we shouldn’t expect online creators to be moral compasses or guides.
