Dispatch from the Funeral of an Influencer

There’s a particular silence that descends when a man whose entire profession was to never shut up finally shuts up forever, and it’s not a peaceful silence. It’s the silence of a feed that has stopped refreshing. It’s the silence of a thousand brand managers refreshing a thousand dashboards in real time, watching the engagement curve go flat, wondering, with the gentle indifference whether the brand partnership contract still pays out.

The deceased was 34, which is considered geriatric in the social media world. The deceased had 9.2 million followers across four platforms. The deceased had a podcast, a supplement line, a six-month engagement to an OF model, and a Wikipedia page that, as of this writing, had been edited 471 times in the last 48 hours.

He died on a Tuesday, doing a brand activation, in a manner not yet disclosed pending an NDA between the family and the sponsor.

The service was held in the great vaulted ballroom of a defunct WeWork in the Arts District, retrofitted within forty-eight hours into something between a cathedral and a pop-up. There were ring lights at the door, the ushers in matching black hoodies that read GRIEF DROP: LIMITED EDITION stood by the open casket which was lit from above by a light box the size of a tabletop. At the foot of the casket someone had placed a small placard with a QR code. I scanned it. It took me to a Linktree.

I had come on assignment, in theory. In practice I had come because I had heard there would be an open bar sponsored by Liquid Death which I was curious how a high end water brand hosts an open bar.

The eulogy’s first speaker was a comedian, at least professionally, who had risen to fame on a podcast where he and three other men had workshopped, at considerable length, the question of whether women could be funny. He opened with crowd work. He asked the front row what they did for a living. He got a laugh from the dead man's mother. The clips are supposedly even funnier.

The second speaker was part of the discount-code wing of the manosphere: a man with the jaw of an action figure and the dead eyes of The Nothing. Not black-hole nothing, that at least has mass. Capital-N Nothing. The Neverending Story kind. A void that swallows imagination when mankind forgets to dream. He spoke, with great moral seriousness, of how the deceased had never soft-launched his ambition, had refused to let the world cuck him out of his greatness. 

Halfway through he pulled out his phone, read aloud a screenshot of a text the deceased had once sent him at 2:47 a.m., and pivoted, with a smoothness I had to respect, to a four-week course on Becoming Unbreakable. There was a discount code: the deceased's birthday. Somewhere in the back of the funeral, a man in a headset gave him a thumbs-up. The applause was genuine.

By the fourth speaker I had retreated to a corner with a black can of the allegedly murderous water, and I had begun to grasp the shape of the thing — that everyone was working.

I had not understood this upon entry. It was not a funeral. The funeral was a shoot, and the deceased was not the subject, the deceased was the location.  Someone, somewhere in the apse, was setting up a dolly. A dolly, at a funeral. He was tracking, slowly, on a horizontal axis from the casket to the mother and back, and nobody was stopping him, because nobody in the room had been raised to stop a man with a dolly and a vision.

I needed air. I made for the exit.

The exit, of course, had a red carpet. Everything has a red carpet now. Funerals, baby showers, colonoscopies. The carpet was flanked by two step-and-repeats. Variety, for some reason, was one of them. Behind each step-and-repeat was a small scrum of paparazzi and a slightly larger scrum of micro-influencers pretending to be journalists. Inside the scrum was the press pen, which had, I was promised in the pre-event materials, been curated.

Curated, like a museum, like a Spotify playlist, like a small batch of artisanal cheeses laid out on a slate board for guests who will photograph them and not eat them. The curation, when I finally clocked it, was the kind that happens when the final eighteen hours the publicist has to call in favors from a tier of media she had not, in her original deck, even acknowledged the existence of.

The editor-in-chief of Interview was there. He wore a coat that cost more than the casket and standing very still, the way certain men stand at art fairs, attended by an assistant who was holding, at chest height, a single bottle of room-temperature Voss. To my knowledge the bottle was never opened.

Cobrasnake had been booked and had, at the last minute, not come — something about a wedding in Mallorca, something about a flight, something about the unexamined exhaustion of a man who has been photographing the same party for twenty-two years. In his place, dispatched by what I can only assume was a panicked group chat at 11 p.m. the night before, was Matt Weinberger.

Weinberger is good and young. I want to put that on the record. Weinberger has an eye, Weinberger has the downtown thing, Weinberger has shot every gallery opening in lower Manhattan for long enough that his presence at an event functions as a kind of weather report for whether the event is, in fact, happening. He’s been upgraded to movie premieres as of late, so it was a curious occurrence to see him here. But Weinberger was not Cobrasnake, and everyone in the pen knew it, and Weinberger most acutely of all knew it, and he was wearing this knowledge on his face with a sense of stoic dignity.

Weinberger was a contained man with a perfect smile, but it was there, banked behind the eyes, visible in the way he changed lenses slightly more aggressively than the situation required. A disappointment about the size of an unanswered encrypted DM. Charli XCX had been confirmed to be coming to the funeral, maybe even do a surprise DJ set The Dare had prepared for her. Charli XCX had been on the call sheet. Charli XCX had been, I am fairly certain, the entire reason the publicist had been able to staff this carpet at all, and Charli XCX had pulled out at 4:47pm that afternoon, citing a scheduling conflict. The scheduling conflict being, per a source I will not name, that she had simply read the room and elected, like a woman in possession of her faculties, to remain home.

Weinberger caught my eye over the top of a new Leica. I gave him the small nod that one professional gives another when both have realized, simultaneously, that they have been booked as garnish. He did not return it.  Weinberger had lowered the camera, glancing at me. Weinberger was, I think, doing math. The math was not coming out well for me. He raised the camera and shot someone past my left shoulder. The click of the shutter was, I think, the verdict that I would not be admitted into the photographic record of this doomed century.

A few feet from Weinberger, leaning against a step-and-repeat with a bottle of half-drunked champagne was the nepo baby.

I will not name her. I am told the lawyers prefer it that way.

She had been, until very recently, the lead of a teen drama on a streamer I will also not name, the kind of teen drama that does not air so much as deploy, engineered backward from a TikTok trend that had peaked eight weeks before the writers' room opened and was, by the time the show actually dropped, already cringe. The show had been promoted by a clipper farm in São Paulo, a small office of underpaid Brazilian editors paid by the streamer to chop the show into vertical sixty-second emotional climaxes, posted under thirty different burner accounts, gaming the algorithm into believing the show was, against all evidence, a phenomenon. It worked the way it always works these days.

Her father, last I had heard, ran a venture fund somewhere north of half a billion, and had decades earlier written checks to several of the producers attached to the very show that had cast her.

She had hired two publicists: one for the evening, one for the past racism. A series of slip-ups in a writers' room. Standard crisis management for someone with her resources. In the months after, she had done the work. The work, in her case, consisted of an Instagram caption with a brown heart emoji and a collab post with a Bronx food nonprofit. She attended for thirty minutes, using the time to film a clip of herself in front of volunteers feeding the homeless while speaking about the importance of the work. She left as soon as she had coordinated post timing with the nonprofit's social media manager, who was delighted to have a micro-celebrity present.

The writers room required that the white men in it (the financiers, the showrunners, the producers, the executives in their late forties) be made to feel that she was safe, something the nepo baby was happy to provide.  The empire does not always have to eat its young. Sometimes the young set the table.

I scanned the rest of the pen for the one face I actually wanted to see, which was Stavros Halkias. Stavros was not there.

In Stavros's place, leaning against the rope line with a Liquid Death of his own, was Caleb Hearon, whom I love. I want to be clear about this. I love Caleb Hearon. I have laughed at Caleb Hearon’s comedy until I had to pull the car over to collect myself. I have, on at least one occasion, texted a clip of Caleb Hearon to a woman I was trying to sleep with as a personality test. And yet, standing there on the red carpet of an influencer's funeral with the option fully open to me, I had absolutely no desire to speak to Caleb Hearon. None. I cannot explain this to you and I will not try. Some people you want to be in the room with and some people you want to be in the algorithm with and the Venn diagram is not, as it turns out, a circle. What I wanted to know,  what I really wanted to know, was why he was here. What was the through-line? Who had called whom. Was there a publicist somewhere with a spreadsheet titled FUNERAL — TALENT — TIER 2. Or is he TIER 1?

Caleb was talking to a reporter. I drifted close enough to listen. He was, with great moral seriousness and not without eloquence, holding court on the water consumption of artificial intelligence. The reporter was nodding along, recording, uploading the clip in real time to a cloud server in the very same data center, cooled by the very same water, that powered the very same artificial intelligence Caleb was decrying. The servers in Virginia were, at that very moment, drinking the Shenandoah Valley dry. Then I thought, we have built a civilization that runs on water and does not know how to swim.

Then I thought, that's a good line. I should clip that.

Then the carpet detonated, because Kylie Jenner had arrived.

She had arrived with Timothée Chalamet attached to her wrist by what appeared to be, though I will not swear to it in court, a small tasteful leash of his own volition connected to a rare Labubu. He was wearing the Marty Supreme jacket. The Marty Supreme jacket, the one from the press tour, the one that was already, eight months later, vintage. Vintage in the way things become vintage now, which is to say not by surviving the years but by surviving the news cycle. He looked thin, beautiful, and this is the part I want to be careful about, like a man who had been brought to a place by a person who outranked him on a metric he did not know was a metric.

The flashes went off. The GlamBot, six feet from him, in the next pen, swung. And I watched Timothée Chalamet, three-time best actor Oscar nominee, custodian of the last living strain of American leading-man charisma, the closest thing my generation has produced to a movie star in the old chemical sense of the term, get tugged by the wrist toward the step-and-repeat of a dead influencer's supplement line, and I understood that I was watching the actual transfer.

The movie star, in his vintage-of-eight-months-ago jacket, is being walked to the photo op by the woman whose follower count is the actual currency in the room, and the movie star is smiling, because somewhere in a screening room in Burbank an executive is looking at a tracking report and deciding, on the basis of this exact carpet, whether to greenlight a film or not.

Cinema, somewhere, was dying. It had been dying so long and so publicly that the dying itself had become content, a streaming carcass its ravenous audience fed from, laid in a casket shaped like a smartphone.

The thing keeping cinema alive was a man going by the moniker of Straw Hat Goofy. That was his TikTok handle. He was the most-watched film critic in America. Cinema's last bastion of hope.

Someone tagged me in a post, and I felt the spike. That, I realized, was the product, not the content, not the clip, but the tiny chemical hit, a dopamine pilot light kept burning at the lowest possible cost at all times.

This is the century’s growth model. There is no wilderness left to claim, no frontier left to monetize. The borders are drawn, the rivers dammed, the moon photographed, and shareholders still want quarterly growth.

So the machine turned inward. It had already consumed our labor, then our attention. Now it consumes experience itself, the morning, the walk, the breakup, the body, even the funeral.

The deceased was a man whose profession, properly described, was the conversion of his own waking moments into recurring revenue. He had become the patron saint of the conversion. He was its Christ. He had documented his entire life until there was no life left to document, and then he had died, and the documentation had continued without him, because the documentation was the point all along, and the documentation was now the only afterlife we can ever know. This was the Schrödinger's cat of late-stage capitalism, if a moment is not posted, did it occur?

I tried, one final time, to remember the deceased's name. All I could remember was a really good Subway Takes the deceased had.

I gave up. I would file the piece without his name. I would call him the deceased throughout. The editor would push back. I would tell the editor that the namelessness was part of the philosophical question we were answering in the piece, that to name him would be to grant him a specificity he had spent his entire career fleeing, that he had been engineered, lovingly, by a machine and mother all the same, a matrix.

The editor would buy it. The editor was, I happened to know, deep in his own Subway Takes K-hole.

I stubbed out a cigarette I did not remember lighting and turned, with the rest of the congregation, to file back inside.

The GlamBot, a robotic camera arm that swoops around a celebrity in a slow cinematic orbit while they pose, producing a six-second clip of them looking, for those six seconds, like the most important person who has ever lived. Operated, traditionally, by a man whom I recognized but could not, at first, place, handsome in the specific way of someone who has been handsome professionally, with the slightly haunted eyes of someone whose Wikipedia page now has a section titled Controversy. The specifics of why had left me. What remained was the shape of the cancellation, the general silhouette of it, the way you remember that a song was sad without remembering the lyrics.

He was back, evidently. He looked rested.

He swung the GlamBot around the deceased's fiancée, who had changed, between the eulogy and the interment, into a second mourning outfit, same black, different silhouette, more structural, and she did the little chin-tilt and the little shoulder-drop and the little wet-eyed look-away, and the GlamBot caught all of it in a single liquid arc.

Then it happened.

There was no warning. There was no rising action. There was a sound, not a boom, more like the sound a microwave makes when you forget a fork was still on the plate, and then the entire western wall of the WeWork-cathedral was simply not there anymore, and in its place was a great soft cloud of plaster and gold leaf and what I would later understand to be people’s appendages that were going up, not down, in the slow way of confetti. Arms, legs, hearts, other indistinguishable pieces.

I do not know what caused it. I have theories. A faulty ring light. A vape pen with a cheap lithium battery. A drone operator crashing into a generator. A god, finally, exhausted. The investigation, I am told, is ongoing, but I have my doubts about its rigor.

Kylie, I should report, was somehow already gone, the kind of gone that is not death but is, in the engagement economy, functionally indistinguishable from it; her car had pulled away three minutes earlier, with Timothée in the back seat already on his phone, already moving. The editor of Interview was being escorted, calmly, to a town car. Caleb Hearon, I want it on the record, was fine; I saw him later, at the edge of the rubble, eating a granola bar an intern had produced from somewhere.

The GlamBot kept swinging. The GlamBot did not know about the explosion. The GlamBot continued its slow cinematic orbit around a fiancée who was no longer there, capturing six perfect seconds of empty air, and the canceled man behind it did not stop it, because he had been canceled once and he was not going to be the guy who stopped filming, not today, not ever again.

I walked out through where the wall used to be.

I did not run. I want to be honest about this too. I walked, the way you walk away from something you understand you are not allowed to look directly at, and I crossed what had been a parking lot and was now a kind of beach of pulverized drywall, and I kept walking, and at some point the asphalt ended and there was grass, and past the grass there were trees, real ones, with bark, and I did something I had not done in I could not tell you how long. I stopped. I bent down. I unlaced my shoes. I took off my socks. I put them neatly, side by side, on a stump.

I walked into the forest.

I had been told, by various people at various times over the past decade, that the answer to what ailed me was to touch grass. The grass was the antidote. That grass was the medicine. The grass would, by some unspecified mechanism, restore me to a more authentic self that had supposedly existed before the feeds had arrived, although I could not, when pressed, remember the origin of this thought.

The grass was wet and cold and it pressed up between my toes in a way that was not, as advertised, restorative. It was clammy and it was full of small wet things. I could feel a mat of decomposing leaf, a small hard object that may have been a bottle cap. The damp came up through my soles and into my arches and settled, unpleasantly, in the joints of my toes. A bug, very small, maybe an ant, walked across the top of my left foot and then walked back. I shivered. I could not tell whether I was shivering because I was cold or because my body, having been promised relief felt nothing. 

Here there was no audience. There was no one to perform the touching of the grass for, which meant the touching of the grass could not be posted. By the only logic my brain still spoke fluently, the moment had not, in any sense, occurred.

I had come here to feel something yet I was not feeling anything. I was, if I was being honest, feeling slightly nauseous, the way you feel when you eat an old food you used to love and your tongue tells you, very politely, that you no longer recognize it. Like broccoli or stale bread.

Then my hip twitched. It was the phantom twitch, the small electrical lie the body tells itself a hundred times a day. I reached for my pocket. My hand went, on its own, muscle memory. The pocket was empty. I had left the phone in the rubble. I had left it, I realized, on purpose.

The hip twitched again. It could not be a notification, this I knew. I knew it the way you know your own name, except that I could not, at that moment, remember my own name either like the deceased. It could not be a notification because every person I followed was dead. Every account I cared about had gone up in the soft pink mist of the explosion. There was no one left to post. There was no feed left to refresh anymore. There was, for the first time in twenty years, nothing incoming, and my hip, which did not believe me, kept twitching, and the grass, which I had been promised would feel like coming home, felt instead like the wet hand of a stranger.

I tried to scream.

I want to tell you a great primal sound came out of me and shook the leaves. What came out of me instead, in a voice that was not my own, in a voice that was cheerful and British and slightly hoarse, in a voice I had heard ten thousand times without ever once choosing to, was.

Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday.

Kristian Mercado is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City. Find him on Instagram @krismerc.

Editors: Haley Sprankle, Cory Alpert