James Charles, Tati Westbrook, and the Future of Beauty YouTube | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/james-charles-tati-westbrook-youtube-loyalty
Over the past week, beauty YouTuber James Charles has been accused of betrayal, Coachella-based snobbery, and promotion of the wrong hair vitamin. He has been pronounced “canceled” by a jury of YouTube gossip channels, the shady Snapchat comments of his beauty guru peers, and, bluntly, by the hashtag #jamescharlesiscanceled. As punishment, culture-conscious former fans are setting their James Charles-branded makeup on fire. In the court of internet culture, destruction of property is a sentence—not a crime.
On TikTok, the preferred social media platform of many Youths, setting James Charles’ merchandize ablaze has become its own meme, in much the same way destroying Gillette razors and Nike sneakers became online phenomenons when customers became disgruntled with those companies’ actions. From a strictly monetary point of view, it’s a rather poor form of protest—the only wallet they’re hurting is their own, and often the meme just becomes a form of free advertising for the person or organization they’re attempting to smear. But while these scandals and the memes they’ve spawned are deeply embroiled in internet capitalism, they’re not actually about money.
Loyalty politics have consumed influencer culture. The spark of this scandal—the end of Charles’ friendship with Westbrook—is ultimately a matter of betrayal, and many fans are reacting as though Charles’ alleged misconduct is a betrayal of them personally. Part of that is the result of internet capitalism: young, savvy fans like Charles’ know that their loyal viewership is ultimately what gives Charles his influence and therefore pays his bills. Just like Westbrook, fans have given Charles both money and (money-making) time, and he hasn’t upheld his side of the contract.
What’s curious, though, is how little that contract has to do with what Charles is actually selling: makeup and beauty advice. These days, subscribing to James Charles doesn’t just mean you like his makeup looks, it means you endorse him as a person and condone his behavior online and off. People take the influencers you follow as a kind of character reference, and an indicator of your politics. For other influencers, failure to sever ties after a cancellation is an internet culture faux pas that can create a scandal of its own, which is why influencers from Jeffree Star to the Kardashians have unfollowed Charles on social media, and why internet sleuths bothered to check whether they had in the first place. That anxiousness has bled over to fans. It’s not enough to quietly unsubscribe. You have to publicly set any evidence of your former allegiances aflame.