đź”’ Drew Pavlou and the Shitpost Economy
If you’ve been on social media much over the past few years you may have noticed a rising star in the “politically bonkers” space. Drew Pavlou is a damn near omnipresent figure on Twitter who shows up in so many retweets by MAGA influencers and Trump administration officials that you would easily assume he’s some celebrity whose actual work you’re unfamiliar with.
In reality, Pavlou is a nobody, but he’s a special kind of nobody who has nobodied his way into being a nobody who everybody has heard of and everyone wishes they hadn’t.
This is a new type of celebrity that sprouted out of social media, a new species in the ever evolving concept of celebrity itself. In the 20th century, celebrities were your pop stars and movie stars. After 2000 there was the reality boom and the socialites; the Kardashians, the Snookis, the famous for being famous. Not necessarily ordinary people, but people who ordinary people wanted to be.
Then the internet made celebrity even more accessible, with the birth of the influencer. These were ordinary people, but they often had some kind of talent or charisma that bought them a shorter route to success.
Now we have proper social media, and in fact it dominates our online experience, and the next phase of celebrity has arrived, but they are not people you want to be, and they don’t have charisma, and they don’t influence. There are echoes of Marshall McLuhan. If the pop star begat the socialite, and the socialite begat the influencer, then the influencer begat these unfortunate creatures.
The attention economy fully embraces the fact that the process that generates celebrity, whether it’s talent or intelligence or charisma or just good looks, is only ever a means to the true end, which is attention. If the process can be bypassed entirely then this is simply a more efficient route to the true goal. Ergo, you don’t need talent if there’s some other way to make yourself difficult for people to avoid.
This is a new phenomenon that I’ve come to call the shitpost economy.
I knew who Drew Pavlou was before anyone on Twitter had ever heard of him, because he started his career as a local nuisance. I’ve never met him personally but he was a student politician at the university where I studied, and he was known for constantly shitposting and harassing people on the student Facebook group.
Everybody of course realized what he was really after was attention, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Try ignoring a mosquito. That’s one thing in itself, but try co-ordinating a whole room full of people to all ignore the mosquito. The attempt, in itself, just means everyone keeps mentioning the mosquito.
The only way to solve the problem was to ban Drew from the group, which they of course eventually did.
So Drew had to find a new way of getting that attention.
In 2019 he started the next phase of his career as an anti-China activist/protester, a cause that he seems to have chosen by throwing a dart. He burned copies of Xi Jinping Thought outside the Chinese embassy and led protests for the cause of Hong Kong independence. That was also the year that Covid-19 emerged from Wuhan, which only added fuel to the whole anti-China thing he had going on.
Now the entire university had a mosquito problem they couldn’t ignore. Some people interpreted his stunts, like prancing around the campus China institute in a biohazard suit, a tad racist, and his habit of calling everybody a cunt was considered less than ideal, behaviorally (in his defense, that’s just Australian). So, Drew was suspended.
Then he hatched a scheme so genius that it could only come from the mind of Drew Pavlou—if he could persuade someone else to legally change their name to Drew Pavlou, then that person could run for a seat on the university senate. If they won, then the actual Drew Pavlou could step into the position, evading suspension. He said that he ran this plan past some lawyers and they told him it was legit.
There is of course no way that any lawyer actually told him this would work (unless, and this isn’t unlikely, they were taking the piss out of him). This would be Drew’s first IRL shitpost. He would get a taste for it.
Around about then, I guess, came the Twitter phase, and the rest of the world came to meet Drew Pavlou, a man of passionate opinions whose ideology is, you might say, somewhat inconsistent.
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