Inside Free Britney 2.0

August 1, 2023 5:35 PM

After her conservatorship ended, some of her fans latched onto a new theory. What if she had never been freed at all? (archive link)
posted by Kitteh (16 comments total)

I just read this this morning because I A) Love Britney and B) am fascinated by conspiracy theories. The whole Britney thing is sad, really. I don't know what's going on there exactly, but maybe we need to go back to the Leave Britney Alone days. Her Instagram dancing makes me feel sad and uncomfortable, anyway, so I try to stay as far away from that as possible. :(
posted by Literaryhero at 6:45 PM on August 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ah, yes, I see the new thing is Qritney. I guess we needed something after the decline of QAnon and then "Transvestigators".
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:51 PM on August 1, 2023

JFC. Leave Britney alone.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:23 PM on August 1, 2023 [9 favorites]

I enjoy celebrity gossip a lot and I'm not ashamed of that. I do maybe sometimes feel overly engaged but I also can't imagine myself caring so much that I'm actually going to involve myself in their real life. Celebrities -- at their best or their worst -- deserve their personal lives. They should get to be weird and messy because they're humans.
posted by edencosmic at 7:59 PM on August 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

mike3k: "I strongly despise that kind of shallow mainstream pop music (also including Taylor Swift)."

Counterpoint: Spears is an amazingly talented musician who has been undervalued mostly because she's a woman, and Swift is a once-in-a-generation song-writing talent who has been undervalued mostly because she's a woman who is liked by other young women.
posted by signal at 8:08 PM on August 1, 2023 [59 favorites]

Mod note: Please reconsider commenting in this thread any further if you are not going to contribute to the conversation in ways the thread was originally intended for.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 8:17 PM on August 1, 2023 [15 favorites]

I understand how this situation could be upsetting to a lot of dedicated fans, but people need to chill out a bit.

Conspiracies can be easy to believe in because people and institutions actually do conspire to harm and exploit other people all the fucking time. And honestly, I would not be all that surprised if some of this stuff turned out to be real. That’s one factor. Intense Fandom is another. And of course, I suspect some of the people involved are also profiting (or attempting to profit) from the attention by parlaying their efforts/theories into social media content. Whether it started out with that intent is beside the point; the moment you start getting that TikTok money…

To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of this specifically, but it certainly does seem from some of the interviewee’s responses that they are heavily invested in being seen as the only ones who understand what is happening to a famous person that they don’t personally know. And of course, the ones who made the 911 call admitted they went too far. Maybe they just got “caught up” in the whole parasocial toxic cloud and had a momentary lapse in judgement.

Yet another reason to take frequent breaks from the screen and go outside.
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:25 PM on August 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ah, yes, I see the new thing is Qritney. I guess we needed something after the decline of QAnon and then "Transvestigators".

God save us that this is what gets glommed onto. Please get these folks back on celebrity shit and tabloid cold cases. Keep them away from public health and controlling the republican primaries.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:50 PM on August 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ah, yes, I see the new thing is Qritney.

They call it BAnon in the article.
posted by Pendragon at 12:29 AM on August 2, 2023

I posted it when I happened across the article, my jaw just dropped. Like, how do you think it's okay to call 911 for a wellness check to a celebrity you don't know personally? But then that's the issue, isn't it? Those subset of fans think they "know" her intimately enough to intuit her wants and needs.

Extreme fandom is nothing new, but social media really does a number on fans. The lines between being a fan and being overly obsessive has gotten thinner with Twitter/IG etc.
posted by Kitteh at 4:28 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it turns out that direct connection with your fans that social media delivered was not the win everybody thought it would be. My sense is a lot; maybe most stars whose fame exists away from social media have pulled way back from social media.
posted by COD at 5:49 AM on August 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Conspiracy thinking helps to make the mundane exciting for the thinker, turning them from a passive consumer of news into an active seeker. This is especially attractive in the current day, when you can do most of your seeking from the comfort of your own home with little effort, aptitude, or skill required. In the case of Spears, there was a conspiracy of sorts, where a group of people exploited a vulnerable person (mostly legally) for financial gain. And the fans who noticed this and campaigned about it helped fix at least part of the problem. Conspiracy thwarted, the “seekers” were stuck in a conundrum — they’d win, but at the cost of their purpose.

Unfortunately for Ms. Spears, she leads a somewhat messy life (and why shouldn’t she?), which generates a lot of “lose ends” from fans who have been feeding their pleasure centers with conspiracy, seeking, and parasociality for years, and some of them are trying to continue to get their fix by weaving those loose ends into a new narrative to restart the cycle. So their initial urge to help a woman who had been seriously wronged has metastasized into “season 2” of her seeker’s imaginary entertainment drama, ironically destroying her peace in the effort to be heroes again. It’s not shooting up a pizza place to save imaginary children from an imaginary basement, but it’s not that far off.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:36 AM on August 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

Conspiracy thinking helps to make the mundane exciting for the thinker, turning them from a passive consumer of news into an active seeker. This is especially attractive in the current day, when you can do most of your seeking from the comfort of your own home with little effort, aptitude, or skill required.

In 2010, P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “The presidential ‘Birther,’ the 9/11 ‘Truther,’ the JFK assassination ‘Grassy Knoller,’ and every other conspiracy buff is announcing aloud, ‘The world is so stupid that even I can understand it.’”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:38 AM on August 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

I mean, in this case, I dunno, which is why the Spears situation isn’t exactly a “conspiracy theory” yet, since there was a conspiracy and a specific injustice to address. Now, in the aftermath, some people are spinning new stories, I think to
keep their pleasure centers firing… so, it wasn’t stupid, but it’s being made stupid (and, ironically, hurting the person it ostensibly is supposed to protect).
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:14 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

If nothing else, things like this really show how well Bradbury nailed the idea of "The Family" and parasocial relationships.

For the record, I think Britney got jobbed and I'm glad that she's got her rights back, even if some of her behavior is odd. As long as no one's being harmed, let the odd ones be. (also Taylor Swift is a force)
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:23 AM on August 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

hippybear, thanks for linking that episode of Into It. I listen to that podcast regularly even if I don't think I'll have any interest in the topic, and thanks to it, I'm now reading this link and commenting in this thread.
posted by Night_owl at 4:59 AM on August 3, 2023