The Pop Corporation

Lily Allen was responding to a tweet about criticism of her. The tweet asked where “this smear campaign” had come from, noting it had come “from nowhere”. Her reply stated “Oh its coming from somewhere, but we move!”

Then, as evidenced by the image above, she added ‘Bots<Birkins’

Now, Allen’s album – ‘West End Girl’ took her former partner David Harbour to task, and regardless of taking sides or not, it was scintillating stuff for a number of Millennial pop fans who love any kind of ‘tea’ at the moment, given that things of this nature are an understandable distraction from the genuine horrors of the world at large – who can blame them?

Either way, some people were less enamoured with the whole thing and felt the need to point out that Lily Allen isn’t exactly a picture of virtue herself – not that she claimed to be – but such is current discourse, everyone gets to chime in.

While she kicked her tour off, certain quarters pointed out that Allen dressed up as Dr Luke for Halloween, after he’d been accused of sexual assault and more. Zoe Kravitz said she was ‘attacked’ by Allen with an unwanted kiss, and the whole thing sounded like ‘well, she can shut up’, rather than an active cancelling.

That is all to say – can two things be true at the same time? We know that we can.

More to the point, is there a predilection for both sides of the aisle to blame all criticism on some vague other? We see it in right wing circles, hitting out at ‘fake news’, and the other side, hitting out at ‘bots’.

And we see that here. If there’s genuine criticism from pop fans with long memories, should their words be dismissed as ‘bots’? The Taylor Swift backlash was in part, dismissed by her fanbase as “narrative manipulation” by bot accounts.

This is where we have to think of Reductio ad Absurdum or, if you prefer, tactics that reduce all criticism or negative feedback to being a “hater”, thereby dismissing genuine, human-generated denunciations. It’s tiring, when it’s not being gossip.

In part, these things make us weary because there are actual problems with bot campaigns and artificial intelligence in popular culture, and in turn, the political spheres. We know that there are people being misled by non-human accounts or people prompting programmes in bad faith, and the content created by these channels are not only a societal problem, but a host of environmental disasters too. False information, computer generated swill cluttering up our timelines and becoming headlines and policy – it isn’t out of the realms of possibility that some of our biggest stars will fall foul of this.

Is someone saying “yuck” at Lily Allen in a Dr Luke costume some concerted effort to besmirch her name during a huge comeback? That seems less likely, but then, there’s a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands and a computer in which to chat pure shit.

And besides, it’s worth remembering the genuinely awful thing she did when she blackfaced a former partner’s penis, and was subsequently accused of racism. That’s the kind of thing someone ought to be aware of if they’re going to spend their money on you.

Either way, it is irresponsible to take too much heed of anyone dismissing all naysayers as ‘bots’, whoever much you like them, because this feeds into the swill that’s already making everyone miserable in the first place.