Lil Tay Is Alive
The subtle art of living, dying, and living again online
May 29 was Arkady Babchenko’s second birthday.
Or, so he wrote on his blog on that day in 2018.
It was on that day, four years earlier, that Babchenko was supposed to climb aboard an army helicopter. But a commanding officer denied him a seat. It worked out fine: The helicopter was shot down an hour later — hence why Babchenko celebrated the date every year. A second birthday.
On his blog he posted about the significance of the day, included a photo of the ill-fated helicopter, and went about his day. As he walked home from the store, to his apartment in Kyiv, a gunman emerged from the shadows and shot Babchenko three times in the back.
The Russian government had wanted Babchenko dead for awhile. A veteran of the Chechen wars, Babchenko had turned pacifist, democrat, and journalist — three titles strongly discouraged in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He had encouraged civil unrest in Russia after a string of rigged elections, celebrated Ukraine’s revolution of dignity, and castigated Moscow’s brutal massacres in Syria. In 2017, sensing his welcome in Putin’s Russia had run out, Babchenko fled to Kyiv.1
Russia, of course, sees Kyiv as its backyard. So it reached out to an intermediary, with the promise of a $30,000 reward for Babchenko’s untimely demise.
And on Babchenko’s second birthday, Ukrainian officials announced his death.
The next day, Arkady Babchenko appeared at a press conference to announce his rebirth.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, a short treatise on dying, and undying, online.
The Russian security services did not put a bounty on Lil Tay’s head. At least as far as I know.
The Vancouver-to-Los-Angeles, uh, rapper rocketed to fame in 2018 after they hit social media paydirt. Instagram posts of them flexing with huge stacks of cash in opulent abodes, and Youtube videos of their barely-listenable Soundcloud raps cemented Tay Tian, then just nine years old, as the youngest flexer of the century. Maybe the youngest flexer of all time. (Move over, Edward VI.)
It was a social media presence that existed in suspended animation — there’s Lil Tay pretending a stack of $100 bills is a cellphone; there’s Lil Tay hopping in her $200,000 car and dunking on the haters; there’s Lil Tay nearly getting into a brawl outside the mall.
It was all fake, of course. Tian’s mom was a Vancouver real estate agent who used her listings as sets for her daughter’s flexing. Tian’s clothes still had the tags on. Tian’s 16-year-old brother was coaching her on the right words to say, the right signs to flash. He would make her as successful a RiceGum, the Youtube diss artist; or Woah Vicky, a white lady on Instagram who pretends to be Black.
“Where Lil Tay goes from here is truly anyone’s guess,” Taylor Lorenz, the social internet’s hagiographer, wrote in The Atlantic then. “Some social-media stars attempt to pivot into mainstream Hollywood, others use their fame to launch side business ventures, and still more crash and burn out.”
It was the latter. Lil Tay’s last still-active Instagram post was a tribute to XXXTentacion, the Florida rapper with a lurid criminal record and a number one album thanks to his wildly successful Soundcloud and Youtube presence. The 20-year-old was shot to death outisde of a car dealership in June, 2018 — his attackers made off with a Louis Vutton bag stuffed with $50,000. They were convicted, in part, because posted themselves on social media brandishing the stolen cash. A photo of XXXTenatcion’s corpse, behind the wheel of his car, also made it online. He was, apparently, a mentor to Lil Tay.
After that, Lil Tay’s social presence seemed to stop — apart from the occasional post accusing her father of manipulation of abuse, uploads which would be quickly deleted. Or the odd story which would read simply: “Help me” or “we have bad news about tay…” A series of legal orders were traded between the various teenagers and adults vying to control the world-changing potential of Lil Tay.
If you care to try and unravel the dizzying saga, a 2018 Daily Beast interview with all of the parties involved is a sure bet to leave you more confused than where you began.
Fans kept obsessing over Lil Tay in the comments. They would trade “#prayfortay” with accusations of “clout chasing.” Some of the comments, naturally, were angry, sexist, racist, and just plain mean. Whatever their feelings, they kept coming back to the social media presence of a not-yet-tween, her fake wealth, and stage-managed persona. Many tried to unravel what was really going on: What was real, what was fake.
Suffice it to say that Lil Tay is a parable for the online attention culture. Whatever keeps your eyes fixed is valuable. Whether you’re yodelling at Walmart or asking a question at a CNN town hall, virality is always a minute away. And nothing attracts more attention than the uncanny valley of stardom. A litany of fake Tiktok millionaires, brandishing gold chains and luxury yachts, are popular not because people believe them — but because most people don’t.
This week, a few years removed from Lil Tay’s last rush of headlines, a post on her official Instagram page announced her “sudden and tragic passing.” Her brother, too, had died, the post said.
Everyone, of course, rushed to cover the devastating news. “Lil Tay dead at 14,” The Daily Mail sombrely declared.
It wasn’t so. The post was deleted, and her family clarified to TMZ that their Instagram had been “hacked.” Lil Tay was alive. Long live Lil Tay. Another rush of headlines.
The few outlets who opted to proceed cautiously were reward with bragging rights.
Perhaps the most self-aware bit of writing about Lil Tay came out of a 2018 article in Maclean’s. “The attention on Lil Tay (including from this article) may help accrue more followers and a coveted brand sponsorship,” wrote Joe Castaldo. “But it will also propel a child farther down a very strange and potentially unhealthy path.”
We figured the real-world lifestyle was the dangerous part — the fake wealth, the cursing, the skipping school. But the real enemy is the alter ego that was created for her: By her family, the internet, the media. Whoever posted that Instagram message was trying to kill Tay Tian to keep Lil Tay alive.
And millions of people watch: Not because they genuinely care, but because they’re obsessed with telling real from fake.
Babchenko’s faked death was a well-orchestrated affair. It, apparently, required pigs blood, a round of blanks, and an ambulance ride to the morgue.
It worked. There really was a Russian bounty on his head, a Ukrainian middleman, and orders — seemingly straight from Moscow — to kill the troublemaker.
Not everyone was thrilled about the stunt. Reporters Without Borders slammed the operation: "It is always very dangerous for states to play with facts and especially on the backs of journalists."
On an intellectual level, they’re right, of course. When the White House distorted the facts of an attack on the USS Maddox in 1964, paving the way for a massive escalation in the war against Vietnam and Laos; or when it did it again regarding Saddam Hussein’s possession or chemical weapons in 2003 — it created a perpetual expectation that the U.S. security state uses lies to advance its bellicose foreign policy.
States have a limited supply of public trust. Abusing that trust, even if it is to disrupt an assassination plot, makes it harder to ask for it again in the future.
Russia, for example, has long since lost any kind of public trust. If Lil Tay is the youngest flexer of this century, Vladimir Putin and his regime must be the most prolific.
This spring, Russian state media proclaimed that the head of Ukraine’s military, Valerii Zaluzhnyi and its defence intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov had been injured by missile strikes. They were being raced to hospital, maybe even airlifted to Poland. And, oh, they died.
Some time would go by, without any confirmation. The story would start anew: There was a missile strike. Zaluzhnyi and Budanov had been injured. They were being evacuated. And, oh, they died.
Every time Russia ran the story, it elicited a new round of frenzy. As the claims failed to ring true, everyone just moved on to the next thing.
As of writing, Zaluzhnyi and Budanov are alive and kicking.
Moscow tried the opposite tactic earlier this year, when Russian propagandists uploaded video of a line of bodybags. Look closely, and you’ll see one of the bodybags is still moving. A-ha they proclaimed.
The video, naturally, was not shot in Ukraine at all. It was a climate protest in Austria, shot before the war even began. No matter, there’s more where that came from.
Russia isn’t trying to convince anyone. It’s trying to flex for its fans. It always, without fail, works. Much like Lil Tay’s fans obsess over every cryptic Instagram story — inevitably spilling over to the mass media — Russia’s easily disprovable claims are designed more to gin up momentary confusion, excitement, fear, attention. To keep the engagement going.
This week, one of Moscow’s preferred spokespeople revived one of Putin’s favorite macabre accusations: Ukraine is trafficking in huge numbers of stolen organs.
A refrigerated rail car full of body parts was en route to Turkey, foreign ministry spokesghoul Maria Zakharova wrote, to be sold on the black market.
The accusation is, of course, both without evidence and medically impossible. But no matter. Much like a video of Lil Tay brandishing a stack of money that she does not own, in a penthouse her mother is supposed to be showing to prospective buyers, repeating lines she didn’t write, on a platform she wasn’t even old enough to create an account on: Zakharova was just feeding the beast.
It is possible, even easy, to subsist on all misinformation, all the time. Indeed, many do. Much like people caught up on every minutiae of the beef between Lil Tay and Bhad Bhabie, you can submerge yourself in the back-and-forth allegations between Russia and Ukraine, engaging with the war like a soap opera.
Alternatively, you can spend your day fact-checking and debunking every piece of bullshit that emerges — mostly from one side, occasionally from the other. This is the whole ethos of Snopes, Politifact, and a host of news fact check operations.
Without a doubt, these operations can be helpful. They helpfully comforted legions of Mr. Bean fans after rumors of his demise were posted online in 2016, 2017, and 2018. For people engaging with information who have the wherewithal to type the news into Google, these services are a big help.
But people come to misinformation for such weird reasons. As I’ve written previously, some people are psychologically predisposed to believe conspiracy theories. (Dispatch #58) Some of them, perhaps informed by the CIA’s lies about Iraq or Ukraine’s chicanery around Babchenko, are too skeptical. Other people, for whatever selfish reason, are happy to pretend to believe.
Perspective and a sense of proportion, of course, are always the key. Even if America and Ukraine lie sometimes, you can count all the things on which they’ve told the truth — meaning a healthy, but not absolute, skepticism is useful. The current Russian state, meanwhile, appears to be pathologically incapable of telling the whole truth on anything. You can’t even be sure if you’re watching the real Putin, a Putin double, or a previously-recorded Putin.
But I think plenty of people are just addicted to the stream. Whether they are constantly downloading the performative reality of Lil Tay, the bravado and death of XXXTentacion, the trans-racialism of Woah Vicky, they may become entirely desensitized to the fakery. Nothing is real. Everything is real. It doesn’t matter, it’s content.
Being obsessed with the comings-and-goings of school-age Lil Tay, or rushing to buy XXXTentacion’s ode to spousal abuse encourages a particular kind of content firehouse. Leaning back and taking in the stylings of Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, or Maria Zakharova is just creating demand for another kind of constant entertainment.
I wrote last week (Dispatch #65) about the fake communities the internet had sorted us into which we will, hopefully, someday break out of entirely. If this week’s newsletter had a moral, it’s that someday we will ned to break the attention economy.
Someday, when Lil Tay dies again, she’ll be back amongst the living before we even hear about it.
That’s it for this week.
Was it too far of a walk between Lil Tay andUkraine? Probably. Yes. It’s the depths of August, leave me be. I am trying valiantly to stick to my Friday afternoon publishing schedule.
Details here care of Masha Gessen’s fantastic profile of Babchenko for the New Yorker.
I thought your segue from Lil Tay’s misadventures to Russia’s misinformation campaigns was very interesting and well done!
It is clear that large segments of society world-wide are now living with an addiction problem. In almost any setting, public or private, people have their phone in hand and spend their time scrolling through their feed. How long before they realize that what they're doing a- benefits the feeders more than anyone else; b- gives them mostly cheap thrills which are forever fleeting; c- eats up time for interacting with the physical world.
How long it will take for the addiction to abate is hard to say. Breaking up the current mammoth social media monopolies could speed up the return to sanity, as could regulating data mining and outlawing certain types of algorithm.