In the age of making stupid people famous, no one is better at billing the top idiots than social media.
While it has been postulated that the internet is indeed making us dumber, it’s hard to decide whether the blame should be given to the internet itself, or to the user. In 2018, we saw the internet once again, create fame out of seemingly nothing. While the World Wide Web has produced some well deserving icons of public attention, we choose to focus on the list of those that we just can’t wrap our heads around.
Lela Star
Porn princess turned pop culture icon, Lela Star sex appeal is what earned her fame. Beginning in 2006 with a spread in Hustler as well as some lowbrow porn, Lela Star was an unassuming Latin beauty from Florida. Taking her seat on the fame train, Star began to undergo multiple surgeries to enhance her sex symbol status. The latest of which created an uncanny likeness between Star and stupid famous icon Kim Kardashian.
In almost stupid famous inception, Lela Star sex videos were waylaid by becoming better known as a … shoe model?! That’s right. Thanks to the likeness between the porn star and fashion icon, Kimmy K’s husband, Kanye, decided to use the buxom erotic model as a stand in and Doppleganger for his wife. Shooting Lela into new realms of internet fame.
Logan and Jake Paul
Dumb internet takes a turn for the embarrassing as brothers Logan and Jake Paul gain a firm foothold on the internet scene. What started out as the duo dominating the now defunct Twitter owned platform Vine, has ended in both brothers coming into questionable fame. Both siblings have been involved in numerous scandals secondary to the content that they have hosted on their individual YouTube feeds. 2017 saw both Paul brothers suspended from the platform due to “inappropriate content”. Logan underwent fire in response to his callous observance of a corpse, while Jake had his own share of problems from posting an explicit video of him losing his virginity to his girlfriend.
While both scandals saw massive losses in the brothers profit margins, it did little to curb their press coverage. While their presence does seem to be fading, it hasn’t kept them from amassing millions of followers and staying on influencer lists for 2018.
President Trump
It’s pretty much impossible to mention dumb internet and fame without giving credit where credit is due. Quite easily The Godfather of Stupid Fame, Trump takes the cake when it comes to creating fame out of outrageous behavior. Now President of the United States, the toupeed and outspoken icon has become a firm target and dominator of the internet meme community. But Trump has seemingly always been unapologetically in the eye of the public scrutiny, but as president of one of the most recognizable countries in the world, his fame (and stupidity) has seemingly reached new heights.
There seems to never be a never-ending supply of poorly worded tweets, mispronounced proclamations, and overly zealous statements of self-import. Trump makes the best internet. Better internet than anyone. The best. We can confirm.
Lil Miquela
Fashion icon and rising music maven, Lil Miquela has taken the internet by storm. In the last two years, she has made it into such publications as Refinery29, Vogue, Buzzfeed, as well as the BBC. Her music is heavily influenced by the 1980’s synth pop scene and has been released on YouTube and Spotify. The catch? She’s not real.
In 2016, Trevor McFedries and Sara Decou created the avatar as a digital art project. While the internet has been known to create celebrities solely based on their fake presentations of themselves (like Lela Star sex scenes, or Trump’s spray tan), it came as a bit of a shock to some of the communities to find out that she wasn’t exactly a real girl.
Internet Challenges
Okay, okay… so it’s not technically a celebrity- internet challenges have fathered more than their share of nearly famous nimrods. The world is no stranger to dangerous and even deadly “challenges”, like the gallon water challenge that was hosted by radio stations before the internet was a thing. But 2018 brought us to new heights (or rather, lows) when it came to the dumb and dangerous competitions.
From snorting condoms, to dining on laundry detergent pods– people all over the world were sucked into the stupidity of “who dumbed it better”. Making the stupid internet celebrities of 2018 most definitely a year to remember- and hopefully soon forget.
