We Are All Cam Girls Now

Make that content baby. Get out there and make daddy some content. Have you ever heard that phrase ringing in the back of your head? I have, every day as my inner monologue urges me to get up and get to work in the content mines. We live in a Truman Show of our own making. We are all cam girls now. And that’s a good thing.

Connection is good. You can be with your friends, digitally. I am lucky to live in a city where I can walk outside wearing my favorite mesh alien t-shirt and heels and Morpheus sunglasses and not be the most outlandishly dressed person on the block. But not everyone has that luxury. I was stuck in a queer hating, homogeneous town for the first 18 years of my life and didn’t have the option to leave. There’s lots of people stuck, feeling out of place at various ages for various reasons. But streamers and online communities allow them to find a place where they can feel seen. People broadcasting their lives online helps foster connection. And can give you someone to eat dinner with. Hats off to you Mukbang eaters!

Visibility is good. We’ve opened up our homes to strangers, sharing our lives on Twitter and Twitch, posting our meals, our triumphs, our losses. We’re sharing the most intimate parts of our lives, just like the hard working, godsent cam girls. We can see different kinds of people on streams now. From farmers to questionable psychologists to entire families playing games together; young and old, all nationalities, everyone has a place online.

Radical sharing is performance art, and we’re all doing it. When performance artist Marina Abramovic performed The Artist Is Present in 2010, it exploded the art world. For 15 days she sat at the Museum of Modern Art and queued guests would sit in a chair across from her for minutes or hours at a time while maintaining eye contact. Last year, popular streamer Ludwig Ahgren had a sub-athon (a live broadcast meant to accrue new subscribers) for over a month. Are the performances really that different? One is called art because the artist calls it that, one is called content because the content creators dubs it so. But with Ludwig’s stream, instead of a museum gallery, we were in his bedroom. Isn’t that a decidedly more intimate space? He invited us into his life, just like Abramovic invited us into hers.