“I want to cancel it because it’s ridiculous to keep giving her my money that I actually work for,” Hughes said. But she’s still holding out hope—soon Calloway is going to post something truly bizarre and spectacular, and only a few hundred people will see it.
Dana Andersen, also 22, and a musician in northwest England, told me she has no regrets whatsoever about subscribing to Calloway’s stories. She’s even written about it on her blog. Being one of Calloway’s Close Friends feels like being part of a private club, and even though she understands it’s an illusion, she argued, there’s no reason to deny herself an illusion that feels this good.
She probably wouldn’t pay to be a Close Friend for anyone else, she said—similar content from any other influencer would feel “fake.” It’s a distinction that’s only as irrational as any other statement a person could make about choosing how to distribute attention and affection. Calloway, for all her flaws, is a real person in Andersen’s eyes: a sincere disaster, and a worthy cause. “I pay Caroline Calloway the money I earn from my own creative pursuits each month, because I enjoy knowing that some of the money has made its way to Caroline for her to spend on orchids and paint and wine with her crush,” she writes on her blog.
But for the influencers selling close friendship, all that intimacy is an obligation.
Ashley Torres, a fashion and travel influencer, says the struggle of providing paid Close Friends content is that her life is “already an open book.” Coming up with something extra can only mean getting more and more personal. She now shares her morning coffee with Close Friends, giving an “unscripted and unedited” chat about what’s happening in her life. Torres’s account, @everydaypursuits, has more than 200,000 followers, though so far just 30 people have signed up to pay $6 a month to be what she refers to as a “BFF.” “Let’s make this official, GF!” her Patreon reads.
For the monthly fee, a “BFF” gets added to Torres’ Close Friends list, where she provides a laundry list of intimate perks, such as “bonus IG stories, exclusive weekend coffee talks, beauty giveaways, Starbucks [gift card] love, and more!” including priority status in Torres’s direct-messages inbox, invitations to coffee dates if she ever stops by a follower’s city, and “extra content” about Andy, her husband. The note signs off “Love you, mean it!”
Love you, mean it?
Sure. Robby Stein, a product lead for Instagram, has said that “a good chunk” of users add about 20 people on their Close Friends lists, while people who have very large followings often add hundreds, “because that really represents, to them, friends.”
Though the idea of turning a personality into a personal brand—which can be sold as a product with value determined in the same way as any other—is not new, this iteration of the practice is a little glitchy and disorienting. Regular people without large followings are now quipping regularly about charging their real friends for access to their best content, implying a self-aware and self-mocking—but not altogether insincere—normalization of the idea that all forms of expression and relation can and possibly should be monetized. Is the difference really just semantics?