How Ben Affleck became the perfect celebrity for These Times
It's been one year since the Finsta-dent.
Hi and welcome to the newly rebranded Okay Zoomer! Many thanks to Shelby for giving me a He’s All That (Addison Rae Remix)-style makeover. I’m going to become prom queen now.
Many of you are new here. Hi! I’m Kelsey. I write about online youth culture ephemera for In the Know, Verizon Media’s Gen Z vertical. This newsletter is unrelated! I also have a new personal website and an old Twitter.
Other folks, you may notice that this is arriving in your inbox on Friday instead of Monday. That is because it’s a very special day — the one-year anniversary of the greatest journalistic scoop of my career.
How Ben Affleck became the perfect celebrity for These Times™️
A year ago, I was concocting a relationship timeline for Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, which my friend Mark pitched as a video. At the time, their relationship was perplexing — they met on set of a movie that hasn’t come out yet, wore matching necklaces and hauled Dunkin’ down the street pretty much every day. The iconic stan account Ana de Armas Updates had just been blocked by the future Bond Girl herself for posting the paparazzi photos and repeatedly (correctly) questioning why they were not wearing masks.
I read on a random blog that Ben was following Ana on Instagram, but she was not following back. I thought this was a pretty baller move, so I decided to confirm the detail by searching her following list for the word “Ben.” She wasn’t following more than a few dozen people at the time.
No Affleck was to be found, but I did find someone whose profile photo kinda looked like … her kissing him? Not a photo I’d seen, and I just dug through a million of them. The account was locked and, famously, called @positiveattitudehunting. Like Good Will Hunting. Get it?
The account had three followers. I could tell from the old follow-a-bunch-of-people-then-check-to-see-who-also-follows-that-account trick that Jennifer Garner was one of them. Who could possibly have a locked account with three followers, two of whom are famous Ben Affleck affiliates, other than Ben Affleck himself? Who else could deploy a bio this disarming? Just a dad who sometimes makes movies??? Ben! You have awards!
Up to this point, my relationship with Affleck had been limited to a fascination with @ArmasUpdates, knowledge that he’s one of the Batmen and pure delight in the fact that she was cast as the villainous husband with a deceitful-looking butt chin in the movie Gone Girl.
He never responded to me or blocked me, his team never told me to take down the tweet and honestly I’m not sure I could even confirm that I knew it was him aside from the fact the profile photo was removed after he probably received thousands of follow requests. His stans told me to die, which was perplexing because who knew he had stans? He’s not one of the main pop girls. Yet.
This could have been the end of my parasocial relationship with Affleck, but it was the beginning of a fascination, and — in dreaded, writerly fashion — a metaphor.
Since the Finsta incident (finstadent), I have been unable to avoid this man. He seemed to be perpetually down bad. From drowning under a deluge of Amazon Prime packages and iced coffees to vaping under his mask to sending a woman an Instagram video to ask why she unmatched him on Raya, he was suffering in quarantine just as much as we were.
Stars: They’re just like us if you disregard the wealth and power!
There’s something about him that makes you want to protect him. I look at him and I think …. I can fix him. And I don’t even have time to fix my own life!
Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas split in January 2021, right as vaccines were being more widely distributed and it began to look like all of us (Affleck included) were on track to have a hot girl summer.
That’s when the unthinkable happened. A vintage Hollywood love story 19 years in the making was revived when Jennifer Lopez dumped her fiance, Coldplay superfan Alex Rodriguez, and reunited with ex-fiance Ben Affleck.
The reunion launched a thousand thinkpieces about Y2K nostalgia and tabloid culture and so on, but it brought us two of the most important things a celebrity relationship could possibly bring to a bystander — drama and hope for a better future.
If Ben Affleck, vape king and discount coffee superfan, could rebound from a Raya unmatching with THEEE nude lipstick queen Jennifer Lopez herself, maybe … maybe I can find the energy to go to dinner after work again?
May we all rise out of our quarantine slump with the same fervor as a phoenix rising from the ashes of that back tattoo Ben Affleck originally denied.
Content dump
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I don’t think you understand, I’m obsessed
A lot of Bo Burnham takes have already been written, so I’ll abstain and just join the chorus of people recommending the Netflix special and also issue a warning because it yeeted me right back into the depressive episode I’ve been trying to escape for weeks. I loved it but it broke me so bad I took a multi-hour nap after.
There’s something really special about seeing early internet people you loved continue to be wonderful across the years. Like, I used to watch Shane Dawson videos (barf) then Mad TV clips (?) then Bo Burnham on repeat on my iPod Touch at night as a high schooler, and here we are. I still watch i’m bo yo when I’m sad.
From yours truly
Bye!