From Fashion Modeling to Academia

Mears started modeling in strip malls in Atlanta when she was sixteen. With not a “promising future” for modeling in Atlanta, she decided to enroll at the University of Georgia to study public relations. On an exchange year in New York at Hunter College, everything changed. While Mears initially moved to New York primarily to advance her modeling career, she enrolled in a few sociology courses she assumed would be manageable enough to allow her to focus on modeling. Little did she know that she would fall in love with sociology, especially with Marx and Foucault: “I was like, this is incredible. And this is actually the course that I teach now here at UvA, […] a theory course covering Marx and Foucault.” She ended up switching her major from public relations to sociology. While taking a sociology of work and occupations course, she read ethnographic studies by scholars who had embedded themselves in workplaces — like Robin Leidner, who worked at McDonald’s to write a book about it. Mears thought to herself: “somebody should do this about fashion.” With support from a professor, that’s exactly what she set out to do, coming to NYU for her graduate degree to uncover the economic sociology of the fashion modeling industry. Mears remembers the unique composition of her cohort: “At NYU that year, when I entered, I was told that the cohort that they had selected—of the 12 or whoever people they let in—[included a] fashion model, a gang member, and a ballerina.” Mears finished her dissertation, producing the book Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, further defining herself as an economic sociologist as a professor at Boston University for fourteen years. As an economic sociologist, Mears explains how she thinks “about how markets are socially embedded in relationships and culture and institutions”, with an added gender component to all of her work. 

VIP World

Mears’ first immersive world as an established professor was the VIP club world in New York, known for its exclusive world of models and bottles. To study this, she became a part of the world through immersive ethnography. As Mears puts it, “[ethnography] lends itself well to books because you get that description and [that] really brings you into another world. So I was like, that’s the kind of sociology I want to do. That’s what I want to write.” Mears referenced another inspiration: Loïc Wacquant, “a student of Bourdieu [who] did his dissertation on boxers in Chicago… [becoming] a part of their world by himself becoming a boxer. And he writes about getting punched in the face… And I was like, that’s very cool. I want to do that.” With this spirit in mind, Mears aimed to get punched in the face by the VIP world.

For several months, Mears tagged along with a promoter — referred to as Dre in her book Very Important People — following him through his daily life to fully understand what the job actually entails. A promoter is a club owner’s secret weapon: recruited specifically to bring in beautiful women, whose presence in turn attracts the wealthy male clientele that keeps the club profitable. For Mears’ ethnographic research, becoming a part of this world meant dressing up and coming to many evenings as one Dre’s girls, playing a part of the game herself, being the type of person that Dre would recruit to come into the club to create the atmosphere that attracts high-paying clients in. For such morally gray work, the promoters were surprisingly willing to talk. As Mears explains, most promoters “took the opportunity for an interview to really paint themselves in a higher picture, distanc[ing] themselves from drugs, from sex work. They know that [promoting] looks like it’s adjacent to sex work, but they’re adamant that it’s not.” The few who refused to be researched were outliers. “For the most part, they were pretty forthcoming […] I think part of it was ego, because they liked the idea that some woman with a PhD who’s going to come hang out at their club is also interested in what they do.” 

Whales, on the other hand, are much harder to reach. A whale is “someone who spends really a lot of money” — we’re talking tens of thousands in a single night — and an entirely different type of person. Mears admits they were the one group she struggled to get close to, surrounded by security and an almost theatrical aura of untouchability. “I really didn’t dare to approach them,” she reflects, “because I felt like they were unapproachable… the whole thing was strange.” By her own admission, part of it was personal — a discomfort with extreme social inequality that made the interaction feel impossible before it had even started. The girls were easy; the promoters were fine for the most part. But the true whales existed in a different register entirely, being the only kinds of people on this planet capable of participating in bottle wars.

Bottle wars are among the more spectacular ways clubs maximize profit. The concept is simple: one client buys an outrageous number of bottles, sometimes for everyone in the club, drawing attention and status from everyone in the room, until another client buys more. A peacocking contest conducted in champagne, with some infamous whales like Jho Low spending millions in a single night. Mears’ book spends a great deal talking about the ridiculousness of it all. Almost everyone knows, including other clients, how just ridiculously wasteful, stupid, and frivolous it all is. But anyone would be surprised just how fruitful these displays of ridiculousness can be for the men themselves who gain credibility, status, and sometimes business deals, making bottle wars a strategic move. Below the whales sit the more ordinary bottle clients — spending $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 a night — who justify their own spending by the same logic in relation to the larger spendings by whales. As Mears puts it, these are “the more normal working rich people… they see themselves as much more normal, like the bankers, […] investors, [people who] work in tech. Like they’re workers, but they have a lot of money.” It’s a telling kind of self-justification: next to a whale dropping millions, a few thousand feels like nothing. The VIP world has a way of recalibrating your sense of what’s reasonable without you ever noticing.

The spending, the status, the spectacle — none of it exists without the girls who build the atmosphere, and the near-scientific machinery behind the scenes by so many people that makes the scene feel magical. What the girls brought in by promoters don’t know is that for every one of them that walks through the door, the promoter collects a fee, for example, $100 per girl. The club gets its atmosphere, drawing in wealthy businessmen from around the world and creating the effervescent world people ache to be a part of, surrounded by beautiful women of a certain caliber. But this world is built on steep inequality. The men — club owners, promoters, businessmen — are the ones who profit predominantly. The women who make the whole thing possible don’t get paid; they get freebies in a world they are destined to age out of far sooner than their wealthy male counterparts. And entry into this world is itself brutally selective, but only for women. Mears reflected upon trying to bring her own friends along to the clubs, thinking it would be more fun, only to be told by the promoter that they couldn’t come. As Mears reflects: “You have to look good. […] You can’t show up without your high heels as a woman, or wearing the wrong clothes can get you sent out. […] [P]romoters are like, she can’t come. […] [S]end a photo beforehand. […] It’s awful. The whole thing is awful. […] They know it’s awful. But they’re in this economy, which is trading on this one very narrow definition of beauty for women.” 

Despite all the awful things that could be said about the work of promoters, when asked what was the most surprising realization upon doing the research, Mears responded that she “started to have a lot more empathy for the promoters than […] expected going in. […] I was like, these promoters are so creepy. The whole thing is so sleazy. […] These are very clear villains. They’re exploiting women and profiting […]. Taking pride in the measures to which they, yeah, stalk, control. This is a kind of awful exploit of masculinity. And it is, but I also start to empathize with them over the course of the research with them. Because I start to see that they’re also doing the same way, they’re comparing themselves to their long right tail of… of wealth, and they want to be wealthy like the rich people that they’re serving, and they’re not going to be. They think that they can break out of the service role, and they won’t. The most successful promoters are the ones that stayed in nightlife, but they parlayed their contacts to have investors to open their own clubs. So some of the most successful clubs in New York are owned and operated by former promoters.” But for most, that exit is out of reach, and the reasons run deeper than ambition. Many of the promoters Mears followed are Black men, often immigrants, navigating a world built on racial contradiction. They leverage stereotypes to their advantage — “people think that we’re cool because we’re Black, they love Brooklyn, they think we have drugs” — laughing about it, even as they remain racially marginalized by the very world they’re helping to run. They have access, connections, and rooms full of the wealthiest people on earth. But as Mears puts it, “it’s not a real ticket in.” The men across the table went to Harvard; their families’ families went to Harvard. The promoter from Haiti who didn’t go to college and charmed his way into the room has a foot in the door — but the door only opens so far.

Content Farm World

Mears published her second book, Very Important People, in May 2020 — “a really bad time to have a book about nightlife coming out.” But as pandemic fatigue set into the news cycle, readers began looking for something different, and by June and July, interest picked up. Although the reactions that found their way into Mears’ inbox can be summarized as “a lot of mansplaining men who were like, ‘I’ve been to Saint Tropez’, and this is what I think,” they luckily weren’t the only ones. One of the more interesting connections was a trained lawyer, magician, and a “voracious reader of ethnography […] on the verge of becoming a very successful manager of an online content farm.” It didn’t take too long until Mears found herself immersed in a new, bizarre world of viral videos and the attention economy. The primary stage for this new wave of online creators trying to catch a viewer’s attention with toilet bowls full of milkshakes and fake cheating scenarios was Facebook Watch, which was introduced in 2018 by Facebook to compete with the likes of YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, and provided sizable financial incentives. “[…] I was so consumed with the fact that this little, simple viral video made like $200,000 […] it got 200 million views.” 

While Mears saw a gold mine for research, her fellow academics were less enthused. “My colleagues would say this is awful, […] you shouldn’t research this. One person even told me this would be a waste of my time, a colleague at Harvard told me that.” Undeterred, Mears delved into the content farm scene, and before long, in her typical immersive ethnography fashion, was making viral videos of her own. With guidance from her fellow creators and the head of this Las Vegas-based “online production company, as he would call it,” who had brought the world to her attention in the first place, Mears had set up her own page to post videos to and experiment with, exploring data tools that the creators use to monitor video performance. 

For most of her research, Mears contributed to the internet corpus of attention-grabbing videos remotely, uploading from Boston, Budapest, and Belgrade. At times, these involved casting extra roles. “I was hiring actors to work with me on Facebook. I’d find some random actors to come film videos with me […] it was a weird experience.” Taking field notes along the way, Mears continued, but soon the poor performance of her videos started weighing on her. “Nothing was working, so it was getting a little bit demoralizing,” she admitted. “It wasn’t that much fun, it was getting pretty exhausting, and I didn’t have anything to show for it.” 

Unequipped with the same skillset and tools as her peers in Las Vegas, many of whom would work in teams and shared backgrounds in professional magic, Mears couldn’t produce complex stunts such as “Breaking apart an ATM.” She notes that the seemingly strange career pivot from cardistry and stage performance to videos can be explained by COVID-era job insecurity and a surprising overlap in skills. “To make a video, you have to understand […] dramatic action and how to stage things. Magicians are really skilled at making things,” Mears explains. “Magicians are really good at manipulating attention; it’s the job to misdirect. And that’s basically what viral videos do, they misdirect.” Unable to compete, she turned to a newly trending niche: livestreams. 

“This genre of video started performing well, which was live videos […] it ups the stakes because it’s live right now,” says Mears. A specific genre that gained popularity, edging into more titillating territory, was livestreams of preparing to take a shower. “Here’s the water, here’s the bubble bath […] you’re doing it for 20 minutes,” she explains. “People are watching because they think you’re about to get in the shower.” Seeing the videos’ success, and still looking for a lucky break, Mears made one of her own. “I felt awful about myself, I really felt like I couldn’t get any lower,” she reflects. “I had to really think about what my boundaries are. They’re doing it, why can’t I do it? But it really didn’t feel great […] I only did one of those videos. It performed okay.”

Apart from hard-earned ethnographic observations that are currently being transformed into a book, the research also brought Mears some financial gain, once a video she had made went viral. The latter, rather than the former, finally sparked some interest from the people around her when a payout check arrived in the mail at her parents’ address. “My mom called me, and she was super excited, saying ‘at least now you have something to show for it,’” Mears recalls. The reaction stung: “Money is the thing people pay attention to, not the fact that something interesting is happening. There was a change in the attention economy, and nobody cared.”

The shower livestream and other forms of “engagement bait” videos often run the risk of being targeted by Facebook policy changes, with content rules changing frequently. Lately, the open question has been AI-generated videos and whether Facebook will decide to limit them. “[The creators] are incorporating AI for sure […] for voiceovers, scripts, and idea generators,” comments Mears. “Videos where there’s real humans seem to be performing better […] but AI-generated ones can just […] flood the platform with AI slop much faster.” Although AI-equipped creators, many of whom are cutting their teams, would be at risk if Facebook decides to pull the plug, Mears explains that they would simply pivot. “What Facebook wants, Facebook gets. They set the guardrails, they have all the financial incentives, and the content creators will do what Facebook says.”

Regarding the role of Facebook in deciding what is and isn’t acceptable, Mears is skeptical. “Facebook is a private company. They shouldn’t be the ones [that decide] because it’s a public good, […] a forum for public speech,” she comments. “They’re not very clear about who makes up the rules and how they make up the rules.” Mears further criticizes the politically driven decision-making behind content moderation. “After the January 6 insurrection, Facebook had tight, outsourced fact-checking […], so the content creators were very cautious. After Trump got re-elected, Facebook was like, I guess we don’t really need fact-checkers anymore because look who’s in office. They did away with the program, […] the guardrails are now a lot messier and looser.” She calls for Facebook and similar companies to be subject to the same oversight as other media companies. “I think that these are forums that should not be controlled according to the whims and interests of private companies.”

Though Mears’ worlds of study could not look more different on the surface, they share one quiet obsession: the machinery of seduction and attracting attention. VIP clubs have an allure to them that people pay illogical amounts of money to be a part of. Once inside, the need for attention doesn’t stop. Bottle wars have whales and other high-paying clients paying full mortgages in a night for the sake of spending the most money and besting one another. As one promoter told Mears: “The guy that is spending 120,000 dollars at the club, we didn’t drink it even. You think we can drink a hundred bottles? No way. So it’s attention, you know? And he’s sitting at a huge table, with thirty models around him. And he’s like this [raising his arms high in the air, pretending to hold bottles].” Built on the work of promoters and allure, extreme selectivity of who gets inside, and social inequality, club owners silently win raking in the profits. 

Where others make spectacles of themselves, others make fools of themselves. Unlike whales, viral content creators don’t want to be known. In the digital sphere, it’s easy to capture the attention of many like a passing boat, with each passing boat potentially earning the creators hundreds of thousands of dollars per video, as Mears herself experienced the thrill of firsthand. But the game is getting harder to play. AI can now produce in seconds what creators spend hours engineering, throwing the economics of the whole enterprise into question. Meanwhile, creators operate in constant negotiation with Meta’s content policies,  pushing boundaries just far enough to capture attention, but never far enough to get pulled off the platform entirely.

Questions for the reader: what do you make of these worlds, knowing what happens behind the scenes? How much would you personally be willing to go, compromising human decency and morality yourself knowing how much you could win in money, experiences, or fame? And how would you go about regulation? Do you think more should be done to combat AI slop and enshittification knowing that the only gains from it are profits for the creators?

More positive developments can be said about the world of nightlife. The exclusive VIP niche isn’t going anywhere — if anything, as wealth grows and elites segregate further, the demand for spaces that make the privileged feel exclusively special will only intensify. But alongside it, something more interesting is emerging. More women DJs are playing big spaces, deliberate efforts toward diversity are multiplying, and alternative nightlife cultures are carving out their own corners. Mears points to a recent book, Long Live Queer Nightlife, about the pop-up clubs of queer nightlife, where the code of entry is radically inclusive — the more privileged you are, the more you pay at the door, with anti-exclusivity literally built into the price. The old and the new exist side by side. As Mears puts it, “there’s something for everyone” — though she’s quick to add that the truly inclusive space, one without hierarchy=, “still doesn’t exist.”

These Worlds and Beyond

In all, these worlds are filter bubbles. Everyone is comparing themselves to one another. Whales to whales. Promoters to whales. Girls to each other. Content creators to each other. Mears shared an anecdote that captures this perfectly. After writing a story for The Economist, she was thrilled to have been paid $5,000 — until she mentioned it to a fellow content creator, who responded with a barely concealed “is that good?” The same creator, a performer who had spent years scraping by, had recently come into money of his own and gone straight out to buy new shoes. “I didn’t realize how cheap Doc Martens are,” he told her. “Are they cheap, or is it just that I’m rich?” As Mears reflects: “I’m sure it skews you.” 

With these worlds behind her, when asked what world Mears wants to immerse herself in next, Mears says “I have no idea. I’m waiting for something to fall into my lap. I really don’t know. [Because] that’s how this guy, [from] the content farm, […] contacted me. So I’m thinking maybe if this book comes out, something else will just happen. [… I’m] still really interested in economies that are transactional and gendered in surprising ways.” In all, there’s no doubt that Mears will have no shortage of worlds to explore in the future, the only question is: which one will find her first?