Are Tao Lin and Megan Boyle the alt version of the Speidi douche train?

Been seeing a lot of legit bros giving cred to Tao Lin and Megan Boyle lately. Wondering if we are really doing this now?

Tao Lin seemed innocuous enough at first. Kind of cute, has a really unique/relevant writing style, embodies lots of things I like about the 2k10 generation like inviting people to gChat with him, stalking Gawker until they notice him, and generally being a transparent individual. I met him over the summer and couldn’t tell if he was an asshole or just really that shy/high on shrooms. He’s always been gimmicky, but he had the writing chops and authenticity to back it up.

As far as I can tell Megan Boyle’s greatest accomplishment is dating Tao Lin, adopting his personality, and having a last name that’s a homophone for some pus-filled skin dramz. Congrats girl, you’ll be signing media releases as the poster girl for 4th wave feminism any day now. But still, whatever, harmless enough, you’re the ‘it’ alt couple, fine.

Except—and maybe this was Tao’s trajectory all along—he sort of stopped being about anything else but attention. At one point you could look at Tao and say, he’s gimmicky but he writes fantastic poetry. Now all you can say is he’s good at generating attention for doing attention-generating things. He’s become a circular argument; he’s relevant because he makes films about himself being high which are relevant because…he’s relevant?

Doesn’t the exchange below mimic, almost exactly, the kind of empty histrionics that we all hated Speidi for?

Maybe you can claim that Tao and Megan are making some kind of conceptual, nihilstic art: becoming famous for nothing. But this has been done to death (cf: the Hiltons, Kardashians, etc) and people who claim to do this are lying. If they think it’s true there’s no meaning or objective value, they wouldn’t be pouring so much effort into trying to generate fame for themselves—because it would follow that celebrity wouldn’t have value for them. There’s an area for creative people to be zany or gimicky or whatever, but it only extends so far as they’re producing genuine art. It’s clear that somewhere around the time Tao’s ‘new creative project’ became filming himself on various drugs that it stopped being about the art and started being about the fame.