Guess what? Tony P hates you, too.

[meta/off-topic] normally I leave myself at the mercy of the gods, but ~tech? This a profile of a hyper-niche social media personality. It's a human interest piece. Right now the other posts in this group are about AI and computer hardware. How is this tech related?

I did not know the man on the screen, but I saw him all the time.

He’d pop up between other things in my Instagram feed: a guy playing golf, a beautiful woman, a hand running a knife sideways over the crispy skin of a piece of pork belly. I watched him walk toward the camera and point at his outfit—lavender shirt, blue slacks, purple tie—before cracking an awkward smile and crossing his arms. I watched him make dinner. That was disconcerting. He didn’t seem to be much of a cook; I’d never seen someone chop with such hesitation. He talked about how he spent his time in Washington, a city I knew pretty well. But he never did much of anything I hadn’t thought of before.

Other people started sending me videos of the man on the screen. Why is he smiling like that? Why is he putting the oil on the salmon that way? Why is he so excited about this new-development restaurant? Is this some kind of elaborate bit? I wasn’t sure, even as I kept seeing him more and more. The Washington Post profiled him and assured readers it wasn’t a bit.

The man on the screen tagged all the brands in his posts. A baseball team, a shoe company, a fast-casual food chain, an ice-cream company, a local golf course. It was hard to tell what he was being paid for and what was just a public attempt to get some free stuff. Either way, the getting seemed good. A sandwich chain flew him out to the Midwest. A ticket company sent him to a football game. He got a promo code that was also his name.

The man on the screen drew the attention of somebody on Capitol Hill. The Democratic Party was starting to panic about reaching younger people, so a senator in his late sixties ended up in a video awkwardly crossing his arms with the man on the screen. That was his thing now, the arm-crossing. He called it the “arm roll.” He had another thing, too. He called it “vibrant masculinity.” The concept wasn’t fully baked—it seemed to be about being a kind man who sometimes wore a flashy tie. Nevertheless, a few months later, he talked to another senator, a younger one who seemed to have his eyes on the presidency, about being a man.

Some people in the comments had always made fun of the man on the screen. Over time, their derision became the main attraction. They mocked his hair, his gait, the way he chose to play a Wheel of Fortune simulator after dinner. They sexualized him to belittle him: Don’t let my wife see this. It was funny, you see, because he was cleaning his apartment and talking about how he was practicing to be a caregiver for a family that he would have one day but that currently did not exist. It would have been easier to just watch the video, wonder what the point of it was, and move on, but these people kept at it. Eventually, they settled on a refrain that grew louder and louder. Hog reveal? Meaning his penis.

The man on the screen paid them no mind, at least as far as I could tell. He kept posting. He did a six-month campaign for a famous coffee-and-doughnut chain, which ended in a post about his dead grandmother and all the places he’d had coffee and doughnuts with her when he was a child. The comments were brutal. You’re pimping out your dead grandma for cash? He took the post down. The chain was cool with that. Later, though, he would tell me he regretted nothing—that his grandmother, pimped out or not, was laughing in heaven. Besides, the campaign paid him roughly $45,000.

Sometimes I wondered how the man on the screen lived with all of this.