Lecture by Meltdown Your Books
This lecture is based upon the M.Y.B.’s essay “Addison Rae’s Aquamarine Did not take place,” and was recorded live at PHACKER2025.
Transcript
“Hello. My name is Meltdown Your Books. I am a researcher in Evolutionary Biology and also a writer on the Philosophy of Science, Fashion and Media Culture. Today I’m giving a talk on Addison Rae, and the notion of Meritocracy in the online world. I won’t have the time to really flesh out some of the large concepts, so it's really more like a fun exercise for us to begin thinking about the value of using popular social media figures as an in-road to discuss social principles and values. It's not an overly serious presentation, so feel free to jump in with thoughts or questions in the chat when you feel like it. The presentation is split into three parts, and reflects an inward and an outward motion, making a start from the more widespread cultural concept of the “Nepo Baby”, and moving to the underlying societal principles that inform this cultural conflict. From there, we can do a brief case study of a popular figure to understand exactly how notable figures utilize these conflicts with their values.
Let's start with the “Nepo Baby” phenomenon. For those of you who have somehow missed this cultural dialogue, a “Nepo Baby” is someone whose social position, career or success is believed to come from factors outside of their personal merit, specifically familial connections or wealth. “Nepo Baby”, as a term, is a very recent development, really only taking root in the post-pandemic cultural landscape. But it's not necessarily a uniquely contemporary thing. Plenty of modern figures have had the validity of their position questioned because of their familial connections. But this phenomenon isn't monolithic, there are, of course, a variety of forms it can take in the cultural evaluation. Or it may draw different, very specific context of each iteration.
There is, of course, the less agreeable form, which is the legacy artist, whose parents were notable artists, but ones without serious financial or industry connections. For example, the drummer, from the post-rock band Tortoise, likely doesn't have any major connections but can account for the success of his pop son 2Hollis. Then there is the generally indifferent form, the industry child form of “Nepo Baby”. It's unlikely that famed model agent John Casablancas had direct connections that helped his son Julian become a famous musician, but it is undeniable that having generalized industry connections is helpful to one's career. Then there is the worst form, the generalized wealth, where any young artist comes from a known industry tycoon, who simply leverages wealth to aid in their child's career. The most famous example is Taylor Swift, whose father purchased the record label in which she eventually debuted on. The domination through wealth is generally the most despised form of “Nepo Baby”.
What I think is important to point out from the onset here, though, is that the “Nepo Baby” is generally weaponized in a few limited areas. Outside of the entertainment industry, no one particularly cares about people inheriting their family business or joining the same industry as their parents.
The most basic explanation you can offer for this is that “Nepo Baby” is only a label that applies to categories of value, that is, positions which are highly socially desirable or perceived as limited. I don't want to over extrapolate survey data, so I won't belabor this, but teenagers today generally forward wanting to work in positions where the “Nepo Baby” terminology applies: Entertainment, Artists, Sports, Medicine. In reality, we of course understand that these positions are very much informed by things unrelated to merit. Better social roles depends on connections, context and economic advantage. Things that are highly desirable are not distributed by merit in any contemporary society today.
As a quick example, outside the entertainment industry—since we'll be focusing on it a lot here—doctors are a wildly “Nepo Baby” type of field. In med school, as in biomedical programs across the country, the idea of a doctoral Nepo Baby, getting into med school out of their parents money is a widely talked about trope. Even though only 3% of the US population are doctors, 1 in 5 medical students has a parent who is a physician. It makes a simple question now, fundamentally, what is upsetting about this? Fundamentally, what is upsetting about this? If I could give an account for it at the lowest level, I would have to say it conflicts with the widespread belief in Meritocracy, being the belief that positions and power in society should be given out based only on considerations of skill and merit. Meritocracy is one of the foundational ideas of the modern Western order. It underpins American notions of being a “land of opportunity” and the European & Western individualism at large. These are absolutist concepts towards social order, Meritocracy is a value in of itself. It is always a moral endeavor. The desire for Meritocracy was one of the primary drivers of the bourgeoisie discontent that started the French Revolution. As time will show, what we now understand as Western democracy, the very nature of free market capitalism—shaken out of the grips of the nobel and religious strangulation—was the promise of Meritocracy, of success one could earn, of value which was not tied to rank or unchangeable personal qualities.
So let's look a little more seriously at this underlying concept of Meritocracy. What is interesting about an absolutist social idea, however, is that it rarely conforms to real social situations, and so these situations that tend to challenge them right along the razor's edge, teetering on both sides of the concept. In the case of “Nepo Babies”, the perceived uneven starting ground causes the feeling of betraying Meritocracy, of allowing positions to go to people based on their class or rank, and yet simultaneously denying someone's hard work, strife, or talent, based solely on their upbringing, instead of their merit, in of itself, feels like a betrayal of Meritocracy. What does it matter where someone starts if they are one of the best, or at least very good at what they do? “Nepo Babies” are a cultural sore spot. Our societal values, as absolutist as they are, do not allow for simple resolution. That's how we engage with them, utilizing case-by-case heuristics, evaluating each “Nepo Baby” individually—whether they deserve their position or not. There are many philosophical approaches for these kinds of unresolved societal hang-nails: analyzing them as dialectical conflicts, as the appearance of constructed binarism, or as an embodiment of an underdeveloped concept which has not yet achieved the purity necessary to conform to real life.
Regardless, these philosophical tools provide us no practical ability to navigate these situations—only ways of extrapolating and analyzing them. Of course, the “Nepo Baby” is just the most easily identifiable figure of the meritocracy conflict. I use it here as an entrance to a concept, but there are an infinite number of in-roads to a societal belief as ingrained in our modern world as meritocracy. This fixation and unresolved dialogue has shown up in a very famous meme format that many of you might be familiar with, which discusses the best modality of organizing a society to the benefit of each person’s limits and capacities. This format has exploded with variations, as the underlying conflict grows increasingly complex due to its unresolved character. Looking back at media culture, we can examine a more subtle example of “Nepo Babies,” what I call the lateral celebrity. After all, celebrities utilize their fame or achievements in one arena to move into a new creative field, often skipping much of the hard work, setup costs, or tribulations associated with those fields. From a purely practical perspective, no one is under the illusion that Lady Gaga is the best possible actress for every acting job. No one believes that without her music career she would have made it as an actress. Her acceptance is based on the convergence of her perceived talent, her perceived good intentions, and the appearance of some form of hard work.
This is just another example of the case-by-case heuristic people use to manage this razor’s-edge problem. When Rihanna used her musical career to move into acting, it was flatly rejected based on her being very bad at it. If Gaga was accepted for being good and Rihanna rejected for being bad, where exactly is the inversion point where it becomes acceptable?
Is there ever a precise level of “good” that makes it acceptable to use fame to strong-arm a career in an unrelated field? Much of what we’ve discussed so far concerns “legacy media” or “old media.” So does this concept apply to social media? And does social media help resolve this conflict? Do modern social media stars escape the meritocracy dialectic? In fact, much like many developments in Western society since the French Revolution, social media was conceived and sold based on the logic of meritocracy. It was meant to reduce barriers that allowed for “Nepo Babies” or gatekeepers who kept out talented and independent creators. This tactic—wielding meritocracy as a guiding torch—is used almost ubiquitously by techno-optimists and those selling technological innovations. Cryptocurrency advocates suggest crypto provides meritocracy to financial systems. Free-internet advocates suggest piracy provides meritocracy in access to knowledge. Defenders of generative AI argue that it provides meritocracy of creative vision over technical capability. Techno-optimism is, by and large, sold through the language of meritocracy.
This brings us to a brief case study that may better illuminate the realities of social media and meritocracy: Addison Rae, the example par excellence of the merging of social media stardom and legacy media. By those metrics, Addison Rae is a poster child for social media as a meritocratic environment. She was raised in a lower-class family with no meaningful connections to the entertainment industry or substantial familial wealth, and she succeeded through her own self-managed TikTok platform. To grasp the size of her success, Addison Rae has over 88.3 million followers on TikTok—the sixth largest account on the entire platform. Where her story becomes interesting is when this immense social media star attempted a lateral move into music. The “content creator to music side-project” pipeline is well-trodden at this point, but Addison Rae aimed to become a serious musician and leave social media as her primary venture, moving between new and old media. There is, of course, a more complicated personal timeline for Addison Rae as a real person, but we will reduce it here for brevity.
Historically, overcoming the barrier between social media stardom and legacy media has been a major hurdle, as these industries were not previously entangled in the way Hollywood and music have been. Addison’s success reflects the merging of these two fields and the newfound ability to move between them. She utilized cosigns from serious musicians—primarily Charli XCX and Arca—while leaning heavily on alternative pop aesthetics drawn from Madonna, Lana Del Rey, and Jessie Ware. The specific use of queer cultural legitimacy is a separate conversation, but industry cosigns are a common tactic for lateral celebrities, one Lady Gaga also employed when pivoting into acting. The effect was to associate Addison with as much “serious art” as possible, shifting her image away from that of a social media persona. This culminated in the release of her debut album earlier this year. To clarify the success of this campaign, she ranked among the top 800 musicians globally in 2025 and appeared on several major critics’ lists, including Pitchfork’s year-end list.
This leads to the recurring question: does Addison Rae deserve this? Is she an industry “Nepo Baby”? Is she using fame as a resource to cut the line into an artistic field? Is she talented enough? Is she serious enough? Is she Lady Gaga acting—or Rihanna acting? From a wider social lens, we might ask how the success of a famous, beautiful white woman in Hollywood could represent meritocracy. Yet how could the success of any individual—regardless of history or form—not be meritocratic? Is weaponizing her appearance and background against her not the very thing meritocracy claims to oppose? An even more complicated layer—perhaps beyond the scope of this talk—is how meritocracy collides with another foundational value of contemporary society: individualism. As Addison Rae herself suggests, if the individual must be defended at all costs, then she had to take any open doors available. Social media became the lever she pulled to pursue self-actualization.
Here, meritocracy conflicts not only internally but with another sister value we also hold as intrinsically good. Beyond that, Addison Rae runs directly into our ideas of aesthetics and beauty. Anyone familiar with contemporary music criticism knows that value is often framed in terms of authenticity. Is launching a music career from a social media platform authentic? If music was the true passion, why not pursue it from the outset? At the same time, postmodern pop appreciation values spectacle, flamboyance, and theatricality. Is a calculated—and often sloppy—music rollout via social media any of those things? Addison Rae’s response to many of these questions is that inauthenticity is a universal feature of these industries. She rejects the constructs themselves. All meaningful cultures exist in the blurry space at the edges of our values. They absorb contradiction and become its living embodiment.
As Hegel once said of Napoleon, who reshaped Europe and Western society through force:
“I saw the Emperor—this world soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
Thank you.