Even if you didn’t sign up for the reality-TV treatment, your life may be mined for drama and packaged for consumption by influencers.
“The people on this cruise ship continue to give me dirty looks everywhere I go,” Marc Sebastian announces to his 1.5 million followers on TikTok. He is filming in a cabin onboard the ship, addressing the camera in classic reality-TV confessional style. Text floats above his head. It reads: “day one on the 9 month cruise.”
The ship in question is Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas, now on a 274-night “ultimate world cruise” set to visit 65 countries and every continent, including Antarctica. It took to the seas on Dec. 10, carrying its presumably well heeled passengers — the full cruise costs almost as much as a year’s tuition at an Ivy League institution. Sebastian is not, precisely, one of them; his “day one” came later. He is there because the cruise has become a strange online obsession. It began with passengers posting snippets of their experience on TikTok and spiraled rapidly from there. The Serenade of the Seas morphed into a spontaneous mash-up of HBO’s “The White Lotus” and Bravo’s “Below Deck”; viewers back on land started gobbling up every morsel of cruise-related content they could find, producing their own commentary, concocting their own wild story lines, turning passengers into “characters.” Many observers are now openly rooting for this opulent vacation to devolve into some kind of entertaining chaos, seizing on any sign of trouble, real or imagined, as a potential first act. Flooded rooms. A shortage of preferred wines. Rumors of sexual libertines. Illness. Exclusive perks for so-called Pinnacle Club members maybe, somehow, sparking class conflict. And of course, microaggressions. This is the “drama” — in TikTok parlance, the “tea” — supposedly captured onboard.
Sebastian was, initially, one of those gawking nonpassengers. But he used his own online following to TikTok his way onboard for one leg of the trip, paid for by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “There’s going to be mutiny, there’s going to be blood, someone is going overboard, I wanna watch,” he told his followers. “Put me on the cruise. I’ll go ... I will cause chaos, I will wreak havoc and I will record everything.”
These are the obvious reasons fellow cruisers might be giving him dirty looks. In his cabin confessional, he inserts a shot of himself walking around the ship, smacking gum, as a perturbed fellow guest can be overheard saying, “He’s videotaping everything.” It sounds like a warning: Stay away from the camera.
The audience on land clearly has a fantasy of what cameras may catch. Something juicy, like a disgruntled crew member struggling to serve an impossibly demanding guest. If you stare long enough, connect the right dots, perhaps you’ll glimpse some tense dynamic, the sort of thing Bravo might send an entire production team racing toward. All the ingredients for drama are there, which seems like enough to hold viewers’ attention; rooting for wealthy vacationers to suffer is a favorite American pastime.
‘I will record everything.’
But it feels as if there is something more driving the virality of this ship and the online world’s uncanny intrusion into its material space. You might imagine a cruise as a place to relax and escape the real world, but it is also a carefully controlled luxury environment, designed to be constantly offering you memorable little experiences of delight — in other words, exactly the kinds of soothing “aesthetic” joys that influencers post on TikTok. The digital world’s obsessive interest just puts the vessel in a more aggressive version of the same surreal situation it was in to begin with, the situation so much of the world seems pointed toward: Everything here is just content. Everything that happens must be engineered for consumption, must pop and amaze — from sea-gazing in a solarium high above the ocean to dancing at the silent disco. As for the humans within those scenes, they, too, must always be on. Some of the people caught in Sebastian’s cross hairs must be looking at an annoying bargain: Either you find a way to be telegenic content at all times, or you spend the next eight months dodging other people’s cameras, lest you accidentally become the ship’s main character for the day.
Still, for the life of me, I cannot yet find anything actually happening on the Serenade of the Seas. One passenger, a conventionally attractive young blond woman with more than 224,000 TikTok followers, posts day-in-the-life videos; they are as banal and familiar as you could ever expect of a cruise. She plays pickleball. She pours sugar-free Smucker’s breakfast syrup over oatmeal. Her pink sweater matches her pink water bottle, which matches her pink smoothie. A vast online audience is eager to turn such passengers into characters in an improvised reality show, but the havoc Sebastian hoped to capture for them — or, who knows, to cause — is nowhere to be seen. So far, his biggest complaints are about noise and lighting.
How surprised can anyone be? Nothing exciting is supposed to happen on a cruise. This is presumably why seniors, especially American seniors, are so partial to them. And yet #CruiseTok has nearly three billion views. Cruises may be deliberately undramatic, but there are things about them that we can’t seem to look away from: the eye-popping engineering, the ships so enormous it boggles the mind that they even float. All those ghastly pearly-white surfaces. Or the odd sociality: The rise of theme cruises, dedicated to topics like “Game of Thrones” or Taylor Swift or knitting, turns the ships into giant convention centers plopped into the ocean, where thousands of like-minded people stagger from one activity to the next.
The appeal of the cruise is that you, the consumer, get to exist in this suspended space that’s been built almost entirely for your ease and enjoyment, for you to see and experience. But in an everything-is-content world, this arrangement can be unexpectedly reversed: Suddenly, your presence on a cruise may be the thing that others want to experience. Our mode of perception, our way of being in the world, fundamentally changes when this happens — when we are, willingly or not, sucked into the endless blob of content, watched or wondered about or speculated on by millions.
As I binged on Serenade of the Seas TikToks, I eventually lost track of whether the videos I was watching were even made by people on the ship. I could not tell the average passenger apart from the working influencer, could not guess whether a given video was a result of incredible social media spin by Royal Caribbean or someone happily doing the company’s P.R. for them. At various points, I could not tell who was vying for my attention and who was merely subject to it. I was floating on the content blob, pulled whichever direction the algorithmic currents took me. And it didn’t especially matter where I wound up, because everything looked, well, like “content.” People talked fast, looked good on camera, seemed funny and charming. All the pinks matched the other pinks. Bursts of manufactured drama occurred at reassuring intervals, and nothing at all of any consequence happened. (At least, not yet.)
There was a time, decades ago, when passengers were given lists of the others cruising with them, complete with names and hometowns. This was meant to facilitate connections among the complete strangers who would be trapped together at sea, with few people to talk to besides one another. That feels unthinkable today. But our desire for recognition and connection persists, and it bubbles up through our thicket of screens in the strangest ways. Marc Sebastian was eating breakfast alone until a couple recognized him and invited him to their table. He didn’t film their conversation.
Zachary Siegel is a journalist and researcher living in Chicago. His work focuses on public health, mental health and the criminal-legal system.
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