Controversy is running rampant around TikTok’s Ken Waks. The man who claims to have noticed a pattern of murders which, he thinks, might point to the presence of a serial killer in various places around the country. Ken strung the TikTok’s community along for months as he ‘tracked’ these killings and built a profile of a potential killer. But then, just as people began to hold an enormous amount of faith in his detective skills, he made a crucial misstep… he promoted his new app.
This low-life pile-of-laundry had the audacity to have a business venture. He dared to take his modest level of clout and use it to help establish a career outside of what people liked about him. If it’s not clear by now… I genuinely don’t care about this story. This is literally no different than any other content creator who uses their clout to hock some paid promotions or to put the spotlight on their dreams.
People have been doing this since the beginning of celebrity culture. Whether it’s Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins using her ‘Ain’t nobody got time for that’ meme fame to become a commercial actress and start a BBQ sauce company or Paris Hilton using her leaked tapes to start a career in acting and business. In some cases, it’s entirely incidental that people become popular enough to start a career. In other cases, it’s planned from day one. So what makes Ken different?
If you want to lie to yourself and pretend that Ken is worse than the rest because he is attempting to profit off of the deaths of people, then I would kindly point you to Bailey Sarian or MrBallen or even any murder mystery game that uses real cases to “solve”. But, I suppose they are fine since their entire profits come from the murders they discuss and not some unrelated venture like a travel planning app, right? Am I the only one confused as to what everyone’s bothered by with him? Is it just his paint-by-numbers face that makes him an easy target for people’s rage or the fact that his grift was so easily identified?
Ken tried to promote Foresyte, a travel-planning app. He did this lazily by using it to organize his routine of running Foresyte, investigating the possible serial killer and working with a charity. The only reason it didn’t work was because it was lazy and seemed to come out of left field.
Let’s be clear, what he did was shady and worthy of being side-eyed. But it’s not because he is some heartless bastard. It’s because he wasn’t good at it. Mr Ballen seems to genuinely care about the victims in his stories, but Bailey Sarian doesn’t (although it’s hard to see her potential empathy past 8 layers of foundation). The reason they are good at what they do is that they aren’t trying to do something they aren’t great at. Like them or not, they are great story tellers, at least to their fan bases.
You only see Bailey Sarian applying makeup and discussing a murder. Anything she sells is either directly related to what she’s doing or is stated as a paid advertisement. If she lazily tried to promote her new video game business claiming that it helps her find new ways to apply makeup, all of her fans would see right through the grift. For this reason, she is smart enough to stick to what she knows and what people know her for.
The fact that a person can’t make something of themselves without bowing to corporate sponsorship or becoming a walking advertisement is something we should all be upset about. Being angry because somebody did it so poorly that we couldn’t pretend that that isn’t what’s happening is kind of strange. People are literally saying ‘I don’t care if you manipulate me, I just don’t want to know you’re manipulating me’.
Assuming it was all a scripted ploy for clout (which it probably was) Ken had a pretty decent idea to start: an everyday man stumbles onto the truth about a serial killer and has to work with people across the globe to solve the mystery. Everyone has to admit that this is an ARG we could all get behind. He just tried a little too hard to make something profitable out of it.
If he had just let it be a thing that did with his fans, eventually he would ‘hit a dead end’. He could then find another ‘case’ and work it with his fans. He could have done this over and over again building more and more clout, a bigger and bigger fan base. He could have accepted donations or taken on sponsors that would ‘help keep our case investigations funded’. Foresyte could have been one of those ‘sponsors’. Realistically, this is a grift he could have kept going for years; never actually solving the cases and just raking in the cash.
If he had done it like this, he would still be relevant with his 1M followers. If done well, nobody would have noticed the grift and everyone would have been blissfully manipulated just like with everything else in our lives. So stop bitching about Ken being heartless. We literally have entire multi-million dollar enterprises dedicated to profiting off death.
We didn’t care when A Thousand Ways To Die aired real ways people died. We don’t care when a blockbuster movie or Netflix show is released depicting the solved or unsolved murder of people. We are whores for entertainment. Especially about death. Take some of your own advice; if you’re going to be a hypocrite, at least do it in such a way that I don’t know you’re being a hypocrite.
Galvanic Ink 