The Saddest Crown on the Internet

Two years ago Ariana Grande was best known as the Nickelodeon kid who grew up to have a genuinely extraordinary voice and a very specific ponytail she refused to vary. Then the Manchester Arena bombing happened. Then Mac Miller died. Then the engagement to Pete Davidson dissolved in real time, in public, with that particular slow-motion intimacy that celebrity grief has when it’s conducted through Instagram Stories. And somewhere inside all that, the follower count kept climbing.

Last night she overtook Selena Gomez to become the most-followed woman on the platform—146,306,947 people to Selena’s 146,273,196, a gap of around 33,000 that sounds significant until you realize it’s noise at this scale. Selena had held the top spot through her own considerable chaos: the lupus diagnosis, the kidney transplant, the years of very-online religiosity alternating with near-nude photos in a rhythm that made her impossible to look away from. Both of them are extremely good at turning private suffering into public intimacy, which is either the defining skill of this era or a form of self-harm the algorithm rewards. Possibly both.

The only man anywhere near either of them is Cristiano Ronaldo, who has constructed his account into such an immaculate monument to himself that it loops back around into something almost admirable in a purely technical sense. The rest of us are down here arguing about twelve-follower differences with people we used to like. The scale of the thing is genuinely absurd. But Ariana Grande has earned whatever crown the internet wants to give her. You don’t come through what she came through in the last two years and worry much about the optics.