‘West Elm Caleb’ and the vindictiveness of a social media feeding frenzy

The saga of ‘West Elm Caleb’ will make you wish that you had never used the internet. It will make you wish that you had never heard of the internet. It is the sort of thing that would make Ted Kaczynski feel vindicated, if his prison guards forced him to look at social media as some kind of esoteric punishment.

I will keep the background short and sweet, or, rather, short and sour. On TikTok, last week, various women in New York uploaded videos about a young man, Caleb, who had both ‘love bombed’ and then ‘ghosted’ them — or, in other words, made it seem as if he was intensely attracted to them and then disappeared into the night. (‘Love bombing’, I gather, is meant to refer to the extravagant displays of affection that abusers will rain down on their targets after violating them, but who are we on social media if not some kind of victim?) Young Caleb even had the gall — allegedly, at least — to meet two different women on the same day.