Kim Kardashian’s saved us all... from being idiots like her
IADMIT it. I’m someone who struggles to keep up with the Kardashians. And for that I blame myself. I have failed to follow basic 21st Century etiquette and have not watched much of the TV reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians, the principal aim of which is to ensure that you, er, keep up with the Kardashians.
I have not kept up. I was too busy valuing my sanity.
This week, though, we were all forced to keep up. And since seeing the news from Paris, where Kim Kardashian was robbed of £9million worth of jewels in the middle of the night, I realise that I have made a mistake. I have been missing out on something important: Kim is a heroine for our age.
I never thought I’d be thanking a woman who regularly poses with her boobs out in hotel bathrooms for rescuing womankind (and mankind, come to that). But these are strange times and our saviours come in the strangest of guises, even sometimes wearing almost no clothes at all.
How has Kim saved us? By demonstrating to the rest of us – and especially to anyone who ever thought about putting a lot of their life online – exactly how not to behave. Without meaning to, Kim has ended up as a one-woman safety warning for the internet era.
Give this woman an award. She has suffered so that others may be able to see their own folly.
LET’S be clear about the circumstances. Everyone deserves to be safe in their own home and, perhaps especially, safe in their own £10,000-anight temporary Paris residence. Setting aside conspiracy theories, no one deserves to be the victim of a crime.
And it is also entirely possible, of course, that the thieves who targeted Kim are too busy to use Instagram and so didn’t see the picture she posted days before of the £3 million emerald-cut diamond ring her husband Kanye gave her recently to celebrate his latest deal with Adidas.
It’s possible, right? She may not have been directly targeted for this particular ring, which was engraved, by the way, with the word ‘Adidas’. Feel the romance, guys.
But even if the thieves didn’t see the advert for that particular piece of bling that went out to Kim’s 84.5 million followers, there are bazillions more photographs that show the lifestyle, the wealth and the fantasy of human existence being one long fashion party, seen through the most appropriately flattering filter.
The Kardashians, as an entity, represent something supposedly to be admired, envied and coveted. That is their whole reason for being. They keep nothing back. Not even a precious personal gift. (And certainly the most precious gift ever to be engraved with the name of an international sportswear manufacturer.)
This incident, then, is a cautionary tale. The total absence of privacy carries huge risks. And living your life so outwardly online is a defiance of common sense.
NONE of us will live that out on the same scale because we won’t have the burden of having 84.5million followers. But it’s a reminder of the fact that the internet makes us reveal stupid things about ourselves that we shouldn’t.
The most recent survey on attitudes to social media showed that a third of people have lost out on possible jobs because their prospective employers didn’t like what they found on their personal feeds.
I doubt Kim has to worry about that sort of thing. But in any case she has done us all a service. Check your privacy settings. Think before you post. Cultivate some mystique. And embrace the harmless online.
I love a cat video as much as the next timewaster. And I recently posted some Facebook pictures of the dilapidated Star Wars cupcakes I made as an example of the world’s most epic Bake Off fail. No one broke in to steal them.
The Kardashian Heist of 2016 is a warning against giving away too much of yourself – especially anything valuable. Because the thing is, if you fail to use common sense online, real life will always come and bite you in the digitally enhanced backside.