So you went to space for likes

Just say you want a zero gravity catwalk, we don't need to pretend this was progress

Where were you when Katy Perry and her (contractually obligated) pals went into space? We’ll all remember the moment forever won’t we? A truly special eleven minutes when six girl bosses bossed a little too close to the sun (not too close, they were basically hovering above Swindon) and launched a thousand glorious memes in the process. On their return, Katy Perry kissed the ground (the trip was eleven minutes long, I cannot stress this often enough), Jeff Bezos stacked it as he ran to open the capsule, while his fiancé Lauren Sanchez told reporters that the trip showed the need to “protect this planet.” Amazon’s global emissions hit over 68 million metric tonnes of C02e last year, but do tell us more about how we should try and stop the planet from dying Lauren. The whole thing was horrendously depressing, totally pointless and bleakly hilarious. It felt like a Potemkin village, a chance for the mega rich to play high up above us, to look down and see a snippet of the world without the unsightly markers of war, poverty and climate change

And here I get to my main point. Other people have gone into great detail about the climate destruction a trip like this causes. They have pointed out how perfectly it highlighted growing wealth inequality, not to mention how ridiculous it was to call it a leap forward for feminism. I want to talk about something much less important. Namely, that I genuinely think that most of these women only did it so they’d have a cool backdrop for social media content. The entire trip (eleven minutes, basically one go on the It’s A Small World ride at EuroDisney) was for the selfies, the TikToks, the chance to one up their celebrity mates or any one of those basic rich influencers who still thinks posing on the back of a yacht outside of Portofino is peak content. ‘Sucks to be you Gwyneth,’ Lauren Sanchez is hissing, ‘I’ve got a video of me doing a peace sign in zero gravity.’ Sure Taylor Swift can post videos of sell out stadiums, Katy Perry reassures herself, her nose bleeding as she blinks for the first time in three hours, but I sang ‘What a wonderful world’ to the world.