There’s a Cleveland couple famous for walking around barefoot, even in the dead of winter. You might have seen them on TikTok or Instagram, getting kicked out of stores for shopping without shoes at Crocker Park or trying to get money out of an ATM with their toes Downtown. Maybe you saw a subsequent video where they cut the bottoms off their shoes to go barefoot incognito. In their videos, they tout the benefits of the barefoot lifestyle, such as feeling connected to “nature” and feeling “grounded.”
What you have not seen is this couple walking around barefoot in real life.
“We just thought it was funny,” Seth Fritz, the husband in the viral duo, says, while wearing shoes at Crocker Park. “It’s kind of like comedy to us.”
Christi and Seth Fritz look like your typical influencers with airbrushed features and two adorable kids. They started normally enough, filming videos of Christi dancing or vlogs of family life. But about six months ago, the couple veered from innocuous-but-popular content to trolling their viewers in increasingly uninhibited ways.
“We know that the more people that are mad or don’t like us or give us hate, that means we’re doing better,” Christi says. “We’re so numb to it because it’s just people online. Like, we don’t care.”
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Some of their videos cosplay being wealthy, claiming they bought their 4-year-old daughter a Tesla or a Burberry purse. In others, Christi intentionally mispronounces words, like “New Year’s Revolutions.” Sometimes they fake entire scenes, like when a Lululemon employee pretended to kick Christi out of the pricey store for wearing an off-brand hoodie. But they hit it big with their idea to go barefoot. Christi says the video in which they claim to destroy $20,000 of shoes (but only cut off the bottom of one shoe) was seen by 56 million people on TikTok.
Beneath all of these videos are comments calling them “stupid” or “dim” or accusing them of having a variety of mental illnesses. And yet, those same commenters keep coming back for more.
“We noticed people either want to be happy, sad, mad or laugh, some kind of emotion, whether they like it or not,” Christi says. “It’s a little bit of drama.”
That blurring between fact and fiction is what has Case Western Reserve University professor Deepak Sarma worried. The shenanigans of online personalities like the Fritzes give people something to talk about.
“Whether it’s true or not, people enjoy talking about it and it devalues the very idea of truth in the first place, which is what the internet has done so well,” they say. “People don’t care as much about what is true. They care about taking sides.”
Beth Thomas, an assistant lecturer at the Cleveland State University School of Communication, says social media is a “form of entertainment.”
“They keep coming back to see what other outrageous things they’re doing,” she says. “It goes back to ‘any publicity is good publicity,’ but it’s also duping people at the same time. A lot of times we don’t know what is fact from fiction.”
As Sarma put it, “Everyone wants a Star Wars world: You’re either with the rebellion or you’re not.”
Or in this case, you either think it’s good and grounding to walk around barefoot, or absolutely outlandish.
Christi Fritz doesn’t care much if you’re in on the joke. She sees their videos as satire, and if she has to walk around barefoot at Crocker Park to make money, that’s fine with her.
“It’s funny, and it’s fun for us,” she says. “I think what people don’t get is that it’s our job.”
That job is going well. It turns out Christi and Seth did not get a Tesla for their daughter, but they did buy one for themselves thanks to their TikTok money.
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