My Media Empire That You’ve Never Heard Of

My name is Ariel Ehrlich, I am 19 years old, and I run a media empire that you’ve never heard of. You may be asking yourself: what media empire? Who is this gay teenage Logan Roy? I’ll tell you the story.

When I was 11 years old, I was under the impression that the best way to encourage political activism was through bullying and threatening. Naturally.

After the horrific events that unfolded on February 14, 2018, at a high school in Parkland, Florida, I wanted to organize a walkout at my middle school. I decided to rally the troops by telling the other sixth graders they had to respond and agree to participate immediately, or else. I impersonated my parents and a fictitious babysitter to coerce a faster response from my friends. I suppose that this was a consequence of growing up in a media-literate family with generally unfettered internet access, as seems to be endemic amongst our youth today, and that is how it played out. In a shock to all, my mother received a distraught phone call from my friend’s parents, and I had my Snapchat revoked — it was only reinstated more than a year later, after I asked my mom on the bima at my Bar Mitzvah. (A key component of running a successful media empire is knowing your competitor’s weakest moment, and when I saw my mother sobbing hysterically in front of our congregation, I just had to seize the moment.) Of course, it worked.

That day, I re-downloaded the app and created a private story. For the elderly people reading this, let me explain: essentially the same concept as an Instagram story: photos and videos with text, disappearing after 24 hours — except you can choose who is on it. I launched my return:

An intentionally misleading post that suggested my Bar Mitzvah afterparty would be held at the Hustler Club. Of course, that was not true, but the point of my social media presence has never been the truth so much as something that might grab your attention for a moment.

Henceforth came years of stream-of-consciousness posting. My mother never went through my phone again, Baruch Hashem (and may she never again, Baruch Hashem), so I slowly shed the fear and thus the self-imposed censorship.

I had several story names over the years: i’m sARI, not sorry, came first. Then, tea with ariiii, on which I mainly spoke about other people’s personal business. (I believe that DeuxMoi stole this idea from me, but unlike me, she chooses to cloak herself in anonymity.)

During the pandemic, Trisha Paytas, the controversial and absolutely amazing YouTube sensation, released a video of herself in full Ancient Egypt cosplay to the song “King Tut (Born In Arizona Moved To Babylonia),” and captioned it, “Prob offensive will prob delete later.” My best friend, Sasha, thought that summed me up in a sentence (albeit I seldom deleted anything later), and so I renamed my private story that. Nearly five years later, it has remained entirely unchanged, except once — I renamed it after a Taylor Swift lyric minutes after she dropped Midnights in 2022. However, after receiving more backlash than the Vietnam War, it was promptly returned to its original Prob offensive glory.

Today, Prob offensive has about 450 members — down from about 600 earlier this year, when I decided that those who did not engage sufficiently did not deserve membership anymore. I don’t do one-sided relationships. After all, I grew up in a country club setting (which, historically speaking, are Prob offensive). Would a country club allow a non-paying member to use the tennis courts? Obviously not.

And let me tell you: I run a tight ship. Screenshots, sharing, or unauthorized discussions regarding Prob offensive without my explicit knowledge or consent amounts to sedition, espionage, and/or treason, all of which are punishable by guillotine — removal from the story. I really do think that I can get away with saying and doing a lot on that story because its name is a disclaimer in itself; you can’t kvetch that something is offensive if you’re being told it’s offensive beforehand.

Here is an example from this January, when I learned that private content had been circulated amongst those who were not blessed with Prob offensive membership. When I announced this hiatus, 37 members threatened suicide, and 49 said that their lives would become empty without me. “Well,” I told them, “Blame the opps. Not me.”

My parents tried to teach me from a young age that saying “no offense” before a statement did not remove its offensiveness… but then I learned the phrase “with all due respect.”

I entered adolescence during the collision of two significant cultural and societal moments: COVID-19 and cancel culture. It was very easy to spend too much time on your phone while quarantined, leading to strong opinions and affiliations with the internet. During that time, seeing people, including my own friends, have their lives practically stolen from them for certain views, statements, behaviors, or rumors just felt wrong. I’ve always been a reactionary and fiercely independent person, for better or for worse, and I think that Prob offensive was born out of that; you cannot cancel someone who refuses to be cancelled. I have always been sure not to say anything truly offensive or divisive. Still, it’s less about me striving to be “rebellious” against a cultural movement and more about existing in the freeing limbo of evading the politically correct without ever meeting its consequences, and hopefully garner a few laughs or gasps while I am at it.

As my mentor, mother, spiritual guide, guardian angel, aspirational figure, and cult leader Kate Moss once said, “It’s easy to be chewed up and spat out. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game to be able to stay in it.” I do this by saying what other people won’t and saying it with my own humor and je ne sais quoi. I think Kate, whose portrait hangs above my bed like some people have saints above theirs, would agree. Then, I think she would probably tell me to drop ten pounds by replacing meals with cigarettes, and I would tell her I agree.

So, this brings us to The Great Experiment. Like the American Experiment devised by our founding fathers, I don’t really know why I am doing this or if there is much of a point. In George Washington’s words, “I don’t know why I’m here, but my mom told me to.” It’s obviously a bit nerve-wracking to try and expand the concept of Prob offensive on a platform accessible by literally anybody, easily screenshotted, and not remotely ephemeral, but my mother says that I am not busy enough and do too little with my life and that I must start a Substack. Maybe she is right; perhaps this is my claim to fame, or at least semi-productivity. After all, when has a Jewish mother ever been wrong?

But even if she is wrong, I need her to stop, from my mouth to God’s ears. (God, in this scenario, may either be our Lord from the Bible or my mother, but they may be the same entity — I’ve certainly not seen God and my mother’s wrath simultaneously. He seems to hide when the nagging begins , and trust me, I wish I could too.)

So, welcome to Prob offensive, the SubStack.