Meet the Man Who Manages Indonesia's Most Controversial Social Media Celebrity

Oka Mahendra was sitting at a spartan, but still somehow messy desk when his phone started to ping with Instagram notifications.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.

He looked at his phone, it's a photo of him with his girlfriend—and top talent—Karin Novilda. The photo was going crazy on social media as the more than a million followers of Karin's Instagram page double-tapped the image to show their support. It left Oka with conflicting emotions. It's his job to manage his girlfriend's career as AWKARIN, one of Indonesia's most polarizing young celebrities. But it's also an invasion of privacy, a difficult compromise between giving Karin's fans what they want and still maintaining some sense of a private life.

"Yeah, because if you were friends with me maybe a year before all of this, I'm like a living breathing VICE," Oka said. "I'm unfiltered. But now I can't be, right? It's hard for me every day. I can't even take pictures in the same t-shirt. I'm not bothered by it, but I don't enjoy it. I didn't want this, you know?"

"Do you post on it often?" I asked.

"I try to," he said. "I mean my feeds are pretty nice. I'll show you. Karin told me I need to be consistent with my Instagram. But I don't want to be famous. I just want the money."

Oka is the 22-year-old CEO of Takis Entertainment—a company whose influence spreads well beyond its seemingly humble means. The company is run out of a half-empty apartment at North Jakarta's Graha Cempaka Mas Apartments. A neon sign reading "Takis" hung on the wall. When Oka flipped the switch it briefly flickered to life and then gave up. Oka sat at a glass-topped black desk and fiddled with a black American Express card. The desk was strewn with empty glasses and a light dusting of cigarette ash. A few tiny ants wandered aimlessly across the desktop.

In the living room, everyone stared at a screen. A half-dozen young men and women were focused intently on the screens of laptops, smartphones, digital cameras, and tablets. This is what it looks like when social media is your business, when the thing you're selling is a curated, brand-sponsored reality back to an adoring public.

"The best thing about Karin is, for example, if some company gives her this bag to promote, she can deliver it like she's never been paid to do it," Oka said.

It's a world where a bathroom selfie gets 80,000 likes. A world where a picture of Karin posing in nerd glasses in front of wall-sized photo of a sandwich gets more than 450 comments. That photo is captioned, "im trying to cut down on my fucking swearing. let's see how the fuck it goes. top (it's actually a dress i slip it into my pants lol): @chicotienda." It's the perfect example of what Takis and Karin do so well. The whole thing is bizarre, seemingly unfiltered, and still an advertisement for a dress. Her fans respond "cantik ka" ("you're so beautiful").

"We're building billboards," Oka said. "All this social media stuff is like investing in billboards in the future."

There was a moment when it all seemed like it was on the verge of collapse. Karin's feed became a flashpoint for the ongoing battle between conservative and liberal values in Indonesia. The country's child protection agency (KPAI) reported Karin, and other social media celebs, to the Ministry of Communications in September over what they deemed vulgar content. One of the KPAI commissioners said "AWKARIN's profanity and indecent behavior can influence children to imitate her lifestyle." Another said "AWKARIN's content is too negative. It can affect a child's development." Suddenly Takis—then a tiny record label with little more than a name—risked losing its biggest star.

She met with the KPAI, publicly apologized, and promised to change her attitude. The whole situation was then brought to a swift end. The KPAI stopped criticizing Karin, and she, and the rest of the Takis crew, continued on with life as normal. But she still remains one of the more controversial figures in Indonesia, a polarizing woman who is loved by some and lambasted by others. A trailer advertising a coming VICE Indonesia interview with AWKARIN prompted someone to call her a "virus" in a tweet to our account.

What's surprising is how fresh this whole story is. Oka began his career as the head of a talent management company after returning from a few years of university in Seattle, Washington. He used to rap under the name "Cash," but he was looking to focus more on the business side of hip-hop here in Indonesia. He had a few mutual acquaintances with Young Lex, and the two were quickly in talks about his company Takis Entertainment—which was interested in expanding and taking on new talent. Young Lex saw a lot of potential in AWKARIN—a young woman who was then just starting to make waves on Indonesian celebrity news sites.

But the controversy was starting to build. People online were diving into AWKARIN's past, and a series of photos of the then 18-year-old Karin drinking alcohol at Jakarta bars and nightclubs quickly became an issue. Young Lex asked Oka if he would run Takis and step-in to repair AWKARIN's image.

"My first job at Takis was to fix her life up," Oka said. "Her surroundings were toxic. She was in a really bad place in life. Imagine being a kid making that type of money, with no-one managing you. Living alone. She could've died.

"Two days after we met Karin to talk about Takis, the photo from H Gourmet came out—the one where she was passed out drunk. She was drinking five times a week. Imagine being 18 years old and being assaulted by millions of people, and in Indonesia there isn't any counseling for that type of stuff. So it was my job, as the CEO of Takis, to care for her."

The KPAI meeting was part of the PR blitz to fix AWKARIN's image problem. But they also leaned into the controversy, releasing a music video titled "Bad" in the same month. In the video, AWKARIN rapped "I'm a bad girl." It was the start of a new career for Karin, one that she plans to continue, explained Oka.

"Hip-hop never became a culture, like dangdut, [in Indonesia]," Oka said. "Hip-hop isn't embraced like it is in the U.S. Now hip-hop's path to mainstream media, and we're talking to millions of people, as crazy as this sounds, is AWKARIN.

"Karin is the first to hit these numbers on YouTube. If we're talking facts, if Iwa K, Saykoji, and everybody else made a song together, they still wouldn't get the same views that Karin got in the video for 'Bad'. But it's not about the number of views, its about the attention people are giving to Indonesian hip-hop, and that's a good thing."

Within a few weeks, Oka and Karin were dating. Their relationship is now Instagram fodder for AWKARIN's feed as their personal life spilled into their work life. It's nothing new for Karin, who once posted a video of her boyfriend breaking up with her—and her sob-filled reaction—to YouTube. It got hundreds of thousands of views before Karin made the video private.

"It's still kind of mind-blowing for me," Oka said of his online life.

Later that week, I was sitting with Oka and Karin at a music video shoot in the suburbs of Jakarta. We were in a well-designed house, lounging near the pool, and talking about Karin's burgeoning music career.

"I'm kinda ditching radio," Oka said. "I just don't see the point in it, I'm ditching TV already. I just don't see the point. So if you want to see Karin's stuff, just go to her YouTube page."

As we spoke, three other cameras were trained on us, filming the interaction. One camera, Oka said, was for AWKARIN's YouTube vlog. One was for some behind-the-scenes footage. The third one? I have no idea. Oka told me that he wants to be in Forbes Magazine and retire by the age of 25. That's a mere three years from now, but Oka said that it's possible.

The shoot was running four hours late. They wanted to film a party scene for her new music video "Candu," but they had to wait for more extras to arrive. Oka and Karin seemed unfazed. A small team of extras—all fans who volunteered to do the shoot—hung out nearby. I asked them why they love AWKARIN.

"She can say whatever she wants and not care what other people think," one told me. "I think she's real, not like a lot of people."