Andy Warhol predicted quite prophetically in the 60s that everyone would have their five minutes of fame in the future. That prophecy has pretty much come true, however the levels of fame have changed drastically and have been watered down somewhat.
Famous on the internet
The internet has made billions of people supposedly famous simply by eradicating privacy and making people more accessible and trackable than ever before. The new generation have taken to the loss of privacy like a duck to water and have never known a world where privacy was a thing people valued very much.
The fickle fleeting fame people find on the internet is a very fluid state of affairs where one minute some influencer or vapid Instagram model may recieve millions of hits and go viral for a minute or so before going back to semi-obscure fame on Ye Olde Internet(s). These dilettantes have to go back to buying more social media followers and paying dodgy sites selling views bot traffic and subscribers. If you have enough money on the internet, you can be really ‘famous’.
Fame does not mean anything if everyone is famous, much like if there was gold everywhere, it would be as valuable as any other ordinary rock. This is why real fame has sort of done a U-turn, and the only people who are left out of the roll call of the internet are the actual famous ones.
If you have a Facebook or Instagram or any other social media page with your real name, you are a compromised individual who is now supposedly ‘famous’, and are now especially known to the millions of shark companies/intelligence agencies/police mining your data, so they can target you better to sell you cheap toxic plastic trinkets from China, or arrest you at three in the morning.
The internet dilutes fame, especially on social media. Now on Twitter, any wanker can buy a blue check mark for $8 per month and be recognised next to some inconsequential rapper or influencer. Your name is next to this guy or girl, it is just a name in a list of billions on the social network, and this is the reason fame is diluted. The worst part of this is when people who acquired fame before the internet come onto a platform, and they start to spill the beans to everyone about their haemorrhoids, or have a hissy fit because they suddenly realise they are just another name in the list of suckers sucked into the data mire of manure, no one has respect for these people ever again. Your previous fame and status have been summarily sucked out of you ass first. With all mystery and enigmatic fame ruined on social media, many previously famous people are thus reduced to nothing but being another Joe or Jill talking about their toenails or some other personal detail that no one wants to know. As for your opinions? No one cares because it is all data swimming around a big fucking vacuous bowl. You see that, skip that, see another bit, skip to another piece of info, all completed in seconds. With people now having their brains altered via the internet, there is little or no patience, which filters into real life as well. Things, tasks, have to be completed immediately, and as for traffic on the roads, woe betide you if you don’t move away from the lights quick enough.
When everyone’s famous, the truly valuable people are the one’s out of the list or are anonymous. They are the rare commodity, the valuable rare diamond or bar of pure gold worth something more than the others. Supply and Demand.
