Comment by advael
3 months ago
I don't think I'm completely oblivious to social status, but I've never understood at a deep level the way most people seem to process concepts like "fame" and "celebrity". I have never had the experience of being awestruck by a person, or elevating them above personhood, though I admire plenty of people. With the few brushes with, maybe we can say "microcelebrity" I've had myself, the opportunities and status benefits, while nice, seemed not worth the bizarre distorting effect on social reality it has, like the thing where someone's heard of me and talks to me like they know me when we've never met is uncomfortable at best, and most people considered various degrees of famous I've met who I came to respect seemed to be similarly jaded with this awestruck or even worshipful reaction some people seem to have when they idolize someone. I really think this whole cluster of behaviors is unhealthy and weird, and the fact that mass-communication technologies and the massive societal resources bent toward persuasion (both commercial and political) have drastically amplified it is probably one of the major causal factors in the polycrisis of the modern world
Celebrity is a commercial, political, and creative 'hack' for mass media – which isn't always unhealthy to consume e.g. good books, films, music, etc.
I agree some people take it way too far, but I personally don't have a problem if Oprah promotes an important novel I wrote.
This is a phenomenon that, like many social phenomena, seems to scale superlinearly, and you've described a gradient of economic advantage along which this will tend to accelerate. These properties suggest to me that an attitude like "it's fine as long as it's not taken too far" is at best pretty naive
Schelling points are a known outcome of many types of phenomena, especially competitive ones.
2 replies →