Follow Your Dreams into a PsyOp Trap!
Forget your family, your community, your demands for fair labor!
The Internet’s been in a tug of war this week. One side saying social media should charge users. The other saying content creators need to be paid. If past is prologue, expect to pay for Instagram, etc. The Gizmodo article detailing how social media will charge users points out the parallel with airlines making flying more miserable and charging for ways to make the flight less miserable that were free before (leg room, complimentary food). Just as we had been flying for too long to seriously consider any alternative, the theory goes, we have been on social for about twenty years now and can’t seriously go back.
How did we get here? In the early days of social — the social networking era of MySpace and Facebook — there was a genuine attempt to build social networks of friends. But even in those Edenic days, MySpace had MySpace Music for musicians to connect to their fans. Great for established bands, but this also stoked the unrealistic expectations of countless amateur emo bands and eventually comedians (myself included) 1 Then Facebook introduced the news feed and the like button. Now you need enough likes to compete with your other friends for attention. Not an accident that Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster was released around this time. Then Twitter and Instagram flooded the flames of fame-seeking with nitroglycerin. Being the high school beauty queen was not enough. Now you needed a sponsorship deal.
So the fame monster brought us here. What’s the origin story of the fame monster? Apparently it goes back to the Renaissance, according to Tara Isabella Burton’s new book Self-Made. Specifically, the cult of genius. Renaissance artistic geniuses like Albrecht Durer and Leonardo DaVinci came from poor families to ascend the ranks of artistic fame. Class mobility in general was a hallmark of the Renaissance, with the rise of the merchant class. But the cult of artistic genius was special. These men had a spark of divinity. In order to not upset the status quo, the emphasis was on God-given talent and many of these geniuses worked with royalty and the Church. But this was the beginning of artists being out on a high pedestal.
As Chris Jesu Lee clarifies in this excellent Substack on the cult of artistic genius, artistic genius was often a platform to justify white male dominance and suppress female or minority points of view. What I would add is that, being that the fame monster goes back to the Renaissance, and that it has long perpetuated the rags to riches myth, chasing your dreams to fame is one of the oldest myths and arguably the most enduring myth of capitalism.
The myth pretty much endured as is until the 1970s, when it grew out of control. The decline of family and community, in addition to the advent of neoliberal markets, led to The Me Epoch we are currently in. The search for recognition that a person needs from a good family, a tight-knit community and a stable job devolved into more depraved attempts of attention seeking over the past 50 years.
This cycle of seeking attention from the faceless admiring masses (with the help of corporations that can deliver them of course) is an incredible engine of industry. Or as Drew Michael said in his latest special Red Blue Green:
There does seem to be some light on the horizon though. Since MeToo, there has been greater skepticism of male artists and celebrities. Since the pandemic, this spread to include female artists and celebrities, any famous person who was out-of-touch with Joe Public. You could even say the youth are increasingly as skeptical now of chasing your dreams as hippies were of the American Dream.
There are still holdouts. But many of these holdouts are aging. Many of these holdouts were told they can follow their dream and be anything they want in this great casino country.
Again I do not say this from the mountaintop. It took me until two months ago at age 47 to completely let go of all desires of fame. What has worked for me and, I would humbly suggest, might work for you, is humility. My process with 12 step recovery has taught me that being humble is not about seeing yourself as less than. It’s about recognizing that you are human. Philosophers that I have long admired like Nietzsche treated humility like it was an op itself. Which it was. For years it helped the common people act like sheep. But, just like Zizek said about capitalism incorporating the message of pleasure in order to ensnare us, it has also steered us away from humility. Oftentimes it has even weaponized Nietzsche’s Ubermensch ideals to have us strive for greatness by buying more and hustling harder. Being humble nowadays means striving for less possessions. Perhaps you may not leave your terrible job to become an influencer, but you may ask why your job does not have healthcare to begin with and fight for it with your fellow humble worker bees. Who knows? You may even bargain for higher wages so you can afford Instagram.
In 2009 I would look at the amount of gigs in my MySpace calendar and compare them to other comedians. Compared to the other open mikers I saw in the city, my gig count was actually high. I made a list of calendar rankings of me and other mikers (I did all this ranking at my day job weekly). I even embedded the calendar on my blog. As my gigs dwindled, my embedded MySpace gig calendar was smaller. I was humiliated and stopped writing my blog.
In the 1960’s, McLuhan used to say : “Publication is a self-invasion of privacy”