This Is a Generic LinkedIn Rant
mcsweeneys.net
mcsweeneys.net
"Thank you for being so brave and sharing this with the rest of us"
"This very much resonates with me, I went through a personal phase in which my core values blah blah spirit animal blah blah blah get in touch if you want to discuss further"
"Great thought! Please contact me if you are interested in pursuing a career in disrupting the cereal industry"
"<gandhi or MLK quote>"
"I fundamentally disagree with the premise, +500 lines of tedious rant"
When media was centralized, celebrities were rare, and had professional handlers and budgets. The influence of celebrity was a measurable outcome, based on control of the message and a filtered amount of contact with fans, all of it operated by agencies, to produce results backed by evidence.
Celebrity status doesn’t obey predictable rules anymore, and everything is too volatile to take seriously. Combined with highly variable tastes and interest fragmentation of “The Long Tail” the idea of celebrity, recast under the guise of the “influencer” buzzword, is a shadow of an idea from a generation ago. It’s concptual remains are grasped at by operators of the ad tech economy, who still trade on the idea that advertising even works at all, barely 10% of the time.
Celebrity isn’t gone, but the artifice of it is harder to manufacture, given the “always on” mobile internet, and how leaky or totally absent privacy is now. Any would-be celebrity fucks up in public before they’re half baked enough to retain something that resembles credibility, and the previosly perfect media narratives of the 20th century die on the vine. No matter, because ten more crop up right behnd each sacrifice, all eager drop like flies. I’m not sure when the picture of a steady state begins to develop, but we might still be a full generation (10 or 20 years) away from that, if such a thing is still possible.