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Comment by mhartz | Hacker News Reader

> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account.

Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped

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They were dedicated to the craft though, there have been countless people who dedicated themselves to pushing the boundaries of their profession and lost their personal lives in the process. Losing yourself to achieve something new in math, art, science, etc. can be seen as a worthwhile sacrifice.

Content creators feels more perverse because they are sacrificing themselves to making metrics go up. The act of creation is in service to metrics that please an algorithm so views go up.

If the magicians didn't care about magic at all but were obsessed with optimizing the show around ticket sales it would be a shitty movie.

I am very skeptic of the creator economy, but to play devils advocate:

Could it be that "craft" until now has been a high dimensional and abstract conceptual navigation exercise, for which some people had both (1) the compass of intuition and (2) the drive. Replacing craft with metrics means that people without the high dimensional intuition/compass (but with the drive) can still play a part in the game.

So maybe this is just another example of unbundling and specialisation process, that is democratising access to renown (or whatever the wealth of "renown" is, in the sense of network topology)

Of course, if the compass that is replaced with metrics is miscalibrated in the system, the end point can still be a very sick society (even if access to the renown in that sick society is more equitably distributed by some measures)

I created an account after many many years on this site to tell you I have had the same thoughts about this navigation in a higher space, akin to spelunking in a cave system of concepts, this is just another way to explore viable concepts.

It's a horrid part of the cave system imo but it's obviously viable.

Oh wow, then I feel very honoured :) It's neat to have that feeling of one of your "weird" or "niche" thoughts being captured (even if poorly) by someone else, living a different life. I love that feeling when I encounter it here!

I often think of minds as very spatial as well, in that introducing new concepts to a mind requires it be tailored to specific characteristics of that mind, like tuning the parameters of a autonomous vehicle before sending it off on its own into the mind, hoping it makes it deeply within.

The truly impressive and powerful concepts (which I understand to have very specific and complex high dimensional symmetry), are those which I assume are the ones that we call poetic or beautiful or resonant. They are the ones whose shape is finely tuned to resonate deeply with the shared shapes of many many human minds.

Often I think of people in their minds as people in mazes, and there are certain areas of the maze people go to, that sometimes certain neurotypes can imagine well, but others can only treat as a black box (though really, they are the maze itself)

It’s not really more equal access, just different people have access than before. There’s still only so much room at the top.

Great analogy! As a performing magician and a big fan of the movie, I get how obsession with a craft can blur the line between reality and performance. But that line still exists. The best actors, creators, and magicians make us feel they’re being real, even when they’re not.

This is why I struggle with enjoying Andy Kaufman's content -- I'm never entirely sure where that line is. I respect his dedication to the craft, but I have a difficult time enjoying it -- on a meta level, it's unsettling.

Also, exactly his aim

Kaufman was Daniel Day Lewis-level dedicated to the character, but there are others, Tom Green for instance, who ostensibly was just as dedicated for the first arc of his fame and career, then loosened his grip on the persona with age. I often think about his trajectory compared to the average social media influencer -- he pioneered so many things and has worked in a bunch of mediums while they're basically imprisoned in their chosen persona, doomed to repeat the formula / gimmick / character day in and day out until the novelty wears off for everybody and they burn out entirely 12-24 months later. The ones with the most longevity seem to have been able to retain autonomy as a creator rather than a creation, as mentioned in the article, allowing them to grow and evolve rather than forever being a one-note wonder whose entire raison d'etre is eating shoe polish on camera.

A couple times that theme appears (there are more)

---

https://youtu.be/uckLb_8LEGQ?t=36s

ANGIER

(scorn)

It's misdirection- he leaves those things lying around to make you think he's using a double.

OLIVIA

All the time? He doesn't know when I'm looking

ANGIER

All the time, Olivia- that's who he is, that's what it takes- he lives his act, don't you see?!

---

Also the dialogue after the fishbowl performance https://youtu.be/J8ZXT2HTxqE?t=34s

BORDEN

(points)

This is the trick. This is the performance, right here. This is why no one can detect his method. Total devotion to his art...

Vonnegut also uses this in Mother Night.

    We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

This isn't purely new, either. I'm perhaps dating myself a bit but I recall that over the years I have seen a few actors have this weird vibe where they're never "human", they always "on" and seem like their actor-thing has totally subsumed their humanity.

David Cassidy and Shirley McClain come to mind for me on this.

Peter Sellers also had this problem; in his case, it was a problem with his personality (or lack of one) rather than something acting did to him.

Comedians seem to exhibit this trait more often than others. Norm Macdonald had a somewhat similar vibe.

Johnny Depp maybe?

I realize I'm probably in the minority for this, but for me when people create a "persona" for their media, it turns me away. I prefer watching people who are more genuine, whose content is less entertainment and more just themselves, even if that isn't what the internet seems to be looking for.

I find it somewhere between "very uncomfortable" and "creepy". Even as a kid something felt very off in those interviews.

The people you consider "more genuine" are just cultivating a different persona.

Don't ever believe you "know" someone you don't. Parasocial relationships are harmless at the low level but quickly become toxic.

Always meet your heros so you can understand they are normal and flawed humans

I think it's even more complex than that. There's only one human I can understand pretty thoroughly, inside and out, and that's me -- and even then, there are a lot of limitations!

We cannot know all the thoughts and experiences of another human being. Even when that person is 100% genuine, there will be aspects to that person that will surprise you!

And that doesn't even get into the weeds of autistics, ADHDers, and intelligent people (I happen to be all three) -- who learn from an early age they have to pretend to be something they aren't, otherwise they'll face intense bullying and ostracision. And even then, there's going to be something "off" about them ....

I grew up watching The Rock. As an adult, it's hard to look past the persona he shows when talking about anything on any medium.

One of the problems with modern social media (and digital media in general) is that this is now happening, to some extent, to everyone. This is particularly a problem for children, who are exposed to this so early that they may never internalize the difference between existence and performance.

Bo Burnham said it really well in an interview:

"I'm saying I feel very stressed because I feel like I'm on stage panicking in front of thousands of people... and I feel like I'm trapped within a performance and I'm freaking out because of it. And 13-year-olds were going 'yeah yeah, I feel like that every day'. And I go 'what are you talking about?' and I realize that the stresses of a C-list comedian were democratized and given to an entire generation.... Social media has made life a performance."

I'm not sure where the original interview is, but I found the quote at 9:43 of this analysis of Inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHat1OlMPeY

Bo Burnham really does have a lot to say on growing up on YouTube and the effects of social media/always performing/looking for an audience. I agree with pretty much all of it, but the most thought provoking one to me was in his Make Happy special right before his big ending. Him talking about the "Me Generation" from that special - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41hNI3YYnWk

> they became inseparable

If one spends most of their waking hours in front of camera producing video after video it's bound to happen subconsciously whether they like it or not.

Arguably also true for some (many?) tech entrepreneurs.

And that those who most successful are able to appear magical because they are willing to do things so unreasonable that the possibility doesn’t even cross your mind.

It reminded me of the old Vonnegut novel "Mother Night". The refrain from that work was "You are what you pretend to be."

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