5 ms·
Very Important People
- fellowniusmonk 11mo agoWhat is the point of this article? It rings incredibly false and superficial to me. How is this about tech? The headspace this person is in seems like pure misery.
- Papazsazsa 11mo agoIt's social commentary about class, fame, and fate – all things very relevant to hackers and news.
- fellowniusmonk 11mo agoIt's just weird celebrity worship dressed up by arguing that celebrity is somehow this innate characteristic his specific friend Adam can spot. This is tabloid ontology. I've worked in the celebrity space for a long time, there is no there there, the dehumanizing of celebrities (and oneself) via worship, para-socializing or unearned castigation is all brain rot. This attempt to hide ungrounded "People Magazine" supermarket aisle foolishness behind pseudo gonzo journalism is such a lipstick on a pig move.
- ibash 11mo agoIt’s not celebrity worship, it’s trying to show the absurdity of celebrity worship.
- fellowniusmonk 11mo agoIt's in the frame and it's mid. There is enough ambiguity of interpretation (as is the nature of gonzo writing) and one instance of saying willow smith talks like a homeless person to trick people into missing the frame the article adopts, the mean spirited takedown and the worship are the same. This is literally textbook tabloid framing, the tabloid elevates, the tabloid destroys, the tabloid tells you have nothing better to do while you wait in a long line. This article is celebrity worship tabloid brain rot.
- Papazsazsa 11mo agoI too work in the attention economy and found the essay relevant and an enjoyable reminder of some of the genx era/Pitchfork era commentary.
- lurk2 11mo agoAre you being sarcastic?
- Papazsazsa 11mo agoNo
- mock-possum 11mo agoI find this kind of attitude insufferable to be honest. This is really hard to read.
- cwmoore 11mo ago“I've seen almost zero famous people in my life.“
- pastapliiats 11mo agoExcellent read
- frankest 11mo agoEnvy is worth talking about. It seems to pull a lot of people, like one of the strings in string theory. They want to be envied so they live an exhibitionist life, or they were surpassed by someone they thought was their equal and now they hate the gap. Is it possible people who feel envy then decide to be more exhibitionist, so they can be envied in the future? I wonder what value envy provided to evolution? Did it motivate primates to do more than they are already doing? Is it a by-product of social status behaviors?
- wseqyrku 11mo ago> by-product of social status behaviors I think that's the one. There's entire rituals to show social status. For example, weddings. That's all it is for.
- frankest 11mo agoWeddings are also a social commitment exercise to the couple. Imagine if you had break a promise you made in front of everyone both of you know, after spending a whole lot of money. It’s loss aversion and social shame that possibly made a lot of couples stick together. Even so, posing with your best clothes, food, locations, entertainment and donning all of your jewelry (all of your wealth in gold in some country) does likely play the Envy string too.
- lucyjojo 11mo agoon an individual, or societal pov, i heavily doubt this is the case... it might be true in some subsets of some societies (royalty? maybe, not sure), or maybe in some periods of times. but this view seems extremely reductive.
- gherkinnn 11mo agoI felt the potato throwing. The primate in me agrees. The potato makes us all the same again.
- 4ndrewl 11mo ago"Like most unfamous people, I feel compelled to meet as many famous people as I can." Is this how people are, or how LLMs think people are like?
- advael 11mo agoI 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
- Papazsazsa 11mo agoCelebrity 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.
- advael 11mo agoThis 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
- Papazsazsa 11mo agoSchelling points are a known outcome of many types of phenomena, especially competitive ones.
- lurk2 11mo ago> Before she started playing, she took a second to explain how love is in the air and in the trees and in the water. "And we're all, like, made out of water, you know!" she said. "And water is, like, you know, life!" It was one of the stupider things I'd heard recently, but it sounded familiar. It’s one thing to be a blogger huffing his own farts, it’s another thing to be rude about it. The girl might not have been a philosopher, but when she was given a platform she said what she had to say; when the author of this article was given a platform he used it to publish a pointless, meandering essay operating under the erroneous belief that he was a good storyteller with insightful things to say.
- Arainach 11mo agoBy leaving out the following paragraph you're doing an injustice, framing a humorous anecdote as an attack: >Then I remembered that I'd heard it before. A homeless guy had been saying this exact same thing down by the beach, although I had to admit the message benefited from the wireless microphone, the giant festival stage, and the thousands of screaming fans. It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker. The author of this article is a solid storyteller who brings in a number of human elements that make it compelling. Meandering storytelling is intentional - this isn't an article for a scientific journal.
- lurk2 11mo ago> It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker. It’s not a poignant observation. This is the issue I had with the entire article; it was an uninsightful, unoriginal tweet that the author dragged out into more than two dozen paragraphs. > The author of this article is a solid storyteller I disagree. He’s using formulaic creative writing methods and came across as pretentious. > Meandering storytelling is intentional The meandering added nothing to the story. You summarized the entire post in less than a paragraph.
- 11mo ago
- Gualdrapo 11mo agoSo they saw something that could be a person drowning and did nothing about it?
- cwmoore 11mo agoNo one seems to notice so it’s probably a bouy.
- thorn 11mo agoIt one nicely written text. I enjoyed being in the head of the author.