We Live in a Culture of Fame-Mongering

I miss a time before the internet, when people's private lives were private and we didn't sell ourselves to the highest bidder.

Photo by Warren on Unsplash

We were eighteen and nineteen wearing clothes out of J. Crew catalogs, sporting baseball caps and complaining about campus cafeterias. All this money spent and pasta was the only food worth eating. We sipped our Snapples, wore our flannels, blasted our grunge because this was the era of our discontent before eras were a thing. We called out to our friends from open windows, called them on the phone, and wrote long letters during the summer. But deep down we were still wide-eyed and gleaming. We had verve, we had moxie, we were shimmying in our seats from all the possibility.

We were freshman in college and removed from the watchful eyes of our parents. We drank 151 out of fishbowls, we danced our bars, we had IDs that swore we were 21 when we barely had the right to vote. But we followed the pack going out on Thursday nights for the fifty cent drafts and five-dollar drink-ups. We blacked out, we threw up, we rolled around on dorm room floors.

Having just turned 18, rape wasn’t real to me until my best friend told me, albeit casually, that her boyfriend wouldn’t stop. Wouldn’t let go even after she shouted no, and I didn’t understand it because no meant hell no — it actually was that black and white to me until everyone, everywhere made in grey.

One weekend, I yelled at her boyfriend in public. Called him a rapist for the things he’d done, for the way he made my friend feel. Guilty, confused because he felt entitled to what she could and could not give. And everyone stared at me like I was the monster. And everyone hushed me because why are you making such a big deal? Why are you kicking up a fuss? Because everyone knew your boyfriend couldn’t be a rapist. Rapists were scary men in alleyways. Rapists were seedy men you didn’t know not the preppy boys with designer frames from good families.

Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s discovering late in life that I have autism and I tend to sometimes not a read a room. Often, I blurt things. Often I make people feel uncomfortable with the things I say and how I say them. Because I’ve never been rewarded for calling out bad behavior. Instead, I’m applauded for my silence and the large degree of my complicity.

You’ll never be famous. You’ll never be popular. Because you’re not political enough. You don’t know how to play the game. Whether it was book publishing or social media, I’ve never been able to navigate the politics and duplicity. The kiss-kiss we’re all good while we prattle on behind one another’s backs. The phoniness required to be adored by the masses so you can sell them things they don’t want or need. The house of lies that delivers a fiction of a life that is, at turns, overwhelming and devastating because we can never quite keep up with all the beautiful things we covet on our screens. We’ll never have a home like that, a body like that, a face like that, a life like that.

All the while I wondered why a game had to be played. Why can’t we be decent and honest? I’ve learned one of my problems (among many, admittedly) is that my values do not bend or waver. I don’t compromise my morals or integrity. I’m not fake simply because I’m not particularly likable or accessible. I make it impossible for people to contact me because strangers give me severe anxiety on the level of palpitations. (I am not being dramatic for effect on this one.) I don’t pretend to be nice to people because I don’t like most people. My circle is sonnet small. If given the option, I’d rather be alone. Or in the company of animals who have no motivation to connive or deceive.

Animals don’t want to be famous or rich — they simply want to live and live decently.

Lately, I haven’t felt the urge to create. Because why bother? No one reads books or stories that challenge them or invite them to sit in discomfort. Why bother when everyone’s outsourced their minds to AI technology while their critical thinking skills are atrophying. Why bother when everyone would rather mindlessly scroll and watch videos of people who are truly underserving of a platform? Why bother when the end goal of everything always is how can I make money off of this instead of how can I embark on something exciting and new? Why bother when we’re encouraged to dumb down for the masses? We think: how can I appear cuter, younger, more amiable?

How can I make more money?

Even when I write about my mourning something larger than me, than art, people elbow their way into their comments to bemoan how they’ve worked so hard on Medium and why aren’t they making any money, not realizing they’ve majored in missing the point of everything I’ve just written.

Because art is not just about fucking money. And yes, this is coming from someone with zero savings, no safety net, no family, no retirement — someone who probably won’t file taxes for a second year in a row because I can’t deal with the money I’ll owe and the IRS-driven panic attacks that will invariably ensue.

We always say that we ignore the pot of water coming to a boil and only see the disaster at the moment the water boils and the animal scalds and burns. We rarely see the full weight of something in the during only in its becoming. Years ago, when we switched out our rotary phones for our push-buttons for our cordless for our brick cellulars to our flip phones to our smartphones we marveled at the technology. The world had suddenly become richer, closer, easier. Technology brought people together, created movements, democratized voices — and while all of this is true I wonder if the rot we’re enduring is worth the convenience.

A litigator with decades of experience, is being demeaned by a simpleton who uploaded a document to ChatGPT and suddenly they’re a peer, an attorney, an equal voice in the game. Legions of terrible mothers earn millions of views and dollars for the lengths they’ll go to neglect their children and they’ll still have their apologists and defenders.

People flood the internet with garbage and noise with their AI-written stories and sloppy journalism legitimized by the fancy tech platforms they reside on. Because they’re on Medium or Substack, they’re suddenly an authority. They’re not beholden to corporate overlords because they’re independent, accountable to their masses when slowly uncover who sponsors their content, who bridges relationships and connections. And while legitimate independent voices exist, the field is not as clean as everyone wants us to believe. Not everyone is as trustworthy as they claim to be.

Because when money is a strong motivator, when the desire to be known is an even stronger motivator, sometimes we’re willing to bend a little here and there and we don’t realize — until it’s too late — that all that bending will break us. And when we’re broken we don’t examine ourselves for diagnosis and repair, no, we keep on breaking. Because the numbers are going up. The accolades and collabs and invitations to parties are too good. And the money? It’s even better.

Over the past year, my eyes have opened and I’m finally starting to see and I wish that I could be asleep and blind again. Writers I’ve followed, liberal voices I’ve supported have unmoored me with their double-dealings, lies, cozying up, and duplicity. I’m shocked by the lengths people will go to “go viral” even if it means hurting everyone they love or shaming themselves in the process. And we keep rewarding the shocking, the attention-grabbing, and the profane. We reward them with our attention and dollars. We reward people — whose only talent is their ability to shock us or sell to us — by giving them a platform and sustaining their indecency.

It’s such that I’ve found it hard to ferret out the real creators. People who add something meaningful to the world whether it’s from the food they make to the stories they tell to all the ways in which they’re trying to make this world less of a horrible place.

But still, the algorithms will try to push garbage on me in hopes that it will stick. And sometimes it does, sometimes I’m weak and fall into a rabbit hole of why does this mother have her five children sleep on the kitchen floor while her and her boyfriend live it up in a spacious bedroom? Why is she famous? Why is her living predicated by the terrible things she’s done instead of what she can create or contribute?

Years ago, I had a public online meltdown. It was what the kids would call cringe. It was a few years in the making, though. Bouts of me crying into my phone, oversharing, and humiliating myself because I felt that it would make me less alone. But the reality is I’d never felt more alone. It was then that I took a step back and realized that the best parts of my private left deserve to be private and when I share them they’re no longer mine. My life is left for consumption and the sharp grisly teeth that is the internet.

Maybe it’s that we’re living in a Twilight Zone moment where everything feels like it’s simultaneously on fire but unfathomable, a time when I know it’s critical that people create that which is real, true, and tangible, but I am subsumed by the garbage and the noise and the nonsense.

I do miss a time when we were mostly offline. When we were bored but curious. I miss the first few years of the internet when we all feverishly created — before creation became inextricably bound to commerce. When only marketers like me knew the definition of the world brand because not everyone was trying to cultivate one.

But perhaps, most importantly, I miss a time when people didn’t whore out the whole of their lives for profit. When they didn’t realize that airing the most private and profane parts of themselves are what makes them famous. And more importantly, makes them money.