I’ve stated this before recently but fame is becoming less and less of a thing and the sooner we realize that the easier it is to find new measurements of success that work for any of us who are sharing something with the world.
We will probably always have a few household names in music, film, sports and social media, but this will be seen as less and less of a measure of success and more and more of a potential side effect of it.
The industries that have upheld a hiearchical structures of Hollyowood, the Music Industry and Professional Sports as well as other fields are becoming democratized as a natural result of the evolution of technology and the internet.
I used to hate the idea of fame and attention and so it drove me away from doing anything that would draw too many eyeballs.
But as attention becomes more and more fractured and more people want it, I realized that it’s becoming less and less relevant and less necessary for success over time.
People will inevitably have to be more discerning with where they place their attention over time. It’s still early. We think 10 years is a long time. For an individual it is but for a society or humanity as a whole, it’s a flash, a fleeting moment.
The internet became mainstream in parts of the world only a few decades ago and entered the pockets of the majority of the world only. In 2019, 34% of the population of the world had smart phones. In 2024, it was 60%.
We are only just getting started in this whole interconnectivity thing.
A lot of people focus on the negative aspects, but that’s just a matter of course for something so powerful. We are still trying to figure out how to use this stuff! Even if we think we knew, we are just scratching the surface. Airbnb wasn’t possible in 1999. Even after it became possible, it needed time to become logistically and legally practical.
The double spending problem was only solved in 2008 and it threatened to upend so much that most of the world shied away from it and half of the world still shies away from it.
Many people focus on the big brother aspect of the internet, and the systems of control that seek to dominate it. But this is just a natural reaction to a power structure being disrupted and proof that they are being forced to change. They don’t really know what to do, if they did, I wouldn’t be here saying this, I’d probably locked in a cell somewhere for having ideas.
Yes there are those who seek to see that happen but they only succeed in the short term. The overall trajectory of humanity is quite clear and can be summed up in one word:
Decentralization.
People think too much in terms of hierarchical structures instead of decentralized networks. The old world was run on hierarchy and castes. Some societies allowed for more social mobility but it has still been a hiearchical structure.
That is braking down.
Fame in it’s traditional sense is nothing but bullshit, rubbing the backs of whoever you have to to stay on top, creating whatever your company wants you to create or at the very least doing things within their rules.
Influencers are an intermediary stage. There’s still tons of bullshit, and this time you cater to the algorothms created and maintained by corporations, but you have the freedom to be your own boss and make your own decisions abbot how to operate.
The issue we face now is that so many of us were overly excited about the potential to reach the top, to be Mr. Beast ot Taylor Swift. In the meantime, we forgot about the importance of building real communities that we feel connected to.
But as I said, it’s only been the blink of an eye in the scheme of things. We forgot how to connect with each other, but 10-20 years of conditioning is only meaningful in the big picture if we allow it to continue.
Of course if we look from within the system it seems to only be moving more and more to that. And now AI is here to render many of us completely irrelevent in that centralized hiearchical system.
As soon as you look outside of that system, you see a different picture.
How many of you know of Dan Deacon? No one I assume. But he has 48,000 followers on instagram and although I don’t know for certain, I can make an educated guess that he can make a living from his music. He tours all over the world playing energetic electronic pop music and makes soundtracks for films both independent and part of that old system.
How many of you have heard of Tengger? I’d be very surprised if you have. They are an ambient band formed by a husband, wife and their young child. They tour the world playing mudic that 99% of people don’t care about, and they are able to do that.
They have 10.k monthly active listerners on spotify, 1/46000 the listeners of Tyler the Creator.
I don’t know them personally so I can’t tell you what their financial situation is like but I personally know other people with half the following who can earn a living. Some play many shows to very dedicated fans, some are invited by festivals and events, some sell lots of merch, some write music for film on the side.
I know one guy who has 167 monthly listeners on streaming platforms and still manages to provide for himsef through music.
The point is that there are potentially hundreds of thiusands of musicians and millions of people who have turned their passions into full time work.
This may have been an unpleasant grind for many of them but this is changing too. As the hierarchical structures become more and more centralized and as AI makes us more and more useless from within that system, more energy leaves the system, craving true connection and community.
So if you want to contribute to society and be rewarded for it, now is the time.
There is no road laid out for you. You’ll have to figure it oit by yourself. Maybe it’s smart to prepare for failure. Maybe its smart to have a backup plan, or to keep your dayjob. That’s up to you.
Decentralization is already here and it’s going to grow.
It’s all just about connecting with people who really see and appreciate you and growing along with life experiences, finding comfortable ways to monetize along the way that don’t compromise on integrity or make you feel like a sell out .
I’m figuring out my own version of this.
I stopped making “content” except for at hive because I realized I already had the network IRL to find a few hardcore supporters and make my passions more sustainable, I just needed to keep doing the work to prove it to them.
I haven’t quit teaching languages and coaching, partially because I like it and partially because I want to give my music a chance to grow naturaly as I transition from treating teaching as the main gig to being more of a side gig.
I can already see results and they came not from trying to convince people on social media but by doing the hard work of improving at the things I felt I needed to improve on. People saw a differences and that made them want to supprort me.
We’ve made the mistake of thinking that the internet can create our success and that we need to reach millions but really we do much better by putting out efforts into wherever we have the most going on in our lives, be it on discord or at our local pub. And if you don’t have much going on in your life, that’s al the reason to go out and explore and take risks until you find a community or a group you’d like to create one for.