The truth is the last big star was Michael Jackson. The internet flattened stardom, we're all just in it together.
– Bob Lefsetz
Reggie: “Selfies are so last year. So passe. Right now the hot new thing is taking pictures of other people. They’re called ‘othies.’”
Scott: “Let me try.” (click) “...I don’t know, it doesn’t look enough like me.”
Reggie: “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not going to catch on.”
– Reggie Watts & Scott Aukerman, Comedy Bang Bang
This is how one game of separation works: technology democratizes power, liberating limited resources, making what was scarce for prior generations suddenly available to everyone...and so, as what provided privilege to those in charge erodes beneath their feet, they capitalize on the high that everyone is feeling by exploiting subtler limitations that are even harder to distribute equally.
It used to be the case that only priests could read, and literacy kept the clergy fat for centuries, until the printing press allowed the common people access to their sacred texts and ushered in an era of democracy that wouldn’t have been possible before. When reading protestants seized governance from popes and kings, the ruling class did not just go away – it simply moved to higher ground: the people with “external” power were the ones who owned the printing presses.
Nowadays, we’re living through another changing of the guard, as everybody with an internet connection can, in theory, publish worldwide...but who is reading (or, more likely, watching) it? When information went from scarce to overwhelmingly abundant, our attention – once an undiscovered resource – soon became the limiting commodity. To mold the minds and energies of the masses, these days, you do not need priests or printing presses; you need programmers – the kind that know what keeps ‘em clicking, fascinated.
“Fascination” comes from fascinare, to enchant – and that may be related to the fascia, the muscles, bands, and bundles holding us together in a single body. Knowing how to fascinate an otherwise seemingly empowered public, you command a power greater than the kings of old. You bind the people into muscles that will work for you by letting them believe they’re free while you exploit their interests. Let them choose between the options you provide. (You can’t “dislike” a Facebook post; the code determines how we interact.) But then, again, the ones who make these choices for the rest of us are equally deluded by a failure to perceive how all this gaming operates on false assumptions: that there is a separate self to protect and promote; that the most effective strategy for gaining power is to rule, instead of serve- leaving everyone with an online environment that reflects the internal limitations of its creators.
And what is more perennially popular than anything? The self, of course! With access to the sum of human knowledge, the majority of us spend most of our time obsessed with social media, because of how the age of television manufactured the “celebrity” and made us want to be the person on the screen. Like coke-addicted lab rats with our fingers on the button, we’re so high on having people watch what we are doing we don’t realize that this isn’t really food. Because we are blind to who we are “underneath” our identification as social animals, we crave the recognition of our peers – and that’s exploited so easily that we rarely even notice. The Facebook likes, the Youtube views, the Twitter favorites – none of this is currency; we’re simply playing into the behaviorists’ and advertisers’ hands. The irony of it is just astounding: all the time and energy we pour into our profiles and our posts, the life that we invest in what we think is self, is funneled into someone else’s pocketbook, building someone else’s pyramids.
But of course, to think of them as “someone else’s” pyramids is just another level of the nuthouse we’re all living in together. We don’t have to see the world this way, either blind to how we’re disempowered or “awakened” to the power games behind pop culture but still trapped in limiting delusions of our separateness. Yes: things change fast, and more of us are waking up to how we’re squandering our lives on self-obsession. Learning this does not mean turning victim’s rage upon the few who manage to exploit the many’s pride and avarice, in adolescent bids for power. Like having someone teach us how a magic trick’s performed, we have the chance to recognize that it “takes two to tango,” one to play the trick and one to be a willing audience. The market only follows the demand, and all we have to do to slay the dragon at the other end of this perceived conspiracy is stop investing so much energy and money on a “self-and-other” story that is dubious at best, and laughable as soon as we examine it. The sooner we acknowledge that the enemy is us (and that we’re being lived, rather than dictating experience), the sooner all of us can get on living beyond the need for enemies.
Among the few lampooning this successfully are Open Mike Eagle and director Ryan Calavano with their video for Eagle’s track, “Celebrity Reduction Prayer” – in which he cannot make it down the street without his every move becoming “content” in the social media machine. And likewise, as the video shows play counts, comments, likes, and other now-familiar landmarks of our patently millennial geography erupting out through smartphone screens to populate the physical environment, “Celebrity Reduction Prayer” prophetically portrays the world of “augmented reality” just over our horizon. The future that we’re buying into now is one in which the self is fully quantified, each cubic centimeter of the planet labeled with its own IP address, and ego’s need to be acknowledged finds its logical conclusion: soon (if not already), almost everyone will know the gilded cage we call celebrity and being totally unknown will be a privilege, the scarce commodity reserved for plutocrats.
Is this the Promised Land we’re wandering toward as devotees of “the American religion?” Most likely, if the satisfaction of the ego stays our ultimate concern. But since humor is the greatest medicine, let’s have a laugh about it, courtesy of Eagle, get some distance from the selfie game, and ask ourselves, as deeply as we can: “Who needs to feel like people think I’m special?”