In a technology-saturated culture that so tailors the entertainment environment for individual consumers that they cannot help but feel uniquely important, Carles wonders whether celebrities are under corresponding pressure to appear ordinary.
Sometimes I wonder what ‘fame’ buys you. I think in the past, it ‘bought u distance’ and u got 2 keep people away from u behind ur gated home in a gated community. But now I think that is ‘frowned upon’ or something, and you seem ‘less human’, therefore ‘less marketable’ as a personal brand to ‘dumb people who believe that celebrities can be ur bro.’ These days, celebrities are required to ’seem human’ and ‘do normal stuff’ and ‘reflect on it’ in the same trivial ways that all humans do.In a self-regarding culture where everyone has become a microcelebrity, it may that banality has become the new status symbol and trivial mundanity the most recondite social reserve of them all. Can we become boring again? Carles wonders. Could anyone be as boring and uninteresting as Ashton Kutcher? Or is he the apotheosis of dullness as the quintessence of fame?
In general, celebrities are people with a ‘limited education’ who ‘didn’t really fit in during high school’ (if they even went at all). Most celebrities feel comfortable living a life of ‘excess’ and ‘not worrying about stuff too much.’ But then there are those celebrities who ‘want something more’ and might start to feel guilty about their ‘voice’/'position in society’ [via their skewed perspective of where they sit in the world]. They look to ‘cultivate meaning’ by utilizing the only forces that they know–something that probably has to do with the celebrity gossip economy.Outflanked by the constant disclosure of personal information exaggerated to the level of significance on social networking sites, celebrities must recalibrate the "celebrity-gossip economy" by deploying their unique mixture of ignorance, stupidity, and entitlement to produce data of incalculable insignificance. The economy runs in reverse. The penny has become the dollar. Inflation has become a black hole, growth a vacuum. Ideas are embraced for their vacancy and analysis has become the inarticulate blast of "followers" in a sheer numerical mass, unable to express themselves in any other way than to be counted. But Carles is here to give voice to their inarticulate cry: "I feel sad that we are all ‘trying to build a tribe’ of followers on the internet. I feel sad that I cannot be the most popular bro on the internet."
No matter how much microfame we experience, the epic popularity of epic banality is there to remind us that are achievements always remain marginal, no matter how much more intrinsically interesting they become. Celebrities must perform their piety, while ordinary people simply engage in the moral through straightforward praxis. But this lived-in morality becomes its own disadvantage in the post-moral age of celebrity, as the performance of the moral seems to guarantee its presence in absence, and render it absent where it is otherwise present.
I start to feel angsty and threatened when a celebrity ‘tells me I should care’ because I think my ‘education’ and the ‘extent to which I feel connected to an accurate version of reality/how-the-world-works’ makes me post-eligible for ‘being required to outwardly care’ about the ‘world getting better.’
The only escape for us is for celebrities to renounce their claim to species being, to renege on the human race. "I want celebrities to be ‘more than human.’
I want ‘fame’ to ‘mean something’ again." At that point fame will once signify a kind of death, an annunciation, as attention makes certain chosen ones into impossible and inaccessible angels who redeem our ordinariness by their own inability to be ordinary again. Saint Ashton, where have you gone?
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