The Everything is Everything Era
I feel beige. Do you feel beige?
Two driving forces are going to continue to wear us smooth until we’re all beige pebbly things that are all the sameish. We need to fight to stay unique.
The Parlay
Right now a reality TV star is the most powerful person in the free world. No real political background, just mostly a business career and then reality TV. Take the names out of it if it makes you uncomfortable either way. Someone gets famous in field A then parlays that fame to land prestigious status in field B. the concept alone is concerning, no?
Imagine you are going into surgery. Someone slips a mask over your face as cherry scented gas fills your nostrils. The doctor says, “Hey bro, this is Gary Busey, he’s going to be your anesthesiologist today, he just switched over from acting.” Then you look up and, no shit, Gary Busey is the one holding the mask. You’d think “Fuck, that’s the last face I’m gonna see before I die.”
So, as a society, we now allow “famous people” to be “experts” on, well, whatever the fuck they want really. I know I’ve been calling for the death of academia for a long time but I was hoping the rebirth would look different than this.
Probably the strangest example recently is a pop star who calls herself Charli xcx is now writing on Substack. She was a pop star but she’s now a writer too. No struggling phase and figuring it out and having to pay bills doing some shit you don’t like just so you can write a bit. Just one tone deaf blog post about “hey I’m relatable just like the rest of you and I’m actually creative across all domains” and boom, writer.
Most days it just feels like the high school popularity contest never ended, it actually intensified until the masses became willing to put celebrity worship over critical thinking.
As with
Yoko Ono as performance artist
Gwyneth Paltrow as wellness authority
Jordan Peterson as lifestyle guru
Russel Brand as public intellectual
Neil deGrasse Tyson as culture critic
Who gives a fuck about their secondary area. The come-up is fiber for skill development. If you just parlay your fame into something else you miss most of the important bits. You cannot be whoever you want to be, you must develop that in yourself over time.
Gigasurveillance
Everything can be recorded by ordinary citizens. 24/7. Anywhere. Meetings are mediated by Zoom. Call recording is built into phones. At any given moment you have 2-4 high quality video cameras in your pocket with high fidelity microphone arrays and that’s just counting the gear crammed into your smartphone. You know what they would have called you in the 90s if you showed up to your kid’s baseball game with four video cameras and microphones? A fucking lunatic.
Is everything being actively recorded and listened to by regular folks 24/7? Probably not but it could be. That kind of technology exposes a lot of bad behavior by people that need to be held accountable. It also crushes any semblance of individuality.
If I make a joke but the words come out wrong. Even if I apologize but (to use Paul Graham’s terminology) someone calls me “x-ist!” there is no nuance. The clip is segmented down to only include the “bad part”, it goes viral, and I am an “x-ist” before I can offer any reasonable defense. As Graham puts it:
The other distinctive thing about heresies, compared to ordinary opinions, is that the public expression of them outweighs everything else the speaker has done. In ordinary matters, like knowledge of history, or taste in music, you’re judged by the average of your opinions. A heresy is qualitatively different. It’s like dropping a chunk of uranium onto the scale.
Whether consciously or through modeling peer behavior, people are terrified of committing a heresy so they talk in sort of a milquetoast, ChatGPT approved, kind of baby speak instead of saying what they mean.
These days I have the most respect for people who say difficult yet well-reasoned things to me. They still care enough to take a bit of a risk. That’s comfortable to me because I know that it is real (even if I disagree).
Parallel Path
You gotta keep keeping on though. I’ll give you the rundown on how I’ve been fighting both of these things.
Parlay? Can’t Play
Don’t give any weight to celebrity opinions outside of their lane.
Stop giving a shit when football players are interviewed about anything other than football.
Stop giving a shit when actors are asked about geopolitics.
No out-of-lane opinions. Ignore!
Be Real
Everyone that knows me personally and professionally knows that I don’t pull punches and I speak plainly. I try to do exactly what it says on my tin. The most human thing we can do during these antihuman times is to embrace our realness especially when that means being wrong and failing (two of the most human things about us).