18th century obituaries sparked the modern cult of celebrity according to University of Warwick researchers. Dr. Elizabeth Barry says they were the o.g. microfamous as common people received wide attention so long as their lives (and deaths) were eccentric enough: “This period also witnessed a change in attitude towards fame that recognised the significance in a newly commercial environment of popular tastes and appetite.”
The Celebrity Atheist List reads like a roster of The Tomorrow Museum’s favorite people: J.G. Ballard, Bjork, Ingmar Bergman, Vic Chesnutt, David Cronenberg, Warren Ellis, Brian Eno, Stephen Fry, Rachel Griffiths, Diane Keaton, Mike Leigh, Stanislaw Lem, Cillian Murphy, Gary Numan, Bruce Sterling, and Angelina Jolie too! The page on Heather MacDonald is especially interesting, as she is a conservative. I adored her book The Burden of Bad Ideas, and many of her City Journal columns…ermm, well, right up until she started writing about why we don’t need civil liberties anymore. (via Technoccult, who adds, “And of course, one could write such a list for every major religion. My point here is that spirituality is not required for creativity and inspiration.”)
Microcelebrity and Frienemies
If you used AOL in the early 90s, you likely remember Courtney Love going nuts on the music message boards. She’d stop in every few months and leave a whirlwind of mostly incoherent posts — sometimes something about Mary Lou Lord and oral sex and Kurt and a van after a show and how it is all NOT TRUE, sometimes just her daily gripes (”I am thinking heavily of trying Prozac…. I would appreciate info from intense, passionate, sexual (hetero, generally) and esp. CREATIVE females regarding this drug__I’m NOT clinically depressed__I’m not even manic-depressive, just super neurotic and paranoid….”) — whatever it was, she always sounded defensive. From an article written around that time:
“It’s like a masturbatory videogame all about me!” Courtney Love brags over the phone, only halfself-mockingly. Love first stormed onto America Online in the spring of ‘94, not long after her husband took a shotgun to his head and changed her life forever. Her first mission: to intercept her estranged father, Hank Harrison, who had been on the service promoting a very unauthorized Kurt Cobain biography he was writing. In an online battle in full view of AOL’s thenthree million users, “hunnypi 28″ accused “BioDad” of exploiting the tragedy. BioDad eventually vanished back into anonymity. Love decided to stick around.
“For a while I was really addicted to it,” she says now. “It was like my only friend. I just couldn’t deal with humans__I was dealing with these cyberbeings, and having these inane conversations, banal conversations, crazy conversations, dealing-with-grief conversations with people from fucking God-knows-where who looked like God-knows-what.”
But she wasn’t treated with adoration at all. Love was entangled in major drawn out online feuds, at a time when everyone hid behind anonymous “handles.” Part of it was to accuse her of killing Kurt, partly a reaction to her paranoid writing style, but I think most of the people coming at her, just wanted to get her attention.
Online, Courtney Love was a pinata, but most of these people were just random suburban teenagers who would inevitably act obsequiously given a backstage pass to meet her. Because they were — kinda — her fans. She still blogs, but has, as far as I know, kept out of online discussions.
There is one case when the rage toward a public figure is genuine: when it is not really the public figure, but someone posing as him. Look at Richard Dawkins on Twitter. Some hater registered the account and used the opportunity to eventually tell his fans how Dawkins is wrong. Following that, he got a number of flaming replies.
Now, anyone who paid attention from the beginning would have noticed it couldn’t possibly be Dawkins. But no one on the internet bothers investing the time to even read a sentence from somebody seemingly important, unless it directly matters to them. You just add “Richard Dawkins” to your Twitter feed cause you know he’s smart and you’d like to read his stuff one day and maybe that passive-contact will make you smarter by osmosis.
AOL users never doubted Courtney Love’s posts were fake. It had to be her. The way she wrote was so uniquely strange. It was a nervous breakdown reduced to online text. It was great!
I was reminded of Courtney Love, reading Keith Gessen’s blog. Not in terms of content, but the reactions he’s received. He made some comment about “Taking back the internet,” and a blog appeared using that name:
Last week, when Gawker linked to this blog, I took some solace in the fact that I suddenly had a slew of tumblr followers. My followers, I thought, would follow me to the ends of the earth.
But now I’ve clicked on some of your tumblrs, and it turns out you all hate me.
Will I ever forget the moment I discovered “takebacktheinternet.tumblr” in my followers? “Ah!” I thought. “A fan site.”
It was not a fan site.
So, without further ado, I’ve decided to take the initiative and buy up all the potential tumblrs my less than enthusiastic followers might be inclined to one day occupy. These are:
keithgessensucks.tumblr.com
keithgessensucksballs.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’sear.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnames.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnamesinthegawker
commentssection.tumblr.com
ididn’tevenstickmyballsinkeithgessen’searbecausei’veneverhe
ardofhimandhesucks.tumblr.comI think that about covers it. Now what you gonna do?
See that’s kind of funny. Maybe he’s not conceited, like everyone thought. And he’s writing it on a Tumblr — the least pretentious blog software one could use. But the criticism kept coming, playful jabs at his alleged inflated sense of entitlement (here and here and here.)
It’s a perpetuation of previous aggression and the capacity to get attention from someone who is in the public eye. Criticism is always easier to write than praise. But the haters don’t really hate him. At least, not the way I hate Chris Matthews or Londoners hate Boris Johnson. They may resent his success. They might find something about him annoying. But the premise of the annoyance — that Gessen takes himself too seriously — was proven wrong as soon as he set up a Tumblr. Now he’s having a party, inviting the very people behind the mocking websites.
Attention is attention whether its praise or venom. As Rex Sorgatz writes in his New York magazine article on how to attain microcelebrity:
If there is a Latin phrase for “reply to everything,” it should be crocheted on your pillows and tacked above your door. Anytime your name is used, you are required to e-mail, comment, or firebomb the person invoking it. When in doubt, remember these three maxims: There is no such thing as being above the fray, every battle is worth fighting, and all disputes are good press.
Tao Lin gets it. He offered free copies of his books to “shit talkers,” anyone who can produce evidence “that you don’t like me (a link to something you typed on the internet or a description of what you said to someone about me).”
McLuhen didn’t predict a medium that keeps you busy every minute of the day — even when you are doing nothing. There is always another thing to “Read Later” or email or blog or cut+paste, or skim rather than read. Time and attention are spread too thin. People are too busy to decide whether they like something or not, the Internet makes everything a joke.
What was the last thing on the Internet you concentrated on for longer than a minute? What got a strong reaction from you? Besides this photo of Ryan Gosling and this video from a My Bloody Valentine concert, just about everything I see online is encoded in my mind as a murky grey shade. And it isn’t often retrieved after I close my laptop for the day. I have no idea what I looked at thirty minutes ago. I could take or leave it, but I can’t tear myself away from looking, when I’m in the middle of it.
And that gets to an idea I have, which is going to be an upcoming post: why everything on the internet goes back to sex. Porn is the one thing that consistently holds one’s attention online (And if you can’t concentrate on that, man, maybe you really should consider visiting those Chinese rehab clinics.)
Another good point from Sorgatz’s piece:
Where traditional fame was steeped in class envy on the part of the audience and alienation on the part of the celebrity, microfame closes the gap between devotee and celebrity. It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity. And you can just as easily begin to cultivate your own set of admirers. Though an element of luck often plays a role in achieving traditional fame, microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.
This is important because for most creative types, microcelebrity is all you can dream to achieve. Sorgatz points out Tila Tequila only sold 13,000 copies of her album. But that’s the average for a Pitchfork-approved musician. An author under contract with a major publishing house might sell twice as many books. Microfame is inevitable for most authors and musicians, regardless of their web participation. And money plays a part in this. Someone can be extremely well known and just never manage to profit from it. When you hear about an author earning six figure advance for a novel, it might seem like they’ve entered a tax bracket above your own. But not really. If that book took two or three years to write (as it very well should have!) the advance isn’t as impressive.
How can you pretend to have any power over your fanbase when they earn twice as much as you did, working as administrative assistants? If you want to be a public figure in these times, you can’t play boss.
Images of male celebrities crying by Sam Taylor-Wood, courtesy of Arab Aquarius.
Previously:
- The President Isn’t Your Boss
- We Live in Public
- Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
- More tagged “web history“
We Live in Public
The girls in this video by Brad Troemel (it almost exclusively happens to females) have had someone steal their photographs and create fake accounts with their names (via.) To prove their account is the right one, they take pictures or videos with their myspace number and send it to the community managers. None is any kind of celebrity, except in the very micro-sense — everyone that goes to punk rock shows in her hometown knows who she is.
The Internet has heard enough about Emily Gould this week, still, I found the passage where she showed her therapist (who insisted “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity”) the New York magazine article that nearly everyone in the media world read last fall, was a great anecdote about the strangeness of modern microcelebrity. Although Clive Thompson said it much better in Wired last year:
You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest
Naomi Campbell will never know or care if you blog smack about her, but writers and editors, even of the highest prominence, do. When I was just started out, I wrote a flippantly dismissive post about a writer I respected but found excessively self-promoting. The writer came across my website (by googling her name and the word “brilliant,” as I saw in my referral log,) and sent me an angry note. Since then I’ve curbed every impulse to best anyone else.
What made Gould’s experience unique is, with obvious repercussions on her personal and professional life, she was paid to write about her immediate circle — the creative underclass, the people who thrive on attention, but also survive on their reputations. That’s you and me and everyone else who receives the New Yorker in her studio apartment. We’re all within reach of each other, even if some of us have more google hits — I even sat behind a friend of Gould’s discussing her relationship on his cellphone, while riding on the Chinatown bus the other night.
Blogging took off because of the dot-com crash. The media types — marketing, conference planning, pr, or something else — were the first to go when the tech bubble burst. Out of work and bitter, blog software meant they could finally go back to their roots in journalism. The World Trade Center disaster only sharpened their focus, giving a sense of purpose to their writing.
The web would look a lot different without those two historic — if unfortunate — events. We might have skipped blogging and moved straight to vlogging. The end result would be fewer citizen journalists and more Julia Allisons, and we’d be all the worse for it.
New York magazine called him the “The Warhol of Web TV,” in 1999, but Josh Harris “thinks Andy Warhol was his ‘advance man,’ a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus,” wrote Jim Hanas in a Radar feature last winter. Harris got rich (80 million rich) off a would-be TV replacing dot-com “Pseudo,” but he’s better know for his We Live in Public experiment, soon to be revisited in a feature documentary by Ondi Timoner (director of Dig!)
We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.
You can’t buy your way into the art world, but with enough money you can create a spectacle. Footage of his previous experiment Quiet, plays out like a classic Ballardian tale, but it is We Live in Public that startup-types still reference.
In 2000, his website Pseudo (screenshot) offered 60 hours of original programming a week. Streaming video “channels” skewed toward emerging subcultures, the post-indie rock, post-Liquid Television, post-Alleged Gallery art landscape waiting for the next new thing. Each channel, not unlike like Gawker Media sites, had its own web address, for the prescient purpose of specialized advertising. (Much more on this at the fascinating blog Ghost Sites of the Web.)
Richard Metzger had a show and Gary Baddeley, publisher of Disinfo remembers the site fondly, “If you were in New York in the late ’90s and you had anything to do with that first wave of dotcom madness, [the documentary clip will] really take you back … and realize that not only did Josh throw a great party, he really was a visionary.”
He definitely made a mark on the art world. Among other things, Harris funded a 2000 prank by Austrian-collective Gelitin, ”The B-Thing,” creating a fake balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (later “woven into the complex tapestry” of WTC conspiracy theories.) And even Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”
“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.
Head interrogator Ashkan Sahini, an artist in real life, would do things like pull people out of their sleep capsules and grill them about their preference for white wine over red. “I am the asshole of this event,” Sahini said with considerable pleasure. “This is a society, and we will flip the rules around.” Sahini was accompanied by someone who introduced himself as Zero Boy, his platinum-haired “bodyguard,” who was dressed in a tight-fitting Soviet colonel’s uniform and carried a megaphone. What was that all about? “I’m a mercenary,” Zero Boy explained through his megaphone. “I have my own trip.”
They’d reveal their suicide attempts and heroin addictions. A “neo-fascist temple,” Harris calls it, but it was also a party. “The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that’s really poignant to look at now,” documentary director Timoner told Radar.
Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.
Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. “Some people cried, but that was Josh’s thing,” says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. “He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight.” By New Year’s Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down.
It’s been said FEMA mistook it for a “suicide cult.”
The next project was WeLiveinPublic.com (the dot-com address now long gone,) by his production company “Panopticon,” collaborating with video artists The Verbal Group, including influential new media artist, Yael Kanarek. Cameras were constantly surveilling he and his girlfriend, and briefly Will Leitch, now editor of Deadspin. His girlfriend broke up with him and left, making her the Emily Gould of February 2001, (although her personal essay ran in the New York Observer, not NYT magazine.) Comparisons to The Truman Show were then inevitable, because it and some Twilight Zone episodes (and the first few seasons of the Real World) were all the references we had to go on. Survivor also premiered in 2000. Remarkable when you think about it … we’ve had an almost decade-long conversation about the ethics of reality television.
Then 9/11 happened, then the blogs, and now we are going back to Pseudo-style web programming, taking the We Live in Public idea past absurdity. You can see aspects of YouTube and Second Life in Pseudo, even micro-celebrity, “People want fame in a day-to-day basis, not over a lifetime,” Harris says in the Vimeo clip. Some of his ideas the Internet has yet to incorporate — for one thing, we’ve yet to make it easy to meet people through the ether without some degree of creepiness. Chat rooms are all but forgotten (unless we can think of Twitter as a time-delayed chat room.) I remember in high school, MTV would occasionally stream chat room discussions underneath video (yes, that was when MTV played music,) and seeing my comments on my television renewed my angsty life with a sense of purpose. I definitely wish there were a chat room to discuss the We Live in Public documentary clip as I was watching it.
It’s interesting how blogging technology now is tilting toward private applications. The blog and web 2.0 marriage is an uneasy one. Facebook was the first to gate us in communities with people we already know (it’s no surprise it started at Harvard — to keep out the plebes.) A cynical answer is Tumblr (where your friends list is actually hidden from view,) Twitter, and Vox are all to promote insider connections. But I think the move is as much for privacy. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the information swimming around out there.
As you can see in the clip (and do watch it!) one of the “Bureau” interrogators remarks — with the bustering confidence typical of everyone involved in the project — that some of the pod people will one day be famous and Josh Harris will have a file on them, revealing, who has “had anal sex…which of their parents they love more.” That was a little too lofty a vision. There are so many micro-celebrities no one really cares about you no matter how many personal details you confess.
Samuel L. Jackson is producing and staring in a movie based on JG Ballard’s “Running Wild.” There’s something in “development hell” for nearly everything he’s written, but this is only the third Hollywood-produced JG Ballard adaptation. Full list at Ballardian. (A shame Five Easy Pieces-era Jack Nicholson never played Vaughn, although, as the author said of that script, “This version was set in Los Angeles …It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — ‘Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!’”)
What happens when George Clooney logs on to a Facebook group called “George Clooney is NOT the sexiest man alive. (via)
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