*
If Andy Warhol were alive today he would have to retract his overquoted epigram, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, since he ain't and I am, I'll tell you why.I've been mystified by the encroachment of Facebook into the lives of pretty much everyone under 30 and a shocking number of people over that age. I'll allow for the possibility that social media could possibly serve some minor constructive purpose in postmodern society even if I can't tell you what that would be. My best take on it has been that Facebook exists for people who want to star in their own reality show; people who understand that the only rule for becoming famous is to become well known. Social networking technology provides such people with a powerful, cannibalistic multimedia "platform" that they can use to dedicate their lives to collecting "friends" and "fans." For the mass of them, I will say, stereotypingly, the quest for said friends and fans involves relentless online disclosure of every thought fragment that causes three synapses to fire. And between those events, there's a world of fun to be had trolling banal data streams issuing from every other fellow contestant. When everybody "follows" everybody else on the World Wide Web, then everyone is world-famous for the duration. This amounts to a shocking rebuke to Warhol's vision, which in any case was more akin to a knowing wisecrack than a profundity.
But today I learned that the world is even better for fame-seekers --- right now --- than my dystopian best guess for the future. Big Hussein Otis sent me this New York Times technical bulletin on the latest colorful timewasting trend to emerge from social networking: a cornucopia of new business models based on specialized social networking web sites for sharing "TMI," as the post-Friends generation likes to say:
A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.The reporter continues to reveal that "Blippy" members share access to their Gmail accounts with the company so it can publish their purchases, thereby greatly increasing the "Blippy" members' street cred by about a zillion I suppose.
In the pithy blurb he sent with the link, Big Otis observed: "those silly millennials --- making the world safe for fascism." I disagree. If this is where American society is headed there will be no need for fascism. After all, the Morlocks did not need to resort to fascism in order to feast on the Eloi --- all they needed was a scary-sounding air raid siren and a docile population with one highly motivating conditioned response. The siren in our real-world postmodern case of course, like the Sirens of Ulysses, is every bit as sinister as what the Morlocks used. But unlike The Odyssey and very much like the Eloi, few today are tied to the mast or have intentionally plugged their ears. So Silicon Valley scumbags glibly brag about their super new business models to The New York Times. Here's how it works: a generation surrenders its privacy to corporations in order to build a "fan base"; American society is rewarded with a terminal load of gangrene.
Update before I'm through: I don't fully or exclusively blame the "millennials" for their victimhood. Besides the prime mover in this sickening trend --- the information-industrial complex --- plenty of blame belongs to Baby Boomers and their clueless concepts of what it means to be a good parent and a good citizen. (Hoy, I need to get me to the prayer meeting.)
