Privacy is the new celebrity
When everyone is a celebrity, people will aspire to be unknown rather than well-known
The concept of celebrity is simple. It is the state of being well known by people that you do not know personally. The celebrity has their every move watched, studied, and critiqued by people whom they do not know. But the promise of celebrity is attractive. The celebrity has social status, wealth, freedom, and admiration. Celebrity status elevates a person to a different stratosphere than other humans inhabiting the same earth. Being a celebrity can make one’s life feel more important than others. The celebrity is important in culture. The celebrity has influence.
Modern celebrity culture was created by and is perpetuated by the media. Around 100 years ago in the early Hollywood era, the concept of the modern celebrity was new and novel. Celebrity was (and still is) aspirational. The life of a celebrity has always been painted as glamorous and idealistic, but mostly unrealistic to achieve. Today it is more realistic than ever. Historically the title of celebrity was reserved for film & television stars, musicians, politicians, artists, and writers. Those whose public work was so important and visible in culture that people took interest in the person behind the work. The number of celebrities there could be was limited by the distribution of pre-internet media outlets. There was only so much space in a newspaper column and airtime on television or radio to elevate people to the status of a known public figure. With the internet, the guardrails came down and with social media the barrier to entry was reduced drastically. The delivery method improved allowing more media to reach a larger share of the population. In turn, media consumption became more accessible, and addictive algorithms forced it to become a larger part of our daily lives.
The social media creator is a close relative to the traditional Hollywood celebrity, a descendant really. Traditional Hollywood celebrities are legacy celebrities. The new celebrities are social media creators. Creators are famous in the eyes of their audience — they are watched, admired, and critiqued — just on a smaller scale than legacy celebrities. A creator that earns a large enough following can even climb the social (media) ladder to reach the status of legacy celebrities — walking the same red carpets and sitting down with the same late-night talk show hosts.
Celebrity has evolved rapidly in the last decade as social media has allowed people to circumvent the legacy institutions that controlled the means to mint new celebrities. Because of this, anyone can now turn themselves into a celebrity by creating and sharing content online. With enough perseverance, anyone can build an audience of fans to achieve a certain level of fame, fortune, and admiration. This has diluted what it means to be a celebrity. It has changed what it means to be famous. Before the internet, fame was more binary. It was grandiose. If you were famous, you knew it and people around you knew it. Today there are over 10 million Instagram accounts that have between 100,000 to 500,000 followers. Most of these people will never be like legacy celebrities that grace the covers of magazines or are followed around by paparazzi, but they are certainly famous. The number of people who know them would exceed the seating capacity of the world’s largest sports arenas. I would argue that any creator who shares content online using their name, image, or likeness (NIL) turns themselves into a public figure and sets themselves on the path to celebrity.
There is a perception that celebrities are desired by the public, but celebrities are not desired by the public. They are consumed by the public. We consume them simply because they are there. They are thrust upon us. They offer us entertainment and a bit of escapism. But when we are done with them we toss them away into obscurity and fixate on their replacement that feels more new and fun. This is a hard truth that is learned only by those that have been (un)lucky enough to experience celebrity themselves. Once they reach celebrity status, they are no longer a person in the eyes of the public, they become a concept — an easily replaceable concept.
The way that we are making people famous today and the trajectory we’re on for how it will progress in the future, I believe, is an evolution of the human race. As we approach a world where everyone is a social media content creator, a celebrity in some capacity, and many begin their journey while they are young, we’ll see a notable change in human behavior. The way we think about ourselves, our lives, and careers will change. In a chronically online world, we won’t need physical defensive mechanisms to survive like Neanderthals, instead we’ll need to evolve mental defensive mechanisms to survive the negative consequences associated with being in the public eye.
The First Shift: Everyone is a creator
Indulge me for a moment. I want to imagine a future scenario, one that I believe is very likely as technology advances and Gen Z and Gen Alpha make up a larger share of the population.
We will live in a world where the majority of people are content creators. There are a few reasons why I believe this will become a reality:
Young people want to become content creators. 65% of Gen Z already describe themselves as “video content creators”. Our chronically online youth aspire for the lifestyle that comes with being a content creator. What’s not to love? More money, no boss, complete autonomy over your daily schedule, unlimited dopamine hits from your beloved admirers, and internet clout. Make no mistake, internet clout is a valid currency that can get you places even money cannot. Most will go the route where they use their name, image, and likeness to create an online personal brand (and career) for themselves. We live in an attention economy. Because we want to be entertained and we micro-dose content throughout every dull moment of our day, this has already become a viable career path.
Artificial intelligence will greatly reduce or eliminate the need for human labor in society.
While there are many different potential scenarios for how AI will affect work as we know it, this one is highly probable — maybe not in five years but almost certainly in fifty. Eventually, we’ll enter a post-work society and receive some type of universal basic income (UBI) that allows people to afford daily life without the need to work.
Becoming a content creator will become the most viable option for humans who want to work or earn additional income outside of a UBI in a post-work society. Content creator will be the last “job” that humans can have. While people won’t need to work, many will still want to work — especially on something they are passionate about. There will also be many who desire more than the “standard issue” lifestyle that comes with a UBI. These people will turn to content creation, developing their own personal brand, to increase their income. AI can certainly create content. AI influencers are already here. But as AI-created content floods media platforms, we’ll grow tired of it and crave authentic human-centric content. It’s a natural human desire to see other humans. Our humanity and individuality will be the only valuable contribution we can bring to a post-work society.
In this post-work society, people will spend their newfound free time consuming and creating content. The idea of a post-work society ushered in by AI has always come with the promise that humans could spend more time on offline leisure activities that enrich our lives — creating art and spending quality time with other people. It’s a nice thought, but I believe it’s too late. We’ve already become too connected to our devices and content feeds, especially our youth. We will spend the majority of our waking hours consuming content. The time we do spend pursuing our interests, hobbies, and expressing our creativity will be turned into content. The art we create will be shared and monetized through content creation.
The Second Shift: Being unknown is in vogue
Now that we’ve set the stage for the conditions that bring us into a world where the majority of the population are content creators. Let’s talk about what happens once we live in a creator-dominated society.
At this point someone who is relatively unknown, who hasn’t created a personal brand on the internet for everyone to see, will become increasingly rare. As humans, we desire what we can’t have. Historically, celebrity has been unattainable for most. The rarified air that celebrities inhabit makes them unique and interesting. But when everyone is a celebrity in some capacity, the desire to be well-known will diminish. Public perception will flip. The “nobodies” will become more interesting. People will aspire to be unknown rather than well-known. This is when privacy becomes the new celebrity.
As technology advances, there will be the ability for every piece of content a person has posted online to be cataloged and easily searched. Much like how the Internet Archive allows for anyone to go back in time to see what a specific web address looked like on a certain day or time. Today there are two major barriers stopping this from happening: content storage limitations and platform access limitations. While I don’t propose to know exactly how these two limitations will be solved, I do believe it’s likely they will be and that this type of resource will exist.
Throughout all of history humans have worked to preserve important information. From ancient libraries to the Internet Archive, it’s in our nature to preserve the past work of our ancestors so that we can reference and study how the people who came before us lived and what they learned throughout their lives.
Naturally, the next evolution of the Internet Archive will be social media content. Social platforms are eating the more “traditional web”. Google, the core infrastructure for discovery of webpages and information on the internet, is losing traction with Gen Z. Instead of searching for information on the web, young people search within social media platforms for entertainment and information. This content is important. Like how our ancestors stored information with libraries of books and how the Internet Archive has preserved websites, social content will be next.
When a public archive like this exists for social content, those who have created public digital footprints can be reduced in a few short sentences or a compilation of images and videos into a concept of who they are based on everything they’ve posted publicly. Anyone who accesses such a tool could surface everything an individual person has said and done on social media using a keyword or phrase search like Google or perhaps asking questions in a ChatGPT-style interface: Show me the five most embarrassing videos John Doe has ever posted. Show me content from John Doe where he talks about politics. Summarize who John Doe is and what he stands for. etc.
A person’s life could be easily summarized by the content they have shared. The good, the bad, and especially the ugly. This is how humans are turned into concepts. This is the trap that many creators will fall into by oversharing information about themselves publicly that allows them to be turned into data that can be easily categorized, dissected, and replicated.
This is when the people who have not overshared on the internet become more important and more interesting. Being unknown will be in vogue. In a room of ten people the one person without a personal brand and public digital footprint will be the most interesting. We’ll live in a world where having no audience and no public trail of your life on the internet is the most valuable social capital.