The would-be celebrities of social media chase the paparazzi instead of being chased by them — that’s the sign of our times.
The desire for fame corrupts as much as the desire for power, in part because, in our culture, fame is power, something that shouldn’t need too much explaining in a country that for the past four years has had a game-show host for a president. That is a trend that is likely to get worse….
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It is a great time to be creative and adventurous, and a tough time to be a risk-averse localist. That has left many Americans, and many people around the world, with a void at the center: The things that once gave people a sense of meaning, relation, and fixedness are either diminished, eliminated entirely, or reconfigured beyond recognition. And so they go looking for substitutes.
The longing after a sense of significance that causes Hillary Hayward-Thomas to reinvent herself as the more exotic “Hilaria” is the same force that powers social-media hate mobs and shallow hashtag activism, cults like QAnon and the anti-vaxxers, and the relatively new but almost ubiquitous phenomenon of partisanship as a form of identity politics.
Every society worships something, and we have decided — disastrously — on ourselves.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
