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2785 Redefining Americain the pre-industrial age, but still a nearly infinitesimal portion of the population at large.All that has changed in the past decade. In the same way that electricity went from a luxury enjoyed by the American %u00e9lite to something just about everyone had, so, too, has fame, or at least being known by strangers, gone from a novelty to a core human experience. The Western intellectual tradition spent millennia maintaining a conceptual boundary between public and private%u2014embedding it in law and politics, norms and etiquette, theorizing and reinscribing it. With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.That%u2019s not to say the experience of being known, paid attention to, commented on by strangers, is in any sense universal. It%u2019s still foreign to most people, online and off. But now the possibility of it haunts online life, which increasingly is just life. The previous limiting conditions on what%u2019s private and what%u2019s public, on who can know you, have been lifted. . . . This has been entirely internalized by the generation who%u2019ve come of age with social media. A clever TikTok video can end up with forty million views. With the possibility of this level of exposure so proximate, it%u2019s not surprising that poll after poll over the past decade indicates that fame is increasingly a prime objective of people twenty-five and younger. Fame itself, in the older, more enduring sense of the term, is still elusive, but the possibility of a brush with it functions as a kind of pyramid scheme.This, perhaps, is the most obviously pernicious part of the expansion of celebrity: ever since there have been famous people, there have been people driven mad by fame. In the modern era, it%u2019s a clich%u00e9: the rock star, comedian, or starlet who succumbs to addiction, alienation, depression, and self-destruction under the glare of the spotlight. Being known by strangers, and, even more dangerously, seeking their approval, is an existential trap. And right now, the condition of contemporary life is to shepherd entire generations into this spiritual quicksand. . . . We are conditioned to care about kin, to take life%u2019s meaning from the relationships with those we know and love. But the psychological experience of fame, like a virus invading a cell, takes all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeking more fame. . . . This is why famous people as a rule are obsessed with what people say about them and stew and rage and rant about it. I can tell you that a thousand kind words from strangers will bounce off you, while a single harsh criticism will linger. And, if you pay attention, you%u2019ll find all kinds of people%u2014but particularly, quite often, famous people%u2014having public fits on social media, at any time of the day or night. You might find Kevin Durant, one of the greatest basketball players on the planet, possibly in the history of the game%u2014a multimillionaire who is better at the thing he does than almost any other person will ever be at anything%u2014in the D.M.s of some twentysomething fan who%u2019s talking trash about his free-agency decisions. Not just once%u2014routinely! And he%u2019s not the only one at all.There%u2019s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous. But I%u2019ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone. Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses%u2014toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes%u2014intothe project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot help [but] pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.So here we are, our chins pressed into the metal holster between the fennec-fox ears, the constant flitting words and images of strangers entering our sensory system, offering our poor desiring beings an endless temptation%u2014a power we should not have and that cannot make us whole. 202125Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.