Thanks to the internet, the 2010s may be the decade that the era of celebrity as we know it comes to a long-overdue end.
The devotion to fantasy and the round-the-clock posturing associated with the celebrity life is now widely recognized as a steep price to pay for the big bucks and exclusive access. But online life has pushed that lifestyle cycle into the red zone, ratcheting up the amount of always-on performance while radically reducing the payoff per minute.
Just the latest warning sign for the celebrity-industrial complex came this month from the popular singer Michael Bublé, whose harrowing and humbling experience seeing his five-year-old son through cancer treatment has led him to publicly renounce spotlight culture.
“I was embarrassed by my ego, that it had allowed this insecurity,” he explains in what he calls his final interview. “And I decided I’d never read my name again in print, never read a review, and I never have. I decided I’d never use social media again, and I never have.”
Only a very few global celebrities—think Kanye and the Kardashians—can play the game and win. For most, heavy media attention in all probability means you’ve made a horrible mistake or have failed in some humiliating way. The fascination and aspiration surrounding the glamor of the celebrity class, which exploded in size and popularity in the 1990s, has been disenchanted by the merciless pump-and-dump tempo of online exposure. When even Taylor Swift can put out a stiff record and be plowed under in wave upon wave of evanescent content, the incentives for jockeying for fame are plummeting.
Audiences are learning this too. With an effectively infinite supply of entertainment, even within the more bizarre or idiosyncratic niches, not only boredom but a sense of being at sea sets in. What do you get the self that has everything? Viewers of television can’t possibly consume all the premium shows churned out by media companies desperate to produce the next “it” series. And the social value of making sure you’re up to speed on the biggest show on television has already begun to plateau, if not drop off completely.
Audiences are also growing convinced that ostensibly “new” forms of celebrity like those found on YouTube are not worth the trouble — either to consume or to emulate. The tabloid drama of new-media stars like Logan Paul is as tiresome and disposable as that of old-media actors and actresses splashed across supermarket newsstands. Instead, young smartphone users are gravitating massively toward content that’s focused around esports, where even the biggest gamer stars are largely just portals to the enjoyment of games.
That shift itself is a bad sign for the sports-industrial complex, which faces an onrushing future of diminishing returns to the celebritization of athletes. For every one LeBron James who routinely astounds and delights—and there are vanishingly few—there are scores and scores of lesser-known players who cash in on their own grueling grind but matter less and less to rising generations. While athletes are just as entitled to their opinion and their personal agency as anyone else, it’s clear that the collapse of celebrity sports entertainment has encouraged the scramble to politicize sports—politics being the one thing these days that can be reliably if shamelessly used to attract attention from large numbers of people. Nike’s no-brainer decision to associate itself so closely with Colin Kaepernick underscores how much the old market appeal of celebrity for its own sake has worn off.
Strange as it may seem, what looked at first like the opening of a vast new ecosystem of traditional entertainment online is shaping up to be a supernova — a death explosion — for a now obsolete fame industry. While young consumers still claim in dismaying numbers that they’d like to grow up to be famous online for a living, that should be seen as a lagging indicator. On closer inspection, young Americans and Westerners are well aware that online attention usually comes from antagonists, that fandom is fleeting, and that the easiest people to get to care about you are those who would like to harm you. If anything, they would most like to be paid to play their favorite games online, safe in the relative anonymity or pseudonymity of game avatars and screen names.
Legacy entertainment business elites — individuals and brands alike — have not yet figured out how to respond to this sea change. There may be no effective way for them to do so. But as the value of celebrity wanes both to celebs and audiences, it seems likely that the industry will turn to a new model for the struggling ad industry, which also now suffers from the disenchantment of aspirational fantasy, to save their hide.
Under the old model, people would pay for content that came with ads they watched — an economy that reached its peak in the great national tune-in to Super Bowl advertisements. Now, as kids and even adults routinely block or skip every ad that comes their way, companies will likely wind up having to offer incentives to watch ads at all. Child gamers are already well familiar with apps that offer in-game credits for watching video ads. Expanded to its full logic, that model would replace the fame economy entirely with a much different sort of lure—the gamification of consumerism itself. We’ll have to see whether, by then, enough people of the future can even be bothered to play.
James Poulos is a Southern California News Group columnist and editorial writer.
