I watched the Nick Bilton "Fake Famous" doc on HBO.

The premise is to manufacture a fake famous person. The result is someone who is now "actually" famous, on Insta and, well, HBO as a result of this manufacture.

But this aspect of the simulation goes totally undiscussed!

Fame has been manufactured for decades. Entire careers were invented from whole cloth. What's different now isn't that people don't need to have talent to be famous (a position the doc takes), but that there is no longer shame in embracing the falseness of fame out in the open.

Fame is merely the capacity—real or perceived—to reach a large audience. That's it! Having actual talent or ability worthy of the attention has been optional for a long time. But the calculated acceptance of fame as mere reach is what's new.

This is why "influencer" is such a telling and novel frame. An influencer is a famous person who is famous for being a vessel for messages—usually of others, and usually consumer marketers. That very term, influencer, got its start in marketing!

Celebrities always did endorsements for exactly this reason. But they were secondary effects of an extant fame. Now we've flipped that on its head. One becomes famous in order to become a carrier for endorsements. The "lifestyle" won along the way is exhaust (and mostly labor).

Also undiscussed in the doc is how the pretty white girl, a brunette made blonde no less, is the one whose fame "sticks," while the dad-bod gay guy and the Black man reject it, and in a visceral way.

I feel like we need a whole other, meta-documentary about everything that's actually interesting about the first one. Including Bilton (whom I like and respect!)'s parlaying of tech-journalistic clout into what amounts to just more reality television!