Baseline Fame

Theory #40 | When privilege becomes a pre-requisite.

David Bowie famously said that fame itself doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant. But what if you’re not famous and you still want to eat there? And what if, in your town of 50,000 people, 10,000 people are some kind of famous. It’s safe to assume you’d have a tough time getting a resy.

This is more than a hypothetical. It’s a sign of our times. In many communities, fame has shifted from being a rare privilege to being a near ordinary necessity. And hence, accruing some threshold level of fame has started to feel like a prerequisite for being able to do historically “normal” things.

I call this the Baseline Fame phenomenon.

Fame used to be highly exclusive.

Very few people could become “famous” and access its privileges. But thanks to the ubiquity of the internet, user-generated content platforms, and all the games they’ve spun up, getting some amount of fame — even if small by historical expectations — is now far more accessible. This is one conseque…