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 consequence of the highly democratized and public status games: status inflation.
Fame used to be a rare luxury but it’s moved down market and within reach of the masses. The tools and means to getting some amount of fame have been so normalized that having access to them, knowing how to use them, and even seeing a modicum of success no longer serves to differentiate you, but to standardize you. Having baseline fame is the new having a college education.1
The consequence then is that not having fame becomes viewed as a failure and a potential handicap for your goals, even when they don’t really require fame.
It’s the 2020s and we’ve priced this in.
We’re far more culturally centered around people seeking fame than we used to be, both emotionally and pragmatically.
Some professions see fame as a kind of currency or credential now, so much so that they basically screen for it. Having an audience can help you stand out from the crowd, close the job, and do it well. Hollywood poaches rising talent from YouTube and TikTok and the like. Even white collar jobs do this, albeit more subtly. Early-stage venture capital seems a hotbed for this phenomenon. It’s a smaller category but even prestige college admissions factor in baseline fame (notice how many known actors, actresses, athletes go to Ivy League schools?).
Baseline fame also impacts personal status games. Having some amount of fame is akin to being popular in school except it's in a huge public arena for everyone to see or discover at will and the ideal of fame involves persistent status and respect for some value delivered. Whether we like it or not, there’s often greater respect and trust placed in people with greater levels of fame. And there’s a disproportionate desire to engage with them in every social capacity (e.g. the rise of exclusive dating apps like Raya for people with a baseline level of notability).
A natural feature of baseline fame is that the baseline keeps changing.
On social media, where fame is the essential game, there’s palpable follower inflation. If having 10,000 followers used to be “impressive” for someone without traditionally accelerated paths to fame (e.g. movie stardom), the goal post has moved to 100,000+. As more people reach baseline fame, the threshold for having a sizable social presence and securing its privileges keeps shifting upwards.
Baseline fame exists within niches too, just at lower thresholds. Online niches used to be sparsely populated, making it arguably a lot easier to become “famous” within them (e.g. tech twitter, longevity twitter). But as they’ve grown and become saturated too, early “winners” have been crowned and thresholds have gone up.
We spend a lot of time criticizing young generations’ search for fame. And while it’s warranted, I now believe that the motivations for it aren’t as singular and simply superficial as we’ve consistently argued.