This matches up perfectly with the version of the 1968 quote that we all carry around inside our heads: “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” It wasn’t until I checked on Wikipedia that I even knew that the actual Warholian version includes the prefix “world” in front of “famous.” Weinberger’s (or Momus’) reformulation of the standard, abridged version of the quotation, in which Weinberger shifts Warhol’s emphasis on the duration of the fame we will all enjoy (15 minutes) to an emphasis on the scope of that fame (famous to 15 people), although clever, is incomplete and unsatisfying once Warhol’s original statement is considered in full.
To more fully appreciate how the future has turned out somewhat differently than Warhol imagined one must consider both of the elements that Warhol’s original statement includes, both scope and duration. Accordingly, I would amend Weinberger’s update thusly: “In the future, everyone will always be famous to 15 people.”
I humbly submit that this amendment brings the contours of the future that we now inhabit (the one clear takeaway from last week’s election being that the future has arrived sooner than we thought it would; this is both good, in the case of the elections, and bad, in the already-arrived future most recently announced by Superstorm Sandy and the flooding in coastal Italy) into sharper focus.
Weinberger is correct that our shared future-is-now reality is one in which, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, texting, smart phones, etc., all of us experience a fame that expands as far as each of us can reach into the digital firmament; for many of us that reach extends only as far as the 15 people that we haven’t annoyed so much with our status updates that they have blocked us, while a select few can manipulate the digital realm like Neo bending the Matrix to his will. And just as “Neo” is an anagram of One, as in The One, these celebrities are the Chosen Ones of the Information Age. Just this week I experienced a rush of frisson as I learned that 66 people had viewed my blog in one day, a reaction that brings to mind the old Kissinger line that academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small; we will defend our fame to the death precisely because it is so small. It is left to the Clooneys of the world to decamp to Italy, out of reach of the Hollywood paparazzi (although with Italy’s bootprint already shrinking on Earth 2.0, it appears that the Chosen Ones will have an easier time giving the slip to the hoi polloi than to climate change).
But what Weinberger’s unedited update leaves out is the way that all those of us who have been transformed from the great unwashed into minor celebrities/deities (which includes everyone except the Chosen Ones, who were already major deities, and possibly the remaining tribes of the Amazon who have thus far escaped contact with outside civilization, although they are actually already famous precisely because we haven’t met them; I saw an internet headline about efforts to make contact with the last batch of them last week, as if they were collectively the last kid from kindergarten we hadn’t yet friended on Facebook) approach our fame like the aforementioned academics competing for the security of tenure. To expand on Kissinger, the academic’s career must make up in duration (eternal, at least until a cushy retirement) what it lacks in importance (when, per Kissinger, what is often important to academics is e.g. one’s success or failure in isolating and thereby marginalizing the lone department colleague who remains a holdout against one’s theory of everything). Just so, our fame must be everlasting, an immortality that must be re-established by the number of comments on each of our status updates (I got 3 on my last one, only one of which was my Mom! ), to compensate for what it lacks in what I can think of no better word for than penetration (making minor fame, with apologies for phallocentrism, no different than that signature malady of the human condition, sexual frustration).
Which is why I am already nervous about what I am going to think of next for posting on this blog and linking to on Facebook (and why I am furiously churning out a novel, that’s right I said novel- and its gonna be one of those really long ones that make a big thump noise when you drop them down on the table to announce to the world that you’re here to fuck some shit up, to follow-up on my fantastic self-published memoir, which it so happens there is a link to right on this blog that you should absolutely click on!). Unless I get exponentially more than 66 hits on this post, in which case I will be decamping, if not to Italy, at least to some fine dining in Little Italy, if I can figure out how to “monetize” my blog, which is an actual option on Blogspot.com. But so is buying lottery tickets, which, in offering the chance for money but not fame, feels like a subversive act in this world Warhol couldn’t quite imagine.
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