The Exchanges

Q candidly in the book, about what it was like to go from someone who saw people looking at you, and you're like, nah, they must not know me to now, like, you can see them out of the corner of your eyes, and you're like, oh yeah, they probably know me from the TV show. So, what has What's becoming a famous person been like, and what are the trade-offs?

A I mean, the interesting thing about fame in this era is it's incredibly relative, right, because different people have different levels of fame, so people recognize me because I have a TV show. Um, at first, there's something kind of addictive and beguiling but also strange and alienating about, like, the gaze of strangers recognizing you, and you could also see in them that they're, they're going through a strange experience because often, Our facial recognition circuitry is so profound and powerful that we recognize a face before we can place it, and so they'll have this sense where they're like, oh, Did we, did you work at Bank of America? Did we go to college together? Were we, like, they're trying to place you, and there's this familiarity that doesn't match the fact they don't know you. And then there's often this moment of like, oh, right, I don't actually know you. Like, and it's this sort of amazing moment where you're seeing the human wiring that was, like, born of 250,000 years of evolution hit up against the strangeness of modern technology. In terms of the incoming experience, I think that it can make you, it can make you vain. It can make you very aware of how other people are perceiving you. There's a level at which, like, even if you walk, if you leave the house and, like, you're unkempt, which I never would have thought of before, like, who cares? But you defin…

AI assessment note: “the loss of anonymity means that you then are viewing yourself through someone else's gaze”

Q So, this idea that the internet is making us all famous, you know, combat, like, um, then commanding our attention, is that really true if most of us aren't posting at all?

A Yeah, that's a good question. First of all, I think there's also a lot of commenting that's happening, and the, and the commenting stuff that happens is that same sort of social attention from strangers. Like, you see so much of TikTok is these sort of wars with commenting. I also think that, like, teens have this relationship where they're, like, through different circles kind of regulating these spaces that are in between strangers but not close people, particularly through the way that Snapchat works. So, like, Snapchat is basically all user-generated content. Like, people aren't really posting that kind of stuff on Snapchat. And that's where, like, a huge generation of people are having their most intense experiences of this, and I think there's a fair amount that's happening there of, like, incoming from people that may not be strangers, but are also, like, at an interesting remove. The other thing I would say is that, like, I think the experience of it for even lurkers has absolutely transformed, like, social hierarchies and status aspirations.

AI assessment note: “I think the experience of it for even lurkers has absolutely transformed”