Fleeting Fame

The record, whether carved in stone or bits of data, is arbitrary in the extreme. To endow with fame and fortune women with big lips or people who hurl themselves over a bar on a bendy pole—while skipping over people who, say, can build houses or make meringues—suggests that fame and game don't rhyme only by accident. Fame comes to those whose accomplishments are recorded, and the “record” is as contingent on human whim as any algorithm.

And the famous are then figments of that record. They're no more real than Beowulf, the warrior longing for fame, who achieved nothing like the enduring fame of Beowulf, the poem. And is Kylie Jenner real? Forbes' billionaire list is renowned for its creative math—and Instagram, like faces touched by fillers, is known for artful distortions. It seems the longing for fame, then, shared by Beowulf and Jenner, doubles as the longing to sacrifice one's real life wholly to the record, to pass out of fact and into fiction.

Virginia Heffernan writing in Wired