I’ve spoke on this before but the shifting landscape is shifting faster and faster and I still don’t see anyone talking about this.
It’s a harder concept to internalize than one would imagine, that fame is becoming more and more of an illusion.
Where it still exists, it has less and less sway. Because attention is spread so thin and fought over by anyone with something to share, attention is almost impossible to sustain for an extended period of time.
That means more and more artists and influencers are thrown into the graveyard of “Where are they now”. The amount of time between a surge of attention and influence and the history books is shorter and shorter.
Add to that the splintering interests and all algorithm centric behaviors and now the added competition of AI which “cheapens” everything while also providing access to people who never had it before. It’s easier to produce a podcast or an album or a clothing brand than ever before.
The barrier of entry has lowered and so the floodgates have opened for competition and that competition has led to such an overwhelming saturation that sustained attention hardly exists anymore.
Attention is hard to achieve but not that hard. Real sustained attention is becoming more and more of a myth. It’s easy to get people to notice and almost impossible to get them to care.
The numbers are illusory. Substance and meaning are hiding in the physical, where numbers cannot possibly capture them.
Start a YouTube channel and work at it for a while and you’ll start to see how fake the numbers are. You realize that you can have a video with 1000 views and only 3% watch to completion, so 30 people, and perhaps half are friends who did it out of obligation. Maybe only 10% watched half way through.
You can pay for a video to reach more people which kills its algorithmic performance but sure brings the numbers in which then become a measurment of nothing.
Then there are those who go viral and discover that likes are nothing but a quick acknowledgement. Like someone on the street who likes your shirt. They aren’t moved. They aren’t changed. They may forget you tomorrow.
Take the example of Space Gambus Experiment. I don’t know him personally and I have only followed him casually enough to have a vague idea, but he at least seems to illustrate my point.
He’s an experimental musician, artist, and writer, and probably many other things too, from Ipoh Malaysia with a very interesting style and impressive numbers on social media. 275k followers and 2000+ likes on many of his posts. If you check out his Instagram, it makes total sense. His work is as close as you can be to objectively very cool and interesting.
But to make my poiny, He also has a blog on Substack which I have read a few times. As you might expect, there isn’t as much activity there. 7 likes. 10 likes. What percentage of 275,000 is that?
In this case I imagine there is some invisible activity on his blog because you don’t need a Substack account to read, and Substack also sends out emails so some people probably never go to the site to like his post.
Still though, the contrast of these numbers would have been little shocking to me if I hadn’t noticed it with so many other artists I respect.
These numbers completely fail to measure an artists true impact. Both the Substack and the Instagram.
Likes are a combination of addicted scroll fervor, habit, and shallow acknowledgement. They mean nothing on their own. The real impact happens face to face. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
This is absolutely not comentary on this particular artist, just on an observation on the nature of the internet and how it’s evolving.
I imagine Space Gambus Experiment has made an impact on people, but not because of his numbers. He doesn’t seem all that concerned with his numbers which leads me to believe that he has enough going on to not not care all thr much about about the numbers.
A real impact is no longer a cult following like Michael Jackson or Queen. We are realizing more and more that that was never genuine impact but rather cult like behavior. That’s not the fault of the artist (usually). It’s just the culture they were part of. It still exists in K-pop and with Swifties, but it’s becoming less and less prevalent.
Real impact now looks like a sold out seminar. It looks like invitations and access to collaborators. It’s the tears on the faces of a person in the crowd and a letter in your inbox telling you how much of an inspiration you’ve been. It’s someone using your song at their wedding party despite it not being well known.
Real impact is the kid who absorbed your work casually only to check back in with you 20 years later with tears in his eyes because he realized that it was your work that helped him through a difficult time or helped open his mind.
It’s the friends I’ve made through my blogging and the person I accidentally convinced to quit their job. It doesn’t always show itself to me so clearly but with time, I begin to feel it a presence more and more clearly in a way that those who left their seeds for me to plant did not feel.
One day my appreciation may reach them.
Thank you Dan Deacon. Thank you Blonde Redhead. Thank you Mr. Bungle. Thank you K. A. Applegate.
I never followed you or “liked” your posts on social media and there were many years where I lost track of what you were doing, but you helped me on my path.
You were the High school or University teacher I needed. You were the adult who helped me process my emotions or the crack in my reality that there was more out in the world to explore.
You will never know how profound your impact on me was. I didn’t listen to every single one of your songs or read every single one of your books, but the one’s that hit, really really hit and I am forever grateful.
This is the real impact. This is all that matters. Ironically, going forward, I believe it will also be the only way for artists to create a stable income too, not the numbers which are becoming more and more of a hollow signal.
The numbers represent nothing more than an opportunity to bring a few new people to your camp, and those conversion numbers will become less and less impressive but more and more meaningful.
As we enter the age where we can create anything with the push of a button, we will become less emotionally reliant on idols and things that we can’t have a two way relationship with. Those things will always exist but will become less and less prevalent and have less sway over our lives.
The transition will be confusing but once we can imagine more clearly what it will look like on the other side, new cultures will begin to emerge that more accurately reflect what is in our hearts than the current top down and cultish models that we’ve all grown tired of.
And as always, here are a few breadcrumbs you can follow to my collection of work in case you feel curious:
