I'm also thinking a lot about how Twitter is basically a video game where in order to get ahead, if you're a true poster, you never show a shred of vulnerability or humanity.

You never post cringe. You post, you know, you never post cringe. Um, you, you know, you, you post without even a real identity. You make up a fake identity.

You, uh, name yourself after an oblique reference to a town in Texas from a film because you don't want anyone to know about

your past.

This is a rule I violate constantly.

It seemingly to the, like, to the point of like being driven out of town with pitchforks.

But I think it's dumb.

I think it's the spectacle and action and to, you know, I know I just got done saying

you can't actually undo it by contradicting it, but I just feel compelled to.

But this is all leading me to my final point about this, which is celebrity and the worship of celebrity, which is a thing that is talked about in this book a little bit with reference to the spectacle and how another thing that's happening another way we split our mind with when confronted with the contradictions of modernity and capitalism is that we defer to

famous people who we venerate and celebrate as sort of like like like, like validity that our future, where we're going to become class mobile,

even though no one ever does that, our future, the myth, at least, of that, is intact.

Every fucking celebrity, every artist claims to have come from nothing. We love that

story. It helps them a lot because it makes them seem like they're a lot better at what they do.

If you're operating on the logic of the meritocratic market. But we love it because, you know, I think emotionally on some level, you look at a famous person and you go, well, that could be me.

Even if you know it's not, it serves a purpose.

It's part of the spectacle.

It's an image.

But in order to function as an image, celebrities have to be perfect.

They have to be proof of heaven on earth, of the promised land that we as workers are all

supposedly headed towards.

That you could be a professional artist and get paid because you're so good at your thing,

...