What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

It's Rico Daley. I'm Adam Clark Estes. And today, we have an episode of Vox Conversations that we want to share with you.

Are we all famous now?

I'm Sean Elling and I'm your host for Vox Conversations.

I know that's a strange question. If everyone is famous, then no one is famous, right?

Or maybe it just depends on what we mean by famous. Last month, I read a New York essay by Chris Hayes, the host of all in on MSNBC.

That explored this question in a different but provocative way. Hayes wasn't exactly asking you for all famous now. Instead, he asked what happens when the experience of fame becomes a universal possibility.

This is the kind of fuzzy idea that bounces around your head for a long time, but you can never quite do anything with it until someone comes around and articulates it so clearly.

That's what Hayes did. And I've wanted to talk to him about it ever since his argument is that the internet has made the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame accessible to everyone.

Anyone who's on a social media platform like TikTok or Twitter is always one viral post away from instant fame or what feels like fame anyway.

Most of us don't ever get it, not really, but it's always there. It's always a possibility.

For Hayes, this means we're always chasing validation in a place that can never really give it to us because we don't really know or care about the people on the other side of the virtual wall.

Like the celebrity interacting with fans, it's hollow and one-sided and the people liking and sharing her post are non-persons who satisfy our desire for attention, but they can't quite satisfy our desire for genuine recognition.

In this episode, I talked to Hayes about why he thinks it's such a radical shift in human life and one we've probably underappreciated.

We also talk about his own uneasy relationship with fame and why, like the rest of us, he just can't back away from Twitter.

Chris Hayes, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here.

I've wanted to get you on the show for a while, but I didn't want to bring you on and talk about the stuff you have to talk about every night on your political show.

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