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Why Stupid, Talentless People Are The Ones Getting Famous
We have reached peak mediocrity.
For a good while I thought I was too old for TikTok.
I just kept to media consumption’s legacy means thinking “You’ll never get me, China!” up until the moment YouTube launched its knockoff feature.
Now I wake up to a mind-numbing thumb cardio session, swiping past a clip or two of Joe Rogan being scared of polar bears, a girl accurately appraised to be 874K likes pretty, several montages poorly timed to the beat of World’s Smallest Violin, and critically-acclaimed footage of a kitten climbing into a slipper.
All before I get to have my first original thought of the day.
One recent morning, that thought happened to be about old artists (read: retro content creators) and how they would’ve had absolutely no f*cking chance of making it today.
Think of Tolkien or Bob Dylan; think of Picasso, who painted like someone who had forgotten to take their Prolixin medication for several fortnights. Believe it or not, it took a while for cubism to grow on people. And for people to understand that the point of Bob Dylan was not virtuosic harmonica solos but Nobel Prize-winning lyrics.
