Internet Time Machine

We Are All Famous Now

Are you an A-Lister or a Z-Lister?

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

My husband takes me to see the documentary Author, and I become obsessed with the story of JT LeRoy, the literary phenomenon who was unmasked as a fictional figure created by the writer Laura Albert. Albert’s story is harrowing, perplexing, and wholly absorbing. The film asks more questions of its audience than it answers: What is fame? What do we want from writers? What is it about a spotlight that simultaneously withdraws and repels us? What do we do when we want everyone to see us, and no one to look at us?

A few days earlier, I attend a launch event for press and influencers. I’m early, and I don’t know many of the other guests. I talk to a woman who introduces herself as a blogger and says her name as if she expects me to light up. “Aha! Wow, it’s you!” I try to make the right face, but it’s too late. In conversation, I mention a friend who has written a book that I’m very excited about. “She’s a huge talent,” I say, and, “I think this book is going to change things for the better. I’m so excited.” The blogger’s face turns in half a second, like a sky switched to gray on a sultry summer’s day. She’s upset about young women, pretty women, thin women, successful women thinking that anything is new, that anyone could have the answers. It’s all been done before. She’s done it all before. She’s been ripped off. Her name was once on everyone’s lips, now it’s just her ideas. What’s the point?

At the end of the week, I’m on a panel at a conference discussing the celebrities of new media and the responsibilities old media has toward them. The star of the panel is a petite, slender, cartoonishly beautiful girl. She’s charming. She makes me feel like a troll living under the bridge in a fairy tale — my inner ugliness, my jealousy, my resentfulness making me grotesque on the outside. She’s famous because she talks about beauty and body confidence. Before I was asked to go on the panel, I’d never heard her name. I discover she has a million Instagram followers. She talks about the pressures of fame, how every major global media outlet wanted to interview her, how difficult life is, and how unfair it is that…