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The Social Network,
Sean has been perceived
as one of the coolest people in America. JT is still more famous, but when he visits
Silicon Valley, people ask if he’s Sean Parker.
The most famous people in the world are founders, too: instead of a company, every
celebrity founds and cultivates a personal brand. Lady Gaga, for example, became one of
the most influential living people. But is she even a real person? Her real name isn’t a
secret, but almost no one knows or cares what it is. She wears costumes so bizarre as to
put any other wearer at risk of an involuntary psychiatric hold. Gaga would have you
believe that she was “born this way”—the title of both her second album and its lead
track. But no one is born looking like a zombie with horns coming out of her head: Gaga
must therefore be a self-manufactured myth. Then again, what kind of person would do
this to herself? Certainly nobody normal. So perhaps Gaga really
was
born that way.
WHERE KINGS COME FROM
Extreme founder figures are not new in human affairs. Classical mythology is full of
them. Oedipus is the paradigmatic insider/outsider: he was abandoned as an infant and
ended up in a foreign land, but he was a brilliant king and smart enough to solve the
riddle of the Sphinx.
Romulus and Remus were born of royal blood and abandoned as orphans. When they
discovered their pedigree, they decided to found a city. But they couldn’t agree on where
to put it. When Remus crossed the boundary that Romulus had decided was the edge of
Rome, Romulus killed him, declaring: “So perish every one that shall hereafter leap over
my wall.” Law-maker
and
law-breaker, criminal outlaw
and
king who defined Rome,
Romulus was a self-contradictory insider/outsider.
Normal people aren’t like Oedipus or Romulus. Whatever those individuals were
actually like in life, the mythologized versions of them remember only the extremes. But
why was it so important for archaic cultures to remember extraordinary people?
The famous and infamous have always served as vessels for public sentiment: they’re
praised amid prosperity and blamed for misfortune. Primitive societies faced one
fundamental problem above all: they would be torn apart by conflict if they didn’t have a
way to stop it. So whenever plagues, disasters, or violent rivalries threatened the peace, it
was beneficial for the society to place the entire blame on a single person, someone
everybody could agree on: a scapegoat.
Who makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and
contradictory figures. On the one hand, a scapegoat is necessarily weak; he is powerless
to stop his own victimization. On the other hand, as the one who can defuse conflict by
taking the blame, he is the most powerful member of the community.
Before execution, scapegoats were often worshipped like deities. The Aztecs
considered their victims to be earthly forms of the gods to whom they were sacrificed.
You would be dressed in fine clothes and feast royally until your brief reign ended and
they cut your heart out. These are the roots of monarchy: every king was a living god,
and every god a murdered king. Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has
managed to delay his own execution.
AMERICAN ROYALTY
Celebrities are supposedly “American royalty.” We even grant titles to our favorite
performers: Elvis Presley was the king of rock. Michael Jackson was the king of pop.
Britney Spears was the pop princess.
Until they weren’t. Elvis self-destructed in the ’70s and died alone, overweight, sitting
on his toilet. Today, his impersonators are fat and sketchy, not lean and cool. Michael
Jackson went from beloved child star to an erratic, physically repulsive, drug-addicted
shell of his former self; the world reveled in the details of his trials. Britney’s story is
the most dramatic of all. We created her from nothing, elevating her to superstardom as
a teenager. But then everything fell off the tracks: witness the shaved head, the over- and
under-eating scandals, and the highly publicized court case to take away her children.
Was she always a little bit crazy? Did the publicity just get to her? Or did she do it all to
get more?
For some fallen stars, death brings resurrection. So many popular musicians have died
at age 27—Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, for example—
that this set has become immortalized as the “27 Club.” Before she joined the club in
2011, Amy Winehouse sang: “They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, ‘No, no,
no.’ ” Maybe rehab seemed so unattractive because it blocked the path to immortality.
Perhaps the only way to be a rock god forever is to die an early death.
We alternately worship and despise technology founders just as we do celebrities.
Howard Hughes’s arc from fame to pity is the most dramatic of any 20th-century tech
founder. He was born wealthy, but he was always more interested in engineering than
luxury. He built Houston’s first radio transmitter at the age of 11. The year after that he
built the city’s first motorcycle. By age 30 he’d made nine commercially successful
movies at a time when Hollywood was on the technological frontier. But Hughes was
even more famous for his parallel career in aviation. He designed planes, produced them,
and piloted them himself. Hughes set world records for top airspeed, fastest
transcontinental flight, and fastest flight around the world.
Hughes was obsessed with flying higher than everyone else. He liked to remind people
that he was a mere mortal, not a Greek god—something that mortals say only when they
want to invite comparisons to gods. Hughes was “a man to whom you cannot apply the
same standards as you can to you and me,” his lawyer once argued in federal court.
Hughes paid the lawyer to say that, but according to the
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