On Clowns

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There are a few factors that explain how things have gone downhill, but one of them is that social media elevates clowns.

The lowest common denominator for attention is people who have, basically, car crash appeal. You cannot resist looking at them once you spot them, and you often cannot resist commenting on whatever they’ve said or done. This makes their reach larger, and more and more people will see what they have to say.

Over time, the fact that they’re famous for being a car wreck stops mattering, is forgotten, or is excused. Fundamentally, the indignity of being a clown does not prevent them from being treated as a thought leader, an intellectual, or an expert on technology, money, politics, or war. Being a clown does not prevent them from working for the government, seeking elected office, or advising those who do. This means that we elevate clowns to positions of legitimate influence and power.

This extends previous trends, where you are happy to be hated in the press so long as they spell your name right, and where if you are slightly famous and want to be more famous you can manufacture a scandal about yourself. Online influence is different because it’s accessible to people who were not famous at all, and is especially appealing for those with a lot of time on their hands to maintain a consistent presence. This also makes it less likely that they are good at anything. If they were good at something else they would be doing it instead.

Much has been written about what the lowest common denominator attention-hogging content is, and very little about who the lowest common denominator attention-hogging person is. It seems fairly clear that this person is, actually, a clown, and is almost systematically filtered for lacking any other virtues. This problem, of course, is self-perpetuating. Clowns elevate other clowns, non-clowns tend to decide to do something else with their time, and people who were on the fence end up behaving more clownishly.

This appears to be an emergent property of mass communication, and should be expected to appear anywhere that it is used. Clowns are in demand in the marketplace of ideas, clownishness is a meme that outcompetes most other things. It is not obvious to me how you would make everything less clownish.