[grandalf]

The idea of emergent PR via this sort of mechanism combined with a trustless and difficult-to-regulate infrastructure offers significant promise for breaking the glass ceiling that makes fame so difficult to achieve.

Ever wonder why news personalities and many celebs are so seemingly mediocre? It's this glass ceiling.

Platforms like Youtube solve part of the problem, but big fame takes big money, and so the funding mechanism has to be much more direct and consumer-driven than ad revenue sharing. ETH is perfect for it.

Many regulations on money transfers and political donation are designed so that they benefit those already in power. If you want to be a real leader it takes spending in excess of $1B, but once you do it you are feared and adored and have a place in the history books.

This is the game that our leaders are playing already, which is why Paul Ryan has a net worth of over $7M and the Clintons have wealth over $250M. They are simply the beneficiaries of massive marketing campaigns and care little for ideas or substance. Trump is the most blatant one to date.

It will be a good thing when this game is open to real competition so that non-elites can take a shot at getting the next $2B image makeover and a few years controlling the nuclear football.

It all starts with the simple freedom to fundraise and donate so that non-elites can form coalitions to elevate one of their own to larger-than-life status.

[aaron-lebo]

Have we not seen the effects of this already? YouTube, Kickstarter, Twitter have already made it possible for nobodies to became massively famous. Most of them are mediocre.

It seems to me the surest way to guarantee mediocrity is to incentivise blatant money grabs. Here's a million a dollars for your billboard of ads? That's not going to build the future we are hoping for, it's gonna make someone else in 10 years make another copy.

[notahacker]

Plus the punks that skip traditional routes to mainstream attention end up on major record labels just like the original elites anyway.

Alex Tew, the original Million Dollar Homepage creator, runs a VC funded startup in Silicon Valley. Social media stars tend to make their money shilling for big brands. I can't think of any internet stars I'm particularly desperate to see go into politics, and that's not because I'm delighted by the status quo

[grandalf]

> I can't think of any internet stars I'm particularly desperate to see go into politics, and that's not because I'm delighted by the status quo

This is a good point, but consider how a lot of politics is kept off of typical social media channels, either due to overarching censorship or decency concerns, because of concerns about repelling advertisers, or simply because the main issues we are fed have mostly to do with what powerful interests want (fear of Islam, fear of Russia, fear of immigration, fear of global warming, etc.)

Certainly such a system would be full of many of the same noise and garbage that fills social media, but I think it would be very interesting to see what would emerge if the constraints imposed by elites were not relevant.

Right now, the only people who focus on social media are the Kim Kardashians and Donald Trumps of the world. More serious people avoid it. Even Michael Moore, in an attempt to use social media to spread his views, now acts like a B-list celeb and plays to a very large, mainstream audience. He essentially plays the part of earnest lefty filmmaker, but he's not anywhere near power.

[notahacker]

I think you must inhabit different social media worlds from me. I see an enormous amount of politics on social media, which tends to be even more lowbrow and fear-driven than the mainstream media for reasons which have nothing to do with capital and everything to do with clicks.

[grandalf]

Well, I'd argue that what you're seeing is a second-tier of power/wealth-hungry individuals. The first tier occupies our political leadership.

The behavior is basically identical, but with dramatically different payouts. Both involve finding a tribe and riding that tribe's enthusiasm to greater notoriety and wealth.

[yyyyip]

Slate star codex/Scott Alexander is a good example of internet-driven democratization of opportunity. A trainee psychiatrist from somewhere in the Midwest, the quality of his blog posts on economic and social issues has led to him being one of the most influential thinkers around at present.

[uncle_d]

I think you just demonstrated the fat-tail balkanisation of the web - Brit here, never heard of this dude.

For many still, the first time they hear of someone outside their own bubble will be when e.g. old media invites them on as a guest, due to their Internet fame.

[Gargoyle]

>It seems to me the surest way to guarantee mediocrity is to incentivise blatant money grabs.

GP explicitly states that's the current state of affairs. That's the basis of his point, in fact.