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by scrozier 528 days ago
You may or may not be aware that Andy Warhol famously quipped that, "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," back in the late 1960s. As media has gotten to be ever more ubiquitous and the cost of entry lower, he was clearly onto something decades before the internet!
3 comments

And then there’s Banksy’s “in the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes“. For pretty much the same reasons you stated above, I assume.
is that how long it takes before a newborn is given their SSN?
A few weeks, as I recall.
In a modern hospital, depending on how healthy a baby is, it might get as many as 15 minutes before the not-removable-except-by-cutting RFID-enabled tag is attached to the wrist or ankle and it becomes part of the hospital inventory and the movements are tracked religiously. They are deathly afraid of accidentally mixing up babies between parents (with a side of worry about them getting stolen). Each of my kids were born at a hospital that averaged a delivery every 15-20 minutes. A nurse may see 50 deliveries in a shift and keeping track is going to be a challenge.
That’s true, I just meant SSN. Newborns are not anonymous by design.
To update this excellent quote to 2025, change minutes to seconds and you just described TikTok.
Yeah, I was thinking that the while modern social media has made the "cost of entry lower," and everyone can theoretically reach more people than ever, it's hard to even describe most of it as "fame" anymore. I mean, does content even "go viral" anymore, with users subdivided into the tiniest niche communities or audiences? Even if things get wider traction for a while, there's so much competition with so much other content that everything seems to get quickly drowned out and then can't even be found again later through search.
There’s a saying on twitter that every day there is a main character and the goal of twitter is to not be it.
Lol once I 3d printed my daughter a “Rocktopus”. It was a model of Dwane Johnson “the Rock” head with articulating octopus arms a cool 3d print that was funny. Anyways she took it and painted it all up and then glued on fake eye lashes and makeup on it. She then made a video to TikTok or snap I forget and it went viral getting like a million views. I could see that made her happy like a dopamine hit so told her that it was fun but to just be careful and that she is awesome and not to stress if random people on the internet don’t validate her feelings. She has me beat though I think my highest upvoted post was like 15k or so on reddit for something satirical and dumb. Feels good in the moment.