While we are all aware that the “democratization” of fame has been a blessing for some (e.g. Tao Lin), for most of the rest of us, it has come with the curse of being able to instantly pinpoint the ego of the type of “man” who would be unable to resist turning on a Google alert for whenever his name comes up in an article from a semi on the radar website (blogs, of course, obviously don’t count).

The desire to know he’s being talked about is more of a source of ejaculation potential than analog banging ever could be (because how can a “man’s” ego possibly be fortified by his fucking skills these days?). “I didn’t see that article come up in my Google notifications,” he’ll admit unabashedly when someone mentions they saw something about him on the internet recently. It’s the kind of exchange that tends only to occur in New York, where everyone keeps track of everyone for the sake of knowing where their place is on the insignificant totem pole called “talentless microcosm.”

The “man” who needs to be notified of being “eloquently discussed” by some middling “publication” (non-ink laden with typos and grammatical errors, as it were) is clearly clinging to whatever bread crumbs of relevancy he can in order to stave off the unshakeable thought that he is just as irrelevant and meaningless as he knows himself to be deep down. But with the “frequency” of Google alerts, he can help perpetuate the fallacy of self-importance that his Asian girlfriend can only do so much to support as one person. It is the foremost tool of modern “fame” that has been perhaps one of the greatest contributors to the deterioration in quality of art. Because if you’re only in it to see how many times your name crops up in some crevice of the internet, how can you possibly create something enduring? What’s more, high-level fame (the Madonna tier) does not require one to be notified of their “many” achievements if there are enough to lose track of.