MIND GRENADES
them to infamy and disrepute. John Keats
disingenuously asked that his epitaph read,
“Here lies one whose name was writ on
water.” Water has substance in this world;
anything written on it does not. (Of course
“John Keats” was also writ in ink on paper,
where it persists.)
The record stretches forward to an
imagined future where entirely new names
will fill it—and stretches back to antiquity.
Do you doubt that a flibbertigibbet like Jen-
ner has entered any kind of eternal record,
one that began long before Beowulf at the
dawn of Western Civ? Watch this. I’ll show
you in three steps: (1) Instagram constructs
Jenner and her lips as stars. (2)Forbes,
which keeps the count, frames her as a
billionaire. (3) Forbes and other talliers of
human “worth” position “billionaire” as an
exalted category of human—on par with
“gold medalist,” the title bestowed in 1976
on Jenner’s father, Caitlyn, formerly Bruce,
whose particular talents in the decath-
lon were first named and styled as fame-
worthy in ancient Greece.
The record, whether carved in stone
or bits of data, is arbitrary in the extreme.
To endow with fame and fortune women
with big lips or people who hurl themselves
over a bar on a bendy pole—while skipping
over people who, say, can build houses or
make meringues—suggests that fame and
game don’t rhyme only by accident. Fame
comes to those whose accomplishments are
recorded, and the “record” is as contingent
on human whim as any algorithm.
And the famous are then figments of that
record. They’re no more real than Beowulf,
the warrior longing for fame, who achieved
nothing like the enduring fame of Beowulf,
the poem. And is Kylie Jenner real? Forbes’
billionaire list is renowned for its creative
math—and Instagram, like faces touched
by fillers, is known for artful distortions. It
seems the longing for fame, then, shared by
Beowulf and Jenner, doubles as the long-
ing to sacrifice one’s real life wholly to the
record, to pass out of fact and into fiction.
Maybe that’s why the first model for fame
in the West is the one Alexander dreamed
of emulating: Achilles. A warrior. With a
serious shortcoming. Who never existed.
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88)
is a regular contributor to wired.
Her most recent book is Magic and Loss:
The Internet as Art.
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