Boston Latin School, my alma mater, is the oldest (and longest existing) public school in the country. 141 years older than the country, in fact. Ben Franklin went there before he moved to Philly. Alumni include Sam Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Bullfinch, you get the idea. There’s an admission test, but it’s free to attend for Boston resident teens. All students at are still required to study Latin for three or four years, and many study Greek as well. It’s a school that consistently ranks among the top in the country, bringing a Classics education into the 21st century.

Last night I saw the video below, made by current BLS students, making the rounds on Facebook through fellow alumni, and it’s just so totally epic I had to post it here. Never mind the sense of nostalgia seeing the old hallways in the background, these kids have done a better job of branding the iconography of my alma mater than my class ever considered. Watch out, marketers, the next generation will soon be doing a better job at our jobs than we are.

Sumus Primi!

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Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, long time in the making. What’s been happening over the past few weeks is not Charlie Sheen going crazy. Although it’s certainly easy to get confused. No doubt, Charlie Sheen wants you to think he’s crazy. After all, the boring recovering-addict Charlie Sheen Show — or the boring functioning-addict Charlie Sheen Show, depending on your preference — is much less interesting to watch than the “Crazy” one. And we are still watching….

In the course of this production it’s hard not to think about the film I’m Still Here, the cinéma vérité chronicling of Joaquin Phoenix’s “retirement from acting.”

For a year and a half, the twice Oscar-nominated Phoenix gained weight, stopped shaving, and tried to start a career as a rapper while his brother-in-law and fledgling filmmaker, Casey Affleck, came along for the ride to document this seeming descent into madness. Phoenix even famously came on Letterman in the course of I’m Still Here‘s production, disheveled and incoherent — an appearance that, by the end, prompted Letterman to say he owes an apology to Farrah Fawcett, til then considered his most disastrous guest of all time.

Of course, in the end it turned out this was not just another overindulged celebrity losing his mind. Nor, even after it was revealed that Phoenix’s “retirement” and subsequent actions weren’t exactly the plot of a straight “documentary,” was it all just simply a hoax. Back on the Late Show a year and a half later, now clean-shaven, and charming as usual, Phoenix explained:

We wanted to do a film that explored celebrity, and explored the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves. We wanted something that would feel really authentic. I’d started watching a lot of reality shows and I was amazed that people believed them; that they called them, like, ‘reality.’ I thought the only reason why is because it’s billed as being ‘real’ and the people use their real names. But the acting is terrible. I thought I could handle that. Because you don’t have to be very good. You just use your name, and people think that it’s real.

For a year and a half, Joaquin Phoenix lived the life of a character who shared his name and history and circumstances, both in private scenes and in the public eye. What then, truly, is the difference between what’s “real” and what isn’t? What does “hoax” even mean in the age of “reality TV?” I’m Still Here, along with the context around it, is a philosophical exploration of these questions.

It’s a very similar postmodern paradox that is at the heart of Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop:

“The world’s first street art disaster movie” tells the story of Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French-born shop-keeper living in L.A. whose compulsive need to record every waking moment, and a cousin who happens to be the street artist Space Invader, combined to lead Guetta to become the de facto documentarian of the street art scene, tagging along on late-night art missions with its luminaries, including L.A.’s Shepard Fairey and, ultimately, the elusive reigning godfather of street art himself, Banksy. About two thirds of the way through the movie, Guetta, who had never previously edited any of the mountains of footage he’d been obsessively recording, goes to the U.K. to present a first draft of his “street art documentary” to Banksy for feedback. Deflecting his true opinion of the unwatchable film, Banksy suggests that perhaps Guetta should consider becoming a street artist himself and sends him back to L.A. with the idea of putting on a small show. Banksy also requests Guetta send him his raw video footage so that he can reedit it himself. And this is where the movie becomes something like an Andy Warhol adaptation of the Blair Witch Project.

A few months before Joaquin Phoenix would be announcing his acting “retirement,” Guetta’s artist persona, Mr. Brainwash, or MBW, had moved from plastering L.A. with his own likeness — an image of a guy holding a video camera — straight to mounting a massive “street art” show, called “Life Is Beautiful,” in a 15,000 square-foot venue. Seemingly overnight, Mr. Brainwash was being positioned as an up-and-comer with the oeuvre of a Shepard Fairey or a Banksy — by then both artists, as well as many other leading names in the street art world, had begun having their art on display inside galleries as opposed to on the exterior of walls — except unlike these artists with years, even decades of creative evolution and refinement, Guetta had no experience. He’d hired an army of sculptors and designers to manufacture the pieces for his show, ripped straight from bookmarks in art books — even the illustration of Guetta holding the camera had been created by someone else.

The day of the show the line to get in stretched for blocks. Four thousand people attended the opening. By the end of the day nearly a million dollars worth of Mr. Brainwash art had been sold.

The story, at face value, seems so preposterous that the question of whether it could truly be real has dogged the film, as well as created the suspense that’s made it even more of a phenomenon. Could an amateur who’d never actually made art himself succeed at pulling off a show that so blatantly counterfeited and so quickly eclipsed those of the art form’s recognized heavyweights? And would they really release a movie about it happening? Or is all of it — the movie, Life is Beautiful, Mr. Brainwash — simply Banksy’s greatest prank yet? Theories abound. The New York Times labeled it as a harbinger of a new cinematic subgenre: The Prankumentary. “The whole thing, it’s clear now,” Fast Company insisted, “Was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy, who has never publicly revealed his identity, with Fairey as his accomplice.” Their conjecture about what really happened: “Banksy… convinced Guetta to pose as a budding graffiti artist wannabe so he and Fairey could ‘direct’ him in real life — manufacturing a brand new persona.” Yet when asked at the end of the film how he feels knowing that he is in part responsible for Mr. Brainwash, Shepard Fairey laughs ruefully, “I had the best intentions. But sometimes even when you have the best intentions things can go awry…. The phenomenon of Thierry becoming a street artist, and a lot of suckers buying into his show and him selling a lot of expensive art very quickly, anthropologically, sociologically, it’s a fascinating thing to observe. And maybe there’s some things to be learned from it.” For his part, Banksy, even as his voice is scrambled beyond recognition, conveys unmistakable melancholy as he says, “I used to encourage everyone I met to make art. I used to think that everyone should do it….. I don’t really do that so much anymore.”

“This brutal and revealing account of what happens when fame, money and vandalism collide” could just be an L.A. story simply too bizarre to have been made up, and just as easily, it could all be a fabricated fable about what happens to an artistic movement when it becomes commercialized. From “selling out” to “cashing in” the concept is so mundane it’s a cliché, but Exit Through The Gift Shop‘s treatment is primarily to emphasize the absurdity of the progression of events rather than to make any concrete statement about them. As Banksy’s art dealer says at the end of the film, “I think the joke is on… I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke.”

Which brings us back to Charlie Sheen. Not that what Sheen’s doing is any kind of joke or “prank.” This is all very much for real for him. And it is also a very deliberate performance. How did we get here? February 28, Charlie Sheen goes on Good Morning America, The Today Show, TMZ, Radar, Piers Morgan on CNN, 20/20 — basically, every celebrity interview news show he possibly can, and attracts a tsunami of flabbergasted attention for bein’ all ka-raaaazy. The next day he launches a social media empire.

Suddenly sounding not so crazy. Hell, as a digital strategist, I’d say it’s a pretty smart move. Within 25 hours and 17 minutes, Charlie Sheen had broken the world record for amassing 1 million Twitter followers faster than anyone else. Less than a week after his first tweet, he’d reached 2 million. “Another record shattered,” he tweeted, “We gobbled the soft target that was 2.0 mil, like a bag of troll-house zombie chow.” By then, he’d also launched a social media intern search:

which received over 74 THOUSAND! submissions in 5 days. Arguably no other celebrity has “gotten” the way social media works as fast. Even Conan had a slower uptake, though he’s undeniably provided a template for Sheen to work off of. (After getting canned from his TV job, Sheen did like MBW to Conan’s Banksy and announced he’s going on tour — the “Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not An Option” Tour — just like Conan’s Banned From Television Tour last year in the wake of his own network debacle.) And, obviously, Sheen’s not doing it all on his own.

In Sheen’s 11-minute livestream episode, titled, “Torpedeos of Truth Part 2,” recorded on March 7th, 2011 — a week after his “old media” blitzkrieg — a terribly lit, grossly contrasted video in which a curmudgeonly, borderline belligerent Sheen looks like he might not have showered for days prior then rolled out of bed that morning, turned on his lap top, and started recording through the built-in camera above the screen, at 6 minutes, 40 seconds, when he ducks “below the frame line,” the camera moves. This is a recording made to look like it’s being done through a shitty built-in computer camera, but when it moves to follow Sheen as he ducks it’s suddenly clear there may be a camera person involved. If there is someone behind the camera, there could just as easily have been a lighting guy, a makeup person, but No! “Make me look as crazy as possible,” was clearly the direction here. By episode four it’d been announced that Sheen had officially been fired from his sitcom. The ante was upped. Suddenly Sheen, well-lit, made-up, looking as healthy as a marathoner — if not for the chain-smoking — in his sweat-wicking Nike shirt, was performing a soliloquy sounding like some misplaced Hunter S. Thompson diatribe. Clearly some writing talent may have been called in — if it hadn’t been already: consider that basically everything coming out of Charlie Sheen’s mouth becomes a meme — it’s been impossible to escape hearing someone say #winning (a hashtag in Charlie Sheen’s very first tweet) for weeks; then there’s #tigerblood, which is so meme-able it can’t even be summarized properly:

Tiger Blood Energy Potion found in a hotel lobby at SXSW Interactive. Photo: Danny Newman

Right now 4Chan, the primordial ooze that has spawned everything from lolcats to Rickrolling to SadKeanu to every other Internet meme you’ve ever heard of, is looking at Charlie Sheen like Woh. The last guy anywhere near this unstoppably memetastic was the Old Spice Guy–

and that guy was created by an AD AGENCY!

Something else you might notice — Charlie Sheen almost never swears. You have never heard him bleeped in any of the interviews he’s done on TV. There are no R-rated words on his Twitter stream. Every so often there’s some sprinkled in his livestreams, but for the most part The Charlie Sheen Show is all-ages. Where he could say “assholes” or “douchebags,” he says “silly fools” or “trolls.” These Playskool insults are unexpected, amusing, almost benign, yet nostalgically cruel. This is not the syntax of a man out of control.

“Where do these words come from, Charlie,” 20/20′s Andrea Canning asked.

“I don’t know,” he rolled his eyes, “They’re just words that sound cool together. Stuff just comes out and it’s entertaining and it’s fun and it sounds different from all the other garbage people are spewing, you know?”

Charlie Sheen doesn’t have Tourettes. He is deliberately saying these things to entertain and be funny and unique. And he’s good at it. Bret Easton Ellis — the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, as well as Lunar Park, a haunted house story in which the main character is a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who’s lived the same history as his eponymous creator (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore — publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) or is it, rather, the life he was expected to have been leading? (“What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.“) — writing in an article titled, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” calls Sheen, “the most fascinating person wandering through the culture:”

You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating…. This privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted ridiculer. Sheen has embraced post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity now means. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock and roll. Deal with it.

Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. For my younger friends, it’s no longer rare; it’s now the norm. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity.

It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is. He’s raw and lucid and intense…. We’re not used to these kinds of interviews. It’s coming off almost as performance art and we’ve never seen anything like it—because he’s not apologizing. It’s an irresistible spectacle. We’ve never seen a celebrity more nakedly revealing.

It’s the contradiction we could never quite reconcile in I’m Still Here or Exit Through The Gift Shop; one we can accept in Lady Gaga because she’s not using her real name and we’re sort of OK with it when it’s just a “character.” Charlie Sheen is real and not real at once: a spectacle and a revelation. It’s meta-postmodernism. It’s existential performance art. Minutes before Charlie Sheen’s first livestream was set to start, the audio feed came on. You could hear Sheen rehearsing the rant he would perform that night, prompting the question: is this all an act? Of course it is! He’s an acTOR. From a family of actors, who’s spent his entire life performing. There’s no way he’d go on camera ever without rehearsing. Charlie Sheen’s whole life has been a performance, and this now is not so much different, just with a bigger audience and, as we say in the 21st century music business, cutting out the middleman. As far as Charlie Sheen knows, this is what real is. And as far a we know that’s what it is, too.

Ellis writes:

If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ (and humiliated by Harvey Levin, or Chelsea Handler—princess of post-Empire) while stumbling out of a club on Sunset Boulevard at 2 in the morning, then you should be a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game, and you’re a fool if you don’t play along. This is why Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians.

What does shame mean anymore? my friends in their 20s ask. Why in the hell did your boyfriend post a song called “Suck My Ballz” on Facebook last night? my mom asks. But nothing yet compares to the transparency that Sheen has unleashed in the past two weeks—contempt about celebrity, his profession, the old Empire world order.

Ellis’s “Empire” is a reference to Gore Vidal’s definition of global American hegemony, which Ellis dates from 1945 until 2005: the era that defined the 20th century. Post-Empire is where we are now. For Ellis, Empire is the lie, the having to hide who you really are, the keeping up appearances; post-Empire, on the other hand, is what Ellis calls, “aggressive transparency.” But his perspective has one flaw: for Ellis, both Empire and post-Empire are binary. It’s one or the other. It’s true or it’s a lie; it’s real or its counterfeit. The post-Empire reality, however, is not the end of the lie, it’s the end of the binary. Sure, “radical transparency” has become a 21st century marketing buzzword. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg believes that Privacy is Dead and has remade Facebook in that image. Sure, I wrote last year, what makes Iron Man the first 21st century superhero? His lack of alter ego; his unconflicted, absolute identity. But that all is only part of the Millennial story.

Social media researcher danah boyd writes:

There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.

Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control.

I’d argue this is, in fact, true of all of us now in the post-Empire. Not just teens. “What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified,” writes Ellis, “Is the moment in the culture when not caring what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy).” Except that Charlie Sheen still very much DOES care. And so do all the rest of us in the 21st century. It’s there in every Facebook photo you’ve untagged yourself from. You had your reasons. It’s there in every location you pulled out your phone to check in at, and then decided not to. It’s there every time you hovered over, and then didn’t click the “Like” button. As tech blogger, Robert Scoble, writes:

The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.

That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.

But then I started noticing that…. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.

See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?

Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.

I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.

This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.

Not only do we still care what other people think about us, we now curate it more obsessively. Trent Reznor calls it “A hyper-real version of yourself.”

This is the hyper-real version of Charlie Sheen. It is a role that Charlie Sheen is performing. And it is also who he actually is. Because how could he not be? Whatever Charlie Sheen does, that is who he is. This is the only way he has to take control over the flow of his information. For a celebrity in particular, as Ellis points out, that control is virtually non-existent. So how did Charlie Sheen wrest it back? By outdoing TMZ and the news shows and the magazines at their own game. He is no longer just a commodity of the tabloid industrial complex. He is the creator and star of his own show, the Crazy Charlie Sheen Show, and all the press is simply promotion.

Then again, it could be something much more simple. At Coachella 2008, Prince, headlining, kept demanding over and over, “Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella! Say my name, Coachella!” And like some epic call-and-response an ocean of 150,000 voices roared back: “Prince! Prince! Prince!” And I realized that if you’re Prince, there’s probably no way you can even get off anymore without 150,000 people screaming your name. Perhaps, if you’re Charlie Sheen, you can’t stay sober unless two million people are following your every move — just over two weeks after his first Tweet, it’s now closing in on 3 million.

“We’ve come a long way in the last two weeks,” Ellis concludes. “Sheen is the new reality, bitch, and anyone who’s a hater can go back and hang out with the rest of the trolls in the graveyard of Empire.” Like I’m Still Here and Exit Through The Gift Shop, what Charlie Sheen is doing is part of a continuum exposing the now inherent unreliability of the markers we’d previously depended on to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. In some ways it’s as basic as the shift from the 20th century to the 21st; from analog to digital, from binary to exponential complexity. What, truly, does reality mean when it’s photoshopable? Or just another marketing campaign for some new movie? Not that reality doesn’t exist. Things are, out in the world; you can touch them. Earthquakes happen; nuclear reactors break; nations perch perilously on the verge of catastrophe. Reality exists, but it is no different from not reality. From the inscrutably contradictory government statements about radiation levels, from the fake Nuclear Fallout maps that spread like wildfire. Reality and not reality exist in the same plane now. It’s enough to make you go crazy. Unless you’re Charlie Sheen. In which case you’re not crazy. You simply are as your world is.

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Remember a time when it seemed like the power of the new technologies suddenly at our fingertips was limitless? When lasers and floppy disks and modems were cutting-edge, and a whole slew of movies which took on the subject matter insisted that teenagers, especially, were capable of using these incomprehensible, futuristic phenomena to do things no one could even imagine? There’s 1982′s Tron, in which Jeff Bridges is a computer genius who hacks into an evil video game corporation and gets zapped inside the computer world, where he’s forced to participate in gladiatorial games; 1983′s War Games, in which Matthew Broderick is a high school kid who nearly starts World War III by hacking into a military computer; 1985′s Real Genius, in which Val Kilmer is a brilliant teenager who develops a laser for a class project and then has to stop it from being used as a government weapon, and another 1985 flick, John Hughes’s Weird Science, in which Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are two geeks desperately seeking popularity, who use a Memotech MTX 512 to create their ticket to the in-crowd: the perfect woman.

The consistent, underlying premise of all these movies was that technology is a new, unexplored frontier, and no one could really say for sure what it could — or couldn’t — do. There was the pervading sense that the new wave of personal computing had put the power to create monsters right at teenagers’ fingertips.

Now, the Internet, iPhones, the rise of “digital natives,” and nearly 30 years later, it seems our conception of the unpredictability of new technology still hasn’t really changed all that much, and neither has the sense that, inevitably, teenage geeks will use it to create preposterous monsters. Case in point: The Social Network.

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The movie is based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. In an interview on Amazon.com, Mezrich describes how the origin of the world’s largest social networking site (if Facebook were a country, it’d be the third most populous, just after China and India) began with a typically adolescent prank:

Facemash is really where it all started. It was late at night. Mark was having a few drinks….He was a master hacker and he hacked into all of the computers at Harvard and took all of the pictures of all the girls on campus and created a “hot or not” website where you could judge which was the hottest girl at Harvard. And this ended up [getting] 20,000 hits in about an hour. It froze the computer systems at Harvard. And he nearly got kicked out of school. That really was the genesis of Facebook, because for the next couple of days he thought about it, and thought, you know, “What if girls could put their own pictures up, and then we’d go and say ‘Hi’ to them, or whatever,” and that’s where Facebook started.

If this story sounds familiar it’s because you’ve seen it before. 25 years before, in fact, as Gary and Wyatt hack into the Pentagon mainframe, create a computer program that synthesizes images, “input” a bunch of photos of girls, and the result is a runaway creation that takes on a life of its own and very quickly alters the course of its creators’ lives as well.

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Cut to 2010, and the question in the Oingo Boingo song, “Weird Science,” which asks, “It’s my creation; is it real?” is no longer rhetorical. Computers are no longer the premise for teen science-fantasy farce, they are serious business.

Now, back to Mezrich, discussing his book on MSNBC:

It is about nerds. The kids who founded it — Mark Zuckerberg and his friend — were geeky, gawky kids, who were essentially trying to get laid…. And basically, these genius kids created the next generation in technology while trying to become part of the in-crowd.

Now, look at Gary and Wyatt:

Now, back to The Social Network:

In 1985, the most incredible thing anyone could conceive of a teenager creating on his computer was a woman. In 2010, it’s a billion-dollar company.

Though much of the history of Facebook is well documented, some of it in blog posts by Zuckerberg himself, the thing to keep in mind in the course of Mezrich’s book, and The Social Network movie, written by Aaron Sorkin, is that while many of the backstory’s supporting cast were interviewed, and directly participated in the recounting of this sordid tale of “sex, money, genius, and betrayal” that Facebook apparently is, the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, very deliberately, declined to be involved in any way. Mezrich himself freely acknowledges that it’s perfectly Zuckerberg’s right not to speak to someone that he doesn’t know, and, in the end, what really happened in some of the scenes he wrote in the story, only Mark really knows. Inevitably, some creative liberties had to be taken in the process of creating a book, and then a film, so, who’s to say where history ends and the weird science begins? Either way, we’re still telling the same story three decades later.

In related news, there’s a Real Genius remake currently in the works, and a 3D sequel to Tron coming out this December.

The tagline insists, “The Game Has Changed,” but you know what?

Not really.

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In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a relatively new medium called the comic book unleashed a new kind of character into the consciousness of American youth. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, this character possessed superhuman powers and a dedication to using those powers for the benefit of humanity. Often battling and defeating evil as hyperbolic as his own goodness, his iconic name would become the source of the term for this all-American archetype, the “superhero.” In the decades since Superman‘s arrival, innumerable variations on this theme have emerged, but always these characters have struggled under the weight of a concept about who they must be that was invented before television. For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation, as played by Robert Downey Jr., and directed by Jon Favreau in the just released Iron Man 2, is really the first Millennial superhero.

The original Superman prototype possessed a key characteristic, one that his creators, first generation American sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, would have known something about, one that this “Man of Tomorrow” would pass on as part of his legacy to future generations of masked heroes: a secret identity. This trait would become an intractable part of the very definition of a superhero, as much a prerequisite for his mythology as extraordinary powers, or at least a flamboyant getup. And yet, in a press conference at the end of 2008′s first installment of the Iron Man franchise, Tony Stark announces to the world that he is Iron Man. This is where the sequel starts off. The need for a secret identity is gone. The entire world knows — and not because some tabloid uncovered the mystery man behind the mask, but because he just straight up told everyone. In the comic books, it took Stark 40 years to make this move. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoings, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself. But in the 21st century, Tony Stark’s approach to privacy reflects how Millennials now think of the concept.

These days, the kind of stuff kids choose to reveal about themselves online is almost beyond comprehension. The latest social platform eroding the boundary between what was once strictly private and is now exposed to the world is Formspring.me, which the New York Times calls, “the online version of the bathroom wall in school“:

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.

Social media researcher danah boyd asked a similar question a couple of weeks ago:

This [behavior] has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.  More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name. Why? What’s going on?

While this particular trend is definitely a bit baffling, those of us that have grown up in the digital age have pretty much come to expect that the privacy arc of the internet is perpetually bending more and more towards greater disclosure. Privacy, as Facebook’s Millennial founder Mark Zuckerberg insists, is dead:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time… But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting [Facebook] now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Here’s an interesting visualization of the Evolution of Privacy on Facebook, indicating how the website has let ever more of our information become increasingly public over the years:

Oh… wait a second, no, that last one is actually the arc reactor implant that’s keeping Tony Stark alive. But, no doubt, Skynet… err.. Facebook is intent on catching up to the full-pie version of the chart soon.

Anyway, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker, they were never prepared for this brave new networked world. Their entire way of being simply doesn’t fit anymore. Neither with Facebook and its social network platform ilk, nor the (*cough* relative) sensibilities of the Millennial youth who use it. For Tony Stark, transparency isn’t just relegated to the subject of his super-powered “alter ego,” it’s a pervasive part of his total personality, his way of being in the world. Stark is as blatant as his id, his mobile touch-screen device is actually, literally, transparent, allowing others to see everything he’s doing on it, every surface in his house seems to be equipped with touch-screen capabilities, his browsing activities public to anyone sitting nearby who cares to look. Zuckerberg himself likely couldn’t have dreamed up a more post-Privacy kind of superhero, one less conflicted about the disparate parts of his identity. With the death of privacy, you cannot be one thing in one context, and something different in another. You cannot be Clark Kent at the Daily Planet desk job, and then Superman on the night shift. You are exactly who you are to everyone at all times. Like no other superhero, Tony Stark’s identity isn’t conflicted. It’s absolute.

In her book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, psychology professor Jean Twenge writes:

It has always been normal for kids to have big dreams, but the dreams of kids today are bigger than ever. By the time kids figure out they’re not going to be celebrities or sports figures, they’re well into adolescence, or even their twenties.

High expectations can be the stuff of inspiration, but more often they set GenMe up for bitter disappointment. [The book] Quarterlife Crisis concludes that twenty-somethings often take a while to realize that the “be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do,” mantra of their childhoods is not attainable.

In the late 90′s, Tyler Durden, himself a sort of Gen X superhero — a transitional alpha version precursor to the Gen Y launch model, if you will — said it like:

We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Even in the throes of the economic crisis, my generation hasn’t really had a Great Depression either — though we did come this close. And even after 9/11 my generation hasn’t had a Great War. The world is now far too mind-numbingly complicated and complex to even have a clear concept of a single, monolithic Evil to fight. The “heroes” of my generation, the ideals that kids look up to and wish to be like, haven’t been men of steel battling evil for a long time, they are now, like Durden says, millionaires and rock stars. And that is precisely what 21st Century Tony Stark is. After he comes out of the closet (or, more accurately, the basement science lab) as Iron Man, he becomes a worldwide celebrity, a household name. Even the migrant worker he stops to buy strawberries from on the Pacific Coast Highway asks, “Are you Iron Man?” like he’s recognized a movie star.

And unlike Superman or SpiderMan or Batman or any other major superhero before him whose truth the world was not yet ready to handle, Tony Stark answers casually, “Sometimes.”

Perhaps that’s the other side of what allows a 21st century superhero to be transparent. The modern world can accept him as such. Gen Y is a lot more tolerant of lifestyle differences than prior generations, after all. The X-Men didn’t hide that they were different, either, but then again, they COULDN’T hide it — looking like Beast or Nightcrawler, or having Rogue or Cycolps’ particular mutations, you couldn’t just “pass” in normal society — and the humans the X-Men fought to protect could never accept them for being what they are. Not so in the world of Tony Stark. He’s no mutant. No outcast. He’s the most popular kid in school. The late DJ AM even spins at his birthday bash. The 21st century Tony Stark reveals to the world he is Iron Man, and the 21st century world says…. Awesome!

In the past, being a tech entrepreneur-slash-engineer, as Tony Stark is, would have made him a nerd, or otherwise Bruce Wayne, still stuck in the previous millennium, putting on a show of  irresponsible playboy-ness to deflect attention from both his morbidly serious crime-fighting alter ego and his humorless tech geek underbelly. Like, remember when no one would have wanted to sit at the lunch table with kids who talked about stuff like “augmented reality”?

Yeah, not so much, anymore. In the  21st century, being a tech geek no longer detracts from the image of a bad-ass or a dilettante. James Bond and Q have combined into one seamless character. It’s 2010, and geeks are cool! Hell, we’ve even got one as President.

While both Wayne and Stark are surrounded by high tech everything, for the 20th century hero all the gadgetry is just a means to an end. Even the Batmobile is ultimately just a flashy tool. Same could technically be said about the iPhone, but who would? In the post-iPod era we have a very different relationship with our technology. Our favorite tech objects aren’t just for utilitarian application, they’re obsessed over, fetishized, loved. It’s why Gizmodo would pay $10,000 for an exclusive scoop on an in-production, “lost” 4g iPhone, and why an enormous global audience would give a crap. When Stark says in the movie that the Iron Man suit is a part of him, that he and it are one, we all intimately understand exactly what he means even if the rest of us don’t actually literally plug our gadgets into our chest cavities.

After a raucous birthday party in which we see Stark, in full Iron Man gear, getting shitfaced and acting the fool, (he’s dying at the time, and feeling a bit of the nothing-really-matters mortality blues — being dissolute and apathetic, itself, unusually postmodern behavior for a superhero), S.H.I.E.L.D. agency director Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) “grounds” the hungover superhero by sequestering him in his house with all access to communication with the outside world cut off until he solves a theoretical physics problem. This superhero’s punishment is having his phone and internet privileges revoked and being sent up to his room to finish his math homework. There isn’t a single one of the 60 million American Millennials that doesn’t relate to this.

When Favreau was looking for a 21st century industrialist corporate executive to use as a model for his and Robert Downey Jr’s interpretation of Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk, co-founder of paypal. Musk even has a cameo in the movie, chatting Tony up about an electric rocket, a concept referencing Musk’s current endeavors, Tesla Motors, which produces fully electric sports cars that rival Porsche in performance, and SpaceX, a private aerospace company working to invent the first reusable rockets, which would dramatically reduce costs and eventually lead to affordable space-travel. This dude is the inspiration for the 21st century version of Stark.

So what’s Tony Stak’s inspiration? Why does he do what he does? There was no childhood trauma that drove him to caped crusading. He wasn’t raised by adoptive Earth parents who imbued him with a strong moral compass during his formative years on a farm in the American Heartland. Sure, ok, he underwent a certain crisis of conscience in his 40s after escaping from a terrorist hostage situation in Afghanistan, shutting down the weapons manufacturing division of Stark Industries and all, but still, why does he take it so much further, going so far as to “privatize world peace.” …. For the thrill of it! As he himself says, he keeps up the good fight at his own pleasure, adding, “and I like to pleasure myself often.” Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to, and most importantly, he GETS what he wants. Sure he has to work for it, but unlike with, say, Peter Parker and Mary Jane or Clark Kent and Lois Lane or even Buffy and Angel, what he wants isn’t perpetually out of his grasp just because he is who he is. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.

The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun.

You can’t get any more Gen Y than that.

Welcome, 21st Century superhero, my generation has been waiting for you.

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During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like your shirt,” she said. “I was wondering, can I have it?” The running joke about New Moon, of course, is the extent of the shirtlessness perpetrated by Lautner’s character and his werewolf brethren. (It’s gone so far, in fact, that Lautner, who beefed up special for the role, has vowed to never appear shirtless in a movie ever again.) As Lautner struggled in response to keep from losing his shirt and his dignity, Kimmel, possibly the oldest person in the entire studio at that moment, interjected, “You know, I think people would look down on men for demanding the shirt off a woman.” Yet that this interaction seemed totally acceptable and par for the course to the otherwise teenage audience struck me as an indication of a potentially far lager trend a few days later, when I saw “The Christian Side Hug” video.

If you’re wondering what on earth is that?? The “Christian Side Hug” is a rap performed by a group of white kids at a Christian youth gathering, about a way of hugging while standing side by side with someone as opposed to facing one another and putting your arm around their shoulders or waist, because, “front hugs be too sinful.” Despite ultimately turning out to have been intended as insider “satire” (though not before passing very convincingly as both 1. A typically “ass-backwards” — to employ a Palin-ism — move from the abstinence movement of promoting celibacy while sexualizing even mundane forms of human contact, as well as, 2. A reason to weep quietly for the final, ignominious death — like a sad toothless crack-addict in an abandoned alley — of hip hop), I happened to see the Christian Side Hug video on the same day as the fallout from Adam Lambert’s American Music Awards performance, and to me there was a certain similarity between the two.

In case you happened to have missed it, or hearing about it, Lambert put on a rather racy, sexually scandalizing live performance at the awards show.

Perhaps confusing the AMA’s with the MTV Movie Awards, which have no problem rewarding male makeouts, or, more likely, shrewdly pushing the envelope hard on the night before his debut album release, in his first televised performance since the finale of American Idol, Lambert “shocked” the audience at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre and the millions watching live on ABC by closing the show with a risqué rendition of “For Your Entertainment,” the first single of his album of the same name. Highlights from the controversial performance included simulated oral sex from a male backup dancer, a make-out session with his male keyboardist, and a giant mirrored prop set up on the stage so the audience could see the looks on their own shocked faces.

According to Rolling Stone, the producers of the show weren’t informed about the guy-on-guy kiss in advance, and after the show, Lambert told the magazine the musician he kissed is a straight man. In the aftermath, ABC canceled Lambert’s Good Morning America appearance slated for the next day, which of course only helped generate even more attention and fanfare for the artist, who has clearly become an expert at navigating the myriad controversies he’s racked up. To me, what connects Lambert’s performance and the Christian Side Hug and the Kimmel incident, as well as endless other examples from our current pop culture, extends beyond any particular sexual orientation and includes even abstinence itself. It’s an underlying aggressiveness to sexuality in general: agro-sexuality.

To be clear, I’m not talking about aggression enacted through sex, but rather about a militancy in the display of one’s approach to sexuality. The past decade’s proliferation of online profiles, digital cameras, and all manner of social technologies has demanded we approach basically every other aspect of our modern identities as a performative display. It only makes sense that sexuality wouldn’t be exempt.

When I was a teenager in the late 90′s the general approach to sexuality could easily have been described as “come as you are.” Kurt Cobain had died the year before I started high school, Britney Spears’ first album wouldn’t come out until I was halfway through, and in between there was a lot of Green Day, Jewel, Fugees, and REM. Rap was still busy beefing between the coasts to have gotten fully pornified yet. Heroin Chic, an aesthetic glamorizing a drug that destroys sex drive, was all the rage. Even Madonna was, by this time, more interested in acting and electronica than vogueing or kink. And AIDS was huge. People were still dying of AIDS then. As opposed to now, when people are living with it. Kids were obviously still having sex, but since there was some semblance of sex education going on under the Clinton administration they were getting pregnant a lot less than in the “abstinence-only” Bush era. Basically, aside from the effort pushing the word “safe” in front of it, sex in the 90′s was not something to get particularly militant about.

Of course, there was the gay rights movement, but by the time Ellen Degeneres was making the cover of Time for admitting, yep, she’s gay, it had already long been transmogrified from Activism to Pride. And perhaps it’s this shift from social justice to self-expression that is the root of Agrosexuality in general. After all, what are purity rings if not emblems of Abstinence Pride? And in some basic way, even the demand for the shirt off Lautner’s back was as much a performance of sexuality as was Lambert’s on the AMA’s.

In a 2006 New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.”

Even the nouveau-celibacy of the abstinence movement is an option on this spectrum, its appeal (if not necessarily its effectiveness) one kind of response to all these overwhelming new choices. As alternative sexuality has become more mainstream, and sexuality moves from self definition to self expression, what has emerged is a new agrosexual attitude that really wasn’t there 10 years ago. There’s an expectancy of an in-your-face show of sexuality — whatever yours may be — as part OF sexuality itself. It’s by no means anything new, but it used to be employed by those who’d followed alternative sexual paths, flying their freak flags as a social statement, or for deliberate shock value, now, however, as the sexual mainstream is fragmenting along with the cultural one being agrosexual is par for everyone’s course.

In her LA Times article on Lady Gaga — likely as close to the embodiment of agrosexuality as a generation could hope for — Ann Powers writes:

Having gotten her start in the bohemian enclaves of downtown New York City, Gaga is deeply indebted to Warhol’s “Superstar”-oriented Factory scene and its aftermath, which produced drag performers like Candy Darling, artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and streetwise rock stars including Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

“The idea is, you are your image, you are who you see yourself to be,” she said. “It’s iconography.”

Warhol supported and exploited a coterie of outsiders who likely would never have emerged from their corners without his help. Gaga takes control but also shows herself losing it; she blurs the lines between self-realization and self-objectification, courting the dangers of full exposure for a generation of kids born with camcorders in their hands.

Though she talks nonstop about liberation, Gaga’s work abounds with images of violation and entrapment. In the 1980s, Madonna employed bondage imagery, and it felt sexual. Gaga does it, and it looks like it hurts.

She says she wants her fans to feel safe in expressing their imperfections. “I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”

Trendwatching.com calls this “Maturialism,” one of its “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010:”

Let’s face it: this year will be rawer, more opinionated, more risqué, more in your face than ever before. Your audiences (who are by now thoroughly exposed to, well, anything, for which you can thank first and foremost the anything-goes online universe) can handle much more quirkiness, more daring innovations, more risqué communications and conversations, more exotic flavors and so on than traditional marketers could have ever dreamed of….We’ve dubbed this MATURIALISM (mature materialism),

In fact, the image at the top of this post is an ad for UK ice cream brand The Ice Creamists, mentioned in the Trendwatching post as an example of Maturialism in action:

Trendwatching suggests that if they want to keep up with culture, brands need to mirror the current societal norms that are “about anything but being meek.” In other words, this isn’t just for teenagers and pop stars; brands need to get in on the agrosexual action, too.

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“I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future, so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for 15 minutes.”
- Banksy

Well, it’s the future, and fame has propagated apace with Moore’s law. Thus, it only makes sense that 30 years since the release of Fame, the original High School Musical, the story of a group of students at a New York City high school for performing arts would be getting an iPod ad campaign-style makeover for the Youtube generation. Of course, you can’t tell an authentic story about youth culture, performance arts, and celebrity fetishism relying just on singing and dancing and acting and rapping and music producing and whatnot. In 2009, you gotta have  Circus! And judging from the trailer, the makers of the remake know das whas up:

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That’s right!

Britney Spears’ new album is called Circus, and this is incredibly interesting to me.

Once upon a time, I used to be the production manager for a circus called Lucent Dossier–

This troupe is actually part of a whole larger Circus performance subculture that has been growing on the West Coast for years. San Francisco’s The Yard Dogs Road Show, El Circo, and Vau De Vire Society, Santa Barbara’s Clan Destino, L.A.’s  Mutaytor, Cirque Berzerk, and Lucent Dossier, these are just a few of the major acts that are coming to mind, but there are untold scores of others. With its own distinctive music, style, and nightlife, the Circus scene’s cultural influence has been steadily spilling over into mainstream fare for a while.

In 2006, Panic! at the Disco cast Lucent Dossier in the music video for their first big hit, I Write Sins Not Tragedies. When Panic! went on the road later that same year they brought Lucent along, and called it the “Nothing Rhymes With Circus,” Tour–

–which, according to the Washington Post, offered “a far superior take on the warped circus theme Motley Crüe was going for in its latest tour.”

Oh, yes…that’s right. A year prior, Motley Crüe–who would become no strangers to the stylings of Lucent Dossier, themselves–reunited, and you know what their comeback tour was about?

Here’s a hint:

The Circus subculture infiltration, I should mention, has by no means been limited to music. With such proximity to the entertainment industry, it’s been showing up all over the place. Captivating gamers at E3, holding it down at Red Bull’s nightlife spectacle, Ascension, even America’s Next Top Model weighed in with an “homage” of sorts to the style earlier this year–

–but none of this is really comparable in scale to an endorsement from the Princess of Pop herself.

Despite the inescapable reality that it’s blatantly far from any kind of original album or tour concept, Britney Spears still chose to go with Circus anyway. Clearly there is something about Circus that continues to resonate with performers, but there is also something about our current culture, that the Circus theme persists in being so damn appealing. It should have long ago gotten played out, and yet here it is again, and again. It would be easy to contend that Circus is just an overly-tenacious current trend (and I know a few Circus professionals who do), but I see it is as the manifestation of a cultural response to a slew of far greater–and much less fickle–social trends.

In Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus, J. Dee Hill delves into the history and sociology of the Circus subculture:

Traditional forms of the tribe, like the village, have almost completely disappeared. Fewer and fewer people live in small communities where their daily interactions bring them in contact with the people they are deeply connected to, either spiritually or economically. Workers in modern corporations are replaceable and no longer bound to each other by the experience of a shared interdependence. The modern individual is preoccupied simultaneously by isolating, immediate concerns of personal survival and the larger, often intangible concerns of war, terror and economic change as transmitted by a now-seamless global media network. The intermediate space of community is not easily reached.

Not by accident, many of the newer, emergent forms of culture include a specifically tribal aspect. A return to tattooing, sacrification, fire performance and drumming, as well as a renewed interest in ritual, has occurred side-by-side with the formation of intentional (if temporary) communities such as the Rainbow Family gatherings and Burning Man festival, all of which focus on celebrating and integrating the peculiarities of their varied members.

It was at these kinds of festivals, in clubs and at underground raves, that alternative circus acts began appearing in the early 90′s. The performers were young, crazy “freaks” without any formal training who used circus costumes, skills or themes as performative means for expressing their own exaggerated personalities. Many went on to gain formal training or to study the history of the genre, but essentially their relationship to conventional circuses resembled that of outsider art to mainstream art circles. They didn’t really relate to the modern-day circus. They took their cues from something much, much older: the caravan-pulling gypsies.

The gypsies, shunned by society at large, but fiercely loyal to their own clan, were the most tribal group in all of Europe. It was these wanderers who first produced circus-like entertainment in the medieval townships, along with strolling players and minstrel shows. It wasn’t until the 1770′s that Englishman Philip Astley fused military equestrian drills with acrobatics and other entertainments to form the modern circus.

The phenomenon of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of tribe.

In other words, kids originally began forming Circus performance troupes as an extension of creating urban tribes:

According to French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, urban tribes are microgroups of people who share common interests in metropolitan areas. The members of these relatively small groups tend to have similar worldviews, dress styles and behavioral patterns. Maffesoli claims that punks are a typical example of an “urban tribe.”

20 Years later, instead of forming punk bands, party kids were forming circuses. And in an age where no one thinks twice of breakdancing or skateboarding, does circus art seem all that unexpected?

In the past decade we’ve also seen the arrival of social media, and “Performative means for expressing exaggerated personalities” as Hill put it, isn’t just for the Circus anymore. It’s what makes the social web go round, too. In Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, Jean Twenge and her coauthors analyzed 15,324 responses to the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, completed by college students between 1987 and 2006. The survey is considered the most popular and valid measure of narcissism, and features statements such as “I think I am a special person,” “I can live my life anyway I want to,” “If I ruled the world, it would be  better place,” etc. According to the results:

The trend was extremely clear: younger generations were significantly more narcissistic. The average college student in 2006 scored higher on narcissism than 65% of students just nineteen years before in 1987. In other words, the number of college students high in narcissism rose to two-thirds in the space of less than twenty years.

While Myspace, Youtube, blogs, and all the rest, aren’t responsible for the origins of this narcissism trend, they absolutely help enable its progress. “Narcissism is the darker side of the focus on the self,” writes Twenge, and our constant interaction with social media is an indulgence in self-focus. All of us have been affected by the process of maintaining our online presence.  Even if we’re not all live-streaming our entire existence, we upload photos of our lunches or puppies for our network to see, we write blogs about experiences that we planned to blog about even as we were having them, we leave comments for friends just so other people will see them, we fill in our favorite movies and books and music in the appropriate boxes on various profiles, aware of what our choices say about us. In a sense, all of this is a performance. We are already constantly performing our selves, and Circus represents the ultimate performance platform.

Not surprisingly, we also crave attention. After all, what’s the point of being the spectacle if no one is watching? “Given the choice between fame and contentment,” writes Twenge, “29% of 1990s young people chose fame, compared to only 17% f Boomers.” No doubt, the 2000′s generation would score even higher.

Writing about narcissism and fame, Danah Boyd, a researcher of digital youth practices, asks, Why is it that people want to be famous?:

When i ask teens about their desire to be famous, it all boils down to one thing: freedom. If you’re famous, you don’t have to work. If you’re famous, you can buy anything you want. If you’re famous, your parents can’t tell you what to do. If you’re famous, you can have interesting friends and go to interesting parties. If you’re famous, you’re free!… [However] Anyone who has worked with celebrities knows that fame comes with a price and that price is unimaginable to those who don’t have to pay it.

The idea of “freedom” is a huge aspect of the appeal embodied by the Circus since way before its modern “reinvention.” Circus has long represented freedom from normal society’s rules. The ultimate outlaw lifestyle. And like celebrity, it too has extolled its own price. No surprise then that celebrities from Motley Crüe to Britney spears should find this theme so relatable.

While I don’t doubt there will be much talk of shark-jumping going on within the Circus underground (after all, just how underground-y can it be if Britney’s fans get into it?), to me, both the alternative and the mainstream reincarnations of Circus are on the same continuum. More than just a subculture or a concert tour fad, Circus has come to articulate something about the nature of our relationship with various social trends shaping the modern experience.

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