The failure addict

Rob Horning profiles John Phillips, the musician perhaps best known for his involvement in The Mamas and the Papas, and opines on the nature of fame today:

The internet’s intricate connectivity supplies us an ever-flashing promise of fame, even though it may end up fleeting or slight. Anyone’s social network can make them feel stalked, hounded. Being able to realistically aspire to this kind of fame, on any scale, does more to make failure seem seductive than it does to motivate concrete accomplishments. Being talented is insufficient when one can become notorious. Indeed, in a culture of entrepreneurial self-fashioning, mandatory sharing, and ritualized backslapping, failure may come to seem the true measure of accomplishment. You can revel in your inadequacy because you know you have transcended it. It has become part of your brand.

I feel a Wilde quote coming on.