The original note, as written at the time
The dilemma of our idols and entertainers: it doesn’t matter whether they have perfect lives or not. For the most part we don’t even care about their personal lives. The image, the avatar, the representation they provide when on screen or in whichever presentation format or media — that is what we are interested in. This is the personality that is well-packaged to suit, to serve our needs in that moment.
Ongoing development
The dilemma of our idols and entertainers: it does not matter whether they have perfect lives. For the most part we do not even care about their personal lives. The image, the avatar, the representation they provide on screen — that is what we are interested in. A personality well-packaged to serve our needs in that moment.
This is usually said as an accusation of the audience and it is more accurately a description of the transaction.
An entertainer is not selling their life. They are selling a stable, legible version of a person that can be present on demand without being present. And the audience is not deceived, exactly — they know it is a performance, the way one knows a waiter is being polite.
What has changed is that the packaging can now be separated from the person entirely. A likeness can be licensed, generated, and made available continuously, and the human being behind it can age, refuse, or die while the representation carries on being exactly what the audience wanted.
That is a new problem in an old disguise. The packaged self has always been the product; the difference is that it can now outlive its supplier, which raises the questions that nobody has a framework for: who owns the version of a person that the public prefers, and what does the person owe to a character they created but no longer control.
There is also a cost to the audience that never gets counted. A representation is designed to be exactly what you need, which means it never disagrees with you in a way you did not ask for. Over years of that, the ordinary friction of dealing with real people starts to feel like a fault in the real people.
The idols are not the problem. The problem is the part of us that prefers the version which never has an off day.