“It is February 9, 1964,” Cass Sunstein writes, opening the prologue of his new book, How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be. “About 73 million Americans are huddled around their television sets”—and already, unavoidably, the difficulty of fame as a subject rears its four shaggy heads: nobody needs to be told what happened when the Beatles went on The Ed Sullivan Show. It’s famous!
But what is fame, and how does it happen? In a world where the host of The Apprentice ended up in control of the nuclear football, and might get it again, it’s worth thinking about how fame is achieved and expanded on, or thwarted. Obviously—everybody knows!—there’s chance involved, and conditions that could be called luck but are less flexible.
Sunstein, the prizewinning Harvard Law professor whose credentials as an omni-expert include a seat in the Obama administration’s circle of advisers, quotes Jane Franklin, “obscure sister of Benjamin Franklin,” writing to her brother about the idea that “Thousands of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world … merely for want of being Placed in favourable Situations.”
Is becoming famous simply a process of not not becoming famous, though? And was Newton’s Principia really quite the same sort of phenomenon as Please Please Me?
In a world where the host of The Apprentice ended up in control of the nuclear football, and might get it again, it’s worth thinking about how fame is achieved.
Sunstein, having declared his intention to “open up the black box of serendipity and see what we might find there,” spends the book rattling off lists such as “the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, and the MacBook Air.” Celebrity, success, popularity, critical acclaim, historical esteem, or plain old market share—Sunstein’s black box treats them all as interchangeable, squeezed into a single analytical framework.
“Short-term fame and long-term fame are not so different,” Sunstein declares. “The intragenerational case is the intergenerational case, speeded way up; the intergenerational case is the intragenerational case, slowed way down.” The book’s can-do title and Harvard Business School Press imprint promise reduction and systematization, and the author gamely tries to deliver. What makes a thing or person famous, in Sunstein’s scheme, is a matter of specific social dynamics: informational cascades, reputational cascades, network effects, and group polarization.
No sooner have these supposed forces been teased apart, however, than they start clumping together again. What is the information in an informational cascade if not a person’s or product’s reputation? The fact that “people wanted to see Barbie and Oppenheimer because everyone else seemed to be seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer” is supposed to be an example of network effects, but when people in 1977 all wanted to see Star Wars, “there was an informational cascade, big-time, and a reputational cascade too, and network effects helped a lot.” Sunstein’s theory of fame seems perilously close to the claim that things are famous because people talk to other people about them. Which, well: yes.
It’s not easy to wring counter-intuitive insights out of overwhelmingly familiar material. Repeatedly, Sunstein poses puzzles that could only be puzzling to someone who has never encountered American mass culture or current events.
“You might think,” he writes, that Republicans or Democrats would evaluate ideas on their merits, “not by whether a proposal or an idea gets early support from one or another side.” Or: “You might speculate that [Oprah’s Book Club] selections would surely do less well than the average bestseller.” Or: “Do you think that writers, artists, and musicians will sell more of their work in the period immediately after they die?… A possible answer is: definitely not.”
Sunstein also tends to lose track of which aspect of fame (or reputation, or success) he’s arguing about. To rebut Samuel Johnson’s claim that once-popular works of the past, if unearthed, would be unimpressive, Sunstein points to the enthusiasm that gathered around Emily Dickinson after her death in obscurity. But what does a non-popular poet gaining in reputation have to do with popular poets’ reputations declining? Wouldn’t Rod McKuen have been more relevant to Johnson’s point?
Is becoming famous simply a process of not not becoming famous?
Running throughout the book, yet rarely touching its argument about the fame process, is the question of what difference it makes if something is good or bad. To show the arbitrariness of success, Sunstein focuses on an experiment called the Music Lab, where people judged a set of unknown songs either with or without the influence of knowing which songs other people had liked. When the judges could follow other people’s preferences, the rankings were volatile. “Almost anything could happen,” Sunstein writes. But there’s that “almost.” The songs that independent listeners had judged the best or worst would rise and fall accordingly in the other groups, resistant to the social effects.
Despite his assigned task and his claims of fame’s fungibility, Sunstein doesn’t seem comfortable being agnostic about the meaning of popularity, or the value of success. He was raised on the baby-boomer mass-market consensus of Beatlemania, not punk rock or Chuck D intoning, “In the daytime, radio’s scared of me,” and he has risen to the top of the system that goes by the name of meritocracy.
He returns again and again to the “brilliant 2019 film Yesterday,” whose protagonist enters a parallel world where no one ever heard of the Beatles, and who becomes a superstar by playing Beatles songs himself—a thought experiment in whether greatness and acclaim are simply inherent facts. Late in the book, in an admiring chapter on Bob Dylan, he wanders away from his chosen theme entirely, content to transcribe his idol’s surly epigrams rather than to try to demystify his fame.
The most notable lesson about fame and substance in How to Become Famous, though, is an unstated and cautionary one. If Cass Sunstein weren’t the famed Cass Sunstein, it’s hard to see how the book would have been published at all. Even with the name on the cover, it’s hard to imagine that anything could make it endure.
Tom Scocca is the former politics editor at Slate and the editor at Popula
