TOM EATON: There's a lot of money in shallow self-serving fame, it turns out
'Can you really claim that someone has pulled themselves up by their bootstraps when they are a member of a family worth more than $100-million?'
EXTRACT
I understand the urge to yell. The whole story seemed to be a distillation of everything that is vile about the attention economy and the chest-thumping triumph of materialism and superficiality.
But here’s the thing. Neither the Kardashians nor Forbes have done anything other than be themselves.
The criticism aimed at Forbes, especially, had a faintly disappointed tone, as if a publication based on Enlightenment thought and humanist ideals had suddenly overstepped some sort of journalistic mark. Which is weird, because Forbes is and always has been Forbes. It is the Pravda of modern capitalism, a tireless preacher of the gospel of wealth for its own sake, and should therefore be trusted as much as we trust any major propaganda outlet.
The Forbes article shot around the world faster than a selfie of Kimmy K’s buttocks: Kylie Jenner, the crown princess of the Kardashian kakistocracy, is about to become the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire yet. The online left, until that moment dreaming its dreamy dreams on a cloud of football-induced dopamine fed to it by Vladimir Putin, exploded. Well, sort of: a number of pundits see the Kardashians as symbols of empowerment, so it was more of a controlled detonation supervised by demolition experts who made sure there was no undue damage to young Kylie.Certainly, there was even muted admiration for the staggering figures quoted in the Forbes piece. Her family might be famous for making money out of nothing, but in just a few years Jenner has made 900 million actual dollars from selling actual cosmetics. Forbes’ decision to describe that fortune as “self made”, however, triggered outrage. After all, can you really claim that someone has pulled themselves up by their boot...
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