Replacing God With Followers
Leo Braudy describes in *The Frenzy of Renown* something much older than Instagram.
People want to be seen.
Alexander the Great did not need followers. He had chroniclers. Roman generals staged triumphs. Kings commissioned statues. Poets hoped their names would still be spoken long after they were dead.
The technology changes.
The need changes remarkably little.
Fame, after all, means something peculiar: other people should know that I exist. Better still, they should know that it matters that I exist.
An audience confirms my importance.
But human applause has one disadvantage.
It fades.
Ten thousand people know who you are. Why not a hundred thousand?
A hundred thousand know you. Why not a million?
There is no obvious point at which enough people have watched.
Then Christianity arrived with a rather elegant solution to the problem.
Perhaps you do not need many followers.
Perhaps you need only one.
Admittedly, he is a fairly important follower.
And an unusually attentive one.
The longer you think about it, the more God begins to resemble a rather unusual social-media follower:
Always online.
Never unfollows.
No privacy settings.
Incognito mode does not work.
Deleted posts are still on the server.
And he does not merely know your posts.
He knows your drafts.
That is slightly uncomfortable.
On Instagram, you can still decide whether you really want to send that comment.
With God, apparently, the fact that you wanted to write it already counts.
**God saw your draft.**
There is, however, a strange advantage to all this.
If God is your decisive audience, then in theory you do not need everyone else's applause.
The entire town may think you are a fool. Nobody has to notice your good deed. Nobody has to know that you helped someone.
One saw it.
And one is enough.
Christianity goes surprisingly far on this point. If you do good precisely so that other people will see you doing it, you have misunderstood something essential.
The perfect spectator is, paradoxically, the one before whom there is no point performing.
God already knows the deed.
He even knows the motive.
That makes him, on the one hand, a rather terrifying follower.
On the other, a remarkably low-maintenance audience.
You do not have to send him photographs.
Then, for many people, God became less important.
In principle, the spectator could have disappeared with him.
Apparently, the need for one did not.
So we replaced him.
Not with another great spectator.
With thousands of small ones.
Instagram. TikTok. Facebook. LinkedIn. X.
And here something changes.
The need remains the same.
But the cost of satisfying it rises.
God already knew what had happened.
The others do not.
If you helped someone, God knew.
Your followers have to be informed.
If you are happy, God knows.
Instagram needs evidence.
If you ran five kilometres, God probably noticed that too.
Strava would like the GPS data.
The old spectator did not have to be convinced that your life was taking place.
The new ones do.
And so we no longer merely have to live our lives.
We have to document them.
Select them.
Photograph them.
Caption them.
Publish them.
And then check whether anyone watched.
Perhaps this is the strangest development in the long history of fame.
Alexander the Great at least had to conquer Persia before other people started telling his story.
Today, each of us carries a tiny Alexander in our pocket and spends part of the day doing public relations for our own existence.
Breakfast is documented.
The holiday is documented.
The run is documented.
The good deed is documented.
Even withdrawal from public life can be documented.
You can write a long post explaining that you need some time away from social media.
So that nobody misses your absence from social media.
Perhaps that is also why our new audience is more exhausting than the old one.
God could apparently tolerate it if you did nothing interesting for a few days.
The algorithm cannot.
**You haven't posted in a while.**
Braudy's human beings, then, may have changed less than we like to think.
We still want to be seen. We still want some audience to confirm that our small life possesses significance.
We have merely reorganised the audience.
Our ancestors believed in an invisible observer who saw their lives and judged them.
Eventually, that idea began to strike us as strange.
So we got rid of him.
Then we put cameras into our phones, documented our lives, and built a global system that allows us to check, at any moment, how many people are watching.
We no longer wanted an all-seeing spectator.
We wanted freedom.
So we replaced him with everyone.
And everyone is much harder to please.