Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.\u201d Technology has brought us to a point where you can find yourself in the spotlight simply by posting a video of yourself petting a hamster<\/a> or cooking tacos using office supplies<\/a>.<\/p>\n But even if all the traditional velvet ropes surrounding the world of fame were suddenly lowered, would it actually be possible for every human on Earth to be famous for fifteen minutes? Is there enough time and attention available to allocate to every person? This is a hypothetical question that has always plagued me. It’s time to sit down and do the math.<\/p>\n The first thing we need to do is define what we mean by “famous.” You can be locally famous, celebrity famous, internet famous, famous for being famous, not to mention infamous. So what did Andy Warhol mean by famous? If you’re at all familiar with Warhol’s view of the world, you’ll know that he was fascinated by the trappings of celebrity – the glamour, the flashbulbs, the overdoses, etc. His screen prints of icons like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Liza Minelli are now themselves iconic. The fantasy future he envisioned probably meant we’d each get a chance to stumble out of a Chanel-soaked limo, claw our way past the autograph-seekers, cut the line at the entrance to Studio 54 and cozy up in a private booth next to Mick and Bianca Jagger. So if we stick to Warhol’s definition of fame, the limited supply of Dom Perignon will quickly prevent his prediction from being anything more than a cheeky remark to be quoted at the beginning of an article about a new SnapChat feature.<\/p>\n But that doesn’t mean we can’t expand the definition a bit and identify the minimum requirements for someone to be called “famous.” You could say that people need to know your name, or that you need to get recognized on the street, or that you have your own line of activewear. But at a basic level, aren’t you famous as soon as a large audience of people is aware of your existence and spends time concerned with what you’re doing? I will say yes (because it’s my blog and who’s going to argue with me besides people in the comments?)<\/p>\n I’ll also say that the large number of people you need in your audience is 1 million<\/span>. That’s enough people to fill Madison Square Garden fifty times. It’s a lot, but less than a million doesn’t feel all that famous.<\/p>\n To be safe, we’ll only count people who are actually paying attention to you during your 15 minute fame interval. They need to be focused on you no matter what you’re doing – even if you’re just eating a hamburger, like Mr. Warhol here:<\/p>\n<\/div> <\/p>\n So even if a person knows your name and considers themselves a fan of your burger-eating prowess, they’re not contributing to your million-person fame quota unless they’re focused on you during your big moment.<\/p>\n Now we’ve got a definition of fame we can work with:<\/p>\n Fame = 1 million people watching you eat a hamburger.<\/p>\n We can even create a new unit for fame measurement:<\/p>\n 1 Andy = A period of 15 minutes in which 1 million people are watching you eat a hamburger.<\/span><\/p>\n Right now there are about 7.5 billion<\/span> people on Earth. <\/span><\/p>\n If we figure about 1\/3 of those people are asleep at any given time, we’re left with roughly <\/span><\/p>\n 5 billion<\/span> people who are available to watch other people eat hamburgers.<\/span><\/p>\n 5 billion total people \u00f7 the 1 million we need for an audience = 5,000 audiences available at any given time, meaning:<\/p>\n 5,000 people can be famous at once.<\/p>\n With 24 hours in a day, we can fit 4 of our 15-minute periods into an hour, or <\/span>96 into a day<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n 96 increments x 5,000 million-person audiences means we have a maximum of:<\/p>\n 480,000 Andys per day.<\/p>\n In other words, almost half a million people can live the dream of being famous for fifteen minutes every day.<\/p>\n So how many days will it take for everyone to get a chance to be famous? More specifically, how long will it take to distribute 7.5 billion Andys?<\/p>\n 7,500,000,000 people \u00f7 480,000 Andys\/day =<\/span> 15,625 days<\/span><\/p>\n 15,625 days \u00f7 365 days in a year = 42.8 years. Rounding up, we can say safely say it would take:<\/p>\n 43 years for everyone to be famous for 15 minutes.<\/p>\n Please check my math, but that sounds like good news! The average human lifespan is <\/span>79 years<\/span>, which means, as long as the global population remains more or less the same, there’s plenty of time for you to get your fifteen minutes of fame! The longest you might have to wait is 43 years. You might even still be good-looking at that point!<\/span><\/p>\n Now all we need is for everyone to spend every waking minute watching videos of other people while waiting our turn for everyone to watch ours.<\/p>\n I’d say we’re well on our way!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s do the math on Andy Warhol’s prediction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,106,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-curious","category-essays","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3998,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580\/revisions\/3998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshworth.com\/jpw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}