Why Kim Kardashian Will Be Remembered in 100 Years
I recently read Chuck Klosterman’s book, But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As if It Were the Past. Great read. This book is an attempt to help us grapple with the issue of recency bias, or the tendency to give more credence to ideas and trends from our current age and to heavily discount the ideas from previous ages. The author does a good job of making us aware that it’s very easy to dismiss ideas from centuries years ago, such as balancing the four humors, as ridiculous. However it’s much more difficult to recognize our own present versions of this. So enter Klosterman’s book to help us to view our current age, practices, tastes and trends in the present… well…as if they were in the past. We can assume this means adopting a more objective long-term view. Much like Vincent Brimble had to do.
This has led me to the question of who will be remembered by history, especially in pop culture and why. Thanks to Klosterman, this topic has provided me, my friends and my family with hours of entertaining discussions. Everyone has their own theories. The most controversial of mine forms the title to this piece: that Kim Kardashian will be Remembered in 100 years.
Yes. Indeed.
This theory is based on an important idea that I think would argue for Kardashian being remembered for a long time to come. It’s one which Klosterman was not able to explore in his groundbreaking book:
Historical Clustering
How many of these names do you recognize? Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra, Pompeii, Herod the Great, Cicero. I’m guessing you recognized a few names from that list. What do they all have in common? They’re all from the same historical time period. They were all living at the same time and they all interacted with one another. There are a number of ways you could discover this. You could read about Julius Caesar and learn about his affair with Cleopatra. Or you could go back and watch the HBO series Rome and see her relationship with Caesar and later pairing with Marc Antony played out onscreen. I learned from reading a book on Cicero that Julius Caesar was epileptic, called jokingly “every boy’s woman and every woman’s boy” and that Cicero switched sides from Caesar to Pompeii several times.
I say this because to read about Cicero is to read about Julius Caesar and Pompeii. The group above is what we call a ‘historical cluster’. Pull one thread from this bunch and the whole cluster opens up. The stories are extremely interwoven. It’s like the stories of the Rat Pack.
It would be hard tell to the story of Frank Sinatra without mentioning his Rat Pack pals, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop and the story would be incomplete without mentioning Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy. I think most would agree we don’t remember Marilyn Monroe simply for her image as Marilyn Monroe. I think it’s clear, we’ve come to the point where the reasons we remember Monroe have almost as much to do with her time period and celebrity cluster as it does with her iconic image. She’s clustered with so many other people and things that we just can’t forget (i.e: JFK, Andy Warhol, Joe DiMaggio).
The same will be true of Kim Kardashian and much of our pop-culture age in my view. Kim K. has written her name all over this age and it will be there for historians to discover in 100’s of years time. She’s highly, HIGHLY clustered. This shouldn’t be surprising considering just how connected many celebrity circles are today. But just in case you’re not convinced, let’s play a quick round of the Kevin Bacon game with Kim K. for a second and see where it leads us. For fun let’s try to trace a path from Kardashian to the Pope. And as a rule, let’s only use connections between people who we can verify have spent time together based on a credible photo of the two together.
Round 1:
Kim Kardashian
Kanye West
Jay-Z
Beyonce
President Obama
Pope Francis
That was easy. But wait it’s easier than that.
Round 2:
Kim
Kanye
Jay-Z
Pres. Obama
Pope Francis
No easier:
Round 3:
Kim
Kanye
Pres. Obama
Easier still
Round 4:
Kim
President Obama
Pope Francis
You get the idea. This is a highly clustered age. Kim’s story is literally joined to Kanye’s story which is part of an amazingly storied hip-hop cluster which obviously includes Jay-Z but also notably includes other megastars such as Biggie, Nas, Lil Wayne, Beyonce, John Legend, etc. Someone in 2146 could simply be doing a piece on what the talk shows were like 140 years ago and come across the video of Kanye saying strange things on Ellen and then be off down a rabbit hole leading to the discovery of Kardashian, Taylor Swift…Steve Jobs…you name it. This age is so rich with connections that a name as connected as Kardashian will echo for centuries… or as long as there is the internet.
(Obvious photos e.g: Jay-Z with Beyonce…not included)
