Like many classical music-oriented kids, I was forced to watch the movie Amadeus many, many times. That wasn’t a terrible fate—it’s a great movie—but I think my various music teachers really wanted us to draw a particular lesson from it, one which comported with contemporary American values: something about the importance of hard work and the recognition of merit. This was very difficult, because the movie itself is aggressively anti-meritocratic: the hardworking but mediocre composer Salieri simply can’t compete with Mozart’s effervescent natural talent. Driven to furious envy, Salieri psychically poisons Mozart—and, it’s implied, maybe also physically poisons him too. I didn’t know this until recently, but the rumors that the real-life Salieri murdered Mozart started only a few years after Mozart died. Decades later, when Salieri himself was dying, he reportedly said, “there is no truth to the absurd rumor that I poisoned Mozart,” (his “I didn’t murder Mozart t-shirt” had people asking a lot of questions already answered by the shirt.) The rumor persisted—Pushkin wrote a play in 1830 about Salieri and Mozart, which Rimsky-Korsakoff turned into an opera (1898), which Peter Shaffer turned into a play of his own (1979), which was then adapted into the movie version (1984). This story has lingered in the public imagination, but not, I think, for the message my teachers tried so hard to shoehorn in about meritocracy and the myth that deserving artists will naturally attract the rewards of eternal fame: I think we instinctively recognize that mediocrity hates genius, and tries to kill it.
I’ve been thinking of Amadeus lately because of AI, and the WGA strike, and Twitter, and basically everything. If you’re on Twitter these days (I regret to admit that I have broken my vow, and am back on my bullshit) then you must have noticed that the new wave of “blue checks” (a.k.a. losers who pay to use Twitter) are a passionately, defiantly mediocre set of people. They bought the blue check to boost their engagement, bringing their tweets to the top of everyone’s feeds—but of course they are terrible posters, really sub basement-level talents with no sense of humor or even reading comprehension. The meritocracy of Twitter, like any meritocracy, was always something of a specious thing—just because you were good at posting didn’t mean you were good at writing or deep thinking, it only meant that you had mastered a particular form of communication, and behind many funny tweets lay the hidden labor of the group DM where would-be viral sensations sweated out their drafts in deadly seriousness, until they achieved the polished effect of unpolished artlessness—but, whatever, the end products were often funny and meaningful, and the great posts and posters often earned the rewards of at least very temporary fame. But the new blue checks are fucking mediocre, and aware of it, and absolutely furious that their $11 a month hasn’t bought them greater fame and attention, which they know they don’t deserve and haven’t earned but still want so badly anyway.
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