It makes an excellent example using Nickelback. When people say they hate Nickelback they aren't necessarily saying they hate the band, but the music industry system that they somehow represent. But it doesn't seem to suggest the possibility that when people say they hate Nickelback, that they mean they actually do hate the music the band produces.
It attempts to say that maybe Fish isn't as bad he's made out to be. But it goes about it in a strange way. First it says that people overreact to the things that Fish says or does because he's famous, but then it goes into how he isn't really famous in terms of traditional fame. Basically, if you didn't know who Fish was then you wouldn't care what he said.
Which is probably true.
But my feelings about Fish is based off of what I saw of him in the Indie Game doc before I even knew who he was or that I was supposed to think of him as famous. Then there's his behavior after the Fez release that didn't necessarily make me think more highly of him, whether he was antagonized by others or not. As the many versions of the saying goes; if you are the only reasonable person always surrounded by assholes, maybe you are the asshole.
In all of this, I really hope Notch doesn't think of himself in terms of what people think of Fish. They are most definitely not the same, nowhere near close. There's a difference between saying I've had enough of this path in my life to wish to go down a different one and rage-quitting like a child.
Multiple times.
I for one, hope that he finds what he's looking for and I hope to hear about the new things he creates. If I never hear of Notch ever again, that's okay too.
The timed link in the grandparent post goes to this point in the video (the video uses “I hate Nickelback” as something to compare and contrast "I hate Phil Fish" with):
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On the internet, celebrities are famous only to the people who talk about them, and they’re only famous because we talk about them, and then we hate them for being too famous, and make them more famous by talking about how much we hate them. Could there ever be anything more self-defeating than this?
If Nickelback decided tomorrow that they didn’t want to be famous anymore, they would have to give up the tours, the roadies, the record deals, the billboards… things most of us don’t have. They would have to settle for normal life.
The only way out for Phil was to give up what most of us consider normal life – openly being ourselves on the internet. Because his normal life is what made him famous. Anything Phil says in public is newsworthy. He had to quit or privatize all social media. He had to stop speaking to his friends in public. If he goes to GDC or PAX or IndieCade, even as an attendee, there will be photos.
Famous people are turned into symbols, and are expected to act a certain way. People stop caring about the fact that they are people.
Famous people are held to a different standard, and their audience feels they are owed something by a famous person. In the case of Notch, for instance, people feel like he owes them his continual support on something like Minecraft, despite the fact that he likes to make little games, and one of his little games happened to explode.
Because people just being themselves on the Internet might result in them accidentally becoming famous, it's not trivial for them to stop being famous, unless they stop being themselves on the Internet.
