We live, at first blush, under the absolute dominion of celebrity. The former and future president of the United States spent more than a decade as a reality TV star. Taylor Swift just concluded the largest and most lucrative pop music tour in the history of the world. Mass entertainment vehicles remain star-driven – just ask anyone flocking to see Wicked (Ariana Grande) or Gladiator II (Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington) this holiday season. And that’s not to mention all the petty dramas of the attractive and famous that still keep us all gossiping.

It might be strange, then, to make a completely counterintuitive claim: that we are leaving the age of traditional mass celebrity. And not only are we leaving it, but we are drifting into a new, uncertain era, one where fresh hostility has emerged against those who, even a few years ago, would have received blind worship and little more.

Much of this is coming from the youngest adult generation, the so-called generation Z, and the millennial cohort that is under the age of 40. Gen Z might be the most misunderstood because they are the first to come of age when old monocultures were crumbling away. Many of them are too young to remember the dominance of cable television, the heydays of A-list movie stars from Julia Roberts to Brad Pitt, or even the wild adulation that certain tech moguls, such as Steve........

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