Is it? So any two people speaking directly and exclusively to each other are 'intimate'?
I'm with the others in that Cameo seems like a fine platform for debasing and exploiting b-listers and past-their-primes. It's the 2020 version of game show or infomercial cameos.
There will always be a market's worth of people with enough vanity to think that the kind of service Cameo provides is morally sound. They are probably the same folks that keep the National Enquirer and Daily Mail afloat.
Let's not kid ourselves with fancy imagery about how good it makes someone feel or how beautiful it is that it satiates someone's desires. "I'm just building what people want" is the classic amoralist's cop-out.
Definition 2 of intimate: of a very personal or private nature.[1]
These video messages or both personal and private therefore they are intimate.
I don't know why disinterest in using this service is almost always coupled with condescension to the people who do use it. It isn't doing any harm to anyone. There are no negative externalities. Just let the people who are interested in the service have their fun.
I won't go so far as the other detractors and say that it's necessarily a debasement of a celebrity to get paid to record a scripted message. It's actually kind of a cool service, especially if there's a price point or agent contacts for commercial messages. In that regard it's not so different from ordering an inscription on a custom artisanal kitchen accessory.
But what I find sad is the commentary it makes on the state of humanity's collective emotional development if commercial celebrity endorsements and falsely personal birthday messages have so much more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives. Separating fiction from reality is one of the early lessons we teach children. It's not the mere existence of this service that is the problem, it's that it belies a deeper issue with culture in general.
> But what I find sad is the commentary it makes on the state of humanity's collective emotional development if commercial celebrity endorsements and falsely personal birthday messages have so much more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives.
This is what you're failing to understand. The celebrity messages don't have more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives. You don't pay for messages from people who are in your life because you already get a lot of contact with them for free.
But if you think paying $50 for a message from a celebrity is too much, that it overvalues celebrities relative to people who you actually have a meaningful connection with... just remember that people pay tens of thousands of dollars for (scam!) messages from people who were once important to them personally, and are now dead. The demonstrated value of the personal relationship is near-infinitely large compared to the celebrity pseudo-relationship.
If your son likes basketball, and you commission a painting of him playing against Lebron James, that lets him imagine himself being a part of that world. If you commission a birthday message to him from Lebron James... that lets him imagine himself being a part of that world. What's the difference?
>But what I find sad is the commentary it makes on the state of humanity's collective emotional development if commercial celebrity endorsements and falsely personal birthday messages have so much more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives. //
Yes, this. What we laud and prioritise often seems so hollow.
