Celebrity can be used to create ripples in the ideation of the masses, however, but that's a hard row to hoe, and only a rare few have the wisdom or good intentions to know where to begin. As well, the forces that facilitate celebrity tend to promote those who fit this modern apotheosis of vapid desire.

William Gibson, as usual, summed it up perfectly in Idoru:

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

Recent events, especially here in America, only ever prove Mr. Gibson's understanding of the widespread lowness of the human condition. But all his "prescience" is really due to his profound humanity.

I watched Grace Hopper’s declassified talk recently and was struck by how often she was right on the money (not all the times, she was also way off on some things), but in a lot of things that sounded truly prescient, she was often emphasising that these things were already happening. A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention.