It is one of humanity’s finest instincts—to stand in awe of brilliance. To watch someone dance along the edge of possibility, to hear Chopin bend silence into ache, or to feel Dostoevsky claw through your moral core like he’s been there before—it affirms us. It makes us feel that perhaps, by some collective miracle, we belong to a species capable of transcendence.

Genius, then, is not just a title. It’s a shrine we build when we run out of gods.

Somewhere along the way, the candles were swapped for LED panels. The gods now sell Teslas.

Who is a genius today? What pantheon have we assembled for the age of Instagram? It seems that without history to filter the wheat from the chaff, we outsource judgment to the crowd—those who yell the loudest. Geniuses, then, are not discovered. They’re voted in.

And the modern ballot offers us Christopher Nolan, cinema’s architect of convoluted time. Hideo Kojima—video game auteur turned oracle of absurdity. Hans Zimmer—orchestrator of soundscapes for adrenaline and tears. Elon Musk—engineer of attention, part-time Martian, full-time spectacle.

Today’s geniuses don’t write treatises or paint ceilings. They tweet. They drop teasers. They do podcasts with millionaires. The Renaissance man now wears a black turtleneck—or, better yet, a political flag.

The recipe for fame

Modern genius isn’t born—it’s baked. Carefully, publicly, and with great spectacle. And like any mass-produced product, it follows a recipe:

  • Mythos: they must be enigmatic, contradictory, almost alien. Not entirely relatable—but not too distant either. We must believe they know something we don’t and that they won’t tell us.

    Sure, you can watch Tenet, read a thousand reviews, behind-the-scenes insights, and interviews with actors. You can build your own understanding of the film. But Mr. Nolan will make sure you still feel dumbfounded when he talks about the complexity of his work, about how multilayered it really is. He will make you feel like you didn’t understand a single thing, because he needs to create a brand. A brand for both him and for you. Him—Christopher Nolan—the great novelty filmographer. And you—the Nolan watcher—the rare specimen in the world of cinephiles who watches something “beyond the scope of what a normie would understand.”

  • Narrative control: they curate their image like a fragrance line. Tweets that mean everything and nothing. Appearances that feel “rare” and “raw” but were edited eight times. They create entire ecosystems for their personal parish. “We modernized the smartphone industry” is an easy selling point when most of your users never tried another company’s product. “Our social media is the ultimate platform” sounds perfect when it dominates the market and buys out the competition.

  • Audience projection: they never explain fully, so we fill the gaps with meaning. We write their mythology for them, hoping they are what we need them to be.

    Like a flag waving in the wind, they are as ideologically powerful—and as easily swayed—as the lightest breeze. The supposed sole creators of the concept of social media one day sell their soul to the government to promote restrictive measures. The same people scream against corruption and overreach when the narrative bends slightly in the other direction.

  • Platform power: they don’t argue in journals. They dominate timelines. Influence is no longer measured in citations but in virality.

    It is probably a symptom of our bizarre age to see a genius looking down on you from a billboard, smiling at your pathetic inability to reach their glory. Still, it’s hard to tell whether, with the same toolkit, the most talented people of the past would have used the same strategies to be seen. Can we imagine Michelangelo promoting his next big thing on the side of a bus? Earhart running a travel blog with bonus content for $5 a month? Byron fighting on Twitter with people against women’s suffrage?

Maybe if Newton lived today, he’d explain gravity on a YouTube channel with royalty-free epic music and slow-motion apples. Aristotle would give TED Talks. And Da Vinci? Probably designing iPhones for Apple.

The hollow center

But what’s behind the curtain?

Strip the myth, and what remains is often an efficient content machine, churning out spectacle for a distracted crowd. The genius becomes a mascot—charismatic, productive, and digestible.

Missing are the qualities that once defined intellectual greatness:

Intellectual vulnerability. When was the last time a pop genius said, “I don’t know”?

Sacrifice. Real genius costs something. It burns through relationships, bodies, and peace. Now it earns brand deals.

Moral courage. Not the Twitter-activism kind—but the silent, thankless resistance to compromise. The kind that doesn’t trend.

Consider those who wouldn’t fit today’s algorithm: Lovecraft, a broken man barely clinging to reality, knowing more about the unknown than the ordinary. Tarkovsky, filming God in the shadows of Soviet decay. Tesla, dying in a hotel with no followers but a room full of pigeons.

Brilliance used to be a curse—something that isolated, burned, and consumed. Now it’s a marketing tactic.

Culture’s reflection

Why do we accept this diluted genius?

Because we are exhausted. We don’t want a challenge—we want certainty. In a time when everything feels like noise, the curated genius is our anchor. A symbol of order, progress, and vision. We cling to them not because they enlighten, but because they distract.

Their charisma is clean. Their stories are short. Their timelines are active.

And questioning them feels sacrilegious—or worse, boring.

In truth, we don’t want geniuses. We want magicians—someone to wave a hand and make meaning appear where none existed.

A different light

But maybe genius is still out there. Just... quieter.

Maybe it lives not on a stage, but in the pages of unread notebooks, in garages full of tangled wires, in lives too complicated to be marketed.

Real brilliance is often anonymous, inconvenient, or unfashionable. It hides in obsession without recognition, in creation without validation.

You won’t find it trending.

The real genius today might be the woman writing philosophy in a Moldovan village or the boy animating short films in silence after his warehouse shift. But you won’t hear about them. They haven’t posted anything in weeks.

So what remains of genius in an age that confuses signal with noise?

Maybe it’s not dead. Maybe it flickers.

Maybe it’s not in the center of the screen but in the corner of your eye—waiting. Genius doesn’t beg for attention. It survives in silence, unliked, unshared.

Look harder. The next true genius might not make a trailer or a tweet.

They might just haunt you when the battery dies.

The true test of genius isn’t how many followers it has but how much silence it can survive.