• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 3, 2011

This week brought the news that celebrated self-celebrator Charlie Sheen has set a world record, which will be recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records and everything, for the shortest time to gather more than one million Twitter followers.

No doubt about it, it is an impressive achievement: Sheen went from opening a Twitter account to having more than a million fans in a remarkable 25 hours and 17 minutes. And apparently he can make good money doing this, as he just signed a Twitter endorsement deal with Ad.ly -- the same company which pays Kim Kardashian up to $25,000 per tweet for product mentions. Indeed, the Hollywood Reporter calculates that Sheen could make up to $1 million a year this way.

The question is whether the volatile actor, whose occasional outbursts have ripened in recent weeks into a full-blown drug-fueled megalomaniacal meltdown, understands why he has so many followers. I'm guessing he doesn't... and his blind spot is as much a comment on Twitter (and our celebrity culture in general) as it is on Sheen himself.

According to Sheen's prolific radio and TV interviews, the American public is compelled to follow his antics and issue superficial judgments about him because his "life is so much more bitchin' than yours," a point which he illustrates with strangely abstract (and syntactically challenging) statements about "winning" and anecdotes about his frequent drug use and liaisons with porn stars.

While this lifestyle might meet certain narrowly-defined criteria for being "bitchin'" -- I imagine millions of adolescent males nodding their considered approval -- to me it sounds like the preamble to a hellish descent into a world of couches on fire, unexplained rashes, tiger maulings and eventual death. A year from now Sheen will either be contrite, comatose, or cremated for public health reasons -- but he won't be doing what he's doing now.

Still, cocaine is a hell of a drug, and I doubt anyone could convince Sheen of the real reason he has so many Twitter followers -- the same morbid curiosity which compels people to rubberneck at car accidents. Sheen probably imagines his 1,000,000+ Twitter followers (like the huge audience for his 20/20 interview) are on his side, but nothing could be further from the truth: we're gawking at a horribly compelling celebrity self-immolation -- riveted not by the hope of his eventual victory and vindication, but rather the virtual certainty of his spectacular self-destruction.