Several centuries hence, as historians try to understand our strange cultural moment from their Martian ivory towers – beheading videos gone viral, presidential politics playing out on Twitter, cold-case murders solved on Reddit – they will come upon the curious case of Khaled Mohamed Khaled, much better known as DJ Khaled.

They will discover that around the year 2016, the 41-year-old Palestinian-American was among the most famous people on the dying, desiccated planet known as Earth. Like a few of Khaled’s contemporaries, these scholars will be mystified by the source of his vast celebrity, which is tethered to no discernible achievement or body of work.

It will take reams of academic holograms to settle on the consensus that DJ Khaled is the kind of jester every culture in decline requires to speak truth to fading power. Some will be distracted and amused, some will be horrified and perplexed, while the truly perspicacious will be packing their bags for the first shuttle to the Red Planet.

What, exactly, Khaled does is a matter of vigorous online debate. He has made rap music but does not actually rap, preferring to have vastly more talented associates to do the work for him – on one of his most popular tracks, All I Do Is Win, which has 70 million YouTube views, Khaled shouts his name a couple of times but otherwise mugs for the camera like a dispensable extra, leaving the work to T-Pain, Rick Ross, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg.

He calls himself a producer but evinces no talent for musical arrangement. He claims to be a mogul but has none of the corporate stature of Jay Z or Dr. Dre. Khaled does have an online store that sells items emblazoned with his famous slogans, but, well, so does Ted Nugent.

DJ Khaled poses with Harvard Business School students during the Get Schooled Snapchat College Tour and Meet at Harvard University (Getty)

His slogans are, as future historians will inevitably conclude, the key to understanding Khaled and his Khaled-sized success. Ursine but not the least bit threatening, in love with big cigars and really big cars but avoiding the edgier trappings of the gangsta trope, Khaled is the millennial generation’s foremost prophet of noxiously empty optimism. He is Norman Vincent Peale – midcentury America’s great “possibilitarian” author of The Power of Positive Thinking – with a baby blue Bentley and a vast social media empire that is a land of Lotus-eaters, where all is good and all are blessed, and you are always on the cusp of winning and moving into a mansion that is nearly as big as his. You would know, if you were a fan of DJ Khaled, that his Miami mansion is enormous, as many of his posts are set there.

A new age prosperity preacher, he spreads his gospel in Snapchat videos that, The New York Times estimates, are each seen by about two million people. In his dispatches from splendid South Florida, Khaled slathers his body in cocoa butter, reviews the meals prepared by Chef Dee, waters his plants and shouts Rastafarian slogans in a bad Jamaican accent from his Jacuzzi. He is fond of recording himself in the shower, from which he dispenses indispensable wisdom: “Follow code…feed ur family and keep ur face clean.” From his jetski, he tells his fans, “Ride wit me through the journey to more success.”

Culture news in pictures Show all 33 1 /33 Culture news in pictures Culture news in pictures 30 September 2016 An employee hangs works of art with "Grand Teatro" by Marino Marini (R) and bronze sculpture "Sfera N.3" by Arnaldo Pomodoro seen ahead of a Contemporary Art auction on 7 October, at Sotheby's in London REUTERS Culture news in pictures 29 September 2016 Street art by Portuguese artist Odeith is seen in Dresden, during an exhibition "Magic City - art of the streets" AFP/Getty Images Culture news in pictures 28 September 2016 Dancers attend a photocall for the new "THE ONE Grand Show" at Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin, Germany REUTERS Culture news in pictures 28 September 2016 With an array of thrift store china, humorous souvenirs and handmade tile adorning its walls and floors, the Mosaic Tile House in Venice stands as a monument to two decades of artistic collaboration between Cheri Pann and husband Gonzalo Duran REUTERS Culture news in pictures 27 September 2016 A gallery assistant poses amongst work by Anthea Hamilton from her nominated show "Lichen! Libido!(London!) Chastity!" at a preview of the Turner Prize in London REUTERS Culture news in pictures 27 September 2016 A technician wearing virtual reality glasses checks his installation in three British public telephone booths, set up outside the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands. The installation allows visitors a 3-D look into the museum which has twenty-two paintings belonging to the British Royal Collection, on loan for an exhibit from 29 September 2016 till 8 January 2017 AP Culture news in pictures 26 September 2016 An Indian artist dressed as Hindu god Shiva performs on a chariot as he participates in a religious procession 'Ravan ki Barat' held to mark the forthcoming Dussehra festival in Allahabad AFP/Getty Images Culture news in pictures 26 September 2016 Jean-Michel Basquiat's 'Air Power', 1984, is displayed at the Bowie/Collector media preview at Sotheby's in New York AFP/Getty Culture news in pictures 25 September 2016 A woman looks at an untitled painting by Albert Oehlen during the opening of an exhibition of works by German artists Georg Baselitz and Albert Oehlen in Reutlingen, Germany. The exhibition runs at the Kunstverein (art society) Reutlingen until 15 January 2017 EPA Culture news in pictures 24 September 2016 Fan BingBing (C) attends the closing ceremony of the 64th San Sebastian Film Festival at Kursaal in San Sebastian, Spain Getty Images Culture news in pictures 23 September 2016 A view of the artwork 'You Are Metamorphosing' (1964) as part of the exhibition 'Retrospektive' of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo at Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. The exhibition runs from 25 September 2016 to 1 January 2017 EPA Culture news in pictures 22 September 2016 Jo Applin from the Courtauld Institute of Art looks at Green Tilework in Live Flesh by Adriana Vareja, which features in a new exhibition, Flesh, at York Art Gallery. The new exhibition features works by Degas, Chardin, Francis Bacon and Sarah Lucas, showing how flesh has been portrayed by artists over the last 600 years PA Culture news in pictures 21 September 2016 Performers Sean Atkins and Sally Miller standing in for the characters played by Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell during a photocall for Tim Burton's "Miss Peregrines Home For Peculiar Children" at Potters Field Park in London Getty Images Culture news in pictures 20 September 2016 A detail from the blanket 'Alpine Cattle Drive' from 1926 by artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is displayed at the 'Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporary Arts' in Berlin. The exhibition named 'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Hieroglyphen' showing the complete collection of Berlin's Nationalgallerie works of the German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and will run from 23 September 2016 until 26 February 2017 AP Culture news in pictures 20 September 2016 A man looks at portrait photos by US photographer Bruce Gilden in the exhibition 'Masters of Photography' at the photokina in Cologne, Germany. The trade fair on photography, photokina, schowcases some 1,000 exhibitors from 40 countries and runs from 20 to 25 September. The event also features various photo exhibitions EPA Culture news in pictures 20 September 2016 A woman looks at 'Blue Poles', 1952 by Jackson Pollock during a photocall at the Royal Academy of Arts, London PA Culture news in pictures 19 September 2016 Art installation The Refusal of Time, a collaboration with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh and Peter Galison, which features as part of the William Kentridge exhibition Thick Time, showing from 21 September to 15 January at the Whitechapel Gallery in London PA Culture news in pictures 18 September 2016 Artists creating one off designs at the Mm6 Maison Margiela presentation during London Fashion Week Spring/Summer collections 2017 in London Getty Images Culture news in pictures 18 September 2016 Bethenny Frankel attends the special screening of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" to celebrate the 25th Anniversary Edition release on Blu-Ray and DVD in New York City Getty Images for Walt Disney Stu Culture news in pictures 17 September 2016 Visitors attend the 2016 Oktoberfest beer festival at Theresienwiese in Munich, Germany Getty Images Culture news in pictures 16 September 2016 Visitors looks at British artist Damien Hirst work of art 'The Incomplete Truth', during the 13th Yalta Annual Meeting entitled 'The World, Europe and Ukraine: storms of changes', organised by the Yalta European Strategy (YES) in partnership with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation at the Mystetsky Arsenal Art Center in Kiev AP Culture news in pictures 16 September 2016 Tracey Emin's "My Bed" is exhibited at the Tate Liverpool as part of the exhibition Tracey Emin And William Blake In Focus, which highlights surprising links between the two artists Getty Images Culture news in pictures 15 September 2016 Musician Dave Grohl (L) joins musician Tom Morello of Prophets of Rage onstage at the Forum in Inglewood, California Getty Images Culture news in pictures 14 September 2016 Model feebee poses as part of art installation "Narcissism : Dazzle room" made by artist Shigeki Matsuyama at rooms33 fashion and design exhibition in Tokyo. Matsuyama's installation features a strong contrast of black and white, which he learned from dazzle camouflage used mainly in World War I AP Culture news in pictures 13 September 2016 Visitors look at artworks by Chinese painter Cui Ruzhuo during the exhibition 'Glossiness of Uncarved Jade' held at the exhibition hall 'Manezh' in St. Petersburg, Russia. More than 200 paintings by the Chinese artist are presented until 25 September EPA Culture news in pictures 12 September 2016 A visitor looks at Raphael's painting 'Extase de Sainte Cecile', 1515, from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence during the opening of a Raphael exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Russia. The first Russian exhibition of the works of the Italian Renaissance artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino includes eight paintings and three drawings which come from Italy. Th exhibit opens to the public from 13 September to 11 December EPA Culture news in pictures 11 September 2016 Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd perform during Otis Redding 75th Birthday Celebration - Rehearsals at the Macon City Auditorium in Macon, Georgia Getty Images for Otis Redding 75 Culture news in pictures 10 September 2016 Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus and the BBC Singers at the Last Night of the Proms 2016 at the Royal Albert Hall in London PA Culture news in pictures 9 September 2016 A visitor walks past a piece entitled "Fruitcake" by Joana Vasconcelo, during the Beyond Limits selling exhibition at Chatsworth House near Bakewell REUTERS Culture news in pictures 8 September 2016 A sculpture of a crescent standing on the 2,140 meters high mountain 'Freiheit' (German for 'freedom'), in the Alpstein region of the Appenzell alps, eastern Switzerland. The sculpture is lighted during the nights by means of solar panels. The 38-year-old Swiss artist and atheist Christian Meier set the crescent on the peak to start a debate on the meaning of religious symbols - as summit crosses - on mountains. 'Because so many peaks have crosses on them, it struck me as a great idea to put up an equally absurd contrast'. 'Naturally I wanted to provoke in a fun way. But it goes beyond that. The actions of an artist should be food for thought, both visually and in content' EPA Culture news in pictures Culture news in pictures Culture news in pictures

Once, he got lost jetskiing as night fell. This was, of course, recorded in a series of snaps, right through his joyous landfall. “Let’s win more,” he concluded as he returned home. If some Good Samaritan saved him from the sharks (he has never been clear on this point, despite the incident garnering enough coverage to make most foreign nations jealous), Khaled offered that kind soul no thanks. The whole point of DJ Khaled is that you will always be rescued from rough seas, and although you are already great, you should be even greater. More luxurious jetskis await, as well as yachts. The dream is yours, as long as you listen to DJ Khaled…and purchase Cîroc mango vodka, for which he has become a “brand ambassador.”

DJ Khaled and Sean 'Diddy' Combs pose with bottles of Ciroc vodka (Rex)

Khaled may sell vodka to pay the bills, but this is just a side gig for the philosopher-mogul. Say what you will about Kim Kardashian, but she isn’t selling anything other than stuff: bracelets, creams, whatever. Khaled’s outlook is more sophisticated, less obvious. He wants your buying power, but he’d rather have your faith. As any televangelist can tell you, the wallet will always come out after the hosannas go quiet. Khaled’s hosannas are better known as memes. There is his famous greeting, “Bless up”, as well as his promise that he knows exactly what it takes to win: “I got the keys”. How do you know he has the keys? See above: “All I do is win”. Does anyone want Khaled to not win? Yes, a lot of people: “They” don’t want you to win. What do you do once you have triumphed over “they” (the specific constituents of this shadowy group are never described) and have won once again? Let the world know by announcing it on social media: Another one.

DJ Khaled’s new book is called The Keys, and it is less a book, as one might understand those antiquated cultural artifacts, than a director’s cut of his Snapchat feed assembled into occasionally coherent sentences organised into chapters with headings like “Be Yourself” and “Glorify Your Own Success.” The book is 212 pages long, and it contains exactly one interesting sentence. Actually, it’s only a clause: “show me another Palestinian mogul who succeeded in hip-hop.”

You can’t, of course. Khaled could have used the considerable talents of his ghostwriter, the journalist Mary H. K. Choi, to give far greater depth to the story of his family, immigrants from the West Bank who became successful clothiers in Orlando, Florida (one of their clients was the NBA star Shaquille O’Neal), only to apparently lose their wealth, in Khaled’s vague telling, to a federal government that considers the payment of taxes a major key to its own success. Khaled, who never finished high school, rose diligently through the ranks of the hip-hop scene in Orlando and New Orleans – as a record seller, party promoter and disc jockey – before finally making it big in Miami, a city for which he professes a disturbingly deep affection. This would all have been far more interesting were it freed of the positivity preaching, but Khaled’s life and Khaled’s understanding of life are impossible to separate – all his reflection is pointed inward, in keeping with the prevalent narcissism of the age. He does allude to the jetski incident, offering this sound advice: “Don’t drive your jetski in the dark.”

DJ Khaled and Nicole Tuck attend the 2016 BET Awards at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, California (Getty)

Mostly, though, The Keys is a paean to the kind of cheerful self-obsession that has come to rule the American psyche. Among its most notorious practitioners is the president-elect, Donald Trump, who has, among other transparently preposterous boasts, claimed to possess “the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president,” to have one of the best memories in the world and to “know more about ISIS than the generals do” – and to have large hands. None of this is true, but in a post-truth world, that’s pretty much beside the point.

Note that Trump’s main complaint, “We don’t win anymore,” is just an obverse of Khaled’s “All we do is win.” Both are hollow gourds, but struck hard enough, they ring true. Khaled engages in plenty of Trumpian self-aggrandisement in The Keys: “I’m humble. I was born humble, but now I get humbler every day. Now, just because I’m humble doesn’t mean I’m not confident. I’m bold, and I know I’m one of the greatest to ever do it,” whatever “it” is. In case you aren’t convinced, the book is filled with laudatory blurbs from music producers and executives, all of them seemingly written by the same intern fresh out of the University of Southern California. Some are born great, some have greatness thrust upon them and a blessed few are great because Lyor Cohen and Kendall “Young Sav” Freeman say so.

Detractors – ie haters, ie “they” – have suggested that Khaled’s entire persona is a winking joke, that he’s really just an Andy Kaufman with gold chains and exceedingly well-watered plants (Khaled loves to water his plants, which he calls his “angels”). Even if that is the case – and there’s no reason to think that – Khaled’s popularity still points to a troubling feature of modern American life. More than 20 years after Peale’s death, we remain entranced by his suggestion that self-confidence is what separates life’s victors from its victims. Only today, his facile ideas have found a new home on the social media platforms that have made DJ Khaled famous.

DJ Khaled introduces the Sportskids of the Year Brooke Sheppard, Rainn Sheppard, and Tai Sheppard during the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year Ceremony 2016 (Getty)

In a world that teems with ghastly news, DJ Khaled seems innocuous enough, a cuddly sloganeer dispensing hope like John D Rockefeller dropping dimes on the poor. But that common view of Khaled ignores the fact that positivity harms our ability to work hard, persevere, succeed – the very traits positivity promises to enhance. A surplus of positivity has made us passive and self-satisfied. On a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, the psychology scholar Jean Twenge explained to host Shankar Vedantam exactly why the cult of self-esteem can be so dangerous to young people: “If you’re already great, why should you do anything?” She pointed to studies that showed successful people often do not have great self-confidence. For example, the least self-confident ethnic subgroup in the nation is Asian-Americans – who also happen to be among the most academically successful and upwardly mobile.

Social media has been shown to decrease self-esteem, with its trolls telling you to crawl under a rock and die because you happen to think Ray Romano is funny, and its showoffs Instagramming their perfect lives, blissed-out and gluten-free. Khaled is an antidote to all that, allowing you to bask in his positivity, which includes both his success and, if you listen carefully enough and buy his flip-flops, yours. When he takes snaps of his fans – Fan Luv, he calls them – they crowd with desperate joy into the frame, as if Khaled’s good vibes were an extremely scarce resource they must compete for.

But what is winning, anyway? Khaled’s keys are nothing new, relying on shopworn premises of marketing and networking. His genius is self-promotion, which has shed the gaudy glaze of crassness to become an indispensable skill of the 21st-century workplace (including, apparently, the Oval Office). The Keys has plenty of more sober cousins: Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future; Power Your Career: The Art of Tactful Self-Promotion at Work; How to Sell Yourself. Says a mystifying headline from The Huffington Post: “Personal Branding: It’s Not About Self-Promotion, it is a Leadership Imperative.” Read a few such articles by self-proclaimed marketing experts, and DJ Khaled’s snaps will indeed come to seem like nuggets of hard-won wisdom.

DJ Khaled performs onstage at EpicFest 2016 hosted by L.A. Reid and Epic Records at Sony Studios (Getty)

It’s true that self-promotion can be beneficial, in particular to women and minorities in majority white-male institutions like investment banks and tech companies. But do not mistake DJ Khaled for Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame. By the end of The Keys, I finally understood the source of Khaled’s fame: He is a professional insinuator, a hanger-on who managed to become as indispensable as the people he was clinging to. He wants us to see him as the equal of Sean “P Diddy” Combs, but my mind keeps snapping back to TS Eliot’s servile J Alfred Prufrock: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous – almost, at times, the Fool.”

In one passage in The Keys, Khaled describes how he once went to New York City to secure a collaboration with Jay Z. “I was relentless, and at the end of the day our relationship and his being my friend made it happen. Every morning I woke up and I believed I’d get that verse.” This seems less like valuable persistence than low-grade stalking, confirmed by an inadvertently revealing testimonial in The Keys: “This man does not take no for an answer.”

Except sometimes the answer is no. Not because “they” rigged the system but because the race isn’t always to the swift, and sometimes you aren’t as swift as you thought you were, and sometimes you twist an ankle. Thus we lose, sometimes bigly. We lose in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and we do not know why. God does not automatically confer his blessings on us merely because we invoke his name. “More success is always the answer,” Khaled says. To what? For whom? And really, always? The answer is never reflection, kindness or, God forbid, silence?

What this inspires is not ambition – which, if you have it, you don’t need Khaled to stoke – but an inability to deal with failure and disappointment, which are far more rare and valuable qualities than a winning attitude. My favorite parts of Khaled’s book are the glimpses of everyday life. The same, on Snapchat, have the feel of celebrity so close you can nearly smell the cocoa butter. Here, shorn of social media’s glow, these moments have a hilarious mundanity: “Look in my fridge: There are delicious juices and smoothies. I have healthy snacks all over my house for everyone.” In one of his more famous snaps, shot while in bed, DJ Khaled declares that “the key to more success is to have a lot of pillows.”

You heard the man. Get some pillows, wash your face, don’t jetski in the dark and you might end up living a pretty decent life.