“The couple has agreed they would like their divorce to be finalized in a timely manner in an out-of-court settlement,” Montag’s lawyer, Jodeane Farrell, says. “Both parties are amicable with each other and over the possibility of finalizing their divorce.”

Pratt, who married Montag in April 2009, was only too eager to speak to the press.  He confessed to People.com: “I love Heidi but our marriage was a show — it was part of ‘The Hills’ world.” (Gasp! The skeptics were right!)  This was what, a few hours after the ink dried on the papers?  And he’s already grabbing for headlines.  Shouldn’t surprise anyone, of course.  This is the same guy who in an interview said, “I’m a fame whore and I’ll never grow out of it … I want every kind of press.”

But who will care about this guy after today?

Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid, tells TMZ, “We are in early negotiations to possibly come to terms for a deal.”

This was announced hours after Montag threatened to sue her estranged husband if he writes a tell-all book about her personal life.  And if a few salacious stories in a book had Montag considering legal action, one can only imagine her response to a sex tape. (Think Kathy Bates in “Misery” plus Lorena Bobbit multiplied by 100.)

According to TMZ, Spencer told a friend that the alleged video “makes Kim Kardashian” — whose own sex tape spring-boarded her to fame — “look like an amateur.”

With all this speculation, though, one question begs to be answered: Is it pre- or post-op Heidi?

Earlier this month, she released an unsurprisingly lackluster album with the poetically appropriate name “Superficial” and started filming a new season of her heavily scripted series “The Hills,” all to the yawns of millions. Perhaps fearing that the dawn of a new decade might signal an end to our fascination with watching shallow people do questionable things, the 23-year-old then took to the cover of People magazine last week to show off her multiple cosmetic procedures — including a horrifying 10 in one day: a brow minilift, nose-job revision, fat injections in cheeks and lips, chin reduction, neck liposuction, ear pinning, breast augmentation revision, liposuction, buttocks augmentation and a little Botox thrown in. In a grand gesture of stating the obvious, she confessed that the reason she put herself through enough work to look like she’d gone through a car window was that she’s “beyond obsessed” with self-improvement. Then, just in case that didn’t get our attention, the sculpted,  pneumatically hootered blonde appeared on “Good Morning America” to tell us, in her Tin-Man-before-the oil-can-stiff-faced way, that “My main message is that ‘beauty is really within.’”

Congratulations, Heidi, you clueless, narcissistic, Playboy-posing, Jesus-invoking coauthor of a book about being famous for being famous plastic surgery junkie! You’re everything wrong with everything in the world! You win!

For her candor – and rather shameless fame-grubbing – Montag has been near universally vilified. After her story appeared on People, the commenters  eagerly panned her new look with unkind comparisons to Joan Rivers. The sentiments ran along similar lines at ABC after the “GMA” appearance, where the adjectives “talking corpse” and “plastic zombie” were bandied about.  (Unafraid as ever to be completely tone deaf, the impressively endowed Meghan McCain used her Daily Beast column this week to decry the “boob police” who allegedly “hailed” and “celebrated” Montag for “showing off her new purchases.”)  Dr. Drew Pinsky, no stranger to publicity-seeking himself, meanwhile quickly diagnosed Montag as a “female cross dresser” who “clearly has some significant emotional issues.” In short, lady, you’re a hot mess in a triple-D cup.

But there’s something almost masochistically unsatisfying about hating on Heidi. Maybe it’s just so damn easy, it feels like it’s giving the fame monster exactly what she wants.  That, of course, has been the perverse quid pro quo pleasure of reality television all along — its stars get the illusion of true fame, and viewers get the effortless joy of feeling superior to them for their craven pursuit of it.

Heidis don’t grow in labs — they just look like they do. They take root in a culture where looking like a manga avatar spun through a porn movie is not only attainable, it’s not even that unusual. Did you watch the Golden Globes earlier this week? It looked like an episode of “Sailor Moon.” 

Appearing on “Access Hollywood” a few days ago, Montag said, “I wasn’t happy with the way I looked …  On blogs and after shows, people would circle my chin and say I had Jay Leno Chin. ” She’s right, they did. They also reviled her as “ugly”  every step of the way, too.

So what did she do about it? Did she go quietly to live on a farm or help the homeless or learn a useful trade? No, she fixed it by spending enough money to bail out the American auto industry. And then we criticized her for that too. Gotcha! You want so badly to be famous? OK, but just don’t get old  or gain weight or go outside looking like an un-Photoshopped version of yourself, bitch! And if you try to, as Heidi put it, “upgrade,” we will despise you for being a big fake, judging you from exactly the same glass house from which we called you ugly. Well played, humanity.

Heidi Montag is a woman whose most evident skill is getting attention, one who has gleaned that if she needs to turn herself into a blow-up doll and open herself up to some class-A excoriation to get it, she’s still game. The most apt word I can come up with regarding that is just “sad.” Sad for someone so desperately eager to “be the best me, in and out,” sad for a celebrity cottage industry so equally eager to tear individuals down. Because as long as there are people who measure their own self-regard in relation to their disdain for others, Heidi Montag will never be out of work.  And there’s something awful enough about watching an enviably pretty young woman surgically transform into a matronly Barbie doll without piling on. That’s why I can’t be bothered hating her. I couldn’t do a better job than a whole lot of people — including, it seems, Heidi Montag herself –  are already doing for her.

The two — known in the tabloids as “Speidi” — appeared on Jones’ radio show last week after he found out they were fans of his. Big fans, apparently: Pratt spent quite a while listing all the Jones material he’d devoured recently, while his wife added, “We’ve been nonstop researching the Internet … for information for at least a month, all day, every day.”

And it got weirder from there. Turns out that Pratt and Montag are 9/11 Truthers like Jones, and that they subscribe to some of the even more outlandish conspiracy theories out there. When Jones brought up one of the more widespread ones, about the government implanting microchips in everyone, Montag said, “This is very serious. It says in the Bible this is the mark of the beast, and that is a sign of worshiping the devil. So over my dead body would I ever get a chip in my body. My body belongs to Jesus Christ. I am a disciple of Jesus, and I will speak out to Christians … this chip is the end of humanity.” Birth control, too, involves a government conspiracy theory, according to Montag:

I feel like God was telling me that this was something just created by the government that is really bad for my body, and I was just getting sick. I researched it, and one of the founding people who invented birth control said it was the worst thing they had ever done. They wished they’d never created it, how it morally corrupted society. It’s just sickening to him, how it devalues women, how it causes depression, how it can cause cancer, how it sterilizes your body, and what it does to your body, how most women are suicidal sometimes on it.

Not to worry, though: According to the reality star, “Most Christians understand what’s going on. They understand they’re being persecuted. They understand this is the end of the world. They understand the New World Order, the One World Currency, is all in Revelations in the Bible, so they’re taking me very seriously and they know when I mean something, that it’s a message.”

But of course, there’s just no satisfying the kind of hardcore conspiracy theorists who make up Jones’ audience. In fact, a few are already worrying that the reality stars are really just CIA plants spreading disinformation.

There are really only two choices here: Either Montag and Pratt are dumber, and crazier, than anyone dared to believe, or this is the best piece of comedy performance art since Andy Kaufman died. (The latter seems very unlikely.) Either way, it’s disturbing, and a little sad.

But who are the victims: us or them? The digital age has allowed a ravenous worldwide mob to devour everyday folks — stalking them with cameras, revealing their secrets — and then spitting out their bones. Octo-Mom was a stripper! Kate Gosselin kept Jon on a $5 a day allowance! Each accidental uncelebrity wanders into our cross hairs and we treat them to the kind of scrutiny once reserved for Supreme Court justice nominees and the girlfriends of philandering politicians. While fame in the age of YouTube looks so easy and accessible that few lonely souls wish to remain anonymous, its spoils are often overlooked. “But the tigers come at night,” Susan Boyle sang ominously in her memorable audition repeated 200 million times on YouTube. Little did she know that the very audience that wept openly before her were the tigers she sang about, anxious to tear her world apart and turn her dream to shame, just as her song predicted.

But while the world may be poised to pounce on Boyle and Octo-Mom and every other accidental uncelebrity that will come after them, it’s unreasonable to blame the masses or the mass media for the fact that even the most ambivalent uncelebrity still seems unable to resist feeding themselves into the treacherous and soul-crushing gears of the new uncelebrity branding machine. Regular folks offer up their life stories — throwing in their dignity and self-respect along with it — and out comes a series of pointless interviews, a book deal, a speaking tour, a reality show, plus CDs, jewelry lines, skin product endorsements and everything else under the sun. Even as uncelebrities lament being harassed by the paparazzi at every turn, they can’t seem to get off that crazy conveyor belt of commodification without transforming every last scrap of their souls into consumable goods.

And naturally the most “successful” uncelebrities, like Spencer Pratt or Anna Nicole Smith before him, recognize that their continued success depends on their willingness to serve up their own undiluted jackassery at every turn. And in a new media universe dominated by procrastination-fueled wandering and short attention spans, all it takes is a little intra-uncelebrity sniping to generate headlines far more popular than the now-archaic-seeming news of Mel Gibson’s latest expletive-strewn meltdown. Recognizing this, gossip rags and celebrity shows point cameras in uncelebrity faces and ask them questions about other uncelebrities, creating such scintillating headlines as “Octo-Mom to Kate Gosselin: Stop Judging Me!” and “Spencer to Audrina: You’re a Ho!”

Sadly, these insipid stories trickle up from the gutter to so-called legitimate news sources. Chasing diminished ad revenue, uncelebrity pap is born at Radar Online or TMZ.com, then gets picked up by the San Jose Mercury News, L.A. Times or CBS in the hopes of capturing enough page views to keep these relatively serious (and therefore doomed) news outlets afloat for another day.

Where are the real celebrities in all of this? While Spencer Pratt now has the ability to work the known universe into a lather over his unspeakable repugnance — and let’s face it, in the reactionary, three-seconds-of-fame age of Twitter, that is a marketable skill — what once passed for big news in the celebrity world fades without much notice, let alone controversy and commotion. Celebrity magazines, which multiplied to keep up with consumer demand a few years ago, now struggle to compete for our attention in a cultural climate that views them with increasing skepticism or worse, apathy. Outside of Brangelina, few celebrities have the power to sell magazines (which might explain why Brangelina is on the cover week after week).

But then, celebrities got pretty boring, once we got to know them a little better. The running feature in Us magazine titled “Stars: Just Like Us!” with its shots of Jennifer Aniston sipping a latte or Lindsay Lohan shoe shopping, only proved that stars weren’t like us at all. They seemed to spend all their time wandering around the same overpriced boutiques with an enormous support staff in tow, or taking their toddlers to the park for a photo op in full stage makeup. Fed a steady diet of innocuous but relatable tidbits — Rachel McAdams just loves Ultimate Frisbee! Tori Spelling says being a mom, like, totally changed her life! — we concluded that not only weren’t stars the least bit like us, but they were way more boring than we are.

Stars were much more lifelike in the old days. Back in the ’80s, “Worst Dressed” lists were populated by the hundreds of celebrities who left the house without the aid of a stylist. Remember the train wreck that was Cher? Those sorts of big, colorful explosions of bad taste were driven to extinction by a whole industry of image-molding professionals. But ironically, the stylists and personal trainers and magazine editors who’ve colluded to fine-tune and airbrush and sugarcoat the life out of the celebrity animal have only insured their own demise in so doing. Surrounded by Ayurvedic specialists and yoga instructors and personal chefs that live in the guest branch of their 15-bedroom mansions, interfacing only with personal assistants and personal concierges and personal managers who wait quietly, patiently, a few inches from their expertly loofahed elbows every minute of the day, the most successful celebrities have had their former personalities sloughed off like so much dead skin.

Thus, the paid professionals who polish celebrity images to a high gloss while spackling over every unusual or unrelatable quirk that might limit a star’s ability to move the maximum volume of product off the shelves have effectively retouched themselves out of a job. Because, as it turns out, seconds after celebrities began inviting us into their recently redesigned kitchens, we no longer cared. We were warmly welcomed into Tom Cruise’s Colorado ranch house and shown framed photos and leather couches and Suri’s little playhouse under the stairs, and we understood it all to be exactly as interesting and authentic as a meticulously constructed movie set. As far as we could tell, celebrities spent all of their time doing the same thing: shopping at Barney’s while talking to their managers on their cellphones, then dashing home to bleach their teeth. These days, the headlines may try to make stars look more ordinary, and therefore vaguely interesting (“Brad Pitt Keeps Fresh With Baby Wipes, Reveals Costar”), but we know better.

As unsavory and omnipresent as the uncelebrity circus might be, is it really any mystery why the incoherent, self-involved ramblings of a freak show like Octo-Mom would capture our interest far more than an up-close and personal interview with Mariska Hargitay in her four-bedroom Hollywood Hills bungalow? After a decade of dutifully lapping up the latest truly bland, unself-aware statements, Vegas-trashy “glamour,” and uninspired home decorating styles of actors and actresses with all of the soul of a bag of frozen peas, we’ve replaced our diet of surgically enhanced automatons with real human beings — albeit, those with a penchant for public humiliation.

Naturally, uncelebrities have only begun their unpredictable reign as the top dogs of this depraved media dog pile. Shortly after Spencer Pratt called the head of NBC threatening to quit “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,” proclaiming himself “too famous” to deign to appear on the show while his brand-new wife Heidi wept piteously over the fact that fellow contestants had ripped the label off her shampoo, the pair were spotted, still in Costa Rica, allegedly chortling over their publicity stunt while bragging about how much money Heidi was going to make on a deal to peddle shampoo on QVC. Meanwhile, the rest of the show’s competitors openly marveled over what kind of person would willfully assume the role of villain — until someone pointed out that villainy had made Pratt more famous than the rest of them put together.

Likewise, Octo-Mom’s eventual reality show is sure to be a huge hit largely because she shares Pratt’s self-deluded swagger and tendency to confuse a rubbernecker’s curiosity with genuine interest. All a reporter from Radar Online had to do was ask Nadya Suleman to look at some photos of Kate Gosselin in a bikini , and she dutifully rambled on for several minutes about how Gosselin “cheated” by having surgery and she still looked “boxy.”

Of course, these ordinary people will only be “just like us” for about five more seconds, and then the book tours and the image consultants and the paparazzi attacks and the aggressive interviews with Matt Lauer will start to take their toll. Whether their rise to fame was accidental or entirely by design, every uncelebrity from Adam Lambert to Jon and Kate to Speidi to Octo-Mom to even Susan Boyle will look roughly the same after the international herd charges over them. Whether they’re taken down by a crippling addiction or a phalanx of highly paid professional handlers, it hardly matters: Very little of their former selves will remain, rendering them just as bland and worthless as the real celebrities that came before them.

We can’t help it. In our gluttonous desire to touch something fresh and unusual and odd and unspoiled by the homogenizing influence of this global digital culture, we trample each new, genuine, special flower until it’s flattened to the ground. And when the dust settles, we’re more alone and more bored than ever in our stifling, self-created hothouse.