American culture has taken on a Soviet quality lately. People have generally split into three moral camps: on the near end, criminals and vested interests deploy active deceptions and lie to the public for personal gain in increasingly grandiose and desperate ways; on the far end, earnest and honest people have been variously maligned and muzzled; and in the middle, the bulk of people are awash in a careless kind of ignorance about what’s going on lately.
Forbes’ retrospective on the FTX fraud is indicative of this kind of deliberate tone-deafness: “The Devil In Nerd’s Clothes’: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Cult Of Genius Fooled Everyone”.
He didn’t fool everyone, or really anyone that arguably didn’t already want to be fooled. That’s the lie in the headline: “we had no idea! Could have never seen it coming!” Are you sure about that?
But if you would rather cynically presume my clairvoyance about that, then simply look to the unraveling of the comedy world at the behest of Joe Rogan. Cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.
600,000 views on YouTube concurs with the sentiment of these productions, too:
Joe is at a point of spiralling now with these developments, because he’s finding out all too late that he was the chatty guy at the urinal. Nobody feels bad for him though, because we all understand that he made a conscious choice to ignore the warning signs as he took the deals that sent him soaring financially. Like so many members of Generation X, Joe gleefully sold out. He simply doesn’t give a fuck about doing the right thing.
So yeah, colour me sceptical whenever someone feigns ignorance about these things, especially at great personal profit. It’s not really ignorance if you could have—or hell, should have—known better. By the way, we have a word for cases where ignorance is revealed to be deliberate: it’s called stupidity. Who knew being stupid could be so profitable?
Unfortunately, this pervasive culture of negligence is far from limited to the ascendant bubbles of phoney right wing tech cliques. Remember how we got here: it was brought to us by the decadence and shamelessness of the permanent Democratic state culture that took form in Obama’s second term, brought us Hillary, Biden, and then Kamala. More generally, it’s a culture that is defined by the consensus of the most successful members of Generation X: the yuppies, professional agitators, and arbiters of the culture of victimhood that the right has been dragging since the fall of mainstream evangelicalism.
I don’t think the tech mob really knew how far they could fly with their unpopular ideology until the functionaries of the old regime showed them. That sentiment of mine tracks very well with the memoir of Sarah Wynn-Williams; as she said, they simply don’t give a fuck.
Given how long that old regime was able to keep throwing punches when everyone with a conscience already called the match, I’m also deeply sceptical about questions that have been called to my attention about whether JD Vance really is poised to win what with everybody now getting on his case and noticing who he works for. Unless something obviously sensible like an AOC run manifests—and there are several reasons why that may not happen—there is no serious Democratic answer to him, and he may narrowly clinch the Presidency as many have cautiously predicted.
Everybody wants to hold their horses. Nobody wants to cut the shit and be honest even when it might not be the most immediately profitable thing to do. And as long as that’s true, liars and psychopaths are going to be better at it than you. They’re willing to break more rules, violate more people and more totally force their will upon the world without reservation, and since all the ‘good people’ are content to stand by and let it happen, it will happen.
It’s time to stop prancing around, announcing vanity projects and grandstanding over the mounting issues facing the public. This is not a game of cards; this is your life and mine. I’m not going to allow my life to be hijacked and fed into some canned line about the common good at the behest of ugly middle-aged blowhards in empty suits who connived their way into whatever bureaucratic post they based their whole personality around.
As sure as I’m living through this I know those people are lying when they say they’re the big shots that helped suffering poor people like me. It’s time to stop tolerating the theatre. It’s killing us.