I see this as a guise to protect the status quo at all costs, masked as a revolutionary undertaking. It’s more infuriating than boring to me, because it serves to water down any attempt at systemic change in the eyes of the people who need change the most. So what you’re left with is the argument that you can’t really have change so you might as well accept the status quo, which also happens to benefit most the people making the argument.
I class an adequate Universal Basic Income as different to the others, it being a proposal with a long pedigree (Mack Reynolds called it 'Inalienable Basic' sixty years back) and a possible way for capitalism to make some peace with decency—The Market is in some ways a very useful game, but we should state once and for all that we're beyond anyone's dying or suffering (beyond embarrassment) for losing it.
(My greatest fear over it is that 'libert'arians and other Rightists want it to be the sole social scheme for the same reason Caligula supposedly wished that all Rome had but one neck.)
I read this earlier today and while I'm with you on the utterly empty blandness of Yang, and really, really hope we New Yorkers are not stupid enough or careless enough to elect him mayor, I'm honestly I'm a little surprised at the paragraph discussing Musk and technology. It struck me as uncharacteristically incurious of you. Yeah, Musk is a comical figure, but making rocketry cheaper and reusable while remaining reliable is a genuine technical accomplishment (though how much Musk how to do with this rather than his engineers is debatable) whose long-term effects are unclear. Electric cars are going to have to be part of any solution to climate change, and making them cool is Good. That you're unimpressed (why?) doesn't change either of those things. They're also not, or shouldn't be, what makes the likes of Musk detestable rather than just laughable--namely, his doctrinaire libertarianism and antiunionism. That's just old-school monstrosity, and not difficult to understand. Between that, a lot of ham-handed, backward-looking ideas, and being a visibly eccentric, too-online asshole, he's an easy guy to hate, not just out of disdain, but out of fear he gets his way. That's worse than being a Yang-tier doofus already, though I guess there's similarity in the kookery.
And while I'm very skeptical of cryptocurrency's utility and outright laugh at NFTs, your critique here really sounds like performative cynicism. By your own admission you don't understand these things or care to, which I guess how by the end you begin talking about how NFTs lack aesthetic merit. But why? They were never meant to have it, and that's generally not how we judge whether a technology is useful or interesting. Or maybe that how you, personally, judge such things, but you don't say why that is, or what sorts of new technologies would seem exciting and inspiring rather than enervating and emblematic of mediocrity. To be honest, it's the rest of the tech field that saps me of hope and fills me with me with dread--ok, yeah, yet another friggin online service or app that does a thing I already could do, but easier and maybe cheaper. Hurrah. Another way to overshare with strangers at the cost of any semblance of privacy, really just excellent. Against this, rockets and cars actually look kind of impressive, given that there was some actual physical engineering and technical innovation involved, instead of being yet another glorified database built to better commodify us while sapping us of our mental health. And that's less cringey and substanceless a la Yang, who is bad enough, so much as outright dystopian.
I think you could apply this to so many of the recent Big Online pop cultural stuff too: Lil Nas X, Justice League, Rupi Kaur, etc. Does anyone really give a shit about any of this? What does any of it actually lead to? It's a performance of narcotized outrage and boredom that just become indistinguishable from the real thing.
You've got it exactly right. To gain the largest number of voters, or of readers, or simply the attention of the many (maybe even the masses) you have to go mediocre. That was harder to do when there were only three networks and only a self-selected few entered the book business (or the writing business, or the business the French call publicité. Now it's so feasible that the cost of adding one person's attention is so close to zero that you can add a million of them for the price of a cat video.
I see this as a guise to protect the status quo at all costs, masked as a revolutionary undertaking. It’s more infuriating than boring to me, because it serves to water down any attempt at systemic change in the eyes of the people who need change the most. So what you’re left with is the argument that you can’t really have change so you might as well accept the status quo, which also happens to benefit most the people making the argument.
I class an adequate Universal Basic Income as different to the others, it being a proposal with a long pedigree (Mack Reynolds called it 'Inalienable Basic' sixty years back) and a possible way for capitalism to make some peace with decency—The Market is in some ways a very useful game, but we should state once and for all that we're beyond anyone's dying or suffering (beyond embarrassment) for losing it.
(My greatest fear over it is that 'libert'arians and other Rightists want it to be the sole social scheme for the same reason Caligula supposedly wished that all Rome had but one neck.)
"the rule of doofuses" /// I think you're onto something with this.
I read this earlier today and while I'm with you on the utterly empty blandness of Yang, and really, really hope we New Yorkers are not stupid enough or careless enough to elect him mayor, I'm honestly I'm a little surprised at the paragraph discussing Musk and technology. It struck me as uncharacteristically incurious of you. Yeah, Musk is a comical figure, but making rocketry cheaper and reusable while remaining reliable is a genuine technical accomplishment (though how much Musk how to do with this rather than his engineers is debatable) whose long-term effects are unclear. Electric cars are going to have to be part of any solution to climate change, and making them cool is Good. That you're unimpressed (why?) doesn't change either of those things. They're also not, or shouldn't be, what makes the likes of Musk detestable rather than just laughable--namely, his doctrinaire libertarianism and antiunionism. That's just old-school monstrosity, and not difficult to understand. Between that, a lot of ham-handed, backward-looking ideas, and being a visibly eccentric, too-online asshole, he's an easy guy to hate, not just out of disdain, but out of fear he gets his way. That's worse than being a Yang-tier doofus already, though I guess there's similarity in the kookery.
And while I'm very skeptical of cryptocurrency's utility and outright laugh at NFTs, your critique here really sounds like performative cynicism. By your own admission you don't understand these things or care to, which I guess how by the end you begin talking about how NFTs lack aesthetic merit. But why? They were never meant to have it, and that's generally not how we judge whether a technology is useful or interesting. Or maybe that how you, personally, judge such things, but you don't say why that is, or what sorts of new technologies would seem exciting and inspiring rather than enervating and emblematic of mediocrity. To be honest, it's the rest of the tech field that saps me of hope and fills me with me with dread--ok, yeah, yet another friggin online service or app that does a thing I already could do, but easier and maybe cheaper. Hurrah. Another way to overshare with strangers at the cost of any semblance of privacy, really just excellent. Against this, rockets and cars actually look kind of impressive, given that there was some actual physical engineering and technical innovation involved, instead of being yet another glorified database built to better commodify us while sapping us of our mental health. And that's less cringey and substanceless a la Yang, who is bad enough, so much as outright dystopian.
I think you could apply this to so many of the recent Big Online pop cultural stuff too: Lil Nas X, Justice League, Rupi Kaur, etc. Does anyone really give a shit about any of this? What does any of it actually lead to? It's a performance of narcotized outrage and boredom that just become indistinguishable from the real thing.
You've got it exactly right. To gain the largest number of voters, or of readers, or simply the attention of the many (maybe even the masses) you have to go mediocre. That was harder to do when there were only three networks and only a self-selected few entered the book business (or the writing business, or the business the French call publicité. Now it's so feasible that the cost of adding one person's attention is so close to zero that you can add a million of them for the price of a cat video.