Yeah, I sense some similar "grift" trends, but the jump to social media felt tenuous. Like you say, this seems to be about bigger trends. On the one side, ther

Yeah, I sense some similar "grift" trends, but the jump to social media felt tenuous. Like you say, this seems to be about bigger trends. On the one side, there are masses of people who need to work, but the economy does not really have useful things for them to do. The basics are handled by a small number of people running combines in Iowa. If there's a steel mill, it's overseen by one guy who pushes a button. On the other side, there are stockpiles of capital that are looking for a place to sit. That want desperately to outpace inflation. In the middle, you have people who can create convincing-looking Potemkin companies. On the one hand, they provide employment to the many people who need it. On the other, they create investment opportunities for the people with the money. The ideas are generally hare-brained, but like options contracts they have theta -- "maybe it'll work in the future?" -- so you can (a) sell shares/contracts without intrinsic value, and (b) keep rolling your contracts/grifts forward, "extend and pretend" style. It's all about hope that never materializes. It's frustrating to me how frantically people work, and how useless the activity is, particularly when there are serious problems happening at the same time (global warming, housing crisis). Yet for some reason (to do with money), people can't work on their problems directly. For an individual, the solution to the housing crisis isn't to go out and build a house; it's to join a venture-backed startup that can convince SoftBank to give you enough money to convince the one remaining 50-year-old contractor to build you a house. Before long, all the activity is in those VC-backed startups, and none of the problems are getting solved at all.