5 ms·

Celebrity and money are like a reality distortion field. I hope I never acquire either in large quantities - it does not seem like a desirable thing

weinzierl 2y ago
Secret money is the best, but hard and rare. Celebrity without money the worst and I fully agree with you that I'd prefer to have neither.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Celebrity can be used to create ripples in the ideation of the masses, however, but that's a hard row to hoe, and only a rare few have the wisdom or good intentions to know where to begin. As well, the forces that facilitate celebrity tend to promote those who fit this modern apotheosis of vapid desire. William Gibson, as usual, summed it up perfectly in Idoru: “[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.” Recent events, especially here in America, only ever prove Mr. Gibson's understanding of the widespread lowness of the human condition. But all his "prescience" is really due to his profound humanity.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - moomin 2y ago
    I watched Grace Hopper’s declassified talk recently and was struck by how often she was right on the money (not all the times, she was also way off on some things), but in a lot of things that sounded truly prescient, she was often emphasising that these things were already happening. A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention.
    - satori99 2y ago
      > A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention Terry Gilliam said much the same thing when talking about making Brazil in the 1980s. "People think I am a prophet and that Brazil described the world we’re living in now a few years ago. But we were living in that world then; people just weren’t paying attention the way they do now." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/terry-gilliam-is-not-in-fact-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/terry-gilliam-is...
- cjrp 2y ago
  Surely secret money comes with it's own pressures and paranoia?
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    Should have said legal secret money. If it just sits there, grows slowly and gives you the piece of mind to have in in case of an emergency I don't see pressure and paranoia.
    - cjrp 2y ago
      True, I think for some people it comes with pressure to help family, friends, etc. Even if nobody knows about it, that's a secret you have to keep.
- zusammen 2y ago
  Secret money is hard at a certain scale. Money is property rights and people have to believe your rights exist for them to actually exist. Elon Musk is not physically strong but simply the beneficiary of forces that have convinced the world’s mindless executors of one arbitrary thing in his favor, but could have just as easily convinced them of any arbitrary thing out of his favor. It’s better to have $5 million than to be broke. That absolutely true. But there is a level of wealth and position where you absolutely must participate in the most evil parts of society to stay where you are. The level of money that you can quietly have is not one that rich people are impressed by. There is a higher level, which you cannot have without the support of society, and the support of society is something you do not get unless you are actively participating in terrible things, either as a willful actor or, more likely in this case, a patsy who usually has no idea what’s going on. I do wish this article had been more concrete about what those terrible things were, though. And I have no sense of where the man was truly a criminal or just way out of his depth. When people in the arts and sciences get caught up in these things, it tends to be the latter.
  - sixQuarks 2y ago
    Not true, there are edge cases. Some billionaires have lived very frugal lives - such as the founder of dollar stores. There was also a multi billionaire who lived middle class and gave away his whole fortune towards end of life
    - zusammen 2y ago
      [dead]
  - dustingetz 2y ago
    paragraph 2: please be concrete, this claim is interesting but completely unsubstantiated as currently stated
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      I don't know what reasonably substantiating such a claim would look like to you, but yeah, there's something to it. Think of it as game theory; or think of it like simple mob dynamics. Play Wolf or Mafia, and get an idea of how powerful information asymmetry can be. Look down stream at where our cobalt, our lithium, our chocolate comes from; what we've done to Africa and South America and indigenous people everywhere; look what Epstein did, and who with, and how media covered it; look at the history of colonialism; look at how people who spoke out against Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/US torture/drone assinations/Israeli occupation and atrocities were and are being treated by the political and media class. Look at how climate protesters are smeared while polluters are green-washed; not sometimes, but as a matter of course. There's not many ways to explain all the above without the original claim as a large factor. I'd recommend Chomsky, Naomi Klein, John Perkins, Sarah Kendzior and Whitney Webb if you want to learn more.
- DevX101 2y ago
  Wealthy people are fairly anonymous to most people unless they actually got their wealth via fame (influencers, actors, entertainment talent). Without looking it up, do you have any idea who the CEO of Coca Cola is? Would you be able to spot him/her (I dont' know either) on the street? Now imagine the armies of $XM annual comp high earners in finance and they're even more anonymous.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    The Mars family is pretty famous for how NOT famous they are.
  - weinzierl 2y ago
    I don't doubt that but I'd call that hardly secret. Random people in the street are the least problematic, the ones closest are.
MrMcCall 2y ago
Like all we are fortunate enough to receive, the effects upon ourselves are based upon how you use it. Of course, we have to acquire such resources through non-harmful means; e.g. it can't be theft or selling coke. Regardless, if we use our resources to help others, that happiness will return to us from within us. There is only one source of happiness: to make others happy and then reap the benefits via the universe's natural karmic flow. Most people are only concerned with selfish desires such that even their charity is for their own benefit, such as their public image or tax breaks. Truly doing something to help another human being -- without any self-concern save reaping the karmic happiness return -- is truly rare on Earth, but once one tastes that sweetest of nectars, one wants nothing else, ever. This world would be a different place if we human beings judged ROI in this most compassionate of ways.
svantana 2y ago
Presumably the guy is distinctively not rich, or he wouldn't have gotten involved in such risky business to make money. Most of the hit songs he's been involved with are based one or more older songs, so he may not make much from royalties.
- klez 2y ago
  FTA: > Adding to his woes, the government seized roughly $80 million from him. That to me means that he was distinctively rich
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - svantana 2y ago
    I assumed that was money he earned from this spy business, but it's not really clear.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > We meet in his sparsely furnished 4,500-square-foot SoHo apartment with floor-to-ceiling views of lower Manhattan I mean, can't be doing all _that_ badly.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  People don't get involved in criminality, in general, out of desperation, but because they enjoy the lifestyle. Hence the hundreds of successful e.g. rappers who end up in prison (or dead) even long after they had far more than enough money that any sense of wanting was far behind them.
  - dinkblam 2y ago
    > People don't get involved in criminality, in general, out of desperation, but because they enjoy the lifestyle. ugh. why do you suppose there is a two degrees of magnitude difference in crime between poor and rich nations? there is no connection to theft not sounding that bad when you are starving? also, are you supposing all the gangs breaking into&robbing homes are actually bored millionaires?
world2vec 2y ago
If you happen to acquire large quantities of money please let me know, I can take that burden off you. ;-)
- brookst 2y ago
  No, no, it is much too burdensome. Let me take this burden that it does not crush you, brother world2vec.
  - world2vec 2y ago
    No, no, no brother brookst - I insist, you don't need to suffer.
    - churchill 2y ago
      Brothers, brookst & world2vec: it would break my heart to watch you both suffer from the pressures worldly wealth and filthy lucre can bring. Why not let me take it off both of your hands so you can live the ascetic lives you crave? Deal?
throw0101d 2y ago
> Celebrity and money are like a reality distortion field. Or it reveals actual reality: if you have lots of money, you probably don't have as many restrictions on what you can and can't do, so it may allow your "true self" to be actualized. Your true self may not be as noble as you think.
- Retric 2y ago
  Many were horrible people before they became celebrities, you just didn’t hear about them.
water-data-dude 2y ago
I agree. I think it’s kind of like how we discovered that cheap, abundant, calorie dense foods aren’t good for people. Humans evolved in circumstances where we weren’t ever likely to have as much calorie dense food as we wanted, so we have wiring that tells us to eat as much as we can (which can hurt us). I think the same is true of positive attention. We’re social creatures, that’s part of how we survive. In the past we wanted to be part of a group, and having status in a social hierarchy could be a matter of life or death. Now that there are billions of people, and social networks make it possible to interact with a LOT of them. Humans evolved in circumstances where we weren’t ever likely to have as much attention as we wanted, so our wiring tells us to glut ourselves on as much attention as we can, which can hurt us (obsession, narcissism, etc.).

weinzierl 2y ago

Secret money is the best, but hard and rare. Celebrity without money the worst and I fully agree with you that I'd prefer to have neither.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Celebrity can be used to create ripples in the ideation of the masses, however, but that's a hard row to hoe, and only a rare few have the wisdom or good intentions to know where to begin. As well, the forces that facilitate celebrity tend to promote those who fit this modern apotheosis of vapid desire. William Gibson, as usual, summed it up perfectly in Idoru: “[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.” Recent events, especially here in America, only ever prove Mr. Gibson's understanding of the widespread lowness of the human condition. But all his "prescience" is really due to his profound humanity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- moomin 2y ago
  I watched Grace Hopper’s declassified talk recently and was struck by how often she was right on the money (not all the times, she was also way off on some things), but in a lot of things that sounded truly prescient, she was often emphasising that these things were already happening. A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention.
  - satori99 2y ago
    > A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention Terry Gilliam said much the same thing when talking about making Brazil in the 1980s. "People think I am a prophet and that Brazil described the world we’re living in now a few years ago. But we were living in that world then; people just weren’t paying attention the way they do now." https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/terry-gilliam-is-not-in-fact-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/terry-gilliam-is...
cjrp 2y ago
Surely secret money comes with it's own pressures and paranoia?
- weinzierl 2y ago
  Should have said legal secret money. If it just sits there, grows slowly and gives you the piece of mind to have in in case of an emergency I don't see pressure and paranoia.
  - cjrp 2y ago
    True, I think for some people it comes with pressure to help family, friends, etc. Even if nobody knows about it, that's a secret you have to keep.
zusammen 2y ago
Secret money is hard at a certain scale. Money is property rights and people have to believe your rights exist for them to actually exist. Elon Musk is not physically strong but simply the beneficiary of forces that have convinced the world’s mindless executors of one arbitrary thing in his favor, but could have just as easily convinced them of any arbitrary thing out of his favor. It’s better to have $5 million than to be broke. That absolutely true. But there is a level of wealth and position where you absolutely must participate in the most evil parts of society to stay where you are. The level of money that you can quietly have is not one that rich people are impressed by. There is a higher level, which you cannot have without the support of society, and the support of society is something you do not get unless you are actively participating in terrible things, either as a willful actor or, more likely in this case, a patsy who usually has no idea what’s going on. I do wish this article had been more concrete about what those terrible things were, though. And I have no sense of where the man was truly a criminal or just way out of his depth. When people in the arts and sciences get caught up in these things, it tends to be the latter.
- sixQuarks 2y ago
  Not true, there are edge cases. Some billionaires have lived very frugal lives - such as the founder of dollar stores. There was also a multi billionaire who lived middle class and gave away his whole fortune towards end of life
  - zusammen 2y ago
    [dead]
- dustingetz 2y ago
  paragraph 2: please be concrete, this claim is interesting but completely unsubstantiated as currently stated
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    I don't know what reasonably substantiating such a claim would look like to you, but yeah, there's something to it. Think of it as game theory; or think of it like simple mob dynamics. Play Wolf or Mafia, and get an idea of how powerful information asymmetry can be. Look down stream at where our cobalt, our lithium, our chocolate comes from; what we've done to Africa and South America and indigenous people everywhere; look what Epstein did, and who with, and how media covered it; look at the history of colonialism; look at how people who spoke out against Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/US torture/drone assinations/Israeli occupation and atrocities were and are being treated by the political and media class. Look at how climate protesters are smeared while polluters are green-washed; not sometimes, but as a matter of course. There's not many ways to explain all the above without the original claim as a large factor. I'd recommend Chomsky, Naomi Klein, John Perkins, Sarah Kendzior and Whitney Webb if you want to learn more.
DevX101 2y ago
Wealthy people are fairly anonymous to most people unless they actually got their wealth via fame (influencers, actors, entertainment talent). Without looking it up, do you have any idea who the CEO of Coca Cola is? Would you be able to spot him/her (I dont' know either) on the street? Now imagine the armies of $XM annual comp high earners in finance and they're even more anonymous.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  The Mars family is pretty famous for how NOT famous they are.
- weinzierl 2y ago
  I don't doubt that but I'd call that hardly secret. Random people in the street are the least problematic, the ones closest are.

MrMcCall 2y ago

Like all we are fortunate enough to receive, the effects upon ourselves are based upon how you use it. Of course, we have to acquire such resources through non-harmful means; e.g. it can't be theft or selling coke. Regardless, if we use our resources to help others, that happiness will return to us from within us. There is only one source of happiness: to make others happy and then reap the benefits via the universe's natural karmic flow. Most people are only concerned with selfish desires such that even their charity is for their own benefit, such as their public image or tax breaks. Truly doing something to help another human being -- without any self-concern save reaping the karmic happiness return -- is truly rare on Earth, but once one tastes that sweetest of nectars, one wants nothing else, ever. This world would be a different place if we human beings judged ROI in this most compassionate of ways.

svantana 2y ago

Presumably the guy is distinctively not rich, or he wouldn't have gotten involved in such risky business to make money. Most of the hit songs he's been involved with are based one or more older songs, so he may not make much from royalties.

klez 2y ago
FTA: > Adding to his woes, the government seized roughly $80 million from him. That to me means that he was distinctively rich
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- svantana 2y ago
  I assumed that was money he earned from this spy business, but it's not really clear.
rsynnott 2y ago
> We meet in his sparsely furnished 4,500-square-foot SoHo apartment with floor-to-ceiling views of lower Manhattan I mean, can't be doing all _that_ badly.
ANewFormation 2y ago
People don't get involved in criminality, in general, out of desperation, but because they enjoy the lifestyle. Hence the hundreds of successful e.g. rappers who end up in prison (or dead) even long after they had far more than enough money that any sense of wanting was far behind them.
- dinkblam 2y ago
  > People don't get involved in criminality, in general, out of desperation, but because they enjoy the lifestyle. ugh. why do you suppose there is a two degrees of magnitude difference in crime between poor and rich nations? there is no connection to theft not sounding that bad when you are starving? also, are you supposing all the gangs breaking into&robbing homes are actually bored millionaires?

world2vec 2y ago

If you happen to acquire large quantities of money please let me know, I can take that burden off you. ;-)

brookst 2y ago
No, no, it is much too burdensome. Let me take this burden that it does not crush you, brother world2vec.
- world2vec 2y ago
  No, no, no brother brookst - I insist, you don't need to suffer.
  - churchill 2y ago
    Brothers, brookst & world2vec: it would break my heart to watch you both suffer from the pressures worldly wealth and filthy lucre can bring. Why not let me take it off both of your hands so you can live the ascetic lives you crave? Deal?

throw0101d 2y ago

> Celebrity and money are like a reality distortion field. Or it reveals actual reality: if you have lots of money, you probably don't have as many restrictions on what you can and can't do, so it may allow your "true self" to be actualized. Your true self may not be as noble as you think.

Retric 2y ago
Many were horrible people before they became celebrities, you just didn’t hear about them.

water-data-dude 2y ago

I agree. I think it’s kind of like how we discovered that cheap, abundant, calorie dense foods aren’t good for people. Humans evolved in circumstances where we weren’t ever likely to have as much calorie dense food as we wanted, so we have wiring that tells us to eat as much as we can (which can hurt us). I think the same is true of positive attention. We’re social creatures, that’s part of how we survive. In the past we wanted to be part of a group, and having status in a social hierarchy could be a matter of life or death. Now that there are billions of people, and social networks make it possible to interact with a LOT of them. Humans evolved in circumstances where we weren’t ever likely to have as much attention as we wanted, so our wiring tells us to glut ourselves on as much attention as we can, which can hurt us (obsession, narcissism, etc.).