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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.
by 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 agoCelebrity 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 agoI 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 agoSurely secret money comes with it's own pressures and paranoia?
- weinzierl 2y agoShould 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 agoTrue, 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 agoSecret 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 agoNot 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 agoparagraph 2: please be concrete, this claim is interesting but completely unsubstantiated as currently stated
- mandmandam 2y agoI 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 agoWealthy 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.