There used to be this old bit on Late Night with Conan O’Brien called, “In the Year 2000.” The fact I’m calling it an “old bit” makes my brain bleed.
A member of the house band would sing, “In the year 2000” and then Conan and Andy would predict something stupid happening in the future. It’s a great joke bucket bit and one that I’ve been jealous of for years. Part of what always made it so funny was that they were doing it right until and then after the year 2000. But really the central thesis was that almost everything we’re being promised about the future is either stupid or won’t happen.
That bit is basically now how we all live in reality.
It’s not exactly groundbreaking commentary to say we’ve fucked ourselves into a corner by requiring everything to be a side hustle. You can’t enjoy a hobby, you’ve got to show it off and present it and prepare it and properly light it so maybe - just maybe! - you can make some money off something that used to give you joy. Everything has to be a job. Everything has to make money.
At the same time, there are a thousand articles a day from CNBC and Forbes about couples that make $20,000 a month in passive income by starting a business with their parents’’ money.
This also isn’t a new observation.
We’re expected to make money in our free time - both through effort and through creating a financial perpetual motion machine that will give us all enough to live our dreams. And then we have to make money off those dreams too. And whether you call this capitalism as intended or capitalism gone awry or late stage capitalism doesn’t really fucking matter. To quote Popstar, “Nowadays, if you don't sell out, people will wonder if nobody asked you to.”
But it’s kind of wild just how bad a lot of us are getting played by this system. Although, you do have to admit, we’ve been tricked in some pretty funny ways.
Guys in fedoras somehow convinced millions of people that exchanging real money for digital gift card money would be their ladder to success. It was clearly a pyramid scheme from the start. Nobody even hid that fact. Bitcoin influencers posted pictures of sports cars and private planes and whatever shit rich people buy when they realize life is a void. How’d they get those cars and private planes? Motherfucker, they sold the crypto that their marks pumped up.
It’s like the bit: In the year 2000, people will give away real money for fake computer money in hopes that the fake computer money will one day be worth the real money that they just gave away.
I’m still not saying anything new here.
We’ve all been played by the digital age. That doesn’t mean I think the digital age destroyed humanity. It’s not like our brains broke the moment more people had WiFi than didn’t have WiFi. We’ve spent millennia beating the shit out of each other for the most ridiculous shit. Adding in Facebook might have changed the game, but it didn’t start the game.
The thing is, the game can’t be won. Maybe the best trick people on the internet pull is that the game can be circumvented if you’re just clever enough. If you invest in the right influencer’s brand, you’ll be an influencer one day too. If you’re patient with a billionaire destroying a website, you might get in that billionaire’s good graces and become rich yourself. I mean fuck, man, there are online influencers whose entire identity revolves around telling their audience to log-off. Which is essentially meaningless at this point because otherwise that influencer wouldn’t have an online following.
It’s actually kind of amazing to see the pure breadth of how we’re getting played. And who’s getting played! Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen put hundreds of millions in crypto and now it’s basically fucking gone. Can you imagine that? Being a superstar athlete and a supermodel and losing a massive chunk of your fortune because some dope told you to just give it to them?
Even rich people are getting played. They’re fine. I’ve got no sympathy for them. The downside is that when rich people play themselves, it fucks a million people under them. Rich people play themselves and then have to lay off the people who are just living their normal lives. Rich people get played by others and then also have to lay off the people just living their normal lives.
Everyone’s getting played.
The promise of the future was always about having more convenience. We got it. The lesson we never really learn - because we sure as fuck didn’t learn it during the Industrial Age - is that creating convenience through work subsequently creates free time which then creates a push to fill that free time in order to buy more convenience with work.
People always ask why we don’t have flying cars yet because they want to travel faster, not because they want flaming wrecks to rain down on houses the moment those flying cars become available. Like I said, smarter people have articulated this far better than I ever will. There are full ass books on it that don’t use phrases like “full ass books.”
Every era in history has played us in one way or another. Religion has played us. War has played us. Tulip mania played us. It’s hard to exist outside vast cultural movements, and it’s even harder to feel like you’re not falling behind or not just about to fail. America may be full of embarrassed millionaires, but it’s full of embarrassed millionaires terrified they’re never going to figure out how to remove that “embarrassed” part.
So they invest in obvious scams pushed by obviously shady people who are obviously going to screw them over.
They trust in billionaires who wreck things because - well - they have billions of dollars, which must mean they know how to not be played!
The hard part isn’t falling victim to getting played.
The hard part is admitting it.
Something nice and irreverent - truly love it. Timely too. Just gotta be careful I don’t become a fanboy.
Can you recommend any of those full ass books? My interest is piqued