BUILDBRIEF: Curb Your Iconoclasm

Jewish Civil War - What Diddy Did - SBF's 25-year slap on the wrist

Screenshot from Youtube

It’s a little early to write about California Forever, the massive new tech-funded effort to spin up a Golden State city — sorry, community — that’s not, like, disgusting and stuff. Imagine. In the meanwhile, it’s always a good time to buy Human Forever.

To the matter at hand:

CURB YOUR ICONOCLASM

For months now, I’ve been driving past an L.A. billboard — what a dying art form — advertising the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You might have seen this in your own neighborhood: Larry David, the apotheosis of ironic bemusement, shrugs atop a smallish chunk of ice at sea, a beleaguered iceberg inexorably melting away behind him.

THE LAST OF HIS KIND, runs the tagline — funny, in a way David and Curb can’t achieve, because he and the show and their signature humor and affect have become so oversaturated, so fully commoditized, that the show’s final season is above all a tribute to the first of his kind, not a lone auteur like Woody Allen but a “whole vibe”.

It’s on account of Larryism that, in the wake of his “show about nothing” Seinfeld, it can be said by many and sensed by many more that “nothing ever happens”… despite, or maybe because of, just how much always seems to be trying to happen, trying to make itself happen. Nothing that our more perceptive scholars haven’t noticed before:

For Baudrillard, the hyper-realization of history coincides first of all with the process of total diffusion of the event by information… with the excessive proximity of the event and its diffusion, with the impossibility of isolating the historical event from its model of perfection and simulation — a process that in turn is part of an overall social transformation characterized by the multiplication and saturation of exchanges, by the hyper-density of cities, commodities, messages and circuits.

A transformation that Baudrillard… defines not only as an acceleration, but also as a sort of “slowing down”: the rise of a force of inertia and immense indifference, overflowing with an “inert matter of the social” due precisely to the mad acceleration of circulation and information, and which prevents history, meaning and progress from finding their own speed of liberation, events from exercising the negative action in which historical transcendence consists. And as with all the other phenomena in which the “dialectic” of hyperreality is declined (language, exchange, otherness, sexuality, freedom, etc.), the historical hyper-realization also generates, by means of a radical denial, a violent abreaction, a negative countertransference, an unamendable derealization of its own object: the “strike” of events, i.e. their no longer having time to take place, and therefore the absence of future, the historical future’s implosion on the present, in the obsession of real time.

And since, as Heidegger said, the past springs in a certain way from the future, this deformation implies also for Baudrillard a corresponding deformation in assuming of our past, whose eminent expressions are in his eyes the archaeological fetishism (recording, filing and memorizing everything of our own past and the past of all cultures), the fossilized irony that accompanies this museum-like hypostatization of objects and subjects, the mania for trials and responsibility towards everything that has been.

The whole ethos of the rebel, the breakthrough, the moldbuster, the heretic, the icon smasher — Larry David was something of its terminal form, the ethos in its “golden years” but not quite able to enjoy retirement, and its commodification has shown as well as anything that our explosion of progress has not led to blastoff but to a mysterious and maddening deceleration and derealization, culminating in what to anyone very online is a very pregnant phrase: the mania for trials.

JEWISH CIVIL WAR

No surprise David himself is now on trial. “I never liked Larry David,” Charlie Kirk recently announced on his show; “he’s your typical kind of New York Woody Allen-type that is constantly complaining.” This, too, is the theological-political problem, the latest reverberation in what attentive readers will know is a globalized Jewish civil war — one I’ve been tracking actively since late summer when all that is now unfolding was visibly building to a head.

By November, in my Wyoming remarks, I suggested “you don’t have to spend any time on the internet to look around today and see that Judeo-Christian Nationalism is crumbling.”

These debates that are now springing up in the wake of the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel, these are foundational criticisms, questions, challenges, and they’re arising because this technological force is thrusting us into a world where these foundational theological questions are inescapable. This is the reckoning that’s coming, the reckoning that is here, and it is in this context that we need to understand it. I think this is a clue to why Christian Nationalism, whatever it means, is now very hot. After all, Judeo-Christian Nationalism has been America’s civil religion for a very long time, possibly since the beginning.

Those tracking events in The Daily Wire Expanded Universe will understand why I don’t feel an inclination to wade into the discourse about this particular discourse. What we are dealing with is not the kind of situation that is more improved upon or more ameliorated the more one talks about it.

The harsh lesson that discourse and intellect don’t save, and indeed often can’t even excuse or justify themselves, is a theological lesson of a piece with what Americans and other “Westerners” are so unprepared to learn (through painful experience) about how the digital medium and the digital age have decelerated us away from the ultimately theological presumptions about technology and progress that, until so recently, gave “us” our “we-ness”.

WHAT DIDDY DID

Speaking of, a longstanding question I’ve heard bandied about in high Silicon Valley circles is why Jeffrey Epstein’s work seemed so limited to the power fields of the East Coast. Was California, playing against type, miraculously spared?

Certainly, I, a one-time turn-of-the-millennium Bret Easton Ellis protege, couldn’t believe that. But when Quiet on Set dropped last week — the last episode is coming April 7 — it unveiled to me for the first time the kind of entertainment-industry elite psychosexual horror that I’d previously only seen between the covers of Bret’s books.

And now, this P. Diddy situation is evidently far from over and quite possibly implicating Universal music mogul Lucian Grange. If you’re not up to speed, I won’t torment you, but if you want a feel for where things are going in the culture if not necessarily in the case, spend a minute (advisedly) here.

SBF’S 25-YEAR SLAP ON THE WRIST

One more thing to flag for the Jewish Civil War file:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange who was convicted of stealing billions of dollars from customers, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the crypto industry and became a cautionary tale of greed and hubris.

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentence was shorter than the 40 to 50 years that federal prosecutors had sought after a jury found him guilty of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering — charges that carried a maximum penalty of 110 years behind bars. But the punishment was far above the six and a half years requested by his defense lawyers.

…Mr. Bankman-Fried was also ordered to forfeit about $11 billion in assets.

… “At the end of the day, my useful life is probably over now,” he said.

At least some Bitcoiners are already seeing red: “SBF stole billions of customers money, lied in court, and only got a 25-year sentence. Ross Ulbricht created a website and is still serving two life sentences in prison.” Who will do time the longest—SBF or Ghislaine Maxwell?

There will be much to unpack here, although it’s unclear whether anyone will be able or permitted to do so. It’s just so difficult to look at SBF’s behavior over the course of the saga and not associate it with protection by very powerful interests—protection that characteristically disappears in the blink of an eye.