BUILDBRIEF: February Week 3

Tucker/Putin Boredom - Starship Stupors - Beware the Foundager - Get Out!

GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/Getty

A richness of embarrassments this week. Let’s do this.

TUCKER/PUTIN BOREDOM

You didn’t think I’d let this one slip. What’s most interesting to me is how, after allowing the fanfare to rest a little, the lingering “story” is Putin’s semi-ironic remarks to Pavel Zarubin on how it all went:

I believe that your Carlson — “your” as a member of the journalistic community — is a dangerous man, and here is why. To be honest, I thought he would be quite aggressive and ask so-called tough questions.

I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond with equally sharp answers, which would add a certain character to our conversation. But he chose a different tactic. He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he remained patient and listened to my lengthy monologues, especially when I spoke about history. He gave me no cause for doing what I was prepared to do. That is why, to tell the truth, I did not fully enjoy that interview. But he acted strictly according to his plan, and he did what he intended. As for how informative it turned out to be in the end, that is not for me to judge. It is for the viewers, listeners and possibly readers of this material to judge.

Yes, a mix of patient silence and historical memory is bad TV — even for those in front of the camera! Maybe only a 49 percent ironic judgment there. As pornography addicts lose the capability of arousal, addiction to remote excitement leads reliably to insuperable boredom. But as pornography well understands, talk is not naturally all that exciting in a visual format. One has to strain the limits of words and meanings to create must-watch talk-driven videos. One reason everything’s always a “crisis”, and the ultimate, these days, narrative ones.

STARSHIP STUPORS

Speaking of narrative crises, people are trying to interpret Starship Troopers on the internet again. I’ll spare you the laundry list of takes — there are a lot — but garfieldbot offers probably the most tempting:

it might just be me being in a bad mood already, but this whole several days of starship troopers really nails down how petty and stupid and pointless all of this is. dont you feel ashamed for caring what any of these dumb bastards think about anything

Too weary even to punctuate… who hasn’t been there? And yet, we must go further. Psychologists speak of the narcissism of minor differences — physicians of souls and bodies might observe that what’s so often going on there is the gargantuan pride of people for whom the acrimonious distance between them is tiny compared to their acrimonious distance from God.

So many debates and narrative wars are fights over how best to distract ourselves from God and the consequences of our distance from Him. So many are themselves distractions from internal struggles to convince one’s mind that there’s a right way to justify the distracting and the distancing. If space is the final frontier of anything, it’s the terminus of our scrambling desperation to escape a confrontation in our hearts with the presiding love of the Lord.

Men will literally argue about Starship Troopers with strangers on the internet instead of going to Church. Is this not itself a conscription into a losing war waged in the outer darkness?

THE FOUNDAGER

You’ve heard of the momager (moms who manage their children’s entertainment industry careers) — now, beware the Foundager! From our friends at Nock:

Capitalism has morphed into a bizarre and perverse managerialism: Massive government spending, unsustainable public debt, and deranged ideologies—all created by managers. The distributed ledger abolishes managerialism and heralds a new kind of entrepreneurial state.

Human Forever readers know the upshot of Mariana Mazzuccatto’s book The Entrepreneurial State — tech innovation is a creature of government, and that’s good — itself heralded a new kind of entrepreneurial state, one where the Cold War had been won. The next step was the terraforming of the domestic population by transforming high-tech weapons into “mind-blowing” entertainment.

The latest twist has been an effort to brand founders and the founder lifestyle as the ultimate amaaaaazing experience — arbitraging entertainment back into high-tech weaponry! Complete vertical integration, just like the Golden Fang… an effort that seeks, cultivates, automates, and scales the production of pocket ubermenschen, a diversified portfolio of world-eaters… ambitious young men who are party in the front office and business in the back, founders on the street and managers in the sheets. “You and me, we’re not so different, Mr. Bond,” but for PMCs pushing different panes of the revolving door. Beware!

GET OUT!

I’ve been trying to figure out for a while how not to bore you with an obvious diatribe about What’s Wrong with Obsession — how the internet is really a machine for terraforming us by reorganizing our identity according to our obsession and how the borgification of creation proceeds from the internet’s filling up all space by surfacing all possible obsessions with all possible things and sorting everyone accordingly.

For now, I’ll just quote Noah from the Mars Review of Books:

Whenever I have some free time it occurs to me that life is ideally meaningful and we are all interconnected nodes of the divine, and then I get really into like arbitrage sports betting strategies or British quiz shows, and forget

In its mix of awfulness and awesomeness, even as it encourages us to forget so much, our breakneck digitization reveals many obvious things it’s far past time we remember — one of which is how readily we all fall prey to the subtle temptation of being “into” things. Beware!