Space…the final frontier. An endless void that offers us nothing aside from long-dead light and a unending parade of lifeless planetoids. You simply must see it.
The perpetually tweeting rich can’t seem to get over the idea that the solution to mankind’s many problems lies somewhere in the costly expanse. In their minds, space holds the key to the future and anyone who disagrees stands in the way of humanity’s beautiful journey. This is bullshit, obviously. Wealth inequality, resource scarcity, and unchecked greed can’t be solved by staring directly into the sun but it sure does get harder to see your role in all of it with your retinas burned raw.
Branson, Bezos, Musk, and the rest have set their sights on the futuristic vision of 1950’s science fiction and they won’t be talked out of it. Forget the fact that their vanity spaceflights were done more effectively by early cosmonauts in the 1960s. Forget about the fact that no one alive today will ever live anything close to a leisurely life in the punishing cold of space. The billionaires are striving for something bigger!
…or at least they want us to think so.
Meanwhile, those a few wealth-tiers down from the aspiring astronauts simply cannot stop talking about cryptocurrency and NFTs. Cryptocurrency has an incredible ecological cost and NFTs are just a fun, flirty way of making that cost feel all the more stupid.
The reason you don’t understand NFTs is that there’s nothing to understand. They are nonsense, they’re one of those hidden image puzzles but without a solution. They’re the necessary next level of stupidity required for investors to continue throwing empty millions at the idea of Money But Computers.
The post-COVID* world continues to prove just how stark the gap has become between regular people and the wealthy. While those of us on the ground cope with the psychological fallout of the pandemic, the rich are busy buying money and trying to french kiss the sun.
The recurring response seems to be “Why don’t they get it?” or more specifically, “How could they be so detached from reality?” which has left us with the slow realization that they aren’t detached from reality, they’ll just never have to live in ours again. Each day there’s more news about the decline of our planet. The west coast is in the midst of a biblical drought, the pacific northwest cooks in the heat, temperate areas flood. We are living through what will undeniably be described as the beginning of something big and terrifying. And yet, the men who rule the world offer no grand plans to save, or even help it. Any rumblings heard of transformative technology are always tied to one thing: a doomed attempt at escaping the consequences of their own actions.
In a world that runs on profit, we all know that Money is Power. When all your culture cares about is the continued return on investment, the reliability of that return is the only attribute they see as worth striving for. So it would seem that as the way those in power acquire their money becomes more convoluted and stupid, the way they use that power is bound to become more convoluted and stupid as well.
There are so many ways the stolen resources of the wealthy could help repair the damage their predecessors did, but all that’s left at the end of the line is the explosive combustion of rocket engines and the soft churning of computers mining for nothing. The low hum at the end of the world. With a global pandemic serving not as a cause for reevaluation, but a starting gun for the race to our own self destruction.
*we all know that COVID is an ongoing nightmare, but unfortunately the reopening of businesses has lead to an ongoing description of this time as “post COVID” despite it being more of an “end of Act I” situation