Tuesday, November 16, 2021
More on high-status hippies
Wolf is graphing the dot-com weirdness and cultishness of WeWork. Cults are running strong now, from Elon to Elizabeth Holmes to Adam Neumann. A business with an obviously stupid and impossible goal sucks in all the investment, leaving no money available for real business.
One commenter brings up a historical parallel:
This prolonged departure from fundamentals is so weird. I recall in the dotcom years, Silicon Valley started off with promising (if speculative) companies and ideas, and drifted over time into pure marketing. Sensing free money on the table, free lunch, a zero sum transfer, the rats moved in (as they did into the hippie movement, which has interesting Bay area cultural parallels). No need to provide value, just have a charming superficial story, build a facade, and the “investors” will come. I am not sure of the relative numbers (I don’t have Wolf’s skills) but things now seem far down that path. Cults of personality abound in today’s society, not unlike the grotesque scenes in the post-hippie Bay area.Like Elon and Elizabeth and Adam, those high-status hippies had government connections and money connections. They turned the drug trade (which has always been a Deepstate specialty) into personality cults, and some of the cults were info feeders for Deepstate. We're parallel to the early 70s in many ways. Nixon saddled business and citizens with a crazy pile of new mandates, in environmentalism and Die-Versity. Cults were everywhere, and cults were mainly Deepstate operations. Now we're seeing inflation, which Wolf is also graphing expertly. The only thing in this comment that I hadn't seen in my own experience is the "investors". This commenter had a different set of experiences.
Labels: Sucker Filter
¶ 6:14 AM
