Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
I foresee a return to an in-person cash economy, and furthermore, a return to in-person communities. Why's dat? Here, I'll explain a little my utopian notion.
We have a president who is a fraudulent man. That is, even the facade that he's a man is a fraud. He literally cannot utter two sentences without lying, and even when what he's saying is trivial he manages to make you feel you're being lied to. "It's a beautiful day. Really, it's just one of those beautiful sunny days." I don't believe you, and I'm right here in the day with you. Forget this, I'm going inside. It must be raining guano or something.
This is more than a constitutional crisis, or a crisis of faith in the press and government. This is the rubber chickens come home to roost. This is a crisis of reality. We can't have this much reality be in question, it's too much. I'd rather just have the old worries, like under Reagan, that we were gonna die in a nuclear holocaust. That's existential. This crap is existentialIST.
Felicity Huffman, so woke playing that trans person, so woke that she bought her kid's way into college. Wait, that's what rich people do. But not always fraudulently. Not always by committing illegal lying. But it’s not always necessary to lie illegally. Because behind the lie of merit-based anything is the embarrassing obscenity that money trumps merit. Money trumps truth. That Fyre Festival, its roots go all the way back to Barnum, it’s entertaining that people with too much disposable income and gullibility and lousy taste in music got taken in such a public way. They were promised entertainment and, lo and behold, they became entertainment. Turns out that, even if the product is a $250,000 festival ticket, the product is you.
We now have a two-decades' legacy of facade masquerading as substance. It's been over twenty years since people made millions on companies that were made of nothing. The tech bubble burst back then, but it's never really gone away. Vaporware is normal now, vapor-everything, and we haven't learned our lessons at all. Not from the tech bubble, not from the housing bubble. It's all a fraud bubble, but we won't admit it. Trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth is just aether. It's nothing. There is no there there, no there anywhere. I ask you, oh wise people, where is there any there?
It's the economy of lies, but economy has drenched every corner of contemporary human existence. We are a society of lies. Not a society of laws, a lie can obviously trump the law. We're a society of lies. Not simulations. Lies. We may indeed be living in a simulation, we can't do anything about that. But we don't have to tolerate all these lies, this atmosphere, this firmament of lies. We can punch through it, punch the face of the god of lies.
We have fraud laws. We have laws against misrepresentation. What we need is laws against plain old lying about stuff. Lying to cheat people of their money or labor or attention. Why is it legal to lie outright? I don’t care if it’s a matter of opinion that the new Barfburger tastes just like real caviar. It’s a lie. A six-inch sandwich doesn’t measure six inches because “six-inch” is just “the name,” not a guarantee of a number of inches? Axe Body Spray will not make throngs of blonde, brunette, and red-haired women chase after you. That is a dramatization of an adolescent heterosexual male fantasy. They’ve presented it in order to tap into your anxieties and desires around sex, procreation, companionship, and, ultimately, mortality. Also, women don’t segregate into herds according to hair color.
As I’ve said before, this is our educational system: advertising. Lies. Indoctrination through lies into the lying culture, the lie of patriarchy, the lie of money and what it means about one’s own value as person. Just lies all the time. You may say to yourself, “but I don’t pay attention to advertising.” Do you pay attention to anything? Because it’s all advertising. Some of it more, some less, but it’s all advertising. A pickle? Advertising. A homemade pickle? Advertising for the DIY lifestyle. A 6th-century pre-Islamic poem about onions? Advertising. A mountain? A mountain in the middle of the Sahara desert that no human being has ever laid eyes on? How could that be advertising? It is advertising. I don’t know how, but it is advertising. An as-yet- undiscovered asteroid in a galaxy on the other side of the universe?
Is that a question? What do you think the answer is going to be? Yes, it’s advertising!
Advertising is what the universe is made of. It’s the fabric of spacetime down to the very Planck level.
Then how can we fight the lies, you ask? How should I know?
Brands. It’s brands, that’s the real culprit. We’re all brands, everything is a brand. No more brands. Brands are edifices of lies, lies are the bricks of which brands are built.
We are slave laborers for the pharaoh of lies, lugging giant stones to build monuments to liars. Our ability to divine fact from fiction, and act rationally in response, has not progressed beyond the ancient Egyptians, beyond the first Homo sapiens.
I started this out by predicting a return to an in-person cash economy. There’s just too much distance and air and space between what you’re promised and what you receive. We need to close that gap. But I think on the way to explaining my prediction things got out of hand a little.
I’m sorry this is so incoherent. Remember, I’ve done nothing but eat, drink, and breathe lies from the moment I was born, so navigating my way out of a ubiquitous epistemological fluid is probably beyond me. I’m no genius. I’m not even smart. That’s just my brand.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!