Saturday, July 29

So one good thing about no longer being on the Dead Bird App is that I might no longer be committing a felony simply by having its cache stored on my computer when opening it, such is the state of things in Silicon Valley. What is it, exactly, that rots someones brain when you have enough power and influnce to make people be nice to you and say you are the best all the time? Maybe I have answered my own question.

I recently thought that SpaceX was survivng and functioning rather smoothly despite ownership, considering that they can send things into space and bring some things back on a semi-regular basis. Yes a rocket exploded and sent shards of molten concrete into a local wildlife preserve but rocketry is pretty dangerous and tricky business! Well then the boss said something and was immediately proven wrong by the FAA. It was a rare moment of the rules being applied. The air, where when things go wrong they go all the way, still demands consequences for foolishness.

I tend to have this notion that small scale observations and interactions of people and power can often be used to understand things that happen at a much larger scale and with much larger stakes. I don't believe people change all that much when they are given the controls to more complicated systems. People are people and their flaws remain the same, whether they are ignoring the complaints of a single employee or the complaints of an entire demographic of citizens. When you see an adult not act like an adult while throwing a tantrum at a customer service desk, or in an office meeting, or in a board room. There is no Mercury program for positions of power. The best engineers and minds of the federal government do not expose the best, brightest, and most deidcated candidates to some of the most rigorous testing available until - tada! - Wally Schirra is the CEO of National Grid. I think we all kind of assume that you get that far because well you have to be good at it somehow. The free market has just kind of naturally constructed a test to find the best candidates for a job, and therefore anyone who gets it must have passed muster. This is, of course, very incorrect.

One of the hallmarks of the age we live in I believe is the deep conentration of an empires worth of capital into an insulated class oligarchs. Sounds bad! Practically speaking what it looks like is that the people in charge of the privaste sector seem like they should be way better than they actually are - like we can all vaguely sense decay in skill at the top. They are saying more stupid shit. They are doing more stupid shit. They are doing this because of the insulation, which was the long project to construct rules, regulations, and norms to protect them from consequences. I think they're interpretation of power is that they can do whatever they please becasue they clearly deserve to do so. Taxes Are For Little People but applied to any and all rules of society excepting the rules they make for each other. No I absolutely do not want to watch Succession thank you.

What is the point of having power if you can't use it how you want? If you have to listen to others? If you might someday have it taken away? Keeping it is the name of the game, and has been extending into antiquity. So when that is your first priority, your behavior and decisions tend to not make logical sense to those that are a staunch believer in The Free Market Will See It Through, because the market doesnt matter. There is no market. There is only the person with power, or others with similiar levels. This is deeply compunded when the methods to insulate people from consequences become deeply rooted to the point where no one can quite rememeber how they were made in the first place. All the hard fought battles to put loopholes into laws, dissuade prosecutions, and convince media of that class's brilliant perspective fade into a kind of inertia. The machine is running and no one quite knows how it got there - not the ones who benefit or the ones who follow. What do you do when everyone over 50 with massive bank accounts acts like the spoiled scion because the system designed by their forebeares did its job? Everything has been arranged and predestined for their success, so why work at or understand it? Without consequences, why bother?

The reason the machine works is because of Them. There was no long project to restore the oligarchy, you simple fool. No. They were born, and They made everything around them. It's because it came so easy to Them you see. That must mean that They are genius. Therefore all things are easy, and if something isnt quite right or misaligned, well it must be the fault of others, and they must be replaced so that They can get on with it.

It would be easy to wonder if we were in the age of divine right. But even in the more sophisticated middle ages there were very serious consequences to leaders who stepped out of line. "No you cant." "Yes I can!" but scaled up. The entire Enlightenment was designed to build a wall of consequences around power in the monarchal system of Western Europe. what it also did was facilitate the transfer of that power from small clusters of families to larger clusters of landed elite. Then it was their turn to scream "No!" when that power threatend to transfer to people who only had their own lives at stake. Similar conflict, but on a different scale and with different actors. Now we have those in power shouting "Yes I can!" when no one said anything in the first place, and Cromwell nowhere to be found.

Have you found youself thinking "it doesn't matter no one will do anything" about something, anything that affects us all because of a neglect of power? Well you have a deep connection to our historical experience as humans. Those experiences aren't good news, I'm afraid.