When Globalization Breaks: Meta, Money, Itaewon, Monsters, and Ye
When Globalization Breaks: Meta, Money, Itaewon, Monsters, and Ye
Gold Threads: Monday November 7th, 2022
Hello friends,
What a week. Meta’s stock is down 70% YTD. Money is being repriced, the tech lay-offs have commenced–wringing out the excess, 150 people died in the streets of Itaewon, and Kanye has been “cancelled” for spewing anti-semitic energy. Let’s dig in.
Meta
Back in Februrary, I wrote in the Metaverse Dreams of Reality:
Facebook is hoping to get a piece of the real Metaverse by co-opting the entire idea for itself, but its rebirth as Meta is a surrogacy by artificial insemination. A bastardized of the original idea, and a hail marry pass to the next computing platform. Like the frontier of space and the national space program, Facebook will undoubtedly progress the wide-open design space of the Metaverse. With 10 billion dollars, it's almost guaranteed, but here’s some poetic justice for you. Even though they have the best-selling headset, I bet more blue light blocking glasses will be sold than the sum total of VR headsets.
Zuck plans to spend $250B on a technology with no proven demand. Compare that amount of money to these spending programs:
1. $253B: NASA's Apollo Space Program, 1960-1977
2. $250B: Zuck & Meta Reality Labs, $25B a year for next decade
3. $40B: Google's "Moonshots" over the past decade
4. $32B: Boeing's 787 Dreamliner
5. $25B: Tesla spend before reaching positive FCF
6. $23B: Manhattan project to create A bomb
7. $3.5B: Apple iPhone, R&D spend 2004-07
As Antonio García Martínez puts it "Meta's business has been kneecapped by Apple, growth has stopped in favor of rivals like TikTok, and it's too late to build a phone. Zuck is making an existential bet-the-company move at enormous scale. Most companies would just delude themselves and slowly die."
Money
The Alchemy of Money Part 1 & 2 is finished, but it’s just a teaser to a more comprehensive piece I’m working on about money.
The biggest concern is articulated in the graph below. While the bottom 90% have experienced near stagnation, most of the growth has gone to the top 10%. Societies that are this unequal have less social mobility, more stagnation, less productivity, and polarization. This is why we’re having inflation. This is why we’re having lay-offs. This is why we’re having more social strife.
Central banks, is to money as St. Peter’s is to faith. The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which have enjoyed the status as the most sacred office in the land, are the catholic churches of our time. Church and state. Currency and politics needs to be divorced from each other.
When you have too strong a concentration of capital it leads to excessive influence over the media and also financing of political campaigns and political parties. Decentralized banking allows us to avoid the troublesome interactions between politics and currencies, which are seen all around the world today. Norway allowed their banks to fail the 90s and are now owned largely by the public. More community banks like ones in Germany lend to small and local businesses that make real growth and productivity more aligned. This is counter to our current banking system that deals in securities and speculation.
The next evolution of our economy will be in the form of decentralized banking and networked digital technologies that make it difficult for banks to extract money from the economy.
Negativity Overload & Propaganda Misinformation
I’m hyper-aware of how much negative media we deal with on a day-to-day basis. The chart above shows you the increase in negative headlines over the years. Which probably contributes to how pessimistic we all feel about everything.
Pumping us with bad news from everywhere, all the time, all at once is one thing, but to have some our most trusted institutions actively be a part of spreading misinformation is straight up propaganda. We might think propaganda died with the fall of 20th century dictators, but it’s certainly alive and well, even in contemporary democracies like ours.
In the Grey Lady Winked, Ashley Rindsberg reminds us that the New York Times:
Won a Pulitzer for covering up the genocide of four million Ukrainians.
They reported that Poland invaded Germany at the outset of WW2.
They helped Castro take power with fawning coverage.
Pushed us further into war with Vietnam with false coverage.
Promoted false narratives that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Leading to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan we spent trillions on and subsequently pulled out of.
Competition between countries nationalism is often used by elites to make people forget class conflict and instead focus on identity, race, and nationality. In an era of politically correct, cancel culture, everything is reduced to lowest common determinator of morality. Enter, the age of monsters.
The Age of Monsters
I published a post on the GM blog called the Age of Monsters. I also posted it here in podcast form.
Naturally, there’s going to be some cross-over of content from GM and my personal newsletter here. I’m trying to establish a foundation with some of these esoteric themes so I can tie them back to current events with more clarity.
I’m going to be moving the exploratory, longer-form essays onto my main website that I’m working on (this will help me feel like I’m not being buzzkill), treat this substack as a newsletter with updates like this, and GM will house more of the polished editorial content we are covering on the new order of money, marketing, and culture. Hopefully these will be thoughtful lenses that help you think clearly about your life, and the world at large.
Ye
Ye is one of my favorite artists. This man came up from the south side of Chicago making beats for my favorite rappers, then became everyone else’s favorite rapper despite his own record label putting him down. He showed up to the ROC with a pink polo when gangster rap was the shit and then became rap’s #1 rockstar. We’ve seen him reach his goals, overcome challenges, grab our attention at will, and transcend his environment time and time again. I loved to watch him speak his truth and rattle corporate logic structures. To see him progress into an isolated, self-referential megalomaniac is sad to witness.
This is what happens when you have an education system that teaches us no cultural context. Just a list of random dates and events. Columbus, 1776, Slavery, Civil War, Nazis, World War II, and 1945. If he knew anything about the history of Jewish-Americans, he would find more in-common with their struggles and celebrate them for creating the American Dream, not condemning them for a conspiracy that doesn’t exist. Ye and Kyrie need a different book in their hands, An Empire of Their Own by Neal Gabler.
Russian-Jewish immigrants came from the shetetis and ghettos out to Hollywood…In this magical place that had no relationship to any reality they had ever seen before in their lives, or that anyone else had ever seen, they decided to create their idea of an eastern aristocracy…The American Dream–is a Jewish invention
— Jill Robinson
Nightmare on Itaewon’s Streets
I thought 10 people dying at a Travis Scott concert, was horrific. To wake up to the news that over 150 had passed away because of being crammed in an alleyway for Halloween left me in shock and awe. I was actually out in Itaewon one night with my family and friends this year. I remember distinctly not liking the environment, and pulling everyone out.
South Korea amongst many of the asian cultures are hierarchical. There’s a famous case study where Asiana pilots had to be retrained outside of Korea so that they don’t defer to the person above them despite an impending crash in front of them. You can see strands of this logic with the Sinking of the Sewol Ferry that killed 304 people, almost all of them children. The cause? They couldn’t reach the president.
While people are pointing the finger at state officials and public leaders for not being better prepared for an unofficial holiday, I suspect this to be the cause of something in the direct opposite camp of command and control. A collapse of order. Pure chaos. Halloween is just chaos if not bound to traditions.
Bringing it all Together: A Unity of Opposites
The above topics may read like a random string of events, but is in fact a result of a halving. An erosion of public and private space. Individuals and community.
The digital world is a world of pure consciousness. It exists in infinity. Life on the screen is a disembodied life. A virtual existence where the rules of society and the laws of physical don’t apply. Which is why online relationships are intoxicating and toxic.
Anytime we think in a binary framework of this OR that, we run into problems. Anytime we separate the mind and the body, monsters are born.
The Collapse of Meta
A network without a body.
The Collapse of Money
Public money without public accountability.
The Collapse of Itaewon
A holiday without tradition.
The Collapse of Ye
An individual without community.