It\u2019s hard to think about given how 2016 and 2017 went, but for me, personally, it all sort of went to hell for good in 2014. The slide started almost immediately, with the first of ultimately seven ER visits for my in-laws that year as soon as I got back from Birmingham. That was when their health took a turn for the worst once and for all. Lost in the aftermath was how Vanderbilt\u2019s most successful coach in the last century chose to go help Penn State get right, functionally taking a huge shit on everything he\u2019d said for three years about \u201cbuild don\u2019t rent\u201d – and sacrificing our best success in football history so that the Nittanys could speed their recovery from having harbored a child molester for years. That\u2019ll sour your outlook.<\/p>\n
But once you get away from the more purely personal, you see the real shit emerge. Ferguson, when some white people finally began to catch on that a huge swath of law enforcement is fundamentally lawless. GamerGate, where it became apparent that social media is a fundamentally negative force and that its operators are utterly unwilling to control or contain when bad people weaponize it.The GOP leveraged six years of blind obstruction to capture the Senate and elevate that obstruction to genuinely unprecedented levels. And the rest of the world finally began to catch on to how Silly Con Valley is sexist, ageist, kind of racist and the functional equivalent of Wall Street in the 1980s, and how its regular business was submerged under the get-rich-quick chicanery of companies whose business model was built on the tripod of \u201cforgiveness not permission,\u201d \u201cdo this for me like Mom used to\u201d and \u201csend nudes.”<\/p>\n
We more or less live in the world that 2014 made. Just as Waterloo set the tone for the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I did for the 20th, 2014 showed us the shape of things to come. Retrograde populism, harnessed in the service of destabilizing any threat to unbridled wealth. And here in Silly Con Valley, we have a better view of it than most, because this is where your future comes from. So\u2026wanna know what\u2019s coming?<\/p>\n
Consider the primacy of technology in the American marketplace. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, to a lesser extent Microsoft – the big dream of wealth now runs through high-tech, more so than the Alex P. Keaton stockbroker fantasy ever did in the 1980s, because tech convinced people that it was all about \u201cmaking the world a better place.\u201d The cliche got to be a cliche because tech believed it was inherently virtuous. With that fallacy plainly dismissed, we can look a little closer and see that in a LOT of ways, it\u2019s about reordering society to ensure continued privilege for the tech elite. Things like \u201ceveryone should learn to code\u201d aren\u2019t about trying to lift all boats, they’re about wrenching away the oars for themselves. Beware the man (reliably a man) who thinks the one thing he knows is the only thing that\u2019s important to know.<\/p>\n
People are starting to figure it out. That\u2019s why we resemble Wall Street 1986 so much; the same dickbags are in search of the next pinnacle of power and this is it – with the added bonus that heretofore at least, tech CEOs have gotten the uncritical praise not afforded to finance in the post-crash era. But it\u2019s becoming increasingly apparent that Zuckerberg and Kalanick and Y Combinator are this era\u2019s Boesky and Milken and KKR. And the insidious thing is that they\u2019re facilitating a slide toward an economy where the ultimate luxury good is financial stability. Think about it: a rental model is the key to the 21st Century indenture. Don\u2019t own music, pay every month for Spotify. Don\u2019t own movies, pay every month for Netflix or HBO. Don\u2019t own a car, pay for Uber or Lyft or Limebike. Don\u2019t own a home, pay\u2026well, pay whatever the market will bear, in Silly Con Valley anyway, where starter homes cost easily $1.5 million.<\/p>\n
And you can\u2019t afford to accumulate the wealth needed to make bigger purchases, because on top of the rent you have to pay the college loans\u2026and by making a college degree the gatekeeper credential, they\u2019ve ensured that you start in enough debt to be stuck on the wheel. After which – well, odds are you\u2019ll probably never get rich, but it takes on the psychology of the lottery. You can\u2019t win if you don\u2019t play, and if you don\u2019t play, you save a pittance while ensuring the winner is Not You. You can ensure that you\u2019ll be driving Uber and running TaskRabbit on top of your hourly day job forever, or you can indenture yourself to Sallie Mae for twenty years\u2026and drive Uber and run TaskRabbit on top of your hourly day job. Meanwhile, the wacky loan packages that used to make home ownership at least broadly feasible in a distorted market are gone, and now you\u2019re going to need at least 15% or 20% down – which, as mentioned above, now means that you have to cough up something in the six figures all at once, and around here do it in the face of people sailing in with cash offers so they can buy investment properties. Which leads to the quasi-feudal practice of writing your begging letter to the seller in hopes of convincing them to take your deal. Downton Abbey by the Bay. Which actually dovetails quite nicely with the distributed servantry of the gig economy. No wonder everyone\u2019s into British period drama. It\u2019s our own Back to the Future.<\/p>\n
And the thing about it is, when all this wealth only flows to the top, you would think the obvious solution is \u201csoak the rich.\u201d But the mythical white working class has gone right along with the course of things, perfectly happy to be living on a slab of cardboard underneath an overpass, cooking a dead crow on a wire coat hanger over a fire in a tin can, so long as the brown people on the next slab over don\u2019t even have a dead crow. It\u2019s the same trick played on white people in Alabama for a century, and it worked a treat there. It just so happens that the cracks in the system made it possible to take it national. And now, because of that 2014 Senate campaign, the Supreme Court goes from possibly having six Democratic appointees for the first time in decades to having the most stalwart conservative tilt in a century. Which means the refs are permanently biased for the foreseeable future, and misconduct like gerrymandering or voter suppression will be even harder to get over on, and changing course will be ever more difficult. When the GOP hasn\u2019t elected a new President with the most votes since 1988, but controls all three branches of the federal government, something has broken. Possibly beyond repair.<\/p>\n
Heads Greenock, tails Galway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s hard to think about given how 2016 and 2017 went, but for me, personally, it all sort of went to hell for good in 2014. The slide started almost immediately, with the first of ultimately seven ER visits for my in-laws that year as soon as I got back from Birmingham. That was when … <\/p>\n