No, really like. The thing that was probably like. THE BIG radicalizing moment from "I don't like it at all but what are we gonna do, tell people how to spend their money, they worked for it", before I even realized that no one "works for" even a single billion, before all of that fell into place, the thing is that they're so fucking unhappy. Like. They're miserable! They're historically miserable, the ultra-rich! Even a lot of the comic-book fictional ones are miserable! They are not happy people and you'd think. You'd think that having more money than Jesus Christ's Vampire Sister could spend in her younger brother's lifetime would free you up to have hobbies. Shower theaters in grants to put on opulent productions tailored to your tastes. Singlehandedly set up fandom conventions for your personal interests. Go to a movie every night and eat at a different restaurant just because. Take up Warhammer without worrying about the cost of having THE BEST battle setup in your basement. Hell, indulge in my personal dream of having a fully 3D-modeled megadungeon and loot for your personal fantasy RPG campaign and provide all your players with lovingly detailed miniatures. Fund a season of Dimension20 laser-targeted at your interests. Find a fanfic author and say "for the next 3 years, make sure I have a stream of my special interest characters". Joyously indulge in your favorite activities. Learn to paint. Meet people into your kinks, I don't know, ANYTHING. I'm not even talking about "oh, fund 100,000 peoples' college tuition and buy up 300,000 more peoples' student debt per year just to cancel", this is just... personal happiness. They're completely joyless. Utterly miserable people.
Instead the only time I've seen a billionaire remotely happy, on a deep level, more than just a little "haha, ok" smile, is when Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a fistfight and Zuckerberg fuckin, he came to life, it was like someone lit a spark in him, for a brief moment it was "oh my god I'm not alone, someone cares" and just
how terrible is that? How awful, that you're on top of the world, and you cannot be happy? You have everything, you want for nothing, we are literally built for pleasure and you can't find it with everything at your disposal?
This isn't some pseudo-mystic connection to "oh, but suffering is important, suffering is what lets us be human, remove suffering and we are no longer human" or any bullshit like that; my mysticism has a place for suffering but not like that. This is just like.
Realizing that they can't even be happy it's like, where did your soul go? What is the point of your life? Why do you live like this? HOW can you live like this? I may struggle for brief moments of happiness but I have them, how can you have less happiness than I do when you have more of everything else? How have you mutilated your essential humanity like this, to the point where you're unrecognizable to me, where if I look into your eyes I don't know what I'd see looking back at me?
Yeah anyway that was one of the big radicalization moments for me, and the rest toppled from there.
For me, weirdly enough, it was Notch. Notch was kind of a normal human being until Microsoft bought Minecraft out from under him. Notch suddenly went from being a dude with a successful indie game to being probably one of the top 50 richest people on earth overnight.
Two things happened to Notch.
One, Notch tried to spend his billions of dollars on all the dream things we think about. He, for instance, tried to fund Psychonauts 2. On the spot. Right then and there. All by himself. But you can't just give a corporation millions and millions of dollars like you're pulling ten bucks out of your wallet. When he realized how much paperwork would be involved, he backed down.
The second and ongoing thing is that all that money sort of made Notch insane. But then you have to ask yourself: was Notch always insane? Or, more to the point, how much would money corrupt any one of us? Telling us sweet lies, eroding our filters, bringing the worst parts of us into the public where the spotlight never turns off anymore. When you think you're invincible, hiding behind what may as well be a shield of infinite money, what problems would we confidently stride in to? Especially if it's a shield we can't easily get rid of.
Imagine the apathy. Money as a curse. Now imagine the types of people who willingly inflict that curse upon themselves. Who see it as the ultimate end goal of life itself.
It's hard to comprehend.
Its not really the "radicalizing moment" exactly but the thing that made it apparent for me how small and miserable the lives of billionaires are, is that they never seem to ever spend money on the small shit. Specifically, all that shit that doesn't matter that we sort of wish we could spent some money on, but it isn't really possible with what we've got. Things like commissioning artists or funding someone's patreon. Putting out a bounty for a mod for a videogame you like, or donating a fuckton of money to their favorite minecraft server. Or announcing a random tournament with a huge prize pot for some dead multiplayer game. How does someone with that much cash not have the switch flip in their brain that they could personally gift random people videogames...and not just do that for the fact that its simply kind of goofy? A billionaire has never gone "Fuck it I really want more people playing fighting games I'm literally just going to give copies of Street Fighter 6 away to anyone that asks." The suspiciously wealthy furry is never a billionaire.
I guess when you live in the kind of world they do, maybe the idea of spending small amounts of money is like a mark of shame? Everything must be extravagant and the tiny personal meaningful shit that you buy a print of or put on a shelf because you're a nerd isn't extravagant.
The big moral purchases that we really want the rich to make, I kind of get why they might not to an extent. Like, how do you know if you're being charitable in the responsible way? Did you do all the research you could? Is doing something for the moral good going to cause people to masquerade as charity and target you? They should obviously, but I understand the paranoia that drives them into being amoral. But that they can be so immersed in rich-people culture and self inflicted misery that they can't even make purchases that don't mean anything is so fucking sad.
I mean really what I'm getting at is that if I personally had more money then I'd ever be able to spend, I'd probably immediately pay hundreds of people to draw fanart of Evilak. It's not really the most important thing I could be doing with that money but it just seems like an easy decision to make.
Every rich person I've ever known has been the cheapest piece of shit you can imagine. Like "will Venmo you for $1.00 for buying you a cup of coffee" level cheap. They wouldn't find "announcing a random tournament with a huge prize pot for some dead multiplayer game" half as fun as not tipping on a $300 meal. Cheap, petty, god-emperors of their own absolutely tiny, empty little worlds.
rich people seem to just be on a different plane of existence. money to them is just cookie clicker except it causes real life suffering. their extra billion dollars means nothing to them in any meaningful way, but they just gotta get more for the sake of it.
and the social status shit... every decision they make that isn't about getting more money is about getting more status. they just... the way they operate is fundamentally different to us, and I don't know how to put my thoughts on the matter to words.
they see other people as just a part of their social and economic web. their children are "extensions of themselves" whose feelings and wellbeing mean jack shit compared to their precious status. feeding your children doesn't add to your status, so fuck them I guess. but giving your children an expensive car does add to your status, even if the child doesn't want to drive let alone even have a license. they'll nickel and dime you on the most important shit like food, but blow absurd amounts of money on meaningless bullshit.
and there's no end to it. there's no stopping point. even once you become the richest person in the world, or the most famous person in the world, it's never enough for them. the universe is about to collapse because your automatons have turned almost all cosmic mass into paperclips, but god DAMN you absolutely MUST get just another billion. just one more billion. one more. and another one more.
they're like a computer stuck in a while loop until their plug is pulled. I have no fucking idea how this happens or why this happens. but it's honestly horrifying how rich people become a game of high-stakes cookie clicker that just won't end.
(and, unlike twitter, I've found myself actually breathing easy and reading them, it's nice not to feel a certain risk, thank you cohost) and a few of them stand out to me. I actually kind of wish there were a "Like" function for comments, because I feel silly about replying "yeah!" to a lot of them but I don't want people to think I'm not reading them or ignoring them, but I really don't want to go down the comments list going
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
anyway a like function is super low priority, accessibility for dark mode and screen readers first, but it'd be nice.
But yeah, the reason I bring this up is because of one of those comments: https://cohost.org/amaranth-witch/post/2578738-the-thing-about-bill#comment-f47f8e41-bf3d-4378-9c2b-3ba514965e78
Specifically, the bit about
there's a degree to which they can't really do anything other than 'perform billionaireness' because their net worth is so deeply dependent on the perception of investors that they are a smart successful billionaire whose numbers will always go up.
which really resonated with me, because that's the thing. Well, A thing. A part of what's at the crux of all of this, the compound reasons of "why do they always seem so miserable", because... yeah, it's a full-time job, and it's such a full-time job that even more than actors or other celebrities, you really are "on the clock" 24/7, our current billionaire main character can't even shitpost without people crawling all over it looking for gold, and that sucks!
And while there's an entire essay on the responsible and ethical use of power dynamics and perception, the relevant upshot of THAT might be "well maybe he shouldn't have been on social media in the first place" and honestly that's true, much like a Brand can't afford to have a loose cannon having a bad day in public, it gets in the way of Performing Billionaireness, and while ultimately I think that the current state of social media is a metastasizing malignant mass which nevertheless has helped me stay connected and alive during some particularly bad times and that if someone CAN survive without social media, they're probably better off not being on it - despite that, it kinda sucks to look at something you want to do and realize "oh, shit, I can do that but I shouldn't do that" (or run the risk of digging your own grave and buying the platform because of the heady combination of extreme wealth, shitposting and toxic masculinity)
And even that isn't defense of the ultra-rich as a modern/capitalist construction, but yes, I have sympathy for the stifled state of the person in there, at least the ones that haven't fully receded into the rarified air of the other world that the ultra-rich have to live in because being reminded of the joys of the little person hurts, when their guard is down. Another comment brought up
This is literally part of the premise of Neuromancer
and yeah, yeah it is, I didn't get it on the first reading but I was far too young then, it's been front and center in my view for a long time (and anecdotally, this is part of why most cyberpunk-styled RPGs don't allow player characters to ascend into the ranks of the ultra-rich, even as fantastically competent individuals, and still remain playable, because of the Otherworld factor). Altered Carbon plays with the concept in a different way, but no less textual, and in both cases it's not subtext, it might even be supertext, imposed as a shadow across every word put down on the page.
The whole thing sucks and makes me want to lash out, a lot, but there's no lashing out within my power which would move the needle even slightly. I can't grab one of them by the lapels and scream at them until they see how fucked up it all is, for so many reasons. So instead, I make frustrated posts on websites, because agitprop born from a mixture of sympathy and anger is far more healthy than either keeping it bottled up, or worse, lashing out at the people who are within my reach because I'm angry at something outside it.
IDK. I'd get a bad grade for presenting this as a paper, because I'm not writing to a thesis or constructing statements in any way other than conversationally, but I'm not in academia anymore, not getting paid to do this, and not in the right state of mind to format it "properly". Things just suck, and since I don't have a lot of reach to put the angry frustrated energy to use elsewhere, I'm trying to do something with it here. Maybe it'll jostle someone who needs jostling, maybe it'll give someone an empathetic tool for conversation down the road, I don't know.
I'm gonna have to write about Dresden Files more dammit. Haven't finished that series of essays.
