Good morning. Hello. Ho are you? #625
Several paragraphs that would make great essays in their own right if I were a sell-out
Good morning! Hello there. How are you today, this fine Tuesday? I am good. I am now going to write a series of paragraphs. Many of these paragraphs will contain interesting ideas. Many of them would make great theses for free-standing, full-blown essays, or “think pieces” that one finds scattered throughout the web. That bitcoin one I wrote for you guys last year got about 100x more reads than my usual GMHHAY, and that one on Apple’s privacy changes got about 50x more. I could write these essays, like one a day. I could put them on Medium and Tweet them out or I could maybe even put them into other publications as I have on occasion done in the past. All of these things would yield some money and it is a stated dream of mine to make enough money to live off of at some point.
And yet the paradox is that an edition of GMHHAY is better than any of these essays. This is a mathematical certainty, since a) we all know that most of those essays really are just a paragraph or so of an interesting new idea, and b) an edition of GMHHAY (well, a good one anyway) has like four or five interesting new ideas! And four is more than one!
But the world is cold and mean and it does not reward this better more fun form of writing. Alas. But I will persevere. Because I am “keeping it real.” And you guys appreciate it, and I appreciate you.
Also before we get started I would just like to say that a David Sylvian/Robert Fripp CD from 4AD records made an appearance on a Love’s Truck Stop CD rack in a Saturday Night Live skit this weekend and that CD rack also had Tricky and Oasis and REM and it was basically the best Love’s Truck Stop CD rack ever and hat’s off to the art director of that segment.
I would like to take a moment to apologize to my friend Jorge and use this as a lesson, explaining something. If I unsubscribe for your email, don’t feel bad. I am probably subscribed two, maybe even three times. I have a lot of emails. Some of them do not have my name in them. I swear I am not really unsubscribing. Honest.
Some of you may know that before I was a modern-day, less racist Andy Rooney on Substack I co-founded a digital ad agency. That agency was guided by the sprit of two organizations: the KLF and Factory Records. We had quotes by Tony Wilson on our website. I routinely quoted the KLF, specificially The Manual in employee communication (I also cited it in my book Agency, making for a really great footnote). The KLF were heavily influenced by Discordianism, and the Illuminatus! trilogy. I myself was more influenced by Illuminatus! offshoot Church of the Subgenius, as well as the economic writings of George Bataille, and his view of the economy being small eddies of energy swirling around on the planet. Here is an example quote from the KLF that I was quote fond of:
Money is a very strange concept. There will be points in the forthcoming months when you might not have the change in your pockets to get the bus into town at the same time as your are talking to people on the on the telephone in terms of tens of thousands of pounds. Some of the following might seem contradictory, but in matters of money they often are… Nobody wins the pools. There is no such thing as a fast buck. Nobody gets rich quick. El Dorado will never be found. Wealth is a slow build, an attitude to life. I’m afraid that the old adage that if you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves is always true. That being said, you must be willing to risk everything - that’s everything you haven’t got as well as everything you have got - or nothing will happen.
Hold that thought for a moment. Now let’s talk about Matt Levine, respected Bloomberg columnist, star to a certain type of media-literate, financially minded individual who has transcended Adam Tooze fanboydom into something a bit more… shall we say, wry. Matt Levine is brilliant, even though he has the habit all successful writers of daily emails posess, which is to copy and paste long block-quotes from their past selves into their emails. Sure, it is reasonable to expect that people are not reading all 1,000 words every day, and sure, it is reasonable to want to return to a topic that interests you, and good neighborly to recap your past thinking on the topic for readers. All this makes logical sense, but in my view of the daily email craft it is selling out and I will never, ever copy and paste long blockquotes of text from my past self. Even pasting in long block-quotes from others feels like cheating. I still feel dirty pasting that KLF quote up above even though it’s one of my favorites. And it’s even more appalling that I am about to do it again.
Anyway, I digress. Matt Levine used to work at Goldman, he has a preturnatural understanding of the mechanics of finance and he is spectularly good at explaining this stuff in laymen’s terms and he’s hilarious and you feel smarter reading him.
He’s also, of late, been developing a, shall we say, alternative view of finance around memes.1 Here is Matt Levine summarizing this developing alternative theory of shareholder value in yesterday’s typically great edition of Bloomberg Money:
I have spent too much time around here writing a dumb playbook for corporate finance and investor activism in the 2020s. What you do is, you buy some stock in a company, and then you mount an activist campaign that is like “if I am put in charge of this company I will do more memes.” The important things in modern corporate finance are unhinged tweeting, public association with Elon Musk and vague plans to accept Dogecoin for goods and services. Promising to do that stuff will make the stock go up. Will it improve the economic fortunes of the company? I dunno; it might. (Some companies need cash, and being able to raise lots of cash by selling stock at high prices is good.) But that isn’t really the point. The point is that if you can make the stock go up then the stock will go up. The stock price, not the economic fortunes of the company, is the thing to maximize here. And in modern markets you maximize the stock price with memes.
What occurred to me yesterday, after having just watched the new KLF documentary (and commissioned that sweater, I am so excited! Thank you Liz!) and reading this edition of Bloomberg Money is that, well, first, Matt Levine needs to write this in book form. He would make so much money. Matt Levine is not as 100% committed to the rules of not selling out in your daily emails as I am, he likes to blockquote himself, return to topics his readers care about (as opposed to, say, Olivia Rodrigo or compost) and while each newsletter often has many different topics, they all do technically fall under the rubric of “money.” But still, I give him a B+ on the don’t-sell-out-on-your-daily-email rules. So of course he’s not going to go write a single-topic book. But man, it would be a real barn burner if he did, I thought yesterday reading this.
But then I asked myself what kind of book would it be? And it occurred to me that Matt Levine’s book of A New Theory of Shareholder Value would actually be shockingly similar to the KLF’s The Manual or The Church of the Subgenius or something like that. There seems to be a donut theory in finance as well as religion. Go deep enough into the nuts and bolts of finance and you end up back into the absurdist. I like this. I like it so much I spent seven too many paragraphs trying to explain this fleeting idea to you. I hope you enjoyed it.
Seems that COVID is still on the march. Bands I love that are on tour keep tweeting that they got COVID and have to cancel a bunch of shows and man that must be so financially devestating. This Tweet thread between Low, who got COVID on tour, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who are on tour, is terrifying. Imagine flying 12 people over from Europe, renting a giant bus, going out on the road and then losing like 1/3 of your income when you need to cancel two weeks of shows. Financially ruinous.
I’ve seen a bunch of bands Tweet out in ther last few days about how desparately wish that everyone in the audience would stay masked, how frustrating it is to have to stand in front of a bunch of unmasked people to earn a living. It is a mess. Everything is a mess. I still look at the numbers every day and things are so much better than January but they are not good and for the last month or so they really haven’t been getting any more better. It’s just lingering. We need that guy from Mortal Kombat to tell us all to stop playing with our food and finish him.
I really want to go to New York and have a few dinners with friends. It is probably fine. But it is not quite fine, and that makes it very hard to pull the trigger on. And it is maddening that it is going to be like this for months and eventually I’ll just pull the trigger anyway, because it’s never going to get any better, is it, and then I’ll think “well shit I should have just done this in April it never got any better and here I went another four months without going to New York” and I’ll feel dumb and it all sucks so much.
Here is an article about an organic farm in Maine that had to close up shop because their land was completely tainted with PFOAs from a 1990’s public program to give sewage sludge to farms as fertilizer. A previous owner of the land took part in this program. Another previous owner is now dead from cancer, just a coincidence I’m sure. PFOAs are fucking terrible. We live about 6 miles from the Haw River watershed, which is completely fucked, all the way down to Wilmington, where the drinking water is undrinkable, because of PFOAs. We are supposedly safe from this — we’re outside the Haw watershed, get our water from Chatham County and not Pittsboro, which means a different treatment plant. But Pittsboro is fucked as well. We are still barely testing for PFOAs, and they are everywhere. If you remember that slight skepticism you felt when you were first watching Children of Men, I’d advise you to get over it. It seems more and more likely that we’ve already completely fucked the planet. I was reading a Tweet from noted milquetoast centrest Matt Yglasias the other day about how people are all too pessimistic and as a government policy we need to be more chipper, things aren’t really so bad. He kind of had a point (he often does) but what he is really failing to take into account is all the horrible shit that has already happened that is only now just dawning on us. Ha. God. Even that is a whitewash. We know. We’re just not doing anything.
I had a thought the other day about what its going to be like getting old. I don’t feel old yet, I think I have a good ten years at least before I even start to feel old. I do think I am going to lose my mind, though. I just sort of… feel it. And I was thinking about coping, getting through your life without memory. How to fake it so others don’t know. And how convenient all these journal entries and GMHHAY entires will be for that. I will need summaries of course, and an index, but they will be very helpful. Condense it all onto some sort of index card or tattoo it on my arm like in Memento and then have a full version of everything on my phone for quick reference. I was also thinking that there’s a good chance all this writing will help…somehow? Is that reasonable? Or unwarranted optimism? I can’t put my finger on it. But in any case, I feel like I should start planning all this now. I bet if you planned on having Alzheimer’s for, like, a decade before you got it you could come up with some pretty interesting coping strategies. Seems like a worthwhile long game project.
Finally, I had a cris de couer the other day, a very sad realization. I was a selfish kid, I didn’t have enough empathy. I have unlearned this, I am a ridiculosuly empathetic individual these days. Last night I was re-watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture and I had to mute ten minutes of the film because I just felt so bad for Decker when Kirk took the ship away from him. A movie I have probably watched a hundred times. A movie where I felt almost no empathy for Decker the first forty or so times I watched it. But now it is unbearable. This is an accomplishment I am proud of, even if I took it maybe a little bit too far. And I was thinking about how I am trying to teach empathy to my daughter and how on the one hand I am a great candidate to teach her, because I learned it relatively recently. But on the other, I am the worst since I, you know, had absolutely none until I was, like, seventeen years old or something. When Jane is in tyrant phase, I think of it as my penance for my sociopathic childhood. I deserve it. Give me your punishment, life.
Okay I think that’s about it, and I would just like to reassure you that I just cleared out every kind of depressing topic in my topics list so tomorrow should be pretty chipper. I was going to do another one-off, off-the-cuff playlist for today but i spent about 20 minutes longer on this edition than usual. So here you get Justa Mix. It’s a good one, though.
Wow shit near the email limit! That’s rare. Sorry this is so long. Until tomorrow!
Interesting. It’s correct to say “a, shall we say, alternative” instead of “an, shall we say, alternative” isn’t it? That seems odd. The interjection “shall we say,” is something that has the dint of seeming like it was… well… interected and not planned, and were it not planned, presumably you’d have already said “an” because you thought “alternastive” was going to be the next word before the interjection inspirastion. This may be a form of time travel. I’m going to spend way too much time thinking about this today.