Doomscrolling For Social Capital
These days I am enjoying my AI play as much as I used to enjoyed playing the Panix Internet Hunt and finding Googlewhacks. Oh the good old days. But these too are good old days because the United States is not at war, and property prices keep going up except in West Texas where you can get a 4 bedroom 2900 square foot single family house in Lubbock for under half a million. Anybody with half a brain who wants to live on Mars should consider places like Lubbock first. It’s far simpler and easier to get water, electricity and churros in West Texas.
I expect most of my associates and counterparts would consider life in West Texas quite a bore, and wouldn’t grok with the locals. In theirs and my air conditioned home offices, the more interesting question is where should I click? It’s not as if we’re going outside into Lubbock. This morning it was X/Twitter and a very popular opinion leader said that every time she reads her feed she sees something even worse than ever before. Maybe a hot yoga class in Lubbock might do her some good. Doomscrolling is also real, but not quite as real as a Lubbock summer.
Wall Street
I’m getting back into the stock market these days. Not because of Bitcoin or anything else, but because I can ask my AIs some basic questions and I’m willing to do a bit more work than I did before. Just before Christmas last year I decided to quit playing the market. I had subscribed to the Motley Fool and some financial substacks and I realized they were giving me low quality information that I could just Google myself. What I needed were tools to alert me and do some other things. The bottom line is that now I am spending a lot more time watching the stock market than I am watching Twitter and social media. Silly me I should have known better. Now I have more skin in the game. That makes it more real.
The primary difference is that I have something to lose by abandoning rationality and hard work when I’m playing the capital markets. But what do I have to lose in a shouting war about DEI’s rebranding of the meaning of ‘equity’? Since I’m not minding making myself into a political non-entity I know I’m not going to try so hard to make Joe Biden or Donald Trump appear to be closer to reality than they are. Depending upon whom you ask, I’m becoming a hermit. Capitalist capital, on the other hand, seems more real to me than social capital.
I mean among a certain set of Americans, you lose a great deal of social capital when you buy a rifle. Among another set you lose social capital when you use the N-word. Among another set you gain social capital when you call yourself the N-word. Maybe I’m just not a dabbler in social equities. Maybe I like plain old capital markets, not social capital markets. I’m one of those people who knows how to read a balance sheet. I understand what shareholder equity means in the world of finance. I can check the markets every day - nobody on the planet knows how to calculate the social equities of DEI. I’m betting they never will.
Margin Call
There’s a great scene in the film Margin Call. This is it. The prelude to the fire sale of 2008. The people in the boardroom realize that they own a whole lot of nothing because they miscalculated risk. They’re going to have to pump it and dump it.
Can it be done? At what cost? The whole thing can be summed up in the following three lines of dialog:
Sam: And you’re selling something that you know has no value.
John: We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.
Sam: You will never sell anything to any of those people ever again.
Brilliant storytelling. Magnificent scene. The entire story pivots around the moment. But you know that. This telling was made 13 years ago about something that happened three years before then.
Click Here
Have you ever asked yourself how many times you’ve heard someone ask you to smash that subscribe button, to like and click on the bell? It’s an interesting sounding sale. It doesn’t ask for much effort. Now that powerful AIs are behind those buttons they’ll start popping up and giving you advice. Simple advice now, but prompting will become the verb like Googling did when enough of us get into deeper relationships with the giants of computing. How deep does the rabbit hole go? Will AIs and their minders sell us something that they know has no value? I don’t trust NVIDIA stock, do you?
I’m lucky. I used to be a Wellpern. That’s what we grandparents of the whole online thing used to call ourselves over at the legendary Well. I know what it’s like to discuss and debate with real people with real brains, real attitudes, strange tastes and senses of humor, politics and sexuality. It was quite the rumpus room, full of GenX rule breakers and countercultural OGs. I don’t actually remember them fondly and I rarely reread the performance art that I wrote back then, but I did own my own words. We all did. And if you felt like it you could scribble any of your previous words, because they were yours.
It will be interesting to see how much scribbling our AIs will do if and when prompted by the national security apparatus of this, the most powerful nation on Earth, whose Congress just busted a move on TikTok. Sell out or be banned. The new generation has a new kind of social capital and a new kind of literacy. They look at each other on TikTok, pay for the privilege and believe themselves to be advanced communicators. Imagine if the parent company of TikTok told those teeming millions that they never owned their images and threatens to scribble them? Imagine it happening to all of the Instagrams. Imagine it happening to all of the Facebook posts. Even here at Substack we had a bit of a Nazi panic. All of my writing here is archived somewhere on various properties I control. I always try to own my words.
As long as this is America, the dollar will remain almighty. Right up there with our roads, water, crops, soldiers and armaments, we will never give up the bucks. Words, on the other hand.. well if not spoken face to face can be quite ephemeral. Then again, so can complex rocket science tranches of equities, especially social equities. Quite honestly, I trust the Federal Reserve and the computer infrastructure beneath all of our banks and financial institutions more than just about anything in this modern world. That’s because all the other banks and financial institutions in the world pay very close attention to ours. Nobody’s being fooled. The DJIA is exactly what it is. Beyond all that Americans hate slavery. Only the weakest of us work for free. Well, some of us do slavish work in strange currencies. I’ll stick closer to the smart money, as close as I can figure it out.
Yes, I’m back on the Buffett bandwagon. I pay no attention to crypto as an asset, but triple entry accounting remains very interesting to me. I’m going to pay a bit more attention to bonds and commodities, like phosphates in Norway. So long as there is this thing called insurance, the assets which are insured are the places to play. God bless the FDIC.
Now admittedly I am playing a bourgeois game. Short of a nuclear exchange, there are no zombie apocalypse scenarios I am putting on the table. We’ve seen some crazy riots during the pandemic, but the germs were deadlier than the J6ers, Ferguson burners, Proud Boys and Black Bloc Antifas all put together. As threatened as I understand many Asians and Jews among us are, the most dangerous Mexican cartels remain in Mexico. All the bastard cops haven’t quit and the likes of Whoopie Goldberg and Piers Morgan still command audiences. I don’t have to be faster than the bear in these calculations. We’re still safe from catastrophe, but not from foolishness. There are decidedly not fools directing air traffic, carrier groups, wheat combines, trade desks, oil pipelines and hydroelectric plants.
I’ll pay more attention to that stuff. Oh and I hear there’s a big rocket going up in the morning. Place your bets.
So, Claude-3 bested the dozen AI's by getting 18.5 questions correct out of 35, according to tomaspuyeo. (How to get half credit for a half-assed answer remains a mystery.) But in my high school days scoring 18 out of 35 would have earned me an F. ~eric. MeridaGOround.com
Cobb wrote: "Depending upon whom you ask, I’m becoming a hermit."
Me too; off facebook in '02, off X this year (more later).