Also posted on my blog: thaneauxthemadcajun.com/...
A month has passed and the FTX cryptocurrency exchange collapse just keeps getting worse and worse, with founder and wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried now in custody and facing indictments on both campaign finance fraud and financial crimes. It now looks like a classic Ponzi scheme run by people who probably thought they invented it (Sam Bankman-Fried though was at least pretty honest, responding to a Bloomberg News reporter that charactering his business model as a Ponzi scheme was a “pretty reasonable response” and describing Yield farming as a process where you a take a black box that does nothing and make mountains of cash from it). It now appears that Sam Bankman-Fried’s digital currency hedge fund Alameda Research, the partner firm of FTX, is deeply insolvent, meaning anywhere from 3 to 9 billion dollars of investor money may have been lost by risky bets and huge investments made using FTX customer funds, a figure which varies based on estimates of on how many assets remain tangible.
It says something that everything I just wrote is the tamest and least bizarre bit of information to come out. John Ray managed Enron’s collapse (the worst and most egregious corporate scandal and collapse in recent decades), and he’s described the fiasco at FTX as unlike anything he’s ever seen. He literally said “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” FTX was basically being used like its owner’s personal slush fund. The company even bought property in the Bahamas for staff and Bankman-Fried’s Stanford Law Professor parents, and even worse, Sam Bankman-Fried apparently had a backdoor program built in through which he could transfer funds from FTX to Alameda research as he pleased with no paper trail and no one in FTX knowing it was done, meaning that no one in FTX had a clear idea of where the company’s customer’s assets and funds were! Also, a huge number of critical corporate discussions, planning, and decisions were made via time-deleting message apps, meaning there is no record or paper trail for much of the company’s operations!
One of the more sordid aspects is the revelation that the CEO of Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison (whose father is the head of MIT’s Economics Department), has been in an on and off relationship with Friedman-Banks for years, and she herself described the group of ten core, senior staff, including Friedman-Banks, who lived together in the Bahamas, as like “an imperial Chinese harem”, with other senior employees familiar with the group describing the company’s founding members and executive staff as basically all being part of an extended polyamory group of rotating relationships. Even the effective altruism, the philosophy of trying to earn the most resources and most efficiently increase your ability to do good in the world, seems to have been something Bankman-Fried and his inner group didn’t take at all seriously and was just a cover for their narcissism (shocking I know, that a silly Ivy League philosophy that declares the best thing for the world is for you to become very rich is a front of self-serving advancement). Bankman-Fried said as much to a reporter at Vox in a recent interview in which he does not seem well, while Ellison at one point renamed her blog “Fake Charity Nerd Girl” as a kind of joke. Bankman-Fried’s on and off girlfriend (also confirmed by Bankman-Fried at this point) and the key architect of Alameda Research also has a lovely history of blogging rather viscerally alt-right garbage as a scholarship student at Stanford University (and the child again, of not one, but two MIT Economics professors), including that women should adhere to traditional roles and are better-suited for childbearing (I wonder how these people’s brains function, given that her mother was an MIT Economic professor and she herself was studying economics at Stanford, one of the premier universities in the world, neither of which are traditional gender roles for women), and genetic justifications of Indian casteism. Yay Ravenclaw Potterhead millennial girl-power trader! This has, predictably, led to the alt-right blogosphere becoming her biggest defenders in the wake of the collapse, creating a conspiracy theory where she is just a fall girl for other people’s errors (and it is the fault of a lot of people, not just her). Bankman-Fried also revealed in the aforementioned Vox interview that he’s just as contemptuous of regulation and government as the rest of the radical crypto-bro ecosphere, and blatantly admitted his previous comments about proper regulatory schemes being beneficial to the industry were just PR.
What was going on at the firms is really hard to explain simply, and I’m not completely sure I’ve properly assorted and pieced together the evolving information on this burgeoning scandal that may take down most of the American crypto-industry before it’s done (after similar collapses of Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi and Voyager in the past six months, as well as Do Kwon’s Terra currency being wiped out over the summer) decimating the global crypto industry. But, basically, FTX was getting investors, over a million as of most recent filings, and these people were putting money to buy into FTX’s cryptocurrency exchange, which also had its own in-house blockchain currency called FTT that was used as a sort of trading currency for making trades on the exchange and could theoretically be cashed out for USD at any time. FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, or some combination of people (I find the excuse that it was an innocent error in bookkeeping that nobody realized Alameda was receiving billions of dollars in customer deposits specious to put it mildly) was redirecting large sums of these deposits into Alameda research. Alameda Research then made lots of extremely risky bets and a number of big purchases, essentially gambling the money it borrowed from FTX’s balance sheet, and incurred heavy losses, losses which the company genuinely doesn’t appear to have had any system to keep track of, and which Bankman-Fried genuinely didn’t appear to grasp the full extent of—maybe not even Caroline Ellison did.
Then Binance, led by Chinese-born billionaire Changpeng Zhao made a flex against FTX, selling out its FTT currency after a Coinbase bombshell on Alameda Research revealed its precarious financial situation. Caroline Ellison, being an idiot, (all of these tech icons are almost, without fail, fucking idiots with huge egos), then tried to do damage control by publicly tweeting to Zhao that Alameda would buy Binance’s balance of FTT at 22 dollars per token, thus revealing to millions of people what Alameda’s break point was, leading to a widespread attempt to short them and further sending the investment firm into insolvency. All of this created the equivalent of a bank run against FTX, which it turned out, didn’t have anywhere near the assets to withstand (he didn’t maintain liquidity or make solid investments) and collapsed into insolvency. Alameda Research, it turns out, was not only using FTX customer deposits for its investment moves, but it then used FTX’s in-house blockchain currency, the aforementioned FTT, as collateral. This is what cryptocurrency is devolving into, companies basically creating their own money, trying to create artificial demand by hyping it as a fantastic investment, and then using their own currency as collateral for other investments. The use of FTT enabled Alameda to inflate its value, hiding losses until the Coinbase article publicized just how much of Alameda’s stated net worth in assets was held in the form of its partner company’s inhouse cryptocurrency The whole scenario, ironically, makes me think of the movie Scarface, and the advice given to Pacino’s character, “Never get high on your own supply.” This whole system only worked as long as FTX was gaining users and investments and people believed there was value in its currency (value which is based on stability, liquidity, and user trust).
This quote from Vox (https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23451761/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-bankrupt-binance-bitcoin-alameda) sums it up quite nicely:
“They printed this token out of thin air, endowed it with some valuation, and then Alameda used it as collateral,” said Nic Carter, partner at venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures.
If I were to put it in more vulgar terms, it was a circle jerk, or in more rarified academic terms, the company had a tautological business model. I mean it’s so brazen! So bonkers! SBK (because I am tired of writing out Sam Bankman-Fried) was using his FTX exchange business to underwrite his trading firm. He was printing his own money and then using that money as collateral for Alameda’s trading, despite the fact that this house currency, FTT only had value as long as people were using the FTX exchange and the company was gaining new investment。SBK didn’t see a problem with this, nor did he understand the nature of the risky bets and extent of the losses in the positions that Alameda was taking on, seeming blindly confident it would even out as he gained users and investments and a few such bets paid off in the future.
The run on FTX’s assets leading to a liquidity crunch was probably the goal of Binance, (however much Zhao has tried to Pontius Pilate and wash his hands, deflecting blame, writing harsh burns to the effect that “no viable business can be collapsed with a tweet”). Binance probably planned the initial panic as a way to then buy out FTX and shove out a hated rival. But when Binance moves to buy FTX, and examines some of the company ledgers and balance sheets, CZ (this is actually how most crypto folks refer to Changpeng Zhao), the CEO of Binance, is like “Woah, what the fuck” basically, and immediately decides he wants no part of this bullshit and pulls out of the buyout, after which FTX completely collapses, files Chapter 11, and SBK’s entire 14-billion-dollar fortune vanishes almost overnight, making it one of the fastest and most utter destructions of a billionaire’s wealth in modern history. The worst thing is that in this comedy of errors CZ almost certainly didn’t want or anticipate this level of clusterfuckery (or he’s as short-sighted and risk-loving as SBK, when by most accounts, he’s a lot more conservative in his business approach), because the fiasco is causing a run on the whole crypto market and causing crypto currencies to slide even further in value. Genesis Global Trading is the latest crypto firm that is on the brink of bankruptcy and is seeking 1 billion dollars in emergency capital to stay solvent, while bitcoin and ether are dropping precipitously day after day, and other crypto companies like Coinbase and Binance as well are taking huge hits. For that matter, on December 13th Binance had to pause customer withdrawals and is also undergoing a liquidity crunch, while rumors are swirling that CZ and other high-level Binance folks are about to get hit with money laundering indictments.
Other huge crypto trading firms are on the verge of collapse, as Genesis’s partner company Coinhouse also suspended withdrawals just like Genesis did, and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which is the world’s largest crypto fund, has hit a record low, and trending down even faster after the company declared it couldn’t provide proof of reserves. What’s telling is that this whole thing is happening right as the stock market and commodities market in general are relatively stable and even as the the crypto-collapse is wiping out billions of dollars of tech bro investments the rest of the market is just shrugging and going like “Yeah, okay, I told you this was all risky nonsense and not sound financial planning.”
Why I was familiar with SBK, and why this collapse wasn’t surprising to me
The only reason I even knew about SBK previously, honestly, was because of Oregon’s 6th Congressional district, the new congressional district Oregon gained in the 2022 reapportionment. This was a new district centered around the state capitol of Oregon, Salem, and Polk and Yamhill counties, with the bulk of Clackamas County and southern Multnomah County (where Portland is). Originally the primary looked mostly like it would break down on establishment versus insurgent lines, as the frontrunner was Andrea Salinas, whose father was a Mexican farmworker who fought in Vietnam, gained citizenship, and then worked as a police officer for 20 years. Salinas was also an ally of Elizabeth Warren, and could be characterized as establishment but left-progressive establishment. Salinas was the Majority Whip of the Oregon State House and had been involved in local politics as an organizer and political activist for decades, particularly in Clackamas, where the largest proportion of the district lives. Her main opponent seemed to me like Teresa Alfonso Leon, another State Rep (and a child immigrant was born in Mexico and became a citizen of the US in 2012), from the largely Latino suburb of Woodburn north of Salem. Leon was supported by some of Bernie Sanders’ Oregon network, and the American Federation of Teachers Oregon, a major union, but Salinas had the backing of Rep. Jayapal from neighboring Washington, and every major activist organization in the region, and she seemed a rare candidate who combined progressive chops with establishment support and a deep local network.
Then what looked like a sleepy primary leading up to a competitive open seat race in a Dem-leaning-but-not-overwhelmingly-so district in the midterms took a weird turn. A literal some dude called Carrick Flynn suddenly started getting millions of dollars of TV ads promoting him to voters on radio and TV across the district, and other forms of digital advertisement. Carrick Flynn was the sort of afterthought candidate who normally ends up with a fraction of a percent of the vote. He was from Columbia County, which is, auspiciously, not in the 6th district. He had gone to college at the University of Oregon in Eugene, which is in the 4th district, another open seat race ultimately won by State Labor Commissioner Val Hoyle. Flynn left Oregon for Yale Law School in 2011, then spent stints in Oxford and Georgetown as a lecturer and researcher. He only returned to Oregon in summer of 2020 after he got his research and advisory position with Georgetown turned into a remote work position, and launched a campaign for congress less than a year later. So you had a random career academic with no ties to the district who had lived outside of Oregon for 10 years and had mainly been involved in AI governance and promoting domestic computer chip manufacturing, before pivoting at the start of the pandemic to advising on pandemic preparedness (using technology). Like yeah, you can look at Flynn’s background and see why it would appeal to a tech “crypto czar” such as Sam Bankman-Fried, as they shared a lot of interests, even as Flynn claimed to have never met or spoken to SBK (lol, I am “highly skeptical” of that).
But Flynn was such a reach among reach candidates. He was an unknown some dude that nobody in the district had heard of, with nearly no ties to the district nor any history of any involvement with the Democratic party or any leftist organization, no support from union or environmentalist groups, no backing from any prominent D politicians, and no obvious ideological appeal (if anything, Flynn was running a far more “centrist” campaign than either Salinas or Leon). Normally a sane, level-headed person, even one with tons of money to spare, looks at the situation and makes a max donation to the candidate, does some fundraising appeals for the candidate in their network, and moves on. SBK spent 11 million dollars directly on Flynn and he basically bribed the DCCC to, outrageously, spend money in a competitive primary (and against the preferred candidate of local Democratic organizations and activists), so that a total of 12 million dollars was spent in the primary against Salinas, including wall to wall attack ads that called her a lobbyist and made any number of spurious attacks against her.
Salinas had to spend nearly all her resources in the primary and even then she was outspent at least 12:1. I worried briefly that being swamped by outside money might actually propel Flynn to victory in a fragmented Dem primary field (especially with several progressive candidates running and Flynn running a glossy Andrew Wang-style third way politics campaign and vaguely emphasizing his rural blue collar Oregon roots at every opportunity while downplaying the decade he had spent out of state or the fact he was an academic or the fact that he had no ties to the district). Luckily, she didn’t lose the primary. The impact of money to override election fundamentals has been grossly overstated by the Left. Leon turned out to be an afterthought, and Salinas beat Flynn by a comical 2:1 margin (37% of the vote to his 18%), however the negative primary and lack of resources in early summer hampered Salinas going forward and she ended up only barely beating a very conservative, highly questionable “pro-life” Mike Erickson (who was Herschel Walker before Walker, being accused of driving his girlfriend to an abortion clinic and giving her 300 dollars to have an abortion back in his 2008 race for OR-05, only to claim laughably that he didn’t know she was getting an abortion). Erickson is a successful businessman who had previously lost all 4 campaigns for higher office, including back-to-back campaigns for the old OR-05, and several races for the state legislature, including one way back in 1992 to future governor Kate Brown. The tough political climate and the bruising campaign almost put Erickson in the U.S. house as a firebreathing Trump-esque Republican in a Dem leaning seat, but luckily Salinas managed to eke out a 2% win.
I recommend bringing this race up any time someone croaks about how SBK was the second biggest donor to Democrats in 2022: point out that a third of his donations to Democrats went to a single quixotic primary campaign in Oregon that his preferred candidate lost by a wide margin. Most of his other money went to primaries as well; the cash suddenly dried and disappeared after June, in the crucial late stretch of the campaign (as we now know, the collapse of the LUNA currency hit Alameda’s portfolio hard and he was increasingly stretched for cash).
The OR-06 spending raised a lot of red flags with me. I was suspicious of SBK’s financial aptitude from that moment on. Because assessing the potential returns of a race, vetting candidates to spend money on—these are well-developed processes and not that different from financial analyses, albeit less precise. Such a single-minded, flippant, nearly obsessive over-use of resources on a single race from someone who portrayed himself as wanting to become a leading figure in policy making and in the Democratic donor class, was counter-productive. I’d even call it self-destructive in the sense that he was burning social capital with the DCCC, which had to take flak from Oregon Democrats, and other dem donors and activists, and losing face to other Democratic organizations. I ultimately wrote it off as the eccentric excess of a young dude from a privileged family (his mother is, like Ellison, also an Ivy League academic, a Stanford Law Professor since 1987) who had gotten way too rich way too quickly and as a result had no concept of money and didn’t really understand politics as well as he understood finance and crypto-trading. It turns out though, that my gut feeling that anyone who can’t make good investments in politics can’t make good investments elsewhere (I immediately thought of both Soros and Bloomberg, who, unlike SBK, both have well-developed, mature, well-informed political philosophies and have spent much more smartly, in the process creating extensive networks of elected politicians who share key parts of their vision for public policy, whereas SBK’s spending seemed random, shallow, and flippant).
What this says about crypto and also the Left
I understand how blockchain works. I know about “Merkle Trees” even if I suck at explaining how they work. Blockchain is, at its core, a set of data including a timestamp, which cannot be practically altered afterwards, nor counterfeited. Blockchain prevents infinite reproduction and other issues that were associated with earlier digital currency attempts (which have been going on since the dawn of the personal computer in the early 1980s). Forgery, duplication, and of course, double-spending were all major issues for digital currency, since it was difficult to prove that, say, a digital token you used to purchase something, was not just a copy of a digital token you used to purchase something else the day before. Blockchain, through encryption and the data from previous and subsequent “tokens” provides a record of origin and can’t be forged and thus “ownership” can pass digitally between users (crypto bros will probably eat me alive for my shitty, non-technical explanations, but I welcome their spite). Blockchain currencies still have the basic problems of purely digital, non-governmental currencies; namely that cryptocurrencies still require physical storage and destruction of physical storage without backup results in the loss of currency with no recourse (a very large chunk of bitcoin created has been permanently lost or is permanently inaccessible). They are also vulnerable to hacking and theft if the systems they are stored in are not secure.
This is not a feasible or sustainable model for currency and it never will be. Currencies are by default lost through circulation or overtime. Bitcoin is no different, as I’ve noted. The U.S. can print more money when old notes are lost or beaten up beyond use. It doesn’t cost the mint exponentially more to mint new dollars, but Bitcoin will never be able to replace its lost currency, and to do so will require ever vaster sums of energy and critical computing resources. The Ming dynasty collapsed because China had to trade high domestic goods for New World silver, and then use that silver to make currency, which created an extended period of inflation and deflation cycles that further weakened a dysfunctional central government marred by famines and climate disasters during the Little Ice Age. It is inefficient to be unable to replace lost currency, and the current disaster is also just example 1073 of the crypto industry proving level-headed critiques of its lack of transparency, internal governance, and stability, correct. Fiat currencies work for governments because governments have real world power and real world assets: they have control over land, resources, and a tax base of citizens. Cryptocurrencies have created finite currency supplies, backed by nothing in the real world other than the interest of other libertarian or anti-government folks in alternative currencies. I mean, maybe the best part of all this collapse is just how many high profile Alt-Right figures and literal neo-nazis are losing huge sums of money right now.
The main issue with crypto is that it’s a fucking disaster for the environment at a time when society is increasingly recognizing the need to counter global climate change, reduce CO2 emissions, and tackle issues associated with industrial waste. Crypto is burning through mountains of computer chips and the energy of a small country each year, creating enormous CO2 emissions and increasing costs while decreasing availability of graphics cards and other key electronics components. It requires increasingly huge sums of energy to produce more bitcoin, for example, the more bitcoin has been produced, which is a design feature of blockchain that creates a built-in practical limit for how much bitcoin can be produced without the presence of a regulating body with broader social accountability. There’s nothing wrong, per say with bitcoin, other than the small issue that it and other cryptocurrencies are major money laundering tools deeply embedded in the black market, and have become the tool of choice for various major criminal enterprises, corrupt officials, and petty dictatorships, on top of the aforementioned security and stability issues (especially since you can’t recreate lost bitcoin, so the loss of the currency is permanent). Under normal demand functions, bitcoin wouldn’t even be that bad for the environment, because the energy expenditure to produce it would, in a healthy system, soon exceed the value of the blockchain token.
The system isn’t healthy. The crypto ecosystem has become a hodgepodge of festering Ponzi schemes like SBK’s. The whole media campaign for the crypto industry is about making people regret how they missed the chance to get rich quick had they invested big back in 2014 or 2015, but that it’s not too late to buy in, and that future returns will continue to explode as much as they did from 2015-2020. That’s the point; it’s all a sort of an artificial scam being played by a who’s-who’s of bad actors, nearly all of them profoundly anti-government (often, like Peter Thiel, anti-labor, authoritarian and anti-democracy), billionaires and con artist techies who reap most of the benefits of these schemes. If someone tells you can get super rich doing nothing and producing nothing of value for society (removing, in fact, valuable resources like electricity and computer chips from society to produce additional digital currencies), it should raise red financial flags, not just moral ones. The entire sad tale of the tech industry post 2008 (when extremely low interest rates created a long cycle of big subsidies for failing business models based on bluster and using tech to cut labor costs at workers’ expense), is one of how an entire industrial sector and what’s more, an entire intellectual and cultural milieu of America consisting of tens of millions of people, have failed to create further big breakthroughs that actually improved society.
Social networking companies transitioned into Social Media and the effects have been awful, as existing social divisions have gotten worse, discourse has spiraled into the gutter at all levels, and both disconnect from other people and political violence and crime in general are on the rise. Uber and Lyft have done nothing but fuck over workers and they aren’t even reliably cheaper than a normal taxi anymore. AirBnb is a gentrifier and causing huge problems in urban planning and development in major cities around the world while barely being any cheaper than a hotel at this point (also blatantly corrupt and contemptuous of enforcing local laws). This is not even getting into the alarming trends with AI and other software development programs that really should raise eyebrows, nor the general problem with how anti-social and anti-human the tech culture is at its core.
To return to the problem of crypto, the issue is that the whole market is simply working to increase demand for cryptocurrencies, which have artificial scarcity, continually. When a single bitcoin is trading for 100,000 dollars, there is an incentive to spend absurd amounts of energy mining bitcoin, which is to say, fighting the imposed limitations of blockchain to further and further extents. The market doesn’t just look like a Ponzi scheme—it is a Ponzi scheme! Cryptocurrency basically depends on going further and further into the mainstream and getting more and more pension funds and investors to park assets in it to keep growing in value, thus providing the returns that make it worth investing in. The tautology of bitcoin lies in how the growing prices are the sales point to get people to buy in with the expectation prices will keep booming. The risks of bitcoin are obvious, because unlike with stable assets like the USD, or AAA rated debt bonds, or with things like stocks (which produce dividends on corporate profits) or commodities trading (at the end you still have a 1000 kilograms of corn you can sell for something because the corn has a practical use elsewhere), cryptocurrency itself has no practical use and doesn’t have the stability of a government backing it; it doesn’t have a perpetual tax base of users in other words. The vulnerability of cryptocurrency, the plague of security related issues and just downright scams because so many people don’t understand it or understand what they are buying into, pale in comparison to the issue of its economic system, which at best could be characterized not as a Ponzi scheme, but a pyramid scheme, wherein the people who were lucky enough to happen to get into successful currencies early on make a lot of money and a lot of people on the bottom lose money (inevitably in every pyramid scheme, from clothing resellers to make up dealers, the latecomers lose money, sometimes a lot of it).
I actually think blockchain is a good technology. I think we need secure digital currencies. We just don’t need anti-governmental, unregulated cryptocurrencies, and we certainly don’t need alt-banks basically dealing in risky derivatives and short-trading on volatile crypto markets with their exchange customers’ money. I remember when I posted the breaking news about SBK’s implosion on a thread on Dailykos several days after the election, and someone responded “This is a terrible thing, because SBK is committed to effective altruism.” Like with the bullshit Patagonia move (which is simple tax evasion in the name of environmental activism, nothing more), or Musk fanboying, there’s a terrible trend of Millennial and Gen Z leftists being gullible, naïve, or something else I can’t find the words to describe as they rush to embrace the bullshitty PR of billionaires and scam artists. The idea of the hard-working, frugal billionaire, or the lofty genius making it big are both nonsense; they are propaganda. Look, there’s simply no other way to become a billionaire very quickly other than 1) ruining a lot of other people’s lives by pushing competitors out of business and 2) massive, continual wage theft from all your employees on the basis that you have special privileges because of your access to capital or position as a founder/person who started an idea (all patently ridiculous), and both these have to be done intentionally, without rest, and with enormous cynicism. The same cynicism SBK revealed in his Vox interview (that he claims he thought was off the record), the kind of intellectual lazy whataboutism that evades responsibility and most critical, displays a toxic, radioactive cynicism about the world, in which everyone is cheating at everything and it doesn’t matter as long as you win and bribe the right people.
It’s only fitting that SBK went on another interview tirade (that is likely to be used as evidence against him in campaign finance fraud charges), and revealed he gave just as much money to Republicans, but that his Republican donations were all dark, because "reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans. They're all super liberal, and I didn't want to have that fight." Lol, I mean why should people believe that the “greed is good”, immature young dude peddling a product 100% created by and undergirded by anti-government ultra-capitalists (American libertarians in other words), is actually altruistic or progressive? SBK’s donations were also generally random, often targeted at pro-crypto candidates or candidates involved in pandemic preparedness, and didn’t do much to actually further Dems, even setting aside his cynical dark donations. It shouldn’t be surprising that it was all blatant, and shallow ploy to purchase as much influence as possible as quickly as possible.
I think it’s not wrong, to a degree, but only in America, and America’s uniquely broken hypercapitalist society where everyone is built on making a lot of money doing nothing, or getting huge returns on minimal capital investments, leading to TikTok economic planning (planning only 30 seconds into the future), and continual, short-sighted, short term profit-based decisions from major corporations to small businesses, which also includes the continual, staggering inflation of most basic consumer goods, rent, and health care (or medical treatment more generally). The problem is that this attitude is normalized—hell effective altruism is just sophistry to put a selfless spin on greed and extreme ambition. Americans have never had much appetite for equality at the expense of frivolous luxuries or loss of privileges, but dystopian, out of touch, cynical, and most importantly, comically self-unaware techies ranging from SBK to Andrew Wang to Peter Thiel, are projecting their sci-fi addled fantasies on a contemporary society they have little understanding or empathy for, and are in many cases using enormous luxuries that they’ve built from frivolous luxuries and scams, to cast enormous influence over policy makers, media, and politicians. We need fewer leftists talking about the values and virtues of rich anti-government moguls and more talking about the need critical reforms, political, legal, and cultural.
Further reading:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23466433/sbf-ftx-zuckerberg-elon-musk-billionaires-lies
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23451761/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-bankrupt-binance-bitcoin-alameda
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-made-political-donations-under-others-names-authorities-allege-2022-12
https://www.businessinsider.com/caroline-ellison-alameda-ftx-sbf-controversial-online-quotes-2022-11