The Poster Boy for the Age of Stupid strikes again
Imagine if you had one good idea that, a few years later, yielded you almost limitless wealth? So much money that you could end global hunger. You could improve the lives of countless millions of human beings less fortunate than you. You could champion charitable causes and promote initiatives in numerous countries to stem the rising tides of injustice all around us. So much money, in fact, you could do almost anything.
Instead, you take a chunk of USD 44 billion and use it to buy a second-tier social network platform independently valued at USD 12 billion. You then kill its main income stream by alienating its key advertisers, fire half the workforce, and disable the system for verifying that famous people are who they say they are. And all because your vast fat-berg of an ego demands that your ungainly phizzog fills the world’s front pages for a few days.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave this week, you know well who I am talking about. And no, I will not sully this blog by naming him. Among fools, he is lauded as some kind of genius. He launches “star” ships that crash in flames. His entire space programme today cannot even replicate what NASA was doing over 50 years ago. He sells “autonomous” cars that kill pedestrians. He founded a tunnel digging firm called the Boring Company (Geddit?! GEDDIT???!!!) that will likely achieve little of what it promises.
For myself, as an independent author I have to use social media to try to get my message out. And that includes Twitter. For the most part, only a handful of other users read anything I post on the site due to my limited reach, but the platform is useful for keeping up to date with the news, as many global news outlets (CNN, Sky, BBC) post their reports there free to watch. But if the platform disappeared tomorrow, who would really miss it? Only in our prehistoric capitalist paradise could something with little-to-no objective value be deemed to be worth so much.
And to think that last year, those journalistic minnows at Time magazine made that feeble-minded simpleton their Person of the Year. If there were an international award for stupid mistakes, perhaps called the “Brexshit Award for Outstanding Idiocy”, it would be difficult to think anyone else could beat the Poster Boy for the Age of Stupid this year.
Anyway, the lack of frosts so far this autumn means my local forest still retains some colour. Take care and be safe, peeps, for the Age of Stupid clearly still has many years until it runs its course.
