Managing The Situation

Ed Zitron (0:02)

Callzone Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

This week is monologue week, by which I mean I had a guest pull out last minute, and so you have to hear me talk about stuff. As ever, subscribe to the premium newsletter. There's a discount link in the notes. It means a lot to me. It's my main source of income along with the podcast, and like and subscribe if you're on YouTube, or toss me a glurt on Sloob if you're on Sloob. I'm also on Pwoyk and Thorp. Anyway, today I'm going to talk about a problem in basically every part of the world, managing situations versus actually dealing with the complexities of the world itself.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a piece called Hyperscale Normalization, inspired, as you may have guessed, by the Adam Curtis documentary, Hypernormalization, where he describes, and I quote, A world where, over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers, and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated, constructing what he calls a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power, with the world going along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring. It's a two and a half hour long documentary, but it comes down to a simple point, that we as a society manage problems rather than dealing with the messy and complex elements of the world around us, putting off problems again and again under the assumption that they'll disappear if we do so enough times. We use the system to manage these problems rather than actually eradicating them or dealing with the conditions. And of course, they never actually disappear. The problems actually compound. Let's take the subprime mortgage crisis, for example. While post-2008 financial regulations, Dodd-Frank and the now weakened Volcker rule theoretically helped curb some of the excesses that led to the great financial crisis, most of the people involved remain both wealthy and employed, blissfully un-blackballed from the world of finance or indeed by the media. In fact, I can find nobody of that time in the media who was ousted or even really critiqued for how badly they fucked up. While financial institutions and companies saw over $14 trillion in bailouts, only $46 billion, about 10% of the TARP plan, focused on trying to save home owners from foreclosure. And in the end, to quote a congressional panel from 2009, there was no evidence that the Treasury has used TARP funds to support the housing market by avoiding preventable foreclosures.

Government funds were used to manage a systemic crisis by making sure the system survived, rather than building a better society or fixing the system or really doing anything more than the Dodd-Frank and Volcker style stuff that really only slightly gnawed on the problems rather than chewing them up and eating them, because doing so, feeding the system money, cleaning up its messes, explaining away its successes, is easier than having any kind of vision or ideal to aspire to.

Doing so strips out, to quote Curtis, the intractable complexities of the real world by creating a simpler one, one where the system works, that progress always flows through following the course of, often poorly remembered, history, and backing whatever the system trumpets that moment. Everything ultimately returns to a point where someone will say the system has worked this long and things always work out in the end, even if they really haven't done so, because thinking of an alternative, even as you see proof point after proof point that the system is not functioning right and keeps having crises created, is near impossible due to the prominence of the dogma and confidence from those in power. The great financial crisis was managed by dropping interest rates to zero and bailing out banks and automakers and basically any systemic companies that would pose a risk to America or various societies, rather than the people in the societies. COVID was managed by the loosest lockdown protocols possible, giving businesses hundreds of billions of dollars via the paycheck protection program, and just to be clear, only for salaried employees rather than contractors, giving banks and financial institutions trillions of dollars via the very same systems that were used in the great financial crisis, and basically doing absolutely nothing to fix the actual problems that COVID kind of exposed. The wealth inequality, racial injustice, discrimination, these things mostly were just kind of pushed off to the side. Companies picked up DEI as long as necessary to appease markets that believe there was actual social change without actually ingesting it. At no point was the system itself significantly altered, such as creating Medicare for All or a social safety net, or making price gouging illegal, which meant that the problems didn't really go away so much as they were managed. The net result was that in 2021, the financial system got saturated with easy money, trillions of dollars of capital that made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Meanwhile, corporations have been using supply chain crises in the specter of inflation to raise prices across the board, so it became obvious that the real reason was sheer unabated greed with companies posting record profits to soak up the cash from a frothy society, excited to be back in the real world, a real world that had materially changed since the beginning of COVID, but no one really wanted to acknowledge that. By the end of 2022, the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates by a dramatic 4.25%, leading to tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in the tech sector alone. And things have never really recovered. Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase due to inflation, even after those interest rate bumps, despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by, get this, corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing balanced coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't actually higher, even as the companies like Pepsi boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating it with itself, whether price gouging was happening despite years of proof that it was and actually continues to this day. The system, by which I mean the conjoined forces of the media, the markets, and the American government, focused on aggressively forcing everything back to where it used to be or at least making it look that way. When things were rough, it pumped money into the system. When things seemed too frothy, it made that money harder to come by, which ended up punishing regular people for the largest part. For the most part, regular people in general were punished for the excesses of the system itself. When they took advantage of remote work, job flexibility, and purchasing power, they were told they were lazy, that they were wrong, that this was temporary, and that in fact, they were too greedy with what they were generously given, and indeed, expected too much from society. The continued perpetuation of the system is always right, ultimately led to the media near completely detaching from reality. A regular person experiencing aggressively worsening standards in their own lives would open the news only to be sneered at for feeling bad, mocked for questioning the numbers, told to sit down and shut up because the media and those that informed them knew better. After two years of hope and abundance, the world and the system itself attempted to revert everyone back to the before times, all without the veneer of prosperity or progress or indeed never going back. In other words, a regular person's form of reality was a confusing mess of social media, alternative media, mainstream media, and governments that seemed intent on saying that either everything was fine or that there was a specific thing to blame, usually a foreigner or some sort of listener or reader themselves, really just people expecting too much. No critiques are levied at the system itself or the choices made by it, or the way in which the media chooses to cover systemic movements, because to do so is considered either stupid because the system always works, right, or hopeless because the system is just so powerful.