life

I Am Exhausted

Maybe it’s the string of cold weather we’ve been “enjoying,” although I don’t mind it. But everything feels exhausting. On the markets side, it feels like we’re one or two events away from something breaking. It could be that the expected revenue from AI for hyper-scalers comes in well below the 1.1 trillion, or 650 billion, or whatever number is currently bandied about. It’s exhausting that no one else sees that as unsustainable and ridiculous. It’s exhausting to see grown people who should be grounded in reality tout the benefits of burning mountains of wealth to build something that isn’t working, but if it did, could lead to existential threats and mass unemployment. But if we accept the fantasy it does work, they become very rich. It’s exhausting to hear we “don’t have the money” for problems such as affordable health care. It’s exhausting to watch someone take seriously the idea that humanoid robots will be a many trillions of dollar industry. It’s exhausting to watch the great big ball of money slosh around, slowly grind away the wealth of retail investors. It’s exhausting to see those investors fail to see the difference between investment and gambling.

On the technology side it’s exhausting to talk about AI and the marginal improvements in each new model. It’s exhausting to see the same lazy, uneducated arguments that it will replace workers, made by people who have little to no idea what those workers do. It’s exhausting to see tech leaders who may be seeing the limits of AI suddenly start to re-hash other technologies to spark a new bubble. It’s exhausting to see formerly reliable products and services suddenly break in strange ways and wonder if someone had vibe-coded that feature. It’s exhausting to spend good money on products that can only be discarded if anything breaks. It’s exhausting to go on the web and realize it’s become more of a data harvesting, surveillance, addiction, and manipulation tool rather than an information sharing tool. It’s exhausting to look at the web, where anyone could create anything they wanted, reduced to four or five destinations for decent people and truly awful places for the rest. It’s exhausting to hear people twist speech to avoid “demonetizing” their content with perfectly normal words, while truly vile people are allowed to spew their hate with impunity.

It’s exhausting to deal with mandates to return to the office, when the office is a room with six-foot wide desks and equally glum co-workers trying to focus by sandwiching their head in noise canceling head-phones, while their dual-monitors serve as blinders to the surrounding motion. It’s exhausting to constantly get prodded with notifications and alerts to pay attention to something that wasn’t important. It’s exhausting to wonder if the next re-org will require me to report to an office thousands of miles away, while the company offers no relocation assistance. It’s exhausting to think about what I’ll do when the bubble bursts and I will lose a job I like. It’s exhausting to look at the options for lunch and realize it’s all various types of slop food where you take a bowl of whatever back to your office break area. It’s exhausting to pass by the well equipped home office you have to leave commute to work, realizing that you are still expected to return to that home office when not at the actual office. It’s exhausting to have your managers start tracking metrics for AI usage, even when you don’t feel like it makes you any more productive.

It’s exhausting to see half the country is happy to be on the way to a racist, authoritarian hell-hole, where the corrupt leader, his corrupt family, and corrupt patrons grossly enrich themselves. It’s exhausting to hear people talk about the constitution that have never read it. It’s exhausting to listen to a court eviscerate the independence of independent agencies, by try to find a carve out for the Federal Reserve (because money must be protected). It’s exhausting to watch law enforcement turned into paramilitaries that intentionally start confrontations, eagerly letting loose tear gas and flash-bang grenades, while arresting people with the intent to subjugate rather than protect. It’s exhausting to see those paramilitaries execute their fellow citizens in the street. It’s exhausting to see Federal law enforcement cover it up and our leaders lie when there’s plenty of contradictory video. It’s exhausting to watch LAPD’s finest, who have judgement after judgement against them from civil rights and abuse suits, unleash a rubber bullet into a woman’s abdomen and laugh. It’s exhausting to see the press and the media white-wash the issue or see it in the leas of traditional politics. It’s exhausting to realize that so many people want a racist ethnic cleansing of the country.

It’s exhausting to watch people abandon reality and honesty, passing around memes and clips that are known to be lies. It’s exhausting to watch people we’ve elevated with massive audiences repeat lies. It’s exhausting to watch the “new media” just regurgitate the facts from “legacy media”, eliding anything that doesn’t fit their narrative, and injecting their own lies. It’s exhausting to have a president who parrots racist, AI generated, slop we know to be lies. It’s exhausting to see the flood of these brainless bits of digital garbage wash up on our shore with the intend to poison our minds, so we don’t know what’s true from what’s a lie. It’s exhausting to know medical professionals who voted for this, because they can’t stand “all the laws and rules” from the “federal government”, but who know that the administration’s vaccination advice is a dangerous lie. It’s exhausting because so many of these people have stopped caring about truth.

Five paragraphs on why I sometimes think this can’t be reality. It can’t be the world we live in. That the real world has to be better than this. The real world can’t be this self destructive, greedy, self-serving, and stupid. That obviously none of this is real. But it is real. It is the daily gristle of our lives we are forced to chew and can’t spit out. It tastes bitter and revolting. We are just forced to quietly to chew and chew because every else sits quietly and chews. Our political leaders, who we trust to voice our concerns, tell us that sitting quietly and chewing makes better people because we want the system to work. And there’s plenty of people on the other side who, off the record, behind closed doors, and very discretely tell us that they also think this gruel tastes awful. They wring their hands in consternation about it all the time. Our leaders say they can work with these people and get real things done. So if we site and quietly chew, don’t disrupt too much, and everything will be okay.

But sometimes go stand on the side of the road with signs and some cars honk at our clever, home-made signs. Other cars give us the finger. I’ve tried understanding the person behind that upturned middle finger, but I’m beginning to think the good I try to find isn’t there. That we are dealing with an irreconcilable vision of the country in which we want to live. That it’s not about taxes, the price of eggs, traditional roles, or their religious conscience. It’s about subjugation, humiliation, and a self-centered disregard for others. It’s dirty, it’s filthy, and it’s twisted. The idea there’s no set of shared values with those people is exhausting.

Would You Do It for $20?

That’s a game you play with your friends. You know something makes your friend’s skin crawl. You ask them how much money would it take for them to participate in that skin crawling activity. The answers vary from “just no”, to “maybe I’ll do it for $1,000,” to “I’d do it for $5”. Then there’s the friend that cements their reputation as a nut, or shows off their nutty side, by just doing it. We got a glimpse of that recently with the Saudi comedy festival.

I don’t put comedians on a pedestal. I don’t think Bill Burr has any special insight into economics, politics, or society. But sometimes the best comedy is pointing out the world as it actually is. And you get a reminder that something we all tiptoe around as oversized, dangerous, and deep is actually small, harmless, and stupid. Even if media, culture, celebrities, and politicians are telling you it’s a great idea, or it’s a sacred cow, or it’s “dangerous,” for a minute you see it’s stupid and we were silly for thinking otherwise. I don’t mean in the “do your own research,” vaccine denying, tin-foil hat way. I mean in the way that we have sacred cows we tacitly or explicitly refuse to question, but should.

Three comedians walk into a racist, brutal, autocratic, fundamentalist regime that doesn’t respect human rights: Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, and Pete Davidson. Pete Davidson is the easiest one to analyze. I don’t really think there’s a huge moral compass there. He seems like the kind of guy who just picks up on the vibe around him. He’s the friend that says “$20 – okay,” because he wants the $20 bucks. He has plenty of cash, but $20 more would be better. Do I care he went to Riyadh? Not really. It just cements my opinion of him as the gross kid.

Whitney Cummings is the queen of bad decisions. She can say, after the fact, that everyone around her made it seem like such a good idea, and the money was amazing, and that she made another bad decision. It’s one of a long line of bad decisions. It would make me wonder if she’d gained any insight about making bad decisions, or avoiding bad decisions, but it would track. She’d have a good five minutes in her next show about what a bad decision she made, and how bad she felt, as she enjoyed the really nice car she bought from said paycheck.

Bill Burr is the tough one. Because Bill Burr really doesn’t need the money. If it were revealed that Pete Davidson was declaring bankruptcy – that would track. Bill Burr is a smart guy. If not smart, insightful at the very least. He’s called out greed, evil, and hypocrisy on many occasions. Every once and a while an excerpt from his pod-cast pops up and he calls folks out for being the worst people. I think he’s also aware that condemning rape victims to be punished, or beating women for not wearing head-dresses, or treating foreign workers like slaves is bad. Pete and Whitney might not think about the fancy hotel they’re in as the product of slave labor. I’m not saying Bill wouldn’t stay there. I’m just saying I imagine his conscience would at least twitch.

And despite the assurances from people like Bill, that the Saudis are just funny people (as if we have no understanding of Saudis), and he could say what he thought, it doesn’t track. This isn’t like going to the Soviet Union and playing a show for a repressive regime, because it’s a closed society with little cultural exchange. Plenty of Saudis travel and live outside Saudi Arabia and plenty of Americans have lived in Saudi Arabia. It’s impossible to say he was ‘freer to speak his mind there,’ because the contract stipulations leaked and included specific topics there were off-limits. Other comics had their invitations rescinded for jokes. We know they were censored. I’m hoping Bill Burr pulled back because he was being censored. Otherwise, that would mean…

But this is where we are. Top, head-line comics, with plenty of money, will gladly play for a few dollars more to legitimize a country that is the embodiment of the backward stupidity they would otherwise ridicule. Or maybe it was always just a bit, like Michael Jackson using a falsetto when out in public, to make us think there was something there. Maybe they didn’t care what they said, or who they said it to, as long as the checks keep coming. If it means making fun of racists, bigots, and (Christian) fundamentalists, that’s fine. If tomorrow making fun of people of color, punching down on gays, Muslims, Jews, or free-thinking people makes more money, well, they can do those bits, too.

And to a larger degree we see companies, especially media companies, caving to pressure because already absurdly wealthy people could make more money “settling” with Donal Trump. We see colleges willing to give up intellectual freedom to preserve their jobs and money. These are institutions that should have a very real, necessary, and strong allergy to authoritarians. Media companies need that allergy because they need creative independence. Universities because they need freedom to think and explore ideas. Have they had to compromise in the past? Yes, and almost always those two industries have regretted it. It’s always a shameful part of their history they never hope to repeat again.

But that’s the beauty of Trump’s America and, in a smaller way, the Riyadh comedy festival. It lays bare the fact that the moral compass of people with money bends towards more money. Movie studios, TV networks, and publishers were always businesses first. But they couldn’t stop the editorial message coming from the creative people they needed to have a product to sell. Universities always needed to bend to their alumni, donors, and grantors, but couldn’t serve their purpose without giving academics broad liberty of opinion. And comedians have always had to put food on the table, pay the rent, and make a buck.

But the institutions, people, and companies with the greatest ability to do the right thing, to fight the right fight, and to stay on the right side of history, have shown they would rather just have the money. Even at the expense of what makes them valuable, hoping that it will all blow over as something else happens. And the next time Bill Burr is making fun of Donald Trump being an autocratic bigot you’ll forget he helped legitimize the kind of autocracy Donald wishes he had.

Maybe Whitney or Bill will do Trump’s next birthday gig, if the money’s right, and they’ll be free to speak their truth in any way that’s not prohibited in the contract.