Polling the room: Should I watch the Manosphere documentary, or is it just going to make me Sad (Discourse Version)1?
This week I got a haircut and started drinking Celsius2 again, so this issue of Money with Katie is more intense than usual on account of the 200mg of sucralose-mediated caffeine presently stampeding through my bloodstream and the personality-altering confidence of hair that smells expensive. Proceed at your own risk.
⚖️ If you’ve ever mused about tax resistance3 (that is, protesting the government by refusing to pay your federal income tax), attorney Rachel Cohen wrote about her decision to pay only her state tax this year—and why she’s publicly discussing it, despite the additional legal risk of doing so. Strangely, it sounds as though the penalty for not filing is greater than that for not paying. Her decision spawned a fidgety CNBC article reiterating the consequences, each of which Cohen weighed in a remarkably clear-eyed manner:
Conviction under a criminal statute almost always requires the government to prove an element of intent. You can see why it might be uncommon to speak and write about one’s intentional violation of the law [...] because doing so hands the government the evidence they need to prove part of its case against you.
But [c]ivil disobedience is successful far before noncompliance becomes so widespread that the government is literally unable to implement its policies. Governments change course because they are afraid of the idea of true mass mobilization. (Current Affairs)
🩸 Blood plasma centers, which primarily clot in low-income areas, are beginning to crop up in more “middle-income” neighborhoods, a signal widely interpreted as evidence that precarity (and the decisions it drives) is breaking containment. The revelations in this coverage—replete with descriptions of “thick needles” in the “crooks of arms” and $70 payouts for liters of blood—first made me lightheaded, then despondent. The implicit disgust about the blood-for-money “shadow safety net” is not the mere fact of it, but that it’s recently swelled out from under the poor and working-class, whose suffering we’ve always tolerated, to those deemed “respectable.” Most striking: The donors interviewed, many of whom described themselves as middle-class or full-time workers, expressed not anger about their circumstances, but embarrassment. (The New York Times)
📈 Speaking of the economic value of the human body, porn generates twice as much annual revenue worldwide as AI. There’s been a conspicuous uptick in coverage of sex work in major financial publications lately. Last week, you had Bloomberg covering a new AppleTV show about an OnlyFans creator named Margo who, to quote the title, has “money troubles,” and now The Economist urging readers to consider the field worthy of “serious analysis.” My prevailing theory for the growing willingness to consider Big Goon legitimate is that it is, in part, another vector for the gigification of work. (The Economist)
✉️ BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, apparently unaware of his position as a person with perhaps enough power and wealth to mitigate the outcome he’s warning about, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders that AI will make inequality much worse. Now that billionaires can no longer reasonably maintain plausible deniability about the K-shaped guillotine elephant in the room, you’ll notice more performative awareness of economic pain from seemingly unlikely places, à la BlackRock shareholder letters which bemoan “income inequality” as though it’s a bad weather forecast. (Even the phrase “inequality” chafes in this context, feeling evasive somehow.)
The kooky thing about CEOs of asset management companies who can precisely and accurately identify “narrow” ownership as the system’s fatal flaw—a dollar in the stock market growing “15 times” faster than a dollar “tied to median wages”—is their practically congenital indifference to the specifics of how ownership might be expanded or why it became so concentrated in the first place. Fink attributes his own family’s prosperity to individual investment, rather than public investment, then plainly describes an era of…historic public investment:
My father was born in 1925. My mother in 1930. They didn’t come from a lot of money. My dad owned a shoe store.4 My mom taught English. But they saved what they could and invested it.
This was the 1950s and ‘60s, right when the Interstate Highway System was being built, the mid-century industrial boom was taking off, and the auto sector was reshaping American life. And in their own small way, they helped finance all of that. They were part of the capital that built modern America. And over time, the gains flowed back to them. By the time they retired, they had enough savings to live comfortably well past 100. Because their wealth compounded alongside the American economy.
The reader learns that the gains flowed (passively) back to his parents, a salesman and a teacher. The “how” or “why” of this flow of wealth to these Regular People is conspicuously absent, uninterrogated beyond their willingness to “save what they could” and “invest it.”
Elsewhere, strangely, he signals an understanding that this isn’t broadly possible today: A full third of Americans don’t have $500 for a car repair, he mentions. “In fact,” he elaborates, correctly, “many are forced to pull money out of the markets just to make ends meet. [...] The challenge is saving enough money to invest in the first place.” Yet beyond a brief discussion of Social Security, there’s no further attempt to square this circle. To be clear: I don’t expect Larry Fink to know how to solve this problem, or even be genuinely interested in solving it, as doing so would directly implicate his life’s work—but in that case, why are we talking about it? (Fortune)
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🏘️ Portland legalized fourplexes and tiny homes in the backyards of existing houses, and it seems to be (sort of) working. Supply hasn’t increased enough yet to meaningfully disrupt prices (and you know how I feel about that gambit), but the needle-mover appears to be less the introduction of a glut of inventory generally, and more the presence of smaller, lower-priced inventory specifically. (Washington Post)
Life imitates art, etc.:
🦴 Understaffing is an increasingly prevalent issue in nearly every sector, with consumer consequences ranging from irregular hotel room cleanings to death from being dispensed the wrong pharmaceutical. Chronic understaffing is, at least superficially, hard to square with concurrent headlines about how demoralizing it is to find a job right now, but these realities uneasily coexist, I think, because in both situations the animating factor is a relentless drive to thin headcount. One given instance of critical understaffing that feels ominous now: Air Traffic Control. (The American Prospect)
🎮 High-end hoteliers are pissed that points programs are letting in too many plebs. The quotes are very quiet-part-out-loud: “Every luxury-hotel brand is trying to create a community of like-minded people, so it’s a challenge during high season. The people cashing in the points are just not the same.” As a Proud Points Pleb myself, I can sniff out the cash-payers (one easy tell: sunglasses inside), and they almost always seem like exponentially less pleasant customers than my fellow credit card rewards connoisseurs. We’re just happy to be here! (Air Mail)
🚢 Over the weekend, I had a reading experience so transcendent it made me want to change everything about myself: I finally got around to David Foster Wallace’s5 legendary essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” about a seven-night Luxury Cruise. The endless, manic footnotes. The cruising-as-meditation-on-death-avoidance. The insistence that this experience was something he “underwent,” like a root canal. The relentless totalitarianism of forced fun:
They’ll make certain of it. They’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able—finally, for once—to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice.
What a thrill to finally locate a PDF of all 100 pages to share with you. Read this instead of watching whatever streamer series you have queued up. (Scribd)
⚔️ Really wasn’t expecting our show about the so-called “Kennedy curse” to end up being a redux of all the Epsteinsode’s lurid themes. Camelot-Heads are the Disney Adults of American history. Enjoy this two-and-a-half-hour journey through the legacy of the Kennedy men, and what it means that today, 30 years after JFK Jr. killed his wife in an entirely preventable plane crash, we still manage to narrativize their romance as an iconic American love story. (Diabolical Lies)
✂️ The most-obviously-wealthy cast member of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Jessi Draper, recently announced the divorce we all saw coming two seasons ago—and that her prenup may be unenforceable because there were no witnesses present when it was signed. Until Mormon Wives, this type of genuinely dark reality television (not “made-for-TV” dark) was lost to the long-gone days of early MTV programming like 16 and Pregnant, quickly superseded by product-placement-disguised-as-entertainment (the Kardashians; the husk of the Real Housewives franchise).
In the era of influencer marketing, reality stars typically become victims of their own wealth and fame. Character arcs that were once relatable or salacious eventually generate so much in the way of income and business opportunities that the cast becomes media-trained and sterilized, interested in little more than hawking whatever tequila or cosmetics brand to which they’ve licensed their name. This makes for, it goes without saying, bad TV—and not the “good bad” kind.
When selling your personal life produces a situation in which you no longer need to sell your personal life, most reality stars become more withholding. Not so with Secret Lives, which has only become more unsettlingly intimate (eating disorders, infidelity, child sexual abuse, domestic violence) as the series has progressed. This surreal, confessional quality is inseparable from the religious spine of the show. (Newsweek)
🤳 As promised: a manosphere critique that doesn’t right the incels’ wrongs with reactionary gender stuff.The gist is that manosphere influencers are in a dom-sub relationship with social media algorithms. (Internet Princess)
See you next week.
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1 Will share my favorite brief reflection on it in the “Culture” section in case you, too, want to intellectually self-fellate.
2 These radioactive energy drinks that turn your pee neon are the 21st-century, late-capitalist equivalent of chain-smoking cigs in the 1990s.
3 Coming out of the gate swinging; you were warned!
4 Watch it be DSW or something LOL
5 Caro sent me the book of essays in the much-fussed-over Literacy Box, with a Sticky note affixed which read, "He was a drunk and an abuser and also the best to ever do it." Art not artist?