The perfect example of today
The New Yorker sponsors a weekly “Cartoon Caption Contest” in which they print a cartoon with no caption and invite readers to offer the most pithy, ironic, bizarre or outrageous caption imaginable to match the drawing.
Not to be outdone, I decided adapt that idea to its print equivalent. Since I cannot draw, I figured I could circulate some typical news item of the day via e-mail and see what sort of one-liners my tiny following came up with.
I was not disappointed.
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The Harvard Business School Alumni Association produces a periodic brochure, a thinly disguised fund appeal. It is named “Impact” and on March 1, 2024 it ran an article about what exciting internet-based things The World’s Most August Institution of Higher Learning was teaching. Here is a quote from that article:
To showcase the power and ethos of Web3-built businesses firsthand, the Co:Create team recently launched an incubated concept called Co:Create Ink at Art Basel Miami in December. Co:Create Ink is a curated marketplace that offers a unique fusion of ancient artistry and modern technology, providing tattoo artists a novel platform to monetize their art beyond the chair. Through Co:Create Ink, they can offer their designs as dynamic non-fungible tokens, which enables them to receive ongoing royalties and recognition for their work. Meanwhile, enthusiasts gain the opportunity to own exclusive digital art with the option to have that digital design redeemed for an actual tattoo by that artist. This initiative exemplifies how Web3 can impart digital permanence to an art form traditionally bound by the limitations of time and skin, forever altering the way we perceive and interact with the art of tattooing.
For those unfamiliar with non-fungible tokens, they are, generally, an offshoot of digital money (think: Crypto Currency). So, you can, sort of, imagine the above as having a Bitcoin tattooed on your arm (or wherever). If you unbundle the story further you can, sort of, imagine tattoo artists getting paid for human billboards as long as that human is alive and wandering around sleeveless (or whatever).
I am always eager to help. So, to promote donations to the Harvard cause I sent that out and quickly got back three responses, each a classic.
“And here was me worrying that they were doing something utterly pointless.”
“It was only a matter of time before Harvard became a multi billion dollar tattoo parlor.”
“Sort of proves that some ignorance is not artificial”
Doublethink as a non-fungible token.
This week The New Yorker’s John Cassidy skewered the English language by attempting to legitimize the word “vibecession.” He quotes a bunch of rosy economic government statistics, then tries to reconcile them with many polls that conclude Americans have no confidence in the economy.
The vibes theory says that, for whatever reason, many Americans’ subjective feelings about the economy have lost touch with reality.
Well, John, I can fill in the blanks of “whatever reason” for you. Americans’ feelings about the economy are completely aligned with reality. Post COVID, Americans know there is no reality in any government statistic. Cassidy even makes my point, then misses it, farther along in his own article:
Although the price of food hasn’t climbed much in the past year, many groceries and other items, such as secondhand vehicles, are still a lot more expensive…
Orwell’s gotta love that one.
The words “Although the price of food…” are about prices reported in official government pronouncements. These words have the same credibility as every other utterance of the Gosplan. In the Good Old Days we just called this “Lying.” Cassidy’s commentary reminds us that some of the Good Old Days are still around.
Tattoo a Bitcoin on every citizen and you will not have created any more wealth than if you proclaimed all the homeless were living a happy picket-fence life in the suburbs.
The jig is up. We all now know that government is a cartoon without a caption; the Grand Master of the Compound Deepfake.