Tag: Big Ideas

The Shakespearean Tragedy That Is Mike Pence


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

You couldn’t make this shit up if you wanted. About four-ish years, Mike Pence was the biggest fucking suckup to Trump there was on the planet. Pence, like von Papen before him with Hitler, gave Trump a patina of political legitimacy.

And then, near the end of the Trump Era he blew everything by doing the right thing!

So, in a sense, Pence destroyed his career near the end of the Trump Era for simply doing the absolute basics of the job he was elected to do. Now, Pence inhabits a strange nether realm where he is both hated by the center-Left AND the very people he would depend on to win any sort of primary.

The only Pence might find some redemption at this point is, tragically, if there was some sort of civil war and he flipped to the Good Guys in a big, big way.

I dunno. Strange times, guys.

My Hot Take On Conspiracy Theories


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve written about this some before, but here goes. While I’m willing to concede that there is the occasional conspiracy theory here and there, they rarely stay secret for very long.

A lot of the interest in conspiracy theories says more about how their proponents feel disenfranchise and helpless in a changing world. The actual conspiracies themselves are just a way for such people to funnel their frustration into a narrative.

I would suggest that most of the things that conspiracy theorists are noticing is the modern world is built on social constructs that have no valid reason for existing other than we’ve all agreed upon them as being “real.” Paper money has no value other than our society agreeing that it has value. That’s it. It’s really just paper.

There are plenty of other examples — barcodes, for instance. If you go down that particular rabbit hole, you can get pretty freaked out. But it’s not some sort of secret conspiracy — the nature of barcodes is well known and everyone just shrugs. So, I would say, that unless you’re willing to organize some sort of mass revolt against the much-needed constructs of the modern world: shut up.

Most of these constructs aren’t really hurting anyone or anything, so why get upset about them?

Anyway. No one listens to me.

The Death Of Cable Channels


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Why, at this point, do cable channels even exist? It would make a lot of sense if the industry collectively gave up and disrupted itself by ending traditional cable channels altogether.

The future is streaming and the cable content is wasting everyone’s time by not getting with the future and making a clean break with the past. But there’s still too much money left in the rotting corpse of traditional cable, so, lulz, this will never happen.

It will be interesting to see what happens when we skip the MX (AR / VR) step and go straight to $1,2000 Mindcaps.

An Old Struggles To Understand Bella Poarch’s Tik-Tok Superstardom


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m an old and I use Tik-Tok all the time. One of the mysteries of the service is why some people become superstars. One of the really surreal Tik-Tok stars is Bella Poarch.

Why is this woman famous?

She’s an attractive, apparently personable person who can sing.

But exactly why she, of all people, is so popular on the service is something of a mystery to me. She doesn’t really do anything. She has a very expressive face? She’s a hot brunette? She taps into the browning of America?

If you wanted to get all conspiratorial about it, you could say that Tik-Tok is now in the business of making Gen Z stars out of whole cloth through the manipulation of its famous “algorithms.” I only suggest this because a number of other Tik-Tok insta-stars have mysteriously faded of late.

That’s definitely a scenario ripe for being turned into a novel or movie — the personal consequences when a Gen Z’s stardom mysteriously fades when their video app moves on and they don’t. I guess that sounds more like a Black Mirror episode.

Damn, The MAGA New Right Definitely Has Violent Revolution On The Brain


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In my never-ending quest to make my abstract fears about a civil war or autocracy coming to the United States concrete, I do a lot of hysterical, dystopian writing about the likelihood of either one of those things happening in the near future.

The lit thing is my Webstats indicate that out there in the aether a shit tone of MAGA New Right people are thinking about a violent MAGA revolution of some sort. Like it happening RIGHT NOW.

This is very aggravating because I write a lot about the prospect of a civil war, but a MAGA revolution is a different matter altogether. Apparently deep in the bowels of Trumplandia, a lot of MAGA New Right cocksuckers have a vague, abstract belief that they’re all going to collectively rise up and overthrow the Biden Administration.

Put up or shut up, is all I gotta say.

While I can easily imagine a Cyber Ninjas induced nullification crisis becoming a secession crisis that leads to civil war, even I struggle with the notion that MAGA is going to go full Turner Diaries and violently overthrow the government on a populist level. It really makes you wonder what’s rolling around the minds of MAGA New Right people — are they that scared of the browning of America that they think, on an abstract basis, the United States is about to have a violent fascist revolution? What the what?

I guess what is happening is the abstract fears that led to Trump in the first place have been taken to the next level — now MAGA New Right people have an abstract belief that MAGA is going to overthrow the government, that MAGA is going to “take matters into its own hands” and do what the “swamp” in D.C is unable or unwilling to do. Ugh.

All I know is a lot of the people involved in the January 6th insurrection turned out to be a bunch of cry babies. You can have all the guns you like, you bunch of fucking racist MAGA cocksuckers, but if you’re a fucking coward then that’s not going to do you much good.

Anyway, MAGA having violent revolution on the brain is not a great development. It does lend some credence to my belief that The Dead Hand of History is now in charge and the United States is fuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

Goodluck. Get a passport.

How Humanity Might Settle And Govern A New Planet


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One thing I’ve always thought was interesting was the specifics of how humanity might settle a new planet. I’ve come up with a very elaborate scenario that would allow humanity to settle planets in a solar system that, say, a galactic empire gifted us as a “homeland.”

But how you would go about settling and governing any of these plants is very, very difficult to figure out. Let’s take earth — in real terms, there are two USA size places that dominate the entire planet — North America and Europe. There are a few other first world nations, but they’re very small in population. While China is growing in economic and military power, the world is still pretty much controlled by the “Western World” of the USA and Western Europe.

Why is this?

Well, let’s talk the Pacific Ocean. The world we live in has more to do with the size of the Pacific Ocean than you might think. It’s this huge ocean that prevented China from settling the New World and makes the type of climate necessary to establish and grow a First World nation so precious. (In other words, it’s easer to warm machinery up than it is to cool it down during an Industrial Age.)

Imagine, however, if there was an Africa-size continent between East Asia and North America. If it had a geography and climate similar to Europe’s, then the world we live in now would be dramatically different. You could probably fit another billion+ people on such a huge landmass.

Anyway, if you take that idea and apply it to a new planet that is empty and ready for humanity to settle, you have a shit tone of problems. On earth, you could literally organize North America and Europe such that you had only two nations that everyone lived in. I mean, we’re not doing the globe’s environment any favors by having so many people live in South America and Africa.

But it’s easy to imagine that if humanity was “gifted” a few planets for our homeland, that there would be a fundimental problem: who gets to settle such a homeland? There are 1 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians. They’re just as human as anyone else, why would you automatically say the West should get the opportunity to settle new planets?

I go over this problem again and again in my head because it’s impossible to solve using the conditions of the scenario. The USA makes the most sense as the basis for a planet wide settlement, but everyone hates the USA and a lot of MAGA New Right people would hate the idea of the States having to absorb a lot of non-Americans (Read: non-white).

I really want to give this scenario a plot and characters and write something using it, but it’s still impossible to figure out at the moment.

Tik-Tok, The Stripper, The Soft Singularity & Me


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only keep harping on this because of how often it happens and how it jiggles my sense of reality. I don’t like the idea that I’m seeing something surreal that is real and yet everyone else is too busy watching Tik-Tok videos to give my fears much bother.

But Tik-Tok AGAIN pushed me something pretty eerie.

This time, it was a video of a woman who looked identical to a stripper I talked to recently. We had a lovely talk for about an hour and two things are true: I thought about her really intensely and we both use Tik-Tok and had our phones on us.

So, if you absolutely don’t believe there is any chance Tik-Tok can read our minds, then, yes, you could say that Tik-Tok used the location information from both our phones to figure out what to push me. But the implications of even that are pretty staggering — that definitely sounds pretty soft Singularity to me. That a company like Tik-Tok has it within its means to take location data to push me a video of a woman who looks just like the woman I was sitting for a while recently is pretty mind boggling.

What’s more, just within the last 48 hours, I’ve been pushed ANOTHER video of a woman who looks identical to my romanticized memory of the late Annie Shapiro. That’s pretty deep. I don’t have any pictures of her anywhere for even me to access — I just have the imagine of her stored in my mind.

So, we could go through a rather elaborate — but no less rattling — sequence of events where by Tik-Tok isn’t reading my mind, or we cut the shit and say: Tik-Tok is reading our minds.

But I still don’t have any proof. Claiming that Big Tech has the ability to read our minds sounds like something a crank would believe. So, for the time being, I just have to assume all these “spooky” things I’m being pushed by Tik-Tok have some other explanation than the one I think is the answer.

The Coming Sino-Taiwanese Singularity War


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I love to run scenarios in my mind. Some of these mental games grow very elaborate and span decades of mental energy. But when I was in Seoul, I came up with a pretty bonkers scenario for how China could strike Taiwan — build a land bridge to the island using nanotechnology.

This is an extremely fanciful (at the moment) idea, but it’s just the kind of thing that would stun the world. Take something we know in theory could happen, then say, “What if it happened NOW?”

I would say this idea would make for a great movie, but, lulz, Hollywood is so beholden to the China audience this would never happen.

But if I were to guess about what kind of really shocking thing was going to rock the world in the 2020s, something like China building a land bridge to Taiwan using nanotechnology would be it.

August Sucks: Fresh Hell Scenarios For August, 2021


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The reason why August is such a sucky month is it’s the nadir of the year for most normal people who work at the big media companies. Huge swaths of the newsroom leave town for this or that pleasant vacation retreat, leaving the fate of any reporting on a breaking news event to a bunch of wet behind the ears cub reporters.

As such, huge news events are drawn to August.

Everyone has to leave their vacation at a moment’s notice to cover this or that huge news event. So, that leaves the question — what will it be this year? Here are my guesses.

Cyber Ninjas “Prove” Trump “Won”
It’s my impression that not only does Trump think he will somehow be magically re-instated in August, but Cyber Ninjas will finally come out with the results of their dumb sham audit. If they come through for Trump and “prove” he “won” Arizona, either that in itself starts some sort of secession crisis by the end of the year, or it begins a process that leads to House Speaker Trump telling Senate Democrats to convict Biden and Harris or risk a civil war.
Someone Drops Dead
A lot of old people are in powerful positions. If any number of 70+ powerful people dropped dead, that, in itself could be The Thing that we think of what made August 2021 suck so bad.
The DPRK Does Something Stupid (Or Implodes)
The DPRK has been pretty quiet since the pandemic hit. August 2021 seems like just the right moment for them to pop out and scare the shit out of us all one way or another. Or implode. You name it. Anything could happen.
Iran Does Something Stupid
It’s easy to imagine a situation where Iran and Israel have at it suddenly and before you know it, WW3 has started.
China Does Something Stupid
A lot of people talk about China going after Taiwan by about 2027. What if China struck in August 2021? Then what?
Russia Does Something Stupid
It’s easy to imagine Russia starting some sort of late summer general war against Ukraine.

Wildcard: a major domestic terrorist attack.
Trump is doing everything in his power to destabilize the United States with his dumb nearly-transactional rhetoric. What if there was a large scale, coordinated MAGA New Right terrorist attack all across the country in some sort of proto-coup effort. How would we handle that?

Wildcard: Cuba
It’s within the realm of possibility that of possibility that Cuba could implode in August, given the massive protests there right now.

We Live In A Cultural Vacuum


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The interesting thing about the modern era is, well, we’re not in an era. I guess the argument could be made that we’re in either the post-Trump Era or the pre-autocracy era or even modern Antebellum era. But, really, when it comes to culture none of those are true.

We’re not in just a cultural wasteland, we’re in a cultural vacuum.

The current era began, I would posit, with the introduction of the first iPhone. In a broader sense, I guess, we’re still in the post-9/11 Era. I thought Rona would do something to jiggle our culture, but that really hasn’t happened.

If I want to make myself feel better, I would get all excited and say we’re one unexpected hit in music, movies or TV for some sort of major shift in our culture perceptions to occur. That’s usually how such eras begin. Some young outlier produces a song, or an album or whatever that is so unexpectedly popular that it shakes everything up.

I guess, in a sense, I am looking forward to a new Nevermind or Pulp Fiction to pop out to really rattle hyper modern pop culture. In a sense, maybe, you might say that Tik-Tok is a precursor to what I’m talking looking forward to. Tik-Tok is making new era stars in a currently unnamed era.

Tragically, of course, the Something Big that changes everything might be some huge news event that is the Day The Earth Stood Still, like 9/11. We’re just about due for something like that to happen.

But I can’t predict the future. I have no idea that is going to happen.