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Perhaps a silly metaobservation, but I am somewhat disappointed with a schlubby nerd like SBF being the villain of our time. Fraudsters in the past used to be a lot more charismatic and often partied with the jetset. Even Madoff was known as having a huge stash of cocaine, going to parties with supermodels etc. SBF bagged Caroline Ellison and did a bunch of weird nootropical experiments while playing video games like LoL.
I can't help but feel that our culture has regressed into becoming more boring - perhaps suitable for the hyperdigital age. I know it may sound weird, but I think who the bad guys are in any society says a lot about that culture. And I'm afraid SBF being our villain says a lot of bad things about ours.
He is the son (oh no, should have said "child" to be in tune with our elites) of two elite parents - the top of what our system selects for - both professors at Stanford.
This isn't a generational change overall, it's a generational change in that our elite is awful and is getting worse because it's been excluding people who aren't highly conformist progressives for a long time and has tightened this. Not coincidentally, the amount of genetic detritus elevated to "elite" status has gone up radically.
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You may enjoy this article, talking about how so many things in our modern culture feel "sexless" compared to previous generations: https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/89-the-death-of-sex
Interesting article thanks for linking.
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So, there was a recent movie that came out on Paramount plus called Honor Society. It's about a girl in high school who is obsessed with academic success to the point where she is plotting to derail the academic careers of her competition. She manipulates several people into getting academically distracted and then her real competition is a schlubby nerd that she decides to distract/derail by getting him to fall in love with her because he only cares about schoolwork, has no friends and is ugly. So, basic plot so far (apart from the ugly). She actually falls for him instead, who could see it coming. But she basically gives away the special recommendation letter they were all struggling to get to him because he's apparently poor.
But it's all revealed to be a lie. He was manipulating her in the same way. I'm not sure how effective this would be since he's the "ugly one" from the Stranger Things cast but okay. So, he pretended to be poor and fall for her so he could get that recommendation by getting her to give it to him.
Of course, that climactic reveal is shown to not matter once she stops moping for the allotted five minutes because she blackmails the guy writing the recommendation to give it to a more deserving minority because that counselor tried to proposition her earlier. Everyone forgives her because even though she reveals what she did she did it in a nice way by distracting them with love or a hobby they liked or something. Everyone lives happily ever after. Except the schlubby nerd boy who had no real emotions except wanting to personally succeed and has to stew in his failure and friendlessness at the end. It could basically be lifted out of any high school romcom from the past thirty years except there is no lesson for the villain, there's no redemption, there's nothing.
So, no, I don't think the movie was trying to make a point but I do think it's reflective of the times. The secret villain is a friendless, rich, and ugly nerd. And there is no path for redemption. They don't have the moment where it's revealed he cared back or at all. There's not even a moment of consideration by the main character that it was possible that he could have cared at all but was hiding it. They don't show him to have a tragic backstory or even being generally a bad person overall. He was just this weird schlubby benignly evil "genius" that was capable of manipulating literally everyone around them into doing what he wanted through means that after the fact seem inexplicable.
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"Villain of our time?"
Not a more visible nerd like Zuckerberg or Shkreli? Elon's working hard to cultivate a dark-horse Bond villain persona, but I guess that might not do it for you.
How about the political leaders? Trump's pretty controversial lately, but I hear the hipsters are following this Dark Brandon guy. You could go with a safe, classic option like Putin or Xi....unless it's better to constrain yourself to American domestic drama.
If conviction for a crime is required, well, there's always Epstein.
Yeah, I think you're hitting the availability heuristic pretty hard. In a couple years, SBF will have been sentenced, crypto will have oscillated a couple more times, and thinkpiece mills will have moved on to whatever most recently made Bay Area futurists look like rubes. This too shall pass.
As an exercise in calibration--who would you pick as the villain of previous decades? World Wars are cheating, so let's say...the 1900s, 1970s, and 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Belfort
Certainly a more interesting character. As our society becomes duller, so does our villains.
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The villain of the 1970s for the US was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but of course he was not part of US culture.
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I mean the greatest investor of all time is old and lives in Omaha eating McDonald’s with soda. At least SBF bought some island property.
Isn’t that the point? Buffet isn’t a huckster.
I was more just commenting on the vibe that things are somehow less cool these days and society is “regressing”.
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Don't overadjust from one example
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I think the SBF case is anything but boring. It's not like he wanted to draw unnecessary attention to himself, hence being boring. He had $100 million of luxury real estate, so it's not like he completely eschewed the high life. He spent lavishly , but didn't show off, unlike social media stars.
His goal was never to avoid attention, but to curate his image. Someone who doesn't want attention doesn't go and give out interviews to magazines, and certainly go to every tiny news outlet spinning stories about his innocence after it all blew up. Him publicly driving a Toyota Corolla was not him being humble and avoiding fame, but him cynically using fake humility as part of his image of 'billionaire with a difference'.
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This place needs to get out of its bubble I'm sociable and have talked with many different stratums of people since the FTX thing and literally zero of them have mentioned it. Tons of people talking about Musk, practically no one even knows who this guy is. SBF won't even be a footnote except maybe largest individual Crypto exit scam. It's not even still much news the in crypto circles I run in.
Wait till the Michael Lewis movie comes out.
Lewis has written 19 books. Three were made into movies.
I’m still waiting to see Ken Leung play Brad Katsuyama on screen.
Edit: …and only one of those three films is about not-sports.
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It's all over the news . Anyone who follows the news probably saw it . I think you'd have to be in a bubble to have not heard about it, than the other way around.
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Really? Zero people have brought up musk with me, but two have mentioned SBF out of the blue on tangents from general "what to do with money/bloody banks" topics. Like "well just don't give it all to that Bankman guy"
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So my wife has been watching a ton of Desperate Housewives* lately while doing filing and billing and Christmas cards. It's got that classic Five {Wo}Man Band structure, with the characters representing different archetypes of modern womanhood: Bree is the uptight and upright right wing Christian, Lynette is the career woman feminist trying juggle job and kids while still being feminine for her husband, Gabby is a super hot materialistic slut, Susan is retarded, and Mary Alice is dead. I caught bits and pieces on our TV, it's not a complicated show you pick up on it fast, so we're vaping weed after work and she asks me Ok, which one of the women am I? I thought about and answered that she wasn't really like any of them, but Gabby is your id. Gabby is the devil on your shoulder telling you to buy shoes and get your rocks off. So she looks at me and says, ok, who is your id, what character? I looked at her, took a hit, and said Sam Bankman-Fried. We both burst into laughter as we realize what a brilliant choice that was. SBF really is my worst reflexes made flesh, me if no one slapped me and told me to shape up, I would have become a fat schlub doing drugs and playing a lot of video games and trying to hustle bullshit, though probably not as rich for however brief a time it lasted.
I think that's true for a lot of people on themotte and in the broader SSC-verse. We're fascinated because he's a failure mode we could have fallen into. And there's a broader thing I think about all the time, that born at most other times in history I would have been useless. I'm a bad farmer, a mediocre mechanic, a physical coward, but I think good and that pays these days. As we more and more highly reward thinkers, our villains will be the failure modes of thinkers.
*It's interesting to me that Desperate Housewives is mostly forgotten as a program, while the various Real Housewives programs live on. Originally the Real Housewives shows were take offs on the popularity of the Desperate Housewives phenomenon: this was going to be just like the show, but real. Now the reality TV show genre is dominant over the forgotten sitcom, young viewers of the reality show forget the sitcom it came from.
It does seem there is a niche in society for people with brains and some sociopathy, but the key is not overdoing it. Michael Millikin for example. SBF is the worst nightmare of the managerial elite because he embodies every worst stereotype of it, and the people affiliated with him.
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I mean, honestly, that speaks to me. I honestly can't imagine myself experimenting with weird drugs and trying to sell more-or-less fake products that you pump up with investment dollars while justifying it with "but greater good" or whatever the EA angle actually was. And I don't care about the SBF scandal. It's incredibly boring to me and I usually minimize threads about it; I don't actually know why I read this one.
But, when I do run into things that could be my dark twisted mirror, it's hard to look away or, for that matter, stop talking about them. That thing just happens not to be this guy, who comes off as a dork who stole from morons in a stupid but not entertaining way.
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Counterpoint: the other villain of our time is Vladimir Putin, who did his best to live up to his supervillain stature.
The villain of the moment is transient and ever-changing. SBF is a schlub, but to many, the villain of the moment is still Putin or Elon Musk, and there's always George Soros and Bill Gates. I don't think SBF is "our" villain or that the fact that a nerd with a cryptoscam is on everyone's minds for a hot minute says much more about culture than that cryptoscams will probably be a thing for a while.
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It's not a culture change - plenty of recent popular fraudsters are charismatic (Elizabeth Holmes, sentenced recently). And plenty of old fraudsters did technical fraud as opposed to charismatic cons.
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As far as I can tell, you're just complaining that Ellison isn't as conventionally pretty as a supermodel? She is impressive in other ways:
daughter of two MIT economics professors
earned a national merit scholarship
BA in math from Stanford
In the top 500 of Putnam competitors in three years
Went to Jane Street straight out of undergrad, probably earning ~$600k / year
That is an incredible list of accomplishments for a 23-year old. If you're into smart/successful women, she's a clear outlier.
I don't think it's that high for new hires. It shows how the managerial class is cut from such a superior cloth compared to everyone else. How does someone compete against this.
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How smart/successful can you be if you are persuaded to join a ramshackle operation by a nerdy guy who quit his job and is pushing a line of babble, then the entity you are CEO of (since your co-CEO quit) is up to its ears in debt and only kept afloat by misappropriated funds, and it all comes tumbling down around your ears?
The smartest move she has made, if it's true, is to turn state's evidence against Bankman-Fried in order to cut some kind of deal with the authorities. But even if she avoids jail time, who on earth is going to hire her for any job above, maybe, sweeping the floors ever again?
Well-connected people fail forward all the time
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Alas, smart ≠ reliably makes good decisions.
[ Edit: I wouldn't hire her to manage my company's PR or financial records, but I'd definitely hire her to do engineering/research work. ]
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