Oh Dear Lordy Lorde 2.0

Unfun fact, the first World War was referred to as "The Great War" it was not pessimistically titled "World War 1" presuming a sequel was already in the works. It is a sad day when someone first said "World War 1" and it was sad when AOC said "Woke 1..." and I believe she was quoting some friend of hers. 

Woke 1, or Woke 1.0 is literally tragicomic, because it implies a 2 which thankfully, mercifully I do not believe to be an intelligible concept. If it is to be anything, it is likely to be whatever young left-leaning people care about now, whom I suspect care about economic inequality, job automation, educational inflation, generational property apartheid etc. which I would suggest is more accurately labelled "Occupy Wall Street 2" albeit lacking the specificity of establishing protest camps.

And let us just zoom out a bit and think about it for a second, here are people, predominantly but not exclusively young, actually pretty much everyone in the bottom 80% of net worth households minus some racists, and most people under retirement age in the top 20% of net worth households. They are unified around a big structural issue like "the wealthiest 0.001% should not be able to hoard wealth and accrue more of it until society collapses"

At which point, I am going to assert, the woke thing to do between 2014-2024, like literally what 8% of the population very loudly proclaimed to be a good idea when confronted with a large body of people united in a demand for change in the face of an existential crisis was to say something like "this issue disproportionately affects [insert marginalized group]" and the problem was not that the statement was untrue, they were often factually true, even expectedly true, the problem was that these statements were the functional equivalent of saying "let's fight among ourselves!"

A Brief Autopsy

Caution, the amount of time I want to spend on exposition here means that what I will describe will be done so in a way that is certainly reductive.

To borrow a term from Commies, many reactionaries have expelled enormous amounts of time and energy trying to formally analyse, render intelligible and communicate what "Woke" is, and if you ignore all the high-end theory, and even most of the jargon, what it was was out there on the streets was a grab-bag of memes, often rhetorical tactics that really functioned more like an intellectual fashion very similar to skinny or baggy jeans, lo-rise or hi-rise jeans etc. Even to the point of sticking around for about a decade while having seasonal trends.

Very few of its adherents had a coherent ideology, nor did they need one. As such conspiracy theorist James Lindsay, likely waisted his breath and drove himself insane doing his analysis of Paolo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and cohering it to a super schema of everyone from Marx to Lenin to Gramsci to Kimberly Crenshaw etc. etc. Because even though there no doubt was an intellectual origin to woke memes, some kind of organising principle, in practice woke people only needed to know enough to name drop, if that.

If you will, it is an effort akin to unpacking the mind of Phil Knight, founder of Nike Athletic Wear company to understand why people wear Nike products.

In practice you can quickly discover that on the ground, on the front line, it was just a set of rhetorical products that allowed people to avoid arguments and obtain very short term outcomes. Viewing it as a youth fashion, rather than an ideology, would also likely have helped you predict its accomplishments, and its association with performativity.

It was embraced by political parties that have their origins in worker movements, or were historically transformed into worker's parties, as a shelf-like extender for the "third way" which was the Blair-Clinton program in the 90s where left wing parties like the Democrats and UK Labour party came to power by maintaining the economic policies of 1980s Reagan-Thatcher, or "Neoliberalism" a misnomer that rather than literally meaning "new freedom-ism" it was "the new focus on the freedom of property owners to do whatever the fuck they like with their property, unrestricted" 

Basically, view it as someone who simply wants to get into power, but needs to consider first and foremost the concerns of those who fund their campaigns being the wealthy asset owning class, what a GIFT it is, if someone tells you "I am more concerned about how many indigenous physicists there are than whether the minimum wage is a living wage."

This is almost like having a plant in an audience to lob you a softball question at a town-hall meating. Imagine how you might be sweating if someone asks you if you are committed to dismantling an economic system that transfers wealth not only from the poor to the rich at an accellerated pace, but suicidally from the young to the old, and somebody stands up and asks you "do you think racism is bad?"

The red flag for somebody with a healthy amount of cynicism, was that the left-wing of two-party systems embraced woke talking points. Woke was incredibly cheap politically because it was mostly concerned with regulating the behaviour of citizens, woke was about individuals paying a personal tax in effort just to go about their daily lives. 

Woke demanded no investment on the part of our governments, it demanded regulation that people raise in many ways, their own cost of living.

Popular in cultural cul de sacs, it was never broadly popular. We can consider it like velcro, it has uses, at one point it was new, it is still around, it was never and never will be the most popular clothing fastener, it is not a broad and popular revolution.

Some memes I am sure will stay like "acknowledgement of country" in the context of Australia, and there are particular historical conditions that make it both viable and original to Australia, whereas I am not sure they will ever take off on the continental USA because indigenous peoples often contested eachother's lands, for example Comancheria displacing Apacheria whereas in Australia, semi-nomadic indigenous groups might have been occupants and custodians of fairly stable geography for 40,000+ years. I strongly suspect that there will be a residual of they/them pronouns, but they may function almost as a regional dialect much like "y'all" is a "Southern Thing" of course this may have been broadly adopted with more success than gender-neutral or non-binary pronouns, just as many US citizens have taken to saying the Australian "no worries" (rather than coming from The Lion King where obviously you would co-opt "hakuna matata" not "no worries")

It Wasn't Just Crazy It Was Bad

I am keeping in mind that many people adopted the memes and rhetoric with the best of intentions. They earnestly oppose sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and hold as values inclusion and justice. If one was to pull them aside one would discover that they likely could cite Scandanavian countries as positive examples of democratic socialism, but they likely would not be quoting from Gramsci's prison diaries nor be referring to arguments made in Judith Butler's gender troubles. 

They likely consumed a bunch of op-ed's that cited as the origin of intersectionality Isabella Baumfree's "Ain't I A Woman" speech and then made some point about some well meaning organisation having some degree of hypocrisy. But many people's pipeline to woke memes and ideas came from watching Nanette, and youtube videos, and twitter, hearsay upon hearsay. I know this because I was there, and it was not a phenomena restricted to those doing Gender Studies or Social Anthropology at University/College at the time, but was taken up by people right up into the boomer demographic who were simply absorbing it through a demography of popular culture.

The thing being, that what critics called the "awokening" being the infodemic of woke memes, identified it early and predicted its doom to fail. It was first labelled as "identity politics" but probably the earliest to really capture the broad phenomena were colleagues Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt had published an article in the Atlantic by 2015 titled "The Coddling of The American Mind" which would go on to be the basis of their book of the same name published in 2018, by witch point much of this was old-hat but no less valid.

Haidt would present 3 "untruths" to stop telling kids, but these are I believe also a synthesis of the woke character:

1. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
2. Always trust your feelings.
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

And I should also point out, my understanding of Lukianoff and Haidt's collaboration was born out of Lukianoff having successfully used cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to recover from depression and then noticing that his student body were adopting effectively the antithesis of CBT which another way of putting it, would be adopting such poor mental hygiene so as to make themselves mentally ill. In 2014.

This may be the sense in which it is fair for AOCs friend to have arrived at the conclusion that "Woke 1 was crazy" in terms of much of it was literally both irrational and incoherent and based on cognitive distortions like mind reading, black-and-white-thinking etc.

I am tempted to keep harping on this point, but I've made the rod for my back that is justifying woke was beyond crazy, it was bad. 

That is I feel the reckoning that actors like AOC are likely keen to avoid, as per the line in "Get Shorty" 1995:

Harry, look at me. You're trying to tell me you fucked up without sounding stupid, and that's hard to do.

My favourite  definition of stupid comes from Italian Economist Carlo M. Cipolla "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." and that I think applies certainly in net effect, to the woke. 

The first sense in which woke was not just crazy but bad, was in being a popular movement, ie mostly consisting of enthusiastic amateurs and activists, and they adopted what Lukianoff would codify along with co-author Rikki Schlott in "The Cancelling of the American Mind" as the perfect rhetorical fortress. A schema of how attempting to argue with woke people would go, thanks to the adoption of memes.

The perfect rhetorical fortress is basically a means by which any dissenting opinion can be dismissed without engagement, and it was basically a checklist of ad-hominems to be appealled to. I myself, when confronted with this social phenomena of early wokeness being trigger warnings as facebook posting etiquette and the emergence of 'mansplaining' wrote in February of 2015 a post about Ad Hominems, as a complete amatueur lay person that probably learned 'ad hominem' because of this emergent rhetorical-fallacy.

There was also the motte-and-bailey, perhaps best exemplified by the discource around the gender pay gap. If at any point between 2014-202X one sought clarity on what was meant by 'patriarchy' the most common response from a fellow lay person who had invoked it, was not a definition but an appeal to the existence of the gender pay gap.

The short motte and bailey was that the motte (boring but easy to defend) definition of patriarchy was simply a catch-all for the disparate outcomes of gender like pay gaps, lack of political representation and representation on C-suites, wealth gaps, orgasm gaps etc. such that patriarchy was simply descriptive of a status quo, which while serious is fairly uninteresting, the bailey though (exciting but impossible to defend) was a conspiracy of men overtly holding women back from equality, very hard to substantiate in terms of recognition under the law through to any actual meeting minutes where men motioned, seconded and passed the oppression of women since like 1979 or something.

This was not crazy, it was bad, because this is a society wide news story equivalent in function to the recent revelations that Meta's own experts knew that adding beauty filters to instagram would harm teenage girls, and they went ahead and did it anyway. Woke was bad, in short, because we knew it was bad, and we knew it was bad immediately, it was promoting ideas and techniques known to be bad not from recent history, but going back to antiquity.

The significance of Lukianoff and Schlott's perfect rhetorical fortress is that it was the experts formally coming to terms with the fact that while it was a matter of record that woke consisted of a whole grab bag of terrible ideas, stupid ideas that would harm others while resulting in no gain and even losses for the woke, all that could be done was to record the criticisms and the warnings because built into being woke was cutting the break lines and going after anyone who did not also cut their break lines and join the charge directly into a dead end.

Then let me just take as an example of woke culpability, the slogan "No climate justice on stolen land" I have made the point before, and we have an exemplar in the People's Republic of China, that this statement is likely profoundly false. While I'm fairly confident, China continues to oppress and marginalise non-Han ethnic minorities in its pursuit of the 'One China Policy' this totalitarian regime has also leapt far ahead of liberal democracies in terms of electrifying the domestic car fleet, building out high-speed rail and other mass-transit solutions, and likely leads the world in investment in renewables and green tech.

Now, literally the slogan refers to 'justice' in which case it is trivially true, basically, justice cannot be achieved until their is justice for people who have been dispossessed. 

My question, where it is hard to summon the credulity to extend a benefit of doubt, is the function of the slogan. How is an amateur activist going to apply it? Because what it sounds like and reads like to me is that someone is attaching a rider to climate action, suggesting that colonial land theft needs to be addressed as step 1 of responding to the climate catastrophe upon us.

This was but one, albeit a prominent one, way in which woke "1" was not crazy, but bad. A friend of mine was a long time organiser of Australia's premier sustainability festival, and looking at the program one year I saw a talk that was along the very lines of 'before we talk about climate change we need to talk about racism' and I opined that these people, though understandable, would one day need to answer for taking up oxygen in a very very serious debate to effectively sabotage it.

To be clear, I'm not saying racism is to be neglected, I am saying that addressing climate catastrophe should not be made contingent on first achieving social justice. The false contingencies foisted onto any and all attempts to make progress by intersectionality, meant very little progress was made, and plenty of regress.

If Woke 2 is anything it is that the right-wing is Woke, Crazy and Bad

My grounds for objecting to this line of arguing, is that the right wing's "wokeness" is simply not new enough to be called woke 2. However it persists where left wing wokeness I think palpably chilled after the 2024 US election. Now if you are an ideologue, you have double standards, you believe there is right and wrong. 

By this I mean for example using a paralegal process of hounding someone out of a job via activism getting their employers or financial backers to commit an act of cowardice to avoid bad press rather than say determine an outcome through a due-process, its impossible to say if this is bad if you are an idealogue unless you find out who is involved and what they believe.

Or holding an adult to account for something they tweeted a decade ago, back when, figuratively speaking, everyone was tweeting like that is impossible to describe as in bad faith unless you know the specifics of the politics.

The right wing of (in particular) US politics have been, for quite some time, an extremely radical party pushing an ahistorical poorly founded agenda who want books and professors and public officials cancelled for the dangerous ideas they possess that might jeopardize progress toward their utopian agenda. They cleave to debunked economic theories appealing infinitely to a simple lack of commitment and demonize and monster their opponents while remaining objectively niche and unpopular.

Andrew Doyle at least a year ago, was already speaking about the "Woke Right" and in discussing this concept Doyle provides his definition of "Wokeness" in a manner more concrete than my own preferred 'grab-bag of rhetorical memes': 

"the cultural revolution that seeks inequity, according to identity, through authoritarian means."

James Lindsay also may have coined the term "woke right" again around a year ago and for me these analyses are surprisingly recent I must admit I haven't been interested in Lindsay's output for years and Doyle I guess, having never really objected to anything he says, but by largely not having his own platform and instead appearing on other platforms I long since learned to triage my attention away from like Triggernometry, Coleman Hughes and Quillette, in that recency I don't want to give too much credit given that from the earliest analyses of Haidt and Lukianoff, pioneers in the sense making of the "Awokening" they've always included both positive and negative identity politics on both the left and the right. 

Indeed, most who possess the capacity to criticise wokeness at all, have always been able to identify hypocritical behaviours coming from the right. 

In which case, if I wasn't so damn aesthetically sensitive, I would literally go and make the "if" in this sections subtitle a much larger font, because in my opinion it is a really big IF.

Worth Recalling Being Sane in a Crazy World

Tim Heidecker or however it is spelt, creative director of Info Wars which satirical newspaper The Onion acquired from its founder Alan Jones recently was doing a press junket to promote the upcoming relaunch of Infowars as a show, including an interview on Wired.com for which the thumbnail pull quote was "acknowledging the insanity makes people feel sane" captured how I was feeling in 2016, where I was getting an education on how ineffective education was.

Triggernometry and the Dave Rubin show have aged like milk, probably because of audience capture. But in 2016 they were what I could find that could make me feel sane about left wing people being anti-free speech.

I had been awoken to wokeness a few months earlier perhaps and was starting to get perturbed like Homer Simpson in a lesbian bar as I noticed more and more of this "thing" around me. I remember the precise moment because it left me dumbfounded, a friend said to me "I don't like evolutionary psychology because I find it condescending to women." with the dumbfounding thing not being so much the stance, as the argument.

Please understand, by this I mean it is like saying "I don't like Aerospace Engineering because I find it condescending to lead balloons." or saying "I don't like the scientific method because I find it condescending to creationism."

I didn't know how to respond, and I didn't at the time. So I couldn't interrogate the many better and worse interpretations of the sentiment expressed. It was just this exceedingly strange thing to say.

A while later, I had noticed something else strange, I can't remember or date the specifics, but on both sides of the wokeness debate, there were all these memes, wokeness had a back breaking amount, such that its kind of a good test of recall capacities to try and recall as many as you can without looking them up - call out culture, cancel culture, platforming, mansplaining, manspreading, emotional labour, gaslighting, safe spaces, lived experience, people of colour, BIPOC, intersectionality, visibility, pronouns, non-binary, gender non conforming, performativity, pay gap, patriarchy, antifascist, antifa, acab, woke (itself), shaming, DEI, accountability, privilege, privilege preserving epistemic pushback, folks, bodies, defund the police, black lives matter, no x without y, decolonization, silence is violence etc.

And on the flipside, critics and skeptics of woke had their memes - virtue signalling, grievance, cancelling, identity politics, postmodernism, cultural marxism etc. What I was noticing though, was that identifying where 'reactionaries' where getting their talking points from was trivially simple, most were uncritically regurgitating wholesale the arguments presented by a circuit of podcast guests who would come to be clustered by conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed 'entertainer' Eric Weinstein as 'the intellectual dark web' Jordan Peterson being 80% of the pareto distribution, followed by Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers, Douglas Murray being likely 80% of the remaining 20% and then a longer list that made up the last 4% of the total idea pie that were nevertheless much easier to identify as the sources of counter-woke memes than everything on the woke side.

By 2016 I was already aware of what came to be known as silos and echo chambers, so extending the benefit of the doubt I simply asked people who the left-wing public intellectuals were so I could check them out. Like where did my friend who builds modular synths hear trigger-warnings were a good idea? And how had someone been convinced that it was progress to start obsessing over race again?

The project was surprisingly hard, and in August of 2016 I wrote and shared a post where I speculated as to how an anti-scientific idea like trigger warnings had gone if not mainstream, certainly mainstream in youth culture.

I recall it, because I can recall speculating that use of trigger warnings had proliferated in the same way that eating desserts with cutlery had proliferated in a Seinfeld episode (the technical term, my favorite marketing term, being 'prole drift')

This was the journey that eventually lead me to James Lindsay, the answer being that woke memes do not come from nowhere, they do indeed have their origins and in many cases were nothing new, and very old. They were just having their moment in youth culture.

Wokeness then, I assert is more akin to a fashion than any serious political movement. It became such a thing, because it was a fashion that actively engaged politics and society, but in terms of its intellectual roots interrogating these would be misleading, like trying to figure out who came up with turning up their jeans, or distressing their jeans, or sagging, or jeggings, and specifically by asking someone 16-25 why they turn their jeans up.

Dollars to donuts, they won't actually know. This is the value of the reflection for me, because while I was experiencing this strangeness in 2016, I think for most people nothing strange was happening at all. It was not crazy, it was increadibly normal. For most people what began happening in 2014 was nothing, nothing they were inclined to notice, because what happened in 2014 was what happened in 2013 and 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007...1944ish (the emergence of the "Teen-ager" thanks to bans on child labour, the transistor radio etc.)

What was happening was what for many was always happening - you were trying to stay "with it" simply emotionally invested in their being an easily discernable formula for navigating life. The extend to which you thought about the adoption of trigger warnings as an early meme, and pronouns profiles as a late-stage meme was the necessity for having arguments to reassure yourself that you were with it and others were not.

Such that my experience, was that people would present arguments for say 'intersectionality' without being aware of Kimberly Crenshaw.

The woke and anti-woke were not two sides of a debate, one was a reaction to the other. It was the equivalent of a fashion commentariat (anti-woke) writing articles about why turned up jeans is a bad look and will go out of fashion in a few seasons.

AOC and System of a Down

AOC suggesting that 'woke 1' was just a prior model, I think makes her appear to me as the guy who still had a goatee in 2003, the 90s were over man and goatees never really came back. But then, there was System of A Down, a bizarre quintessentially 90s band that didn't break until 2001.

SOAD belong firmly among the greats of the 90s rap-metal alternative rock bands like Faith No More, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Rage Against the Machine and Primus, and not the dog-leg of 'Nu-Metal' that came after them but before System of A Down (at least in terms of commercial success). Right, like what I'm saying is that there's a good chance if you love FNM or RATM then you'll love SOAD too (infact FNM and SOAD are touring Australia together early next year, so yeah, of course) but there's also a good chance that you'll think (even if you kind of like them) that comparatively Korn and Limp Bizkit are a joke.

SOAD are kind of an exception that proves a rule though, by 2001 it was fair to say that alt-rock was dead, the demos that had been hit by the Bay Area musicians that got played on college radio and signed with interscope now listened to pop-punk acts like Blink 182 and Sum41 were all the rage. People in their 20s were being made to feel old wearing Doc Martins and Converse All-stars by the teenagers wearing Globes and DC shoes and Sketchers.

Yet strangely, SOAD were also there, and they were big.

Maybe AOC who was sighted as an example of a prominent woke lightening rod that had quietly removed her pronouns from her online profiles, is you know, an Eddie Vedder. She is going to make bank touring and playing the hits to the woke die-hards, she is going to be fine, but maybe she is just looking for her System of A Down when she alludes to a 'woke 1'

Here's the thing, I can be rightly accused of having 90s nostalgia. Being a 90s tragic. That shorthand can gloss over the detail though, I think due to socio-economic circumstances conditions were ripe for a bunch of really interesting shit to happen in the 90s, and having thought about it a lot, I now consider the 90s to span from 1988-1996, just as the indigenous people's of the continental United States didn't neatly recognize modern boarders prior to colonization, such that what white people call 'Native Americans' are also native to Canada and Mexico, people with a shared culture and way of life that don't fit neatly into modern naming conventions.

Just so, decades don't actually neatly fit into decades, and as such, I feel no desire to see a renaissance of many shitty aspects of the 90s, like MSN messenger, Nu-Metal, Ska, Punk Pop, Y2K, Gangsta rap...yes much of what made the 2000s the worst cultural decade had begun in the 90s. 

Being nostalgic for woke though, even though I've made SOAD my analogy, the analogy is kind of bad as a concluding note, because SOAD were like the very 90s secret bonus track that was actually good (like NIN cover of "Physical" as track 98 of their 1992 'Burn' LP) but Woke is more like being nostalgic for the 2000s, just a terrible terrible time to be nostalgic for MTV Punked, Guitar Hero and American Idol. 

The civil rights movement of the 1960s is to the 90s as Woke is to the 00s. Okay one was progress that got arrested, the other is regress that we should be glad to see the back of. 

The Most Underrated Move in Chess

 I by no means have any qualification to assert the truth of the title of this post. I barely even play chess, and really like an angry conservative imagining the bad attitudes of snowflake liberals, I imagine the move that is the subject of this post, is not talked about much by people who are interested in chess.

The move is this, a player reaches out with one hand and topples their king piece so it lays on its side, conceding the match.

That's the move I will be talking about, and I am asserting its applicability to domains outside of chess, most of which chess has little to no applicability for all it is asserted to teach its enthusiasts to think strategically and spawn vacuous statements like 'he is playing chess while you're all playing checkers' etc. 

Beginning with Stein's Law

Stein's law is to me, your classical classical economists kind of law, it basically states that things that can't go on forever must inevitably stop. Unusually for a classical economist kind of thing to say, it kind of argues that the kind of economic activity you want is a sustainable one. Why I characterise it as pretty classical a thing to say, is its non-interventionist vibe, that in my opinion is the kind of classic thing an economist would say, being completely out of touch with reality: 'don't worry everyone, anything doomed to fail, will fail eventually so why stop it?'

Now I am going to apply Stein's law to economic phenomena, first I'll look at National Debt or Sovereign Debt then I'll look at financial bubbles.

When is national debt unsustainable? Consider this a semi-lay opinion, certainly not an expert one, but the intuition that debt becomes unsustainable and therefore the nation will go bankrupt, when national debt hits 100% of GDP or GNP, which is to say, the country has borrowed its entire economic output. I suspect actually that the rational limit is actually much much higher, it would logically be when the service cost (interest payments) of that debt are equal to GDP plus growth, which would mean that basically the entire national output has to be dedicated to interest repayments before it is even accomplished, such that should anything slow that economy in any way, so there is no growth to meet the interest obligations then you've hit the limits of national debt.

Of course, I'm not aware of this ever happening, or ever playing out that way, there's also a degree to which GDP doesn't map to national debt. For example in the Greek sovereign debt crisis, it was the Greek government issued bonds that could not be serviced with the government not bringing in revenue sufficient to pay the bond holders. But GDP and GNP generally include both government and private sector, and so here we begin to see a limit of Stein's law - economic phenomena doesn't simply collapse when it has to, in the case of national debt to reach the theoretical limit, first the government would basically have to change its tax code to capture 100% of present and future GDP which would likely precipitate much of the economy offshoring, or else we are talking about some pretty spectacular government services being available for people to go to work for the sole purpose of paying taxes.

So lets look at a financial bubble - I am partial, or partially sympathetic to anybody who just thinks assett/economic/financial bubbles are not even worth talking about. Its pretty easy to identify a bubble - the price of an asset doesn't make sense. While I say its easy, generally you need to compare it to the riskless rate of return - historically this is a treasury bond in the same currency, though obviously some treasuries are not considered 'riskless', but if a US treasury bond has a 4% yield it doesn't make sense to buy any asset that won't generate at least a 4.01% return on your investment. 

It's pretty easy to find a bunch of shares and other assets that do not generate anything near a 4% return. For example, right now SpaceX trades at a price far above any real revenue it generates, its price is with very little embellishment, based on a sci-fi story written by an amateur author. It's most profitable business activity is commercial launches of rockets to deliver satellites into orbit. This business activity accounts for something like 2% if it's IPO valuation with 98% based on shit that doesn't exist yet, I believe mainly Musk's AI business that is likely competing with Meta as least popular, least used, lowest quality LLM. 

Crypto or NFTs are another, now slightly dated example of a bubble. Bitcoin being the most capitalised in terms of its total conversion value to something like USD, is used less than 2% of the time to purchase goods and services, it is mostly just literally a token people buy and sell in exchange for varying amounts of real or 'fiat' currency that can be used for goods and services. There is a theoretical value for something like Bitcoin being 0, this is based on some kind of real-world value, but it is unlikely that Bitcoin's value in USD is going to hit 0 any time soon. It was well put by Bloomberg journalsit Zeke Faux when he appeared as a guest on Dan Toomey's Good Work episode and here I'm paraphrasing "Is Insane Clown Posse's music good or bad? I would argue it is bad. Am I going to bet that no juggalos turn up to this year's Dark Carnival? No."

If markets were efficient, any time an asset price rises forces the expected ROI below the riskless rate of return, the foolish purchaser should be punished for it. But that rarely happens. Often this is because nobody can agree on what the expected ROI will be, for example, if Neil Degrasse-Tyson, who is a believe an astrophysicist, announced he was joining forces with a bunch of MIT phd's to build a time machine, or faster than light spacecraft, there will probably be some level of differing opinions on whether it is even theoretically possible to build a time-machine. 

Some people holding phd's in physics, might be adamant that it simply isn't possible to travel backwards in time, some holders of the same or equivalently relevant phd's may just be crazy, just like it's possible to find a medical expert with a phd that served in a prestigious research lab who will endorse crazy medical quakery. Then there will be experts who will at least allow that based on their impression of Neil, maybe he has figured out something they haven't. Right down to 'the dumb money' people who have no idea about anything and say things like 'bro! in 2030 we'll all be time travelling to 2031!'

Next we have Cassandra

Here is what I learned the hard way. Australian real estate is almost certainly an asset bubble. Some even go so far as to describe it as a ponzi scheme. Uttering such a statement can be frankly shocking to many Australians. I was of this opinion in 2006, two decades later the Australian housing bubble still hasn't popped. I could go figure out exactly when I learned my lesson on this blog, but I probably had the crucial revelation by late 2008, early 2009 after the GFC where Australia almost singularly avoided any correction or rationalization of its housing prices unlike pretty much everywhere else in the world.

The unique problem with asset bubbles being this: If I can't rationally justify why price of Y is X today, then there's no reason why the price of Y would be rational or reasonable tomorrow.

Or more simply put - its almost impossible to predict when someone will stop being stupid or crazy, let alone a lot of people.

Any price in bubble territory, simply cannot be explained, which is not quite true, in the example of Australian house prices, explanations are offered constantly - supply is short of demand, the population is growing faster than the housing supply, too much red tape etc. etc. 

Depressingly often, these explanations have no basis in truth, there are also many explanations that are simply unmentionable domestically - house prices are high because of 'investment', negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts, low holding costs, a lack of attractive investment opportunities in productive sectors, self-managed superannuation policy etc.

Enter Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy cursed by Apollo for rejecting him sexually, who spat in her mouth such that while she had the gift of prophesy nobody would believe her.

This is very often the curse faced by anyone intelligent enough to extrapolate out to Stein's law. In the past decade we've seen a number of non-starters not only start but persist until utterly destitute. Now I want to point out, this is not limited to any particular pole of the political spectrum or any point along it, untenable ideas come from all directions, furthermore if I give a good broad diverse set of examples the odds that one of these ideas being one you yourself are firmly still committed to will go up, but anyway certainly not limited to: Identity politics, crypto, the metaverse, making America great again, antifa, UBI, "AI" etc.

In all cases, a few debbie-downers almost immediately lucidly described the inherit fatal flaws of such ideas, often citing historical precedents that are a matter of public record and even simply pointing out that the thing at hand was so commonly subjectively experienced as shit, that it was almost objectively shit. 

I don't have the time or space to break them down, just let me reassure you that it never takes long when any enthusiast starts promoting an idea, for a decent critic to come along and poke holes in it. 

So let me break this down instead, imagine your whole life every day you have to get up, pack up your camp and walk all day, stopping only to forage and hunt, your tribe hugging to a wall that extends up into the sky such that you can't make out the top of it.

After years of doing this, you finally say "Let's just dig under this wall." and a few of the other youngsters start saying 'yeah, yeah! (s)he's right, I'm tired of just migrating along this wall all our lives, lets tunnel under and see what's on the other side!" and then an older person in the group says 'No, it won't work, look at how high up it goes, all that material puts more and more compressive stress on the material below it, that wall is going to go down into bedrock."

Some of your fellow young ones are persuaded, losing their enthusiasm but you are undeterred. "well okay if it's so deep we can't go under it, then we'll build a ladder and go over it!" and you are pleased to see your friends perk up at the suggestion.

"We could, maybe but look we can't even see the top of that wall, we've never seen the top of it. We'll have to erect a ladder at least 200 maybe 300m tall, it will have to be strong enough to not collapse under its own weight, and we'd have to raise it to the wall, probably by building it in sections from the bottom up, we'd likely run out of food and starve in the process."

"Okay, then if it's so tall we can't get over it, and it's so deep we can't go under it, and obviously it's so wide we can't go round it, then we'll go through it!"

"With what tools? Again not only does a wall that tall have to run deep because of compressive stress, it has to withstand wind on a surface area that large, it's going to be immensely thick. Like digging a mine shaft through solid rock."

And so, I think this is what Cassandras and the public at large often experience as an impasse. People in general don't like Cassandras because they just seem to shit on our ideas, our solutions, our hope, just as the original Cassandra told the hopeful Trojans that if they brought the wooden horse into the city then Troy would fall. Nobody wanted to hear it after 10 long years of war (plus she was cursed to not be believed) but often a Cassandra is not saying that the situation is hopeless, it is only made hopeless if everyone rallies around a course of action doomed to fail.

And very few of the intelligent people that suggested very early that raising the salience of race up to more or less an ubiquitous daily topic of conversation would most likely result in a resurgence of racism, I think didn't want progress to be made toward a more egalitarian society. And very few of the intelligent people who pointed out that MAGA would make the modal struggles of United States Citizens harder not better, are firmly wedded to doing nothing about the growing economic inequality that arises naturally from the ordinary operation of neoliberal economic doctrine, just that there was no finish line defined by when America was "great" as a consensus period in history, and that walls both physical and metaphorical in terms of a boarder fence and tariffs were definitely not going to make the US any greater.

It Ends With Keynes

John Maynard Keynes was the remedy to Cassandra's suffering, if indeed Cassandra suffered being denigrated as a madwoman, locked up, sequestered eventually taken as a spoil of war before being murdered alongside her captor all of which, she saw coming and faced with no small portion of dignity.

But Keynes said:

"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Which is equipping a Cassandra not just with the gift of prophecy, but the gift of cognitive empathy - perspective taking, which is what Cassandra's need to not be defeated by this world. For me this was the fundamental insight that if I can't use reason to explain the price of a SpaceX share, or a bitcoin, or pets.com, or a beanie baby, or an australian residential property today, then I have no reason to say expect it to crash tomorrow.

Patrick Boyle recently released a video that is good I feel, at diffusing some of the schadenfreude going on about the AI bubble - specifically the many claims of circular financing Nvidea is doing, pointing out that it is not shady accounting but a fairly ordinary practice of lending customers money with which to buy your products, the same thing many consumers do when they sign a two year contract for a new phone or purchase a vehicle on finance.

But specific to something Keynes said was that if you try to 'short' the "AI" companies who the Cassandras have built a pretty rock solid case that the needed revenue (something like figuring out a way to earn more from LLM generative "AI" than all the ad revenue of Alphabet, Meta, X, LinkedIn and Pinterest put together for the entirety of their history, and the increasing evidence base to suggest that as you build more powerful LLMs, costs go up, not down.) you will likely just lose money every time the bubble fails to pop, which could take years.

That may require some modicum of a technical explanation, as did "The Big Short" the movie about the few people who bet on the GFC, against the US economy which at the time was based on ever inflating real estate prices. Shorting something means like if the price of a share is $10 and someone thinks it will go up to $15 and you think its price will go down to like $2, you write up an options contract which says that by so-and-so a date you will sell your share for $8 if you exercise the contract, obliging the other partner to buy your share at that price. You are 'going short' because you make money if someone is obliged to buy something worth $2 for $8 giving you a $6 profit, but you lose money if the price goes up to $15 where you have to sell your shares well below market value giving them a $7 profit.

So say you USED YOUR EYES looking UP FROM YOUR PHONE anywhere in the past 5 years to notice that NOBODY USES CRYPTOCURRENCY AS CURRENCY. That all-caps statement is slightly hyperbolic, I'm sure on occassion people buy things with crypto, things like boats and houses and cars and not with the proceeds from crypto, but like a buyer finds a vendor who is willing to straight up swap a car for some bitcoin, a double coincidence of believers, but what anyone with eyes can notice is that crypto is not used to buy coffee, groceries, petrol, pay utility bills, pay taxes, buy street food, pay rent, pay wages, budget projects, keep accounts, value properties, buy shares etc. 

Right? It was pretty easy to use just basic sense information to see through the hype a long time ago. A fairly average smart person when confronted with the exchange rate between bitcoin and USD was capable of connecting the neurons necessary to point out that just because a bitcoin was valuable did not mean it was going to become a currency, as the same is true of baseball cards and comics. Furthermore, for a good 5 years, you didn't even have to think for yourself, there were plenty of credentialed people who had done the thinking for you, people who looked at crypto, looked at blockchain and could quickly and lucidly explain all the numerous reasons why it was not money. 

What I noticed, was that most of said commentators who looked at crypto and NFTs and said 'this is nothing' NEVER told people to go short on it, which is to say, actually bet on its price (or exchange rate if we want to humour the currency claims) would collapse.

Had you done so, you would have spent the last 5 years going broke, even though you are absolutely right and for good reason. Zeke Faux went to crypto conventions as a journalist and met a guy running a crypto bank who said he paid interest on deposits by his clients, but didn't charge any interest on loans to clients, and Zeke was like "that is like a business model for going bankrupt." Literally the best case scenario for that business, is that the owner is running a Ponzi scheme, I jumped the gun, had this owner clarified that the interest he paid was based on the historical deposit value of crypto...no because he has no means of generating income unless he sells other people's crypto, his only bulwark against bankruptcy would be to hold so much crypto himself and counting on it inflating in price faster than the interest rate offered that he could pay off his obligations by liquidating his crypto, by which he is almost certainly ruined by now.

But that gets me back to my point, if you wrote a sequence of short derivitives on bitcoin 5 years ago, you likely would have gone bankrupt well before you got to Oct 4 2025 the all-time high that defines bitcoins collapse from which it has never really recovered, and all but the die-hard juggalos can't find a reason to ever get excited about bitcoin ever again.

Now I said this ends with Keynes, and the point is the futility of trying to profit from being to see something's inevitable failure.

Knocking over your King

I asked my friends who are into games, particularly board games what term they used for the point in a game where the outcome looks inevitable. Like when somebody has a monopoly in Monopoly but the other players aren't bankrupt yet, or in chess when you are at such a disadvantage that the only argument is whether you are 2 or 3 moves from checkmate.

My friends suggested that this section was called 'the endgame' however, I don't think that was what I am trying to describe. For me the operative part of a term like 'endgame' is 'game' as in something is still at stake. Like the many board games, for example 'Trouble' with its pop-o-matic bubble, or Snakes and Ladders which the frightened people of the United States of America call 'Chutes and Ladders' or perhaps it is less so than that they are frightened of snakes so much as too literal minded, but games that have an endgame where a precise dice role is necessary and there is some ambiguity as to whether another player can catch up and overtake.

Of course, the ultimate game for 'endgame' is Tennis, where literally no matter how far a player is behind in games and/or sets and points, to win the game you must win match point and it is mathematically always possible for your opponent to come back from any match point and rob you of victory. It is a sport with infinite deuces and infinite sets (at least until 2019) which means even when you are 2 games down going into the fourth, you could be just 10 hours away from winning 70 sets to 68 in the 5th.

So what I propose instead is 'the epilogue' this is a theoretical and sometimes practical point in a game where the outcome is determined, but the rules technically allow someone to play out turns until the actual final conclusion. At this point though, I would suggest nobody should ever, in ethical game playing be obliged to play out the game for the gratification of the determined victor. Nobody should be obliged to sit around watching some immature moron gloat at how much monopoly money they are stacking up and how soon all of you will be ruined.

This does not, however mean that losers can 'rage quit' a term from online game playing  that may be motivated by various behaviours, but is definitely uncool when motivated by the ego-blow of losing.

But simply knocking over your king and conceding the match, offering a polite handshake I feel is humane and respectable. Now let us conclude by applying this to life.

The thing being that systems tend to fail before they have to fail. Democratic governments get ousted for example, when life gets expensive and not typically when people are actually starving. Steins law may suggest that things that cant go on forever must stop, and perhaps this is a reason not to get all het up and try and coordinate an intervention, but typically I think, uncoordinated interventions precipitate failure before concrete failure.

Soldiers desert the lines, civilians dodge the draft, fragging COs and going AWOL all happen before a battle or war is officially lost. In other words, habit fails before the institution does. 

The import, which makes the checkmate so underrated though, is that you have to zoom out from the chessmatch itself, to the infinite game. Knocking over your king and offerring the concessionary handshake means you may have saved yourself 8 minutes or 15 minutes to go get an icecream. Or maybe watch a rerun of Seinfeld, it is in this sense that by mitigating your loss of precious time, it is an increadibly powerful move. Furthermore, both players profit from the time saved.

As we head to the 2030s we are coming up to being a century removed from when Germany rather than admitting defeat on D-day, instead declared total war, by contrast after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered saving at least hundreds of thousands of lives. 

By contrast, I don't think you need to be a Cassandra, to see that Iran has the United States totally and utterly beat, and had them by the strait of Hormuz months ago. Everything since the initial US attack has been epilogue in that war, yet the decision makers cannot make, day after day, the single most powerful move available to them - to admit defeat. It has been, continues to be, and will be costly and will only grow in cost the longer it remains unresolved. In fact, it is possible that by not conceding defeat after the first two weeks, that the inevitable victor Iran may not have yet realised how much leverage they actually had. 

It's a seperate post, but I feel this is often a vulnerability in those who are victims of grift and scams and Faustian pacts - they do not realise how much they can yet lose. 

So when people will knock over their king is hard to predict, harder to predict than the outcome of a game. Cassandras should relax and get themselves some icecream, sorbet if you must.

On Not Getting Fleabag

I came to Fleabag eventually via Stath Lets Flats, and I was already late to Stath Lets Flats an incomprehensibly brilliant show that somehow uses all of everything Greek to out-nothing Seinfeld in a show where truly nothing happens, even most scenes nothing happens and along the way Stath becomes a father, a man dies and and two people fall in love.

But there isn't much Stath Lets Flats, and when one hungers for more, one discovers Jamie Demetriou is known for it, and Fleabag.

Ahora, people around me had raved about Fleabag calling it "brilliant" and saying things like "I love it" but knowing you knowing me, this is not typically the kind of thing that carries any weight with me in my consumption behaviour. Often quite the reverse, and not even in a contrarian way, but in like a 'do I need to render assistance? No, they've got it covered.' way.

I'd been told it was like something like a show about a woman who gives dating advice and she's grossly unqualified or something. I don't think that's a fair description.

Anyway sufficiently to say, I didn't get it, and having made my way to the end of season 1, don't get it.

I was disoriented in the opening sequence, where Phoebe as Fleabag breaks the fourth wall and describes in an anti-Ballardian way letting a guy insert his penis into her rectum resulting in him giving a tender and moving address the next morning about how much it meant to him to finally have anal sex, before cutting to Fleabag drinking tea in some kind of quaint sitting room looking pensive before she delivers a punchline now 3-4 scenes and 3 minutes in the making "do I have a massive arsehole?"

Here we arrive at where language fails me, because I get it, its just neither surprising nor funny nor interesting. Fleabag will get an audible laugh from me, by episode 6 of season 1 when Olivia Coleman at her exhibition asks Fleabag in front of a wall of moulded penises "Have you seen your father?" which like an innuendo based joke is made interesting by the sinister undertones of their relationship, so Fleabag initially plays into the double entendre by answering at face value that yes she's already seen her father, then Olivia introduces the paradigm shift, the "Jamaica?" turn of indicating she's referring to a mould of the father's dick and balls, then Fleabag taking the blow from the powerplay then proceeds to escalate the joke by correctly identifying her adult father's dick and balls on the wall, and Olivia gets her powerplay right back in her face and both women simply walk away.

That joke is brilliant, and absolutely dies dissecting it. Otherwise I would say that Fleabag is a drama, it reminds me tonally of "Kevin Can F*** Himself" but only the part where sitcom vision is subtracted and its just a bleak drama set in Providence about a poor woman's domestic hell.

Because it has some funny lines and funny scenes, and I mean genuine ones, Fleabag is not the great mystery to me that Bob's Burgers is, where people show me clips and scenes and episodes and act as if the show has jokes in it.

What then would I say Fleabag is a show of if describing it to a stranger, like what is it actually about? I'd say it is a show about putting a brave face on distress. This is essentially the arc of the first season and the tension that is released in the finale - spoiler ahead for a 10 year old show, but in episode 1 we are presented with Fleabag, a quirky, self-absorbed eccentric woman preoccupied with sex, and in an almost incongruous scene she lets slip that her best friend accidently killed herself, but its presented as just another quirky factoid that is incogruously dark in tone when compared to the opening question of "do I have a massive arsehole?"

In the season 1 finale, we finally have the full picture, where Fleabag's best friend who accidentally killed herself by walking into the bike lane with the intention to hurt herself and force her cheating boyfriend to visit her in hospital, the last piece being given is that Fleabag was the woman he cheated on her with. Fleabag is revealed to be a trainwreck, alone, alienated from her family, and wracked with guilt.

So the show is certainly about something. It isn't vacuous. It very much feels like a one-person show from the Edinburgh fringe, produced into a TV series.

So is Fleabag overrated? Is it simply a matter of taste? Is there something wrong with me that I don't get how brilliant Fleabag is from its opening scene?

Well one line of inquiry for me, was how old it is, season 1 released in 2016, it is a year before Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, became the biggest comedy special in the world. Maybe I didn't get Fleabag because I missed the boat, it was a proto-something that no longer has the impact because things have come along since.

It did remind me most of Nanette probably, though where Nanette is not so much intimately, but intrinsically linked with the person of Hannah Gadsby who kept making specials but subtracted the very thing that made Nanette, Nanette and just left her comedy, I feel it is a special that has aged like seafoam, it was a moment that was not frozen in time, it was a strange variant of the "Not!" "jokes" that followed the release of Wayne's World, but lacking the resurgence into public consciousness of Bohemian Rhapsody, it resembled "6-7" in being a thing, without being funny and it has all been landfilled by Gadsby's post-self-deprecating humour which is hard to describe without sounding hateful, when I think the consumer feet-based vote makes it more just a statement of fact - people flocked for the grief porn, and they didn't stay for the jokes.

Anyway, I'd seen this trick 9 years ago, and missed perhaps its first iteration 10 years ago. I was seeing things in the wrong order, Fleabag is actually a drama disguised as a comedy, it is perhaps a deconstruction of Sex & The City, I mean it quite literally is, and it's not clear where it stands on SATC, just that now Carrie has no friends, she is actually as poor as she would be, and she is a train wreck.

Like Springfield minus the Simpsons, everyone in the world is a tragic figure, the same 'prestige' of season 1 as Nanette is more morally ambiguous, Gadsby was unambiguously the victim of a heinous crime, Fleabag is both victim and perpetrator of human tragedy, not malicious but incompetent.

The trick is to 'get us laughing' which understanding that humour is a matter of taste, both Gadsby and Waller-Bridge are just not good at. Being a comic performance rather than a stand up set, her performance falls short of Molly Shannon, Amy Poehler, Olivia Coleman, Carrie Brownstein, Isy Suttie, obviously Julie Louis-Dreyfus (that's never really fair, but Veep while definitely being a comedy, was more dramatic and less a sitcom than Seinfeld) etc. 

Without the novelty, a novelty Phoebe Waller-Bridge may have pioneered ahead of Gadsby, the 'trick' of making someone think for most of 6 episodes, that they are watching a comedy when in fact it is a very dark drama is gone for me now. I've seen it before by consuming media out of sequence, as one might watch Moana now, before watching Pocahontas and not realize one is a soft reboot of the other, and its a bad example because Moana is probably on every level a superior film to Pocahontas with the benefit of two decades for the internet to autopsy everything wrong about Pocahontas.

The other show Fleabag reminded me most of, was "Baby Reindeer" which I could believe was actually commissioned by Netflix as an attempt to get on the Fleabandwagon. Both I believe were born of Edinburgh Fringe shows, and Fleabag certainly feels like an adaptation of a one-woman show, Waller-Bridge's performance feels more like a stage performance than a screen one. Particularly with how often she breaks the fourth wall, which in contrast to baby Reindeer which uses voiceover instead, is something I feel works better or is easier to tolerate on stage than on screen, with voiceover being the opposite.

It's hard, very hard, to describe "Baby Reindeer" as in any way superior to Fleabag, what I would say is that Reindeer's advantage is that it will likely always be a spectacle, less prone to aging out as a precedent by later antecedents. Baby Reindeer takes us on twists and turns, as Fleabag presents us with this low-key zany woman being 'hilariously' irreverent, Baby Reindeer presents us with a victim of stalking, an alt-comedy Hackney working as a bartender shows kindness to a deadbeat woman who then becomes obsessed with him.

Then eventually Reindeer reveals much more ambiguity, with his own backstory being a victim of grooming, dragging his innocent girlfriend into being victimised by his stalker by engaging her before eventually coming to terms with himself so he can eventually disengage from the stalker...I can't really remember it, but what stays with me from Baby Reindeer is that ambiguity where I don't know how I feel about any of the central characters.

Fleabag is much more cut and dry, while it is unusual for sexual infidelities that cross relationships with friendships to have such tragic outcomes. We can both understand Fleabag's guilt and see that while having sex with her best friend and business partner's boyfriend is a betrayal, it is more so his than hers and neither can be held responsible for the cuckold's reaction.

Leaving us simply with this story of 'woman went off the rails, pretends everything is fine' and perhaps in 'not getting' the humour in Fleabag, aside from that one great gag with the penis wall, I wasn't misdirected. I suspect the experience I am supposed to have, is to find the character of Fleabag enviously free, liberated, honest, truthful before I am to be confronted with the underlying distress that defines her.

If I were to give a really poor, a straw-plot analogy, then it would be captured in this old 'Kids In The Hall' sketch brutally titled for the purposes of this post 'Cheap, Crappy Art' with the crucial line being 'I've learned, that people who seem happy, are often unhappy.' Fleabag series one is a portrait of a crying clown, with the innovation such as it is being that we substitute happy/unhappy with free/trapped or confident/insecure.

The point being, that if you stand back far enough and consider what Fleabag is actually about, it's just a forest, I think you need to watch it from up close to be wowed by the novelty of trees. If you can infer forest from the presence/proximity of trees, without having to stand back or send a drone up, then Fleabag I think has become a DVD to be found at a flea market already. 

There simply isn't the quantity for it to be a Peepshow contemporary, or even Stath Lets Flats which at 3 x 6 episodes feels like a really short run sitcom. But I need to acknowledge that there's one whole more season of Fleabag I haven't watched, and perhaps one day I will.

But I notice again, the huge interval between seasons 1 & 2, such that I'm going to go ahead and just assume that season 2 has its own story arc. The one promising aspect of a second series of Fleabag is the delay between seasons 1 & 2 given that it was adapted from an Edinburgh Fringe show, prompting me to recall the massive drop off in the quality of Flight of The Conchords first and second season, which I suspect was the result of season 1 being based on a massively tried and tested body of work touring as a comedy folk-rock act, and season 2 being produced without that material. But Flight of the Conchords second season, while having musical numbers that were frankly shite most notably 'mermaids' for me it still had more laughs in it than Fleabag season 1.

Getting us to a fallacy I think consumers often make and crops up in other domains, the pithy 'Wagner is better than it sounds' fallacy, where the immediate experience of a thing is actually not that enjoyable or engaging, but a consumer becomes convinced that it, most commonly is 'clever' or that it is in some arbitrary way 'two-dimensional' (an example being Midsommer, which as a horror movie is kind of just a soft remake of the original 1970s 'The Wicker Man' and has similar characteristics like being very bright and gay for a horror movie, a genre that more often relies on darkness, the movie is well made but not mind-blowing, with characters that make dumb decisions in a way that the protagonist of the wicker man does not, but many I have come across seem, in my estimation, overly impressed by the trivia that Midsommer is a metaphor for the failure of a relationship.)

Fleabag is two-dimensional in terms of 'it makes you think this woman has no shame, but actually she is full of shame!' and it's the kind of thing I can't retrodict as to whether in 2016 by September, I would have in any way been impressed by this. I only got around to watching it in 2026 where my learnings since have left me at a place where I don't get it. 

I don't get it's 100% and 91% reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but then, I also don't get how one would review a show that doesn't really have any flaws, but for me, doesn't really have any selling points either. 

Here's what I will give it, especially over Baby Reindeer and Nanette, from all my research as far as I can tell Fleabag is not based on actual events. It feels plausible, and perhaps the fact that Pheobe Waller-Bridge appears to have comic talent commensurate to, if not exceeding Gadsby and Gadd, but far shy of Coleman, Sutty, Tarbuck, Whelan, Phillips, Morgan, Conaty, Godliman et al. it is very good simulacra as in, if you told me tomorrow that Fleabag was really Phoebe Waller-Bridge and she did sleep with her deceased best friend's boyfriend leading to her accidental suicide and the Fleabag Monologue was based on actual events, I'd believe it.

Otherwise, I'd say it was an example of alt-comedy from a point early in a period where the zeitgeist got obsessed with trauma, wearing it somewhat like a jaunty hat. And so maybe I do get it.