The Scourge of Greatness

We’re in world undergoing a massive greatness transformation.

Everything in the modern world is superlative - the deceits of attention media, the expansiveness of the surveillance state, the opulence of wealth inequality, the efficiency of the propaganda convincing you this doesn’t matter, and, the intransigent apogee of human conceit, AI. Good will never be enough again because everything exists in gravitational orbit of an impossible preeminence. 

Intelligence is greatness and greatness is intelligence, and this too is being assimilated into the market commodity trough to be parceled into ‘individual’, ‘team’ and ‘enterprise’ intelligence pricing plans. The highest levels of intelligence, naturally, are ‘founder’ class - for those comfortably sequestered in the impeccable security apparatus of luxury doomsday bunkers and powerful rockets and private militias, jabbing pins into a fractured society, preserving an aperture deep enough to weaponize fear, yet maintain a fragile compliance through material distraction. 

This greatness, semiconscious within it's perverted havoc of tariffs, fuel shortages, food insecurity, war, medical debt, low wages, union busting, mass surveillance, social engineering, media gaslighting, institutional corruption, market manipulation, human trafficking, civil rights violations, climate apocalypse, and economic dystopia, is, in essence, a perfectly calibrated enshitification machine, gilded in resentment, morally bankrupt. 

Nowhere is this derangement on display more than the current job economy: the greatness complex untethered as an AI intoxicated wasteland of fake listings, scams, corporate deceit, and low wage exploitation. Here, it is not enough to have followed the path to the middle class template of higher education, internships, volunteering, independent study/training, grinding low wage ‘entry level’ jobs for the experience, and years of skill refinement for an expectation of professional advancement.

Instead, a decade deep along a path, there are no steady gains toward a comfortable wind down into something resembling financial homeostasis and you find yourself starting over - older, poorer, suddenly unqualified for little more than the carousel of gig work.

The market conceit of the gig being it’s endgame state which, second only to total human replacement and automation, is the closest one can get to undiluted capitalism; the greatness economy having nearly fully reshaped the relationship of worker and employer into a be your own boss feudalism, guided by the invisible hand, algorithmically gamified to the point that a job isn’t a job, but a casino game, a betting platform, a marketing pitch, a hustle to nowhere. Stable, well compensated, benefited, accountable employment arrangements are inefficiency. Freedom is insecurity.

Greatness is a political buzzword for the incredulous, the generationally atrophied, culturally ignorant, and the ultra-wealthy. It is a meaningless adage to hide evil and incompetence behind a flag, a nation, historical myth, brainwashing theology, and a malignant cult of individualism cast as unencumbered freedom. Late stage capitalism is a psy-op designed to addict us, sell us, numb us, or enrage us. This is the ideal formula for consumptive compliance and docile acceptance of the rapid erosion of our rights.

If there has been any greatness in the last fifteen years, it has been the greatness of the betrayals. The promise of technology as a force of good, of social improvement, of equality of opportunity has been a campaign of large scale resource depletion, wealth consolidation and data mining. The promises of higher wages, better jobs, affordable housing, child care, health care, lower food costs, corporate accountability, institutional reform, and every other vacant campaign pitch has been one continuous two decade policy failure. 

Now, we wage more war under crushing debt at the behest of the same depraved, brain damaged elderly men. We pour the remaining billions into domestic military, surveillance, and resource extraction because the benefactors of the largest wealth and power consolidation in history are nihilistic, emotionally deficient children who must nourish their derangement and social antipathy with tools of manipulation and control, hidden behind worn out promises of personal liberation through technological servitude, the myth of civilizational superiority through rendition to their singular vision. 

So the greatness lingers, the empire decays, and a sensible future waits in vigil for the scourge to lift.