In which after the second day of the Bioneers Conference, I am convinced again that the concept of “money” is basically false

 May 15, 2022

I just “went” to two days of the Bioneers Conference. Well, I did it the way that we’ve had to do things for a while now. I live-streamed the conference. I’m writing this on the third day of the conference, which I’d decided not to attend. However, the speakers changed, and I’m now sort of wishing I could hear a few of the speakers that were brought in as replacements. This post is sort of about some of them. Regardless, I made my choice though.

I don’t really yet know how to broach this conversation and whether to do it with or without names. But something has come up in the way that “the culture”, broadly speaking, and the literary world in particular, disposes of certain viewpoints. In a very insidious way it disposes of people. 

I don’t really want to get into the specifics of a certain prominent national security and technology publication and associated drama, but in a serious way - what the fuck? Who benefits from that? Some other guy I’m thinking about right now is an example of what we can see happening on these publications. I wonder if it is a factor of the legacy of the money-obsessed New York publishing paradigm, but regardless, it is wrong to buy out and dispose of people that you actually just don’t understand. 

What I’ve noticed often is something like this: someone writes for a publication for a short amount of time, in this unspecified relationship that they sometimes call at-will employment, but the overall reality exceeds the bounds of that definition. During the time of employment, they are treated like a specialist in something, and then when the employer grows tired of this specialization I suppose, the relationship ends when the author gets kind of pigeonholed into writing an article that is supposedly, under this system, supposed to reveal exactly who they are. Their writing at that time becomes in a sense a self-definition, but more like a confession of their identity under a sort of ill-defined threat. Then they are effectively canned, and they “move on.”

Who benefits from this? Of course it’s an assumption that everyone is really only writing about themselves, and not another or a group or an idea. Of course it’s a bad assumption that if someone is even in “the zeitgeist” they are only still writing about themselves. It’s an absurd privileging of personal experience over critical thought. But who benefits? Those stirring up panic over all the good that we don’t know, and those that are out-and-out liars about what we don’t know - and globalism, and so forth: do they benefit? The propagandists and so on: generally, those who are uppity about knowing more than the average bear - they benefit, but only off of the delay. In looking for evidence of enormously important things we don’t yet know, aren’t we blinded by a pride that says they couldn’t possibly be better than us, or better than what we think they could be? 

I’m not convinced of this thread of treating every employee as a sell-out. I’m not convinced that this system that employs writers on the basis of a relationship where the employer takes a part of your soul, is actually resulting in anyone knowing anyone any better - I’m definitely unconvinced that it is resulting in more people knowing the truth about what kind of people are really out there. 

A not-insignificant portion of this does have to do with right-to-work paradigms and, like I said, the at-will employment contract system. But the problem does exist in the general ignorance propped up by a system where money can pass as knowledge and the problem is not restricted to the existence of a few legal structures. Money can only pass itself off as knowledge when some knowledge is sequestered and locked away from most people - forbidden to know about except for a few. 

To risk being too esoteric, this generalized ignorance seems to be a bastardization of the theory of social contract. To be clear, I’m not saying that the social contract is money; I’m saying that money is the foremost misuse of social contract theory; it is based on ignorance and racism, and it is bolstered by the oppression of certain real people; and until we sideline discussions of money, and privilege knowledge instead, we will have no way to see what social contract theory is. 

I’ll leave it with this, there, for now.