2024 is a magical year, and we're lucky to live in it
This issue is stacked with Terminator 2 references
Hi, everyone. It’s been a busy week with professional stuff (🤞), and my family is off for our summer vacation tomorrow. (Our flight was canceled 36 hours in advance. I have no idea if it’s because of the Crowdstrike thing that bluescreened the whole world yesterday.)
This week:
Our bleak future isn’t what you’re imagining
We’re just going to forget about the Trump shooting, right?
Men’s products must be stopped
Rangelife Shorts
Your dark vision of the future is all wrong
It’s a beautiful time to be alive, and we’re so lucky to experience 2024.
Sure, it wasn’t a great week. In my little world, an email thread with friends got really dark. Middle aged dudes are not doing great.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. Despair has been a broad theme in many of my conversations with friends and family this year. It’s bizarre how everyone, of all cultural stripes, imagines we’re all heading toward a dystopia that looks exactly like their worst nightmare. Talk to a MAGA or a neocon or a Christian nationalist or a liberal Zionist or an MSNBC Brain or a college TikTok socialist or a libertarian or an ex-Republican centrist about the future we’re sprinting toward. Their various dark fantasies will splinter in places and converge in others, but they will all look like a combination of Stalinist Russia and maybe The Handmaid’s Tale, but with different victims of oppression.
But also none of their fantasies will actually come true in any way that resembles what they’re imagining. The future just keeps happening, driven by forces larger than any one person’s or cartel’s whims.
I’m not immune to these despair spirals. I didn’t sleep for a week after that presidential debate. Am I the only one who imagines Stephen Miller ecstatically stroking his thighs as he approves the plans for sadistic concentration camps for the people who booed him in high school? You see, I have my own dark waking nightmares!
Hollywood has also given us lots of visions of how humanity could destroy itself. My son and I watched Terminator 2 the other night, and the early robots-vs-humans battle scenes take place in 2019. SkyNet became self-aware in 1997. Odd years are always scarier. (BTW, this movie is fascinatingly Gen-X coded because it was released in 1991, another scary odd year.)
It was 24 years ago that Bill Joy wrote the most terrifying essay ever, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” a treatise on all the technologies that might wipe out humanity. Wired’s techno-optimism, coinciding with the dotcom 1.0 era, made it one of the world’s most important new media brands. This essay happened to appear in Wired in April 2000, just as NASDAQ started melting down, marking the ends of the dotcom financial bubble and Wired’s bubble of optimism. (Incredible timing.) This essay shook a lot of people deeply. Honestly, if you told me in April 2000 that I’d still be blogging about that article in 2024, I’d be delighted to know that the world was still here!
But also, I’m not ready to give up on the future, or to stop appreciating the present. I’m genuinely grateful for all I have. The climate is broken, but the weather is nice most days. I’ve been unemployed for months, but my family isn’t skipping any meals. We could have been born into Gaza or Siberia or Sudan, but our Safeway has butter and eggs and fresh fruit every day. Reagan, Bushes, and Trump have run the government for 24 of the past 44 years, but… I don’t know. Very little has gotten fixed. But we’re still here.
Gratitude is like a superpower we all have, but we usually forget to use. 2024? Not too bad.
Are forgetting about the Trump assassination attempt yet?
One week ago today, a young man tried to shoot Donald Trump. I say “tried to” because it’s not 100% certain that any part of the bullet actually hit Trump, or if it was just shrapnel from something a bullet actually hit. Trump predictably won’t release the medical report, so we’ll never know. Remember when he got COVID a few weeks before the 2020 election, and nobody knew for a whole weekend whether he was alive or dead or on a ventilator? Transparency is for suckers.
Either way, the assassination attempt was a scary situation, and a man attending the rally died from his wound. Trump turned his death into a prop at his RNC speech.
This assassination attempt was also really confusing because it didn’t conform with our political narratives, so people had to invent new ones. For the first couple days, the news cycle spun around the theme of “political violence,” but the young man didn’t seem to have a political beef with Trump. His family was MAGA and had placed Trump signs in their yard, and he himself had a conservative rep among his high school peers. He chose a weapon that was inappropriate for a sniper situation. His Google search history shows that he probably picked a Trump rally over a Biden rally because it was a short drive from his house.
This violence may not have been any more “political” than John Hinckley shooting Ronald Reagan to get Jodie Foster’s attention. (Hinckley today is asking for the violence to stop, please.)
The political pundit class shat out an even grosser narrative than “political violence,” declaring Trump the presumptive winner of this and all future elections, based on that photo with blood on his face and his fist in the air. This is the kind of dumb hyperbole you say out loud when you’re on TV and want to get invited back, but of course it’s profoundly ignorant of the modern attention span of our hyperfragmented media environment.
Of course, everybody is going to mostly forget about this shooting in another week. Trump makes more news in four hours than most countries do in a month. It’s why nobody can stop talking about him.
Jason Pargin did a good TikTok about just how fleeting some supposedly world-shaking stories can be, especially when they don’t fit a narrative or inspire arguments. His example is from December 2020, when a guy drove an RV armed with a massive bomb into the Nashville tourist district in the middle of the night, and destroyed an entire city block. Remember that? I didn’t, to be honest.
In fact, as far as I can see, there’s one narrative that should stick to the assassination attempt, and probably would if the Democrats had a leader who communicated clearly, instead of doing whatever Biden is able to do at this point.
And that narrative is: America is awash in guns, maybe 377 million of them, more than one gun per human in the USA. And America is also awash in unwell people who should absolutely never touch a loaded firearm. I’m not afraid of AI with guns.
Large majorities of Americans support national restrictions on what kinds of guns and magazines can be sold and who can buy them. As guns replaced pickups as the primary prop for Tactical Dad cosplay, the number of mass shootings increased geometrically. In the 1980s and 1990s, these shootings primarily targeted young Black and Latino men, with their families sometimes caught in the crossfire. This motivated Congress to do almost nothing beyond “more prison.”
Some of us naively believed that maybe a really high-profile shooting of affluent white people would move Congress to finally regulate guns like every other country in the world has.
Then two boys shot up a high school in Littleton, Colorado, an affluent suburb. That got us a feckless “assault rifle ban” that didn’t do much and then expired. And mass murderers continued to deliver more victims who should have moved the needle, politically. One guy massacred a first grade classroom in Newtown, Conn. (The survivors just graduated.) Another shot up a high school in Parkland, Florida. Another an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando. A Wal-Mart in Texas. A synagogue in Pittsburgh. One guy opened fire on a Las Vegas country music festical, wounding or killing more than 500 people, most of them white and likely conservative. Even a pro-gun Congressman got shot at a softball game in DC!
It turns out that it doesn’t matter how much political power the victims families’ had, because the gun industry has mrore. For each of these massacres, pro-gun-industry politicians deflected to the “mental health crisis” in America.
Well, Trump’s would-be sniper grew up the son of two mental health professionals. He had plenty of access to mental health services, but he also had plenty of access to his dad’s AR-15.
The cops saw the shooter walking outside the Trump rally with an AR-15, and they didn’t do anything because he was just manifesting his Second Amendment rights. Trump tends to bring these people out.
I think 377 million guns in America is too many. I’m also confident that, say, 100 million guns is too many.
People are shooting kids, teens, parents, grandparents. And for every three murders, four people commit suicide with their guns.
But the gun industry has captured Republican primary voters, as well as most rural and many suburban elected officials. And the Supreme Court has for the past 30 years ignored the muskets-and-bayonettes context of the Second Amendment (and the entire “well regulated militia” clause). Last month, they ruled that people have a Constitutional right to own a bump stock that turns a semiautomatic rifle into an automatic one, thus overturning a restriction passed by Congress and signed by Trump(!) following the Las Vegas massacre. Even the NRA supported that restriction!
Now a recent high school graduate with very poor training came within inches of murdering a presidential candidate. The wake-up calls have all been rung. But the gun industry and right-wing ideology are keeping us in bed.
Harassed by men’s brands
They call it the “pink tax.” This is when a company creates a specific “women’s” version of a product, and charges more for it, because they can. The original example is razors — multiple companies starting marketing pink disposable razors that were nearly identical the black ones they sold to men, but they charged 40% more. Today, the California Senate estimates that women pay $2,381 more per year than men do for the same products.
The Pink Tax is gross and awful, and probably legal because nobody has to buy these products — they can just buy the cheaper version that isn’t pink.
Consumer goods companies realized decades ago that women will research the products they put on and in their bodies, and that trends can move markets.
Over the past few years, consumer packaged goods companies have dealt with another problem, differently: Men.
Men want to take care of their health, their bodies, and their looks. But many men have an innate fear of deviating from a very narrow path of what makes a man. If an American man were desperately digging through his bathroom for a razor, and the only one he could find was pink, he’d show up to his own wedding with a next-day shadow.
In the USA, Axe was a real pioneer in this space. How do we sell perfume to men? Call it body spray, name it after a violent hand tool, and promise that it will literally turn your life into a porno.
But today, every consumer goods company has learned Axe’s lesson. Men need to be reassured that this beauty product isn’t for girls, and also you’re not gay if you buy it.
Take a walk down the men’s product aisle, and you’ll see any number of brands that promise either sex or random violence. Hair conditioner? “Joker’s Killing Spree Mane.” Daily SPF-30? “Cyberdyne T-1000 Cream.” Cuticle treatment? “Rock Hard Titty Stroker.”
Much like the Pink Tax, these products are often priced much higher than nearly identical products. Call it the Axe Tax.
I may start Babygirl brand. Just imagine it. “Babygirl: personal care for dudes who aren’t obsessively worried about their sexuality. Babygirl: non-toxic product names for non-toxic products.”
Rangelife Shorts
Bitcoin farm sickens a whole town. We’ve learned a lot in recent years about how noise pollution can impact human health. And it’s probably safe to assume that it affects the health of other living things, too! In this case, a loud hum from a large-scale Bitcoin farm appears to sending its neighbors to the hospital. Here in San Francisco, an EV charging station has made a city block intolerably noisy. It doesn’t have to be like this.
First time hearing Wu Tang’s “Protect Your Neck.” There’s something so pure about “first time hearing” videos. It’s also gratifying for an Old to watch a Young listen to something 30 years old and declare, “This is awesome.”
Being famous is getting harder. Chappell Roan is a pop star who blew up this summer. (Some of you probably already know that, but I can see the demographics of Rangelife’s readership.) Roan’s not only experiencing the benefits of fandom, but also the price, meaning young fans stalking her and her family. So she said she’s going to try to stop getting more famous while also continuing to grow her career as a pop music artist. Good luck with that! Online fandoms are very bad these days, with people trying to outdo each other to be the Biggest Fan. We’re about 10 minutes from some 19-year-old making a skinsuit out of a TikTok ASMR creator.
The US economy is the envy of the world. While the rest of the planet is still muddling through COVID recovery, the US has been absorbing 1/3 of the world’s investment capital. It’d been cool if someone whom the press wanted to listen to could speak clearly and authoritatively about how amazing that is!
Yeah, I’m off for vacation. I’m not saying “everything will be fine,” but remember that some dumb kid came a few inches from permanently altering America’s political future in ways we can’t predict. We never really know what’s next. The future has not been written. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.