I’ve mellowed since I wrote about SOPA last month.

One occupational hazard of being a radical is that it makes you want other people to be as radical as you are. It’s always tough to empathize with other people who haven’t taken the same intellectual path as you have. They haven’t read the same books, met the same people, attended the same lectures, or read the same articles. Their families are different. They may have religious beliefs, while I don’t.

Jeffery Tucker’s essay on the protests of January 18th shifted my thinking.

And who and what started all of this? Strikingly and notably, it was the “conservatives” — or even the “libertarians” — who continued to be oddly confused by the whole topic. It was the “civil libertarians” and people associated with what is commonly called the “left” that became the machine behind the protest. This is a beautiful demonstration that you never really know for sure where to find the true friends of liberty.

People have asked for my speculations on the future of this legislation. My guess is that this protest will effectively kill the current versions of the bills in Congress. They will be tabled, and the corporate interest groups pushing them will quiet down. Then in the summer and fall, it will all start up again with less-objectionable legislation that claims to remove the offending powers, but, in reality, does largely the same. Will the protesters sit this one out, or will they see that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty? In the end, the freedom of the Internet can be guaranteed, not just by stopping new legislation, but by repealing old legislation. In this respect, this protest represents not an end, but a beginning.

 

At least some of my objections came from that it wasn’t “my team” behind the protests. The rhetoric wasn’t totally libertarian and neither were the main people behind it. In real terms, the protest worked. The government and its corporate allies backed down, for the moment.

Self-interest motivated the protests rather than principles.

It’s not as convincing to other people for political beliefs to be dependent on what’s expedient for you rather than a set of consistent moral principles. Whatever gets people to oppose onerous legislation is at least a little pleasing to me — especially when it succeeds in preventing an expansion of state power, however temporary.

Radicals like me are prone to agreeing with one of Lenin’s statements: “The worse, the better.”

The worse it gets, the more radicals there are, and the less lonely it is to be one. But the corollary to that is that you might get machine-gunned or thrown in prison because of how bad it gets, defeating the entire purpose of silently cheering on onerous new laws because more people will join your little club instead of conforming.

Back to the title of this post.

Killing Hollywood peacefully seems like an effective strategy to me. While it doesn’t strike at the intellectual root of the problem, it does attack the financial supply lines to onerous legislation like SOPA and PIPA.

I don’t understand the various calls that I’ve read for “peace” and “compromise.”

There’s no compromise with a gun shoved in your mouth.

The distinction between Paul Graham’s approach and that of Chris Dodd is notable. One wants to beat another industry through peaceful competition. The other wants to send kevlar-armored thugs riding helicopters to destroy an entire sector.

There’s no moral equivalency in that. One is a non-violent call to action. The other is a howl of aggression.

I struggle to comprehend the mindset of the people who made the “I Work for the Internet” page.

I, like most of the faces there, work at a tech startup.

Unlike the majority of the faces on that page, I’ve been arguing against the advance of statism for as long as I’ve been shaving.

I don’t understand the occasional politics. The president is a wonderful guy to vote for who will bring you hope and change, apparently, up until the political system creates a bill that actually threatens your ability to do your job.

It’s fine when car manufacturers, energy companies, chemical companies, guitar companies, meat-packers, farmers, and anyone else that you can think of get subjected to draconian regulation that determines everything that they can and can’t do–

But when it comes to your industry, a totally awesome page full of people springs up out of nowhere arguing against the latest egregious law.

The destructive regulations proposed are no less damaging than any of the other millions of laws that control other industries.

I don’t know if the movement to oppose the legislation will succeed or not. But the hypocritical outrage bothers me.

When I complain about one of the various wars the US engages in, I get almost no backing from normal people. I don’t get the sense that the people in these photos gives much thought at all to the millions of people imprisoned in this country at all.

Moral outrage is only meaningful if it comes from something other than narrow self-interest. For it to have a wider impact, it must be universally applied.

It can’t just be ‘murder is bad, except when I’m killing people’ or ‘government oversight and regulation is wonderful, except when it’s my industry.’

I fail to perceive the moral difference between the regulation that outlaws high-water-pressure showerheads and SOPA.

I don’t get the mentality that cheers when the president announces a round of multi-billion dollar subsidies to the tech industry and then boos when the same guy threatens to pass crippling regulation on the same industry.

When he is doing something ‘nice’ for your industry, he’s the ‘good daddy,’ but when he threatens to do something mean, he’s suddenly the ‘bad daddy.’

Greedy amorality seems like a great survival strategy until someone with a bigger gun comes along. Morality is itself a social technology that, properly used, results in a society that increases in prosperity through the ages.

A completely amoral society always devolves into apocalyptic bloodshed.

The tech industry has benefited massively from the purposefully ‘hands-off’ regulatory approach that the government has taken towards the internet since its inception. It means that venture capitalists prefer to fund tech startups with little-to-no regulatory overhead — other industries are hobbled by the need for constant compliance, regular bribes to politicians, and often (as with finance) near-total domination by the state. Capital flows to where it’s least-impeded.

I suppose this kind of behavior is to be expected — it’s in the narrow, amoral self-interest of internet tech workers to be in favor of regulation for everyone else and to be for no regulation when it comes to their own industry. It ensures that the industry retains its relative privilege, which translates into higher salaries for workers and greater chances of success for companies.

It is also ultimately self-destructive, but not necessarily within the lifespans of the people promoting this state of affairs. The same tech muck-a-mucks who are happy to fête whatever bozo president is in charge with fancy suppers at $50k/plate may die long before the consequences of their appeasement ever impacts them personally.

I see these periodic dramas as a sort of bribe-collection moment for politicians. Tech types are notoriously stingy with bribes. It is a way for the political class to signal that, on a whim, they could destroy the industry. No rational argument, apparently, can tame this desire for destruction. Only a sudden mass outbreak ofbegging and money-raising can prevent the Orc-like politicos from Washington from rampaging through the industry, cutting down thriving companies with deadly cease-and-desist letters.

I, for one, don’t think that my freedom is something that I need to lick anyone’s fancy leather shoes for. It’s not someone else’s to give to me in the first place.

I have been on the other end of calls that this site asks people to make to congressional offices.

I would expect these calls to go to the same places that I put them when I received them from angry constituents — the notepad of some stressed-out, low-level government worker. It would then be ‘brought to the attention of’ some politician, which would in all likelihood never happen. Constituents only meet with politicians in staged, Potemkin events like ‘town halls.’

If you want to have dinner with a politico — a real conversation — you need to pay for it.

Considering the financial shambles that the American government is actually in, I’m more inclined to reply to these sorts of proposed laws with a…

“Do you feel lucky, punk?”

…because the hysteria is just what the political class wants. They want the rending of garments and maybe the formation of some insufferable PAC that will run advertisements targeted towards geriatric voters that have nothing in common with me.

The best answer to this legislation is, in my opinion, to taunt ‘em to pull the trigger.

Nothing good ever came of appeasing bullies.

I read this article about a Brooklyn couple who wants to buy a house but can’t afford to while I waited for my bacon to cook this morning.

I lived in Boerum Hill for less than a year a couple years ago. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for most of my life. Boerum Hill in particular is a gentrifying (read: affluent whites are displacing West Indian immigrants and African-Americans) neighborhood with a stunning number of vacant condominiums due to overbuilding during the bubble. That’s probably eased since I was last in the neighborhood on a daily basis.

Regardless, it the article tells the tale of two public school teachers (whose salaries are paid by private sector workers like myself) who want to buy a house, but can’t.

I struggle to understand the mentality of people who plan their personal finances around buying a house that will make up the majority of their net worth using leverage of at least 5:1 that may be outstanding for 30 years at a much higher interest rate than is sane to pay for leverage that extreme.

The marketing of mortgages and houses eshews the harsh language of risk that would accurately reflect the transaction.

The truth is that couples like this are trying to “save” up enough capital to leverage themselves by 5x to purchase a consumption good that’s subject to high taxes and maintenance costs. They want to do it because at least one member of the couple suggests that television tells them that it’s what they’re supposed to do.

TV rots your brain and encourages you to make stupid decisions!

$1,600 is more than enough to rent a spacious one-bedroom in southern Brooklyn — it would not consign this couple to studio or to a distant Queens neighborhood with an infinite commute.

News articles like this one just amplify the dangerous marketing language of the mortgage/real-estate/commercial banking/government-subsidized-lending quadrangle of doom. The subtext is that this couple has “done all the right things” and somehow deserves to live in the same neighborhoods as families that earn multiples of their incomes in the private sector.

I also read a racial subtext into the real estate purchasing decisions of white yuppies. You can live in affordable housing in NYC as long as you can at least tolerate — if not love — living among people who look different from you and come from a different country. The surcharge for living among white yuppies is a doubling to quintupling of your real estate price.

Their salaries don’t match where they work because socialism doesn’t work. Political bureaucracies decide what these teachers earn and not what the market is willing to pay.

For myself, I will not purchase real estate under these conditions unless the cash price is less than 5% of my net worth. Even then, the cost in terms of mobility, overhead, and illiquidity is a bad trade.

This is also the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve policy and other governmental initiatives to pump up the price of housing. People with ordinary incomes can’t afford to buy houses because the prices have never been allowed to fully clear.

That the couple saves money is supposed to generate sympathy for their fake plight:

So why can’t their savings yield enough money for a hefty down payment? “It feels like anytime we hit around $20,000 something terrible or some unexpected thing happens,” Mr. Kinney said of their savings which reached about $22,000 at its peak. He planned on coming up with another $20,000 for their down payment by borrowing from his pension.

Uncertainty is why you save money and refrain from consumption. The future is unpredictable.

A better dream for a young person or couple is to dream of having enough capital to protect themselves uncertainty. A house is not safety. It’s an anchor to a location that’s usually combined with more leverage than an ordinary person is equipped to manage.

A house that leaves you indebted and stuck to a location in a gyrating market is not a source of protection from the unknown future.

The savings isn’t there to be blown on a fucking granite countertop that you use to distract yourself from how empty your relationship is.

It’s there to make it possible to build wealth and to handle unforeseen events — like your wife getting pregnant, becoming unemployed, getting hit by a car, losing money in the markets, being the victim of a crime, or whatever.

$20k for two people in NYC is like a basic emergency fund that would cover circa six months of unemployment or adverse conditions for both people.

I read an article about how people my age are struggling almost every day. I’ve tried to write about the topic repeatedly for months. I choke on my drafts every time.

A friend told me that I could write a good book on how to get work. I haven’t even started thinking about how to do it.

When people that I know who are still struggling ask me for advice, I can never offer them anything that’s useful. What worked for me could never work for anyone else.

I feel an uncomfortable sense of recognition when I read articles like this one in New York Magazine. I’ve resembled some of the characters in the story over the last few years. I know people who are like that, too: smart, formerly affluent people stuck working in strange jobs for pocket change.

I choke on my drafts because I despise writing about concepts that purport to describe people. There’s no such thing as a “generation.” There are no “millenials.” There are individuals that happened to be born during a particular year at a particular place and time.

Noreen Malone’s article only resonates with me because I come from the same milieu of New York private school-educated scions who expected to be masters of the universe because we happened to fall out of our mothers’ reproductive systems in the late 1980s in a nice neighborhood. This was not true.

It turns out that, in order to do well, you need to be capable of performing tasks, building machines, generating ideas, and collaborating with other people in order to be judged worthy of a good paycheck. Merely attaining a degree in literature doesn’t guarantee that anyone will think that you’re worth a salary.

These trend pieces — and even reports that tout economic data about how so many young people are unemployed or struggling — are useless to people in those positions.

It’s not enough for a magazine to print a true first-person narrative. Editors and writers feel a need to project a narrative onto a trend that can’t be validated. The individual is never enough for these people with no self-esteem: everything must be sorted into a collective.

I have no relationship to the category of “Americans between the ages of 18-29.” I may be a young man who was born on this land mass, but I’m not somehow a fungus that lives in a mind-meld with all of these random people. Neither is anyone that age.

We tell stories to each other to connect, to share experiences, to carry one another to where we want to go. Stories with real people and real characters are more persuasive than a bland, “generational” trend story.

Isn’t a life in and of itself compelling enough to read about? Literature is built on characters and not abstractions.

The thought process that lead to my attaining my current job began with a question that I asked myself more than a year ago:

“What does it mean that word rates have declined so much over the last decade?”

I had recently met a bearded-and-bald author in a Brooklyn coffee shop. At the time, I was in a semi-psychotic-networker mode in which I was exchanging contact information constantly with random people that I would meet in bars and coffee shops.

He told me to get the fuck out of the business.

Word rates have dropped from $8 to $4 to $2 to $1 to $0.50 or less for freelancers at magazines since the rise of the web.

I’d known this for some years already. I’d counter-acted that knowledge with egotistic machismo. I would just work harder than other people and get to where I wanted eventually.

Examining that was not easy. It entailed investing time and psychological effort into changing what I thought of myself. I’d been calling myself a “writer” for years. I was immensely proud to have paid for rent, food, and cover charges at music venues from the proceeds of my typing.

It was also motivated by my failed search for a better therapist at the same time. The best woman that I found out of a dozen charged around $800 a month. While I realized that, while I could pay her, I would probably generate more stress than I would dissipate by doing so and destroy savings.

It’s also impossible to project anything when you’re a freelancer living from gig to gig. Revenue projection is a fantasy that you use to hide from reality and gain temporary relief from the terror of impending insolvency.

To end this digression, I thought more about that price trend. For a person who loves to read about economics and finance, I’d been terrible at applying that knowledge to my career choice.

I decided that it meant that it was the world telling me that it didn’t want what I was doing very much. I would need to work harder for less money for longer for less reward than doing almost anything else.

At the time, I’d recently read many books about trading securities based on price trends. I thought about how I could act on that knowledge, without actually having enough money to invest.

I decided that I would invest my most valuable asset — myself — into some business trend that looked promising, rather than one whose wage rates seem to cut in half every two years.

So, almost two years later, I work in one of the only growing sectors of the American economy. I feel like a bizarre exception, but anyone who has ever met me would describe me like that, anyway.

Prices are tremendously dense packets of information that some of us need to be walloped with repeatedly in order to understand what they’re trying to tell us about what people want and the current structure of the economy. You don’t need to know why something is priced in a certain way to act based on all the human action that the price implies.

Prices are objective. Explaining prices is, at best, shitty fiction.

In the face of plummeting wages for freelancers, the best ‘argument’ I could muster was that it was what I wanted to do. And that was true: I wanted to do it. But prices told me that the great masses of capital did not give a fuck about how I wanted to style myself.

I decided that I could do better at meeting the market, and started reading tons of books to build my confidence enough for me to get me into an industry that isn’t shambolic.

I think (with limited justification) that plenty of people my age struggle to cross the the gap between what the adults in their lives told them that life would be like and what adult life actually is like. Child-rearing in the Western world is mostly an enterprise of preparing kids to join a circa 1955 workforce. Leaving college can be a time-warp experience, especially for those of us with a liberal arts background.

Making that transition isn’t easy, especially considering the economic gyrations that the world continues to go through. Solutions to these life-problems need to come from within, they’re not coming from a politician.