Any Redditors on here? I am, because in the enshittified web, it’s often the only place I can get a fairly simple question about cooking or styling or whatever answered. Because I don’t want to spend my whole life there, I’m not in many groups, but one I am in is Boomers Being Fools. For the comic relief.
Friends? Fellow boomers? We are not well-liked by the youngsters.
I believe I’ve said before what my answer is when I hear younger people accuse my generation of getting all the jobs and buying all the cheap houses and then pulling up the ladder behind them, etc. I tell them that I’m very sorry that happened, that I missed the generation-wide meeting where that was discussed and voted upon, and then, if I’m feeling puckish, I’ll mention that the guy who informed my newspaper that we were phasing out pensions and going to 401Ks was way older than me.
But I signed up for the 401K! Glad I did.
Anyway, Boomers Being Fools is a ridiculous Reddit group, with the tone of petulant children. I was on an airplane and there was this whiny boomer lady or I had to spend time in the hospital and the boomer in the semiprivate room turned on Fox News or a boomer cut me off in a parking lot, etc. It’s actually kind of fun to read, and realize how sensitive today’s young people are. I try to please and thank-you my way through life. I don’t recline my seat on airplanes. I return the cart to the cart corral. I try not to be a Karen, and now I have to try not to be a boomer. It’s no use, I fear.
So, we watched “Mountainhead” on HBO over the weekend. You might have heard about it — a feature film written and directed by the “Succession” showrunner, and dealing with the same subject matter, i.e. the ultrarich and the blithe path of destruction they leave in their wakes, as well as their utter lack of self-awareness. (True fact, not in the movie: Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht travels with another, $100 million yacht as a tender. It contains all the toys for the guests on the big yacht — the Jet Skis, etc. — as well as the helipad. It recently traveled to Cannes, where Lauren Sanchez, Bezos’ girlfriend, was to receive some sort of award for her “environmental advocacy.”)
It wasn’t a four-star movie, but I’d give it a solid three, three and a half. A lot of the surrounding publicity is about how fast it was written, filmed and produced, as so much of this world defies and outruns satire, but the punches did land. The outline: Four of these tech titans are having a boys’ weekend at the mountaintop home of one, the poorest of the lot as a mere $500 millionaire. In the background, the world outside is burning because the richest of the quartet, plainly an Elon stand-in, has released an updated version of his social network that allows for undetectable deepfakes that have plunged much of the globe into chaos. He doesn’t give a shit, of course. The one with the slightest trace of a conscience has an AI product that could help users tell fact from fake, but he won’t sell it because the longer he holds out and the world burns, the richer he gets. The fourth member of the group is the elder, has a cancer whose reality he hasn’t accepted because he’s convinced transhumanism is around the corner and he can be uploaded into immortality.
In other words, pretty much the kind of poker weekend you have with your friends, right?
Atlantic story about “Mountainhead,” in gift-link form.
Now our week begins. Supposed to actually get above 70 tomorrow, if you can believe that forecast.