Like Empires, Prices Rise and Prices Fall (1/4)
Cultural Drift and The Fall of the U.S. Empire
Expedia started running an ad on youtube sometime around Spring 2024. It took me weeks of pretending to search for flights and screen recording to capture. It’s about a ten second shot of a roman colosseum with twinkling, harp-like music in the background and a soft masculine voice that says,
“Like empires, prices rise and prices fall.”
What is this?
Like, seriously. What is this? This is not normal. This is incredibly daaaark.
Have the oligopolists ever been so brazen as to publicly joke about civilizational collapse? In an advertisement? As an excuse for high prices during unprecedented levels of inflation, greedflation, shrinkflation, and stagflation?
Absolutely, Un. Real.
Number go up, number go down — economy go oopsie —little baby-waby shruggy shoulders. 👼🏽🤷🏽♀️
I swear, living in hypercapitalism is like that Fred Armisen scene from Broad City — the entire premise is just so absurd, and the longer it goes on, the more the degradation increases, until… finally… surrender.
Chill Out Bro. It’s Just a Meme.
Well… yes, and no.
This isn’t just the dystopian greed machines being insufferable again, or the tone deaf corporate growth monsters so-called, “missing the mark” — like Apple conceptually destroying the entire history of creativity with a giant hydraulic press, and Google piggybacking off the Olympic fanfare to promote Gemini as a way for children to outsource their personal emotions to a chatbot.
We all know that little girl had much better things to do with her time than lovingly craft a handmade letter from her heart… ick. #ProductivityGains #AccelerateChildhood #ThingsThatGiveMeTheIck
It’s completely par for the Silicon Valley course to see building deep authentic relationships with people you admire, through sincere heartfelt communication, as a menial task to offload onto a chatbot trained on reddit. #OutsourceYourEmotions
But, this Expedia commercial is different than our favorite “don’t be evil” surveillance tech monopoly showcasing the productivity boost gained by shoving ai in the spot where human connection, meaning, and joie de vivre intersect.
This feels very… very — let them eat cake.
So why is the marketing department of a large multinational corporation vibin’ out so hard to that Lil Robber Baron track on the New Gilded Age album? (remastered policy wonk version) Well, my guess, it’s probably just some millennial signing off to trend-hop onto the latest viral tiktok meme, six months after it peaks:
Yeah, sure… It might be a little bit dystopian, but it’s just a trite marketing ploy.
Is it though?
I wondered why this meme was even trending and ended up watching 30 minutes of presumably WEIRD men articulating why they perpetually ruminate on the Roman Empire. And most of what I heard could fall into twoish fuzzy general categories:
Positive Emotional Projection
Aspirational, inspirational, and motivational self-actualization fantasies where men reported using imagination, visioning, and play to creatively express traditionally masculine archetypes, like a warrior’s urge to protect and defend. These practices are reported to be generative in that they create new positive imaginal stories of strength and power, the potential of an empowering future to live into.
Negative Emotional Processing
Studying history to learn from the past as a means of present-day strategic orientation and emotional self-soothing: a way to make sense of, contextualize, and process nebulous feelings of fear, a generalized sense of dread related to politics, as well as worry, concern, and anxiety around an impending fall of Western Civilization. To me, it sounded something like: finding a sense of grounding inside of story, information as catalyst for reflection, knowledge as power, searching for the answers to our problems, and studying models of noble heroism, brotherhood, and leadership in preparation for strategic defense.
History Doesn’t Repeat, but it Sure Does Rhyme.
In a time when ruminating about Rome is short-hand for end of democracy and collapse of civilization — the history channel is being functionally described as everything from a binky and a blankie, to the unofficial sigma male research center for the postmodern man.
Now, let’s take this all with a grain of salt. It’s more like tessography, reading the cultural tea leaves of the zeitgeist. Who knows if these clips are authentic. Who knows if the authentic reports are accurate. There’s no consistency across the questions within the meme’s format. There’s no control for bias. We have no idea if the video curation is representative, or how it was conducted — it’s not a formal study ya’ll.
For now… It’s just vibes.
But vibes matter, so let’s check in with a few other heretics to see what they have to say.
This young internet witch here in the video above takes an admittedly reductive approach to describe this through the lens of the “gender wars.” Rather than totalizing the nature of gender and essentializing sex, they use a similarly gendered language while superimposing the conceptual framework of the anima and animus in Jungian theory, stating:
“Men be thinking about the Roman Empire. Why? Because the connection to the collective unconscious is profound in them, because day-to-day life means very little in comparison with the temporal. The spatial is reduced, unless it is a space of power or a space of comfort, it's generally a threatening environment.
A man wants to erect something that will survive throughout history — this is the drive of man, and this is what has produced man's greatest things. Man erects an obelisk. Man erects a pyramid. Man erects a government, and so on. Man erects technology. These are impositions on the ephemeral nature of time, which is feminine.
Things, by nature, die and go away. No one lives forever. Nothing lasts forever, but men refuse to accept this to the point where the past takes on profound importance. An obsession with history, an obsession with what men have done, and thus what men can do.
Men want to erect the future and erect themselves in the future to immortalize themselves and ultimately immortalize their cock.”
Now, bear with me here. I’ve read Jung, but I’m no Jungian scholar, so I may not be getting this completely right, but… it kinda sounds like the Roman Empire meme is being used as an emotional support penis for men who may be experiencing some form of sociocultural impotence, systemic trauma, and societal malaise.
In my head, “The Masculine Urge” sounds something like,
“I don’t feel safe or powerful in this space, so I’ll use my mind to travel back in time. There I can erect imaginal fantasy worlds with the agency to enact my will, because my subconscious carries the divine masculine urge to penetrate the world with my yangy, penis energy and create manifestations that immortalize my being.” - Imaginary Subconscious Urge of The Roman Empire Manosphere Memeplex
Okay, well that sounds kinda hilarious and maybe mostly true.
Now, let’s remind ourselves of our incredibly robust powers of empathy, cause I feel like we’re starting to tread into online polarization territory here. Get out your Artificial Super Intelligence effigy, your Joe Rogan idol or Sam Harris daibutsu, your Lex Fridman murti or Jordan Peterson patron saint candle, and repeat after me:
Our science, who art in sub-atomic particles, hallowed be thy name; thy cosmos emerge’th; thy will be pre-determined in matter as it is in anti-matter. Give us this day our daily intelligence; and forgive us our fuck ups as we forgive those who fuck up against us; and lead us not into judging and bullying people in our heads, nor online, especially unto those who we wish to talk the absolute most shit about — but deliver us from our ever-elusive shadows and let us walk in compassionate, loving service to the divine sacredness of all life — Amen.” — The Hyper-Rational Omni-Materialist Meta-Meta Know-It-All Galaxy Brain Prayer of Supreme Safe Super Intelligence
We’re syncretistic and non-denominational here, so I invite you to share and send me your favorite prayers in the comments below. The one above is from a church Ayn Rand used to attend in high school. For me, an atheist prayer full of curse words offers just the right amount of ironic-sincerity to prep and support our metacognition in holding our perspectives incredibly lightly.
Alright, so I don’t want to hear any laughing or teasing. It can be far too easy to other, objectify, and dismiss human suffering from those seen as the so-called out group.
So, is the Roman Empire just the latest psychological safe space of the Manosphere?
From the pickup artists to the incels, the MGTOWs to the black pills, the alpha males to the sigma males — are they all hiding out in some imaginary snowflake-dusted secret garden in the noosphere— listening to bro-casts, practicing the dark-forum arts of memetic magick, viking LARPing, server raiding, and wood-carving fascinum together around the digital campfire?
Over a decade ago, Maurice Glasman wrote a piece titled “We need to talk about Keynes – and his Viagra economics,” where he warned:
“If a stimulus package is conceived without embedding that investment in a strategic plan that will lead to the creation of new institutions, then we have a fundamental problem: we are generating debt, not value.
It is the economic equivalent of Viagra, so to speak: what happens when the external stimulus wears off?”
So, has the great and powerful Almighty GDP Penis stopped growing? Someone please write an evolutionary economics paper about how quantitative easing and tightening are just economic jelqing for the societal phallus— you know, the biologically implausible, or even impossible practice of attempting to grow a thing that’s relatively set in size.
And, just a quick note here… I don’t think we ever got those new institutions — in fact, I’m sure of it — that’s why I’m working on this over here. Anyhow. So… what happens if we’re drowning in debt from all directions when the planetary energy bill comes due, but we’ve had economic erectile disfunction for decades and our stimulus package just can’t get up and to the right anymore?
Is the economy out of blue pills?
Well, let’s ask a more experienced, more famous digital witch — evolutionary biologist and former professor turned podcaster, Bret Weinstein.
Intellectual Honesty Caveat: Now, Bret is known as being a particularly heretical witch, trafficking in all manner of contrarian heterodoxy and institutional heresy — from vaccine misinformation to platforming medical quackery — he’s been called "one of the foremost purveyors of COVID-19 disinformation" by medical experts in the field, and his science communication on these topics is described as "totally irresponsible. It's reckless. It's sick. It's predatory. It's really sad."
That being said, this is not about Bret on a personal, or even an intellectual level. We’re tracking the cultural trends, the evolution of online narratives, the sentiment across memetic cohorts over time — not if Bret is good or bad, likable or unlikeable, right or wrong.
Okay, now that, that’s out of the way… In August of 2024, in a conversation with Tom Bilyeu, Bret said the following,
The key thing is, human beings detect the failure of growth because the failure of growth is not an economic fact — it's a fact of resource scarcity, and it has applied to all of our ancestors for three and a half billion years. […] Growth didn't get invented in a modern economic context; economics formalized an understanding of something that is as primal as anything else.
What must be true in order for us not to descend into this other phase, the phase of musical chairs… the Music Stops and there are way too few chairs, in which blood is thicker than water and that's the rule that governs the day. The way to avoid that fate is to recognize that it predicts a great deal about the noises people will make as it's happening.” — Bret Weinstein, Tom Bilyeu 31 Aug 2024
Hmm, sounds like if we want to avoid this, we probably ought to start listening to the noises people are making? So, what are the noises that we’re making? Well! Come back for part two where I’ll tell you all about the noises the culture is making — everything from Andrew Tate to Peter Turchin, and how artificial super intelligence is all wrapped up in this royal bloody mess.
Think you’re Wise Enough to build New Institutions?
If so, there’s a mission afoot. 🤫 We’re searching for those prepared to erect a wiser world. Join us if you truly want to live.
Love this T!!!