the_dunk_tank

People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job at Google every day, and in the real world you attend Bay Area house parties. You just hope this one won’t focus on the same few topics as all the others . . .

“There’s no alpha left in bringing Buddhism to the West”, says a guy in an FTX Risk Management Department t-shirt. “People have been bringing Buddhism to the West for a hundred years now. It’s done. Stop trying to bring more Buddhism to the West.”

“That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup. “There’s no alpha left in bringing Buddhism to California. When was the last time you heard of someone preaching the dharma in a red state? Never, I bet.”

“I don’t think red state conservatives would really go for Buddhism,” says Risk Management Guy.

“Cheems mindset again!” says Astra. “Think about it for five seconds! Buddhism is about self-liberation. Conservatives love the self, and they love liberating things! The only problem is a hundred years of western progressives interpreting it in western progressive terms. Have you even read David Chapman? You just have to rephrase it in the right language.”

“And what’s the right language?”

“Glad you asked! I’m working on a new translation of the Pali Canon. I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’. Some parts don’t even have to be retranslated! The sutras say that you attain the formless jhanas by ‘passing beyond bodily sensations and paying no attention to perceptions of diversity’. See, it’s perfect! Red state conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity!”

“That’s offensive,” says a man in a t-shirt with a circular labyrinth on it.

“Oh, and you’re some kind of expert in offense?” asks Astra.

“As a matter of fact, yes! I’m Ben Dannis-Arnold, Offensiveness Consultant, at your service.” He hands Astra a business card.

Astra is briefly flummoxed, but soon recovers. “So . . . you teach businesses how to be less offensive?”

“Oh no, not that kind. I teach them how to be more offensive.”

“Why would a business want to be more offensive?”

“Well, it’s hardly a secret that there are a lot of woke SJWs in Silicon Valley these days. You don’t want them at your startup, because they’ll demand you change your corporate culture to accommodate them, then leave and do a tell-all interview in the New York Times. But you can’t refuse to hire them either, because then they’ll sue for discrimination. Your only hope is to never get them in your hiring pipeline at all. The good news is that this is easy. They refuse to work for any company that offends them. So as a CEO, one of the most important things you can do for your company is to say offensive things on Twitter about marginalized groups. But you’ve got to get it exactly right. Too little, and the woke people might not hear about it. Too much, and you’ll get in big trouble. Like, imagine if you said something transphobic, and then trans people refused to work for your company. Trying to run a tech company without trans women would be like trying to run a Broadway musical without Jews.”

“That’s offensive,” says Astra.

“Exactly!” says the Offensiveness Consultant. “So we need ways to sound offensive, without actually offending anyone in real life. Just between you and me, you know all those weird new sexual identities you hear about? My firm astroturfed up about half of them. The idea is, founders can say those sexual identities are bad and deviant, and everyone will agree it’s very offensive. But since they’re made-up, no real people get harmed, and nobody boycotts their companies.”

“Pansexuality!” interjects FTX Risk Management T-Shirt Guy. “I knew it!”

“No, pansexuality is real,” says the Offensiveness Consultant. Then he frowns: “At least, I think it is. It’s not one of ours. But to be honest, I have no idea how many people are playing this game. Sometimes I wonder if they’re all made up by different tech PR firms, mirrors reflecting mirrors.”

You worry the conversation is devolving into culture wars, so you move on. There are Bob and Ramchandra in their corner, talking about something something finance. You strike up a conversation.

“Hey, how’s your rapping-about-borderline-financial-fraud startup going?”

“Oh,” says Ramchandra. His face falls. “We had to exit. The FTX collapse really took the bottom out of the financial fraud industry. Now we sell antistocks.”

“Antistocks? Is that like . . . shorting a stock?”

“Shorting is barbaric. Think how nice and simple going long is. And then with shorting you have to borrow from some specific person for some specific amount of time, and deal with margin calls and short squeezes and all that garbage. We asked ourselves - how can we make shorting as simple as going long? Antistocks are the answer. A Tesla antistock is a certificate which obligates you to pay us the value of a Tesla stock dividend each year.”

“Why would anyone ever buy that?”

“They don’t! We pay them X dollars to take it! Then when Tesla goes down, they pay someone else less than X dollars to take it from them, and keep the profit.”

“What if they don’t pay the reverse dividend?”

“I mean, that’s the counterparty risk you take with everything, isn’t it? Home loans, car loans, credit default swaps. If it helps, we’re limiting the product to accredited investors, so they can’t, like, pay a homeless guy $1 to take it off their hands.”

“And you think people will prefer this to just shorting Tesla the normal way?”

“It’s not just about shorting Tesla. This is the beginning of a whole new antifinance revolution. Lots of people want to invest in SpaceX, but they can’t, because Elon Musk selfishly refuses to go public. No one else can get around that. But we can! We print a million shares of synthetic SpaceX stock and a million shares of antistock, each antistock share requires you to pay one one-millionth of SpaceX’s yearly profits to the holder of one stock share. Or, you know how millions of ordinary people can’t afford homeownership anymore because Blackrock keeps buying up all the homes as investment properties? We just print a million synthetic houses and a million antihouses, where the antihouse owners have to pay the average rent in a certain area to the synthetic house owners each month. Blackrock gets to invest in real estate without having to worry about all those boring contingent things like mold or termites, and we can leave the real physical houses for ordinary families.”

“Sorry, but this sounds like a terrible idea.”

“I’m glad you think so! Would you like to be a seed anti-investor in our startup? If you’re right, then our antistock prices will never be this high again!”

“No!”

“So you’re saying you think our startup will succeed?”

“Aaaah! No! I mean - no! I mean - stop it!”

You leave the conversation in a huff, and almost bump into a crowd of people blocking the entrance to the kitchen. “Watch it!” says one. “Shhhh!” says another.

“What’s going on?” you whisper.

“We finally did it,” says a man in a SHRIMP WANT ME, UNALIGNED AIS FEAR ME cap. “We got a YIMBY, a crypto bro, and a youth pastor in the same room at the same party. Now we’re taking bets about who can hijack the conversation most effectively. Watch!” You see that there are three people in the kitchen, seemingly unaware they were being observed. Shrimp Cap Man pokes his head in, and shouts “Nice weather we’re having today!”

“Yeah, California has great weather,” says one of the guys in the kitchen; based on his LEGALIZE HOUSING t-shirt, you infer he is the YIMBY. “Which makes it even crazier that 80,000 Californians a year move to Texas, which is 100 degrees plus in summer and below freezing in winter. It’s not because they like the weather, it’s because California’s restrictive housing policies make it impossible to live here, and despite everything else Texas gets wrong at least you can build homes there!”

“Speaking of building homes,” says the youth pastor, “I want to tell you about a carpenter who - “

“The problem isn’t building the homes!” interrupts the crypto bro. “The problem is that the banks charge such a high interest rate on loans that nobody can afford them. Direct cryptographic crowd loans could get rid of the bankers and middlemen…”

“You know who else wanted to kick out money-changers?” asked the youth pastor. Some of the onlookers cheer, and you think you see a few dollars change hands.

“The moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem!” objects the YIMBY. “If first-century Jerusalem had been vertically denser, there would have been room for banks in the commercial district. The only reason they had to invade the Temple grounds was because of artificial land scarcity.“

“We don’t even need moneychangers!” says the crypto bro. “Automated market makers can do that! This is all so obvious! People are ignoring it just because of a temporary market downturn, but as soon as crypto goes up again - “

“You know who else rose again?” asks the youth pastor.

“Land value tax could have solved that,” says the YIMBY. The crowd suddenly goes silent. Did he just say that land value tax could have solved the Resurrection of the Christ?