Today’s thought: the pace of change has increased, but the pace of meaningful innovation has decreased. As proof of this, I offer the Bentyaga Thunderclap.
What is a Bentyaga Thunderclap? Well, a Bentyaga is the new Bentley SUV that will be the Flying Spur of VW/Audi SUVs. Which is a nice way of saying it will be a way to spend $200,000 or more on a VW Touraeg. Another way to think of it is that it will be a Lincoln Navigator for people who have more money. As such, it has a guaranteed place on the Mount Olympus Of Loathsome Objects. The MOOLO. I just made that up. But you already know what’s on there, don’t you? Clothing by “Vineyard Vines”. The new subdivision they’re putting up down the street, the one where the homes have crown moldings made of Styrofoam and names like “The Dorchester”. The Hublot Big Bang.
The MOOLO rises in its tin-plated majesty above the Venn intersection of expensive and meritless. Its Aphrodite is Paris Hilton and its Zeus is probably a pre-political-aspirations Donald Trump. We live in its shadow and we are hunted by its residents, who earn bonuses eliminating our jobs then back their whale-shaped Infiniti SUVs over our children. In this company, nothing could be more welcome than a vehicle conceived, designed, and marketed as a mobile intimidatory fortress and statement of one’s recent arrival to confounding wealth. Look for one in the rearview mirror of your four-cylinder Fusion soon, pressing its supplier-milled cross-eggcrate into your mind like Laurence Olivier with a set of dentistry tools.
So that’s Bentyaga, a sort of three-ton vehicular mountebank. What is Thunderclap? It’s a great set of social media tools that allows someone to saturation bomb everything from Facebook to, presumably, Grindr at exactly the same time. If your Thunderclap is successful, it will result in an hour or so of your chosen message absolutely dominating everybody’s Twitter and FB and Instagram timelines. Everybody signs up in advance, hands over control of their public identities to a brand-new app because why not, and then at the chosen moment, that app floods your social media accounts with the organizer’s memetic vomit.
Two of the most popular Thunderclaps-in-progress: a demand to feature fat women 67% of the time in the media and something something about improving the lives of dogs, probably at the expense of children. That’s the future of America, right there: lonely fat women, under-represented in the media but over-represented in dog ownership. I hope Iran’s nuclear program is successful because, truly, who wants to live in a world of braying two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder Dove Real Beauty wanna-bes surrounded by pitbulls and the like? It’s not safe for the kids, not that anybody has kids anymore. Why would you have a kid when you can have a dog? Your kid might challenge your opinion on something and it will almost certainly require your full involvement at some point.
* Choose a dog
* Choose the Twitter Social Justice Army
* Choose a wide variety of plus-size clothing
* Choose intermittent sexual relationships with men who despise themselves for entering you
* Choose to loudly voice your opinions
* Choose a job with no tangible benefit to America
* Choose Thunderclap
It makes perfect sense that Bentley has paid Thunderclap to do a Bentyaga campaign. It makes less sense that Bentley wants me to join it, but I shouldn’t overthink that; they have my email address because there was a time in my life where I thought I might look dashing behind the wheel of an Arnage T.
Regrettably, I’m afraid that I must at this time decline the opportunity to be part of a zombie botnet to benefit the billionaire controllers of a German automobile company who are desirous of making additional cash from credulous idiots and, to be truthful about it, their equally moronic wives. I’d love to help them, but I’ve decided to limit my Thunderclapping to promoting One Direction’s new record and it just wouldn’t be fair to the boys if I diluted my Thunderclap integrity.
There’s no small amount of dark humor to the whole thing, but if you step back, crack off the irony that you have permitted time and culture to shellac around you like a pupa from which you are meant to emerge as the perfect imago of a soul-less consumer, and consider the twinned ideas of Bentyaga and Thunderclap honestly, it is depressing enough to make your stomach drop in the sickening fashion commonly associated with a first-generation Intamin freefaller. How much human capital was spent in the creation of these worthless things, these ideas and products without value? What life-saving or soul-preserving innovation was denied the world because the most intellectually extraordinary people can earn more in the service of social-media tripe or marketing trash to the wealthy idiots of the world than they ever could in true science or art? What could the man who engineered the Bentyaga’s cooling system for Saudi conditions do if he turned his mind to providing clean water for children? What could the team that perfected the Thunderclap’s ability to shove massive amounts of data across the cloud at a precise time accomplish if their mission had instead been to lower the planet’s temperature a tenth of a degree?
We are awash, as a society, in the ephemeral, the navel-gazing, the narcissistic. Our larger problems go unsolved while billions of dollars are spent in search of the “next Facebook” without pausing to consider if we even needed the first one. We are the rats in the experiment who would starve themselves for cocaine or an orgasm or a shock to the feelgood center of the brain. We’re all told that “AGW”, anthropogenic global warming, will destroy the world. And the only thing anybody can think to do about it is to make car engines smaller or put up a windmill. The reason for that is that the finest minds are elsewhere, doing other things. They aren’t worried about global warming; they’re busy trying to make money, and the money is found in the trivial. I can barely tell the difference between Kik and Snapchat but the fact remains that they both exist and there are more Snapchat clones coming as fast as the venture capitalists can staff the pop-up offices. Meanwhile, the major problems of our society go unconsidered.
If Thomas Edison were twenty-two years old today, he’d be working for Slack or putting together a Kickstarter for some consumer gadget. And as long as that’s the case, humanity is doomed. So why not enjoy the decline in the Connolly-leather interior of the refined new Bentyaga GOD DAMN IT I THOUGHT I CLICKED NO
And almost zero mention in the American zeitgeist about the enormous refugee problem tidal waving over Europe.
What could the man who engineered the Bentyaga’s cooling system for Saudi conditions do if he turned his mind to providing clean water for children?
Probably not much, since providing clean water is a known and proven technology. The difficulty isn’t technology, money, or desire. The problem is political. Certain entities want other people to starve and/or die of thirst and disease in their quest for power.
I agree with your general concepts, but I don’t think the engineers and designers responsible for that monstrosity would be doing the world any favors by working charity projects. They’d just be poor and the world would be largely the same.
I guess that thought is even more depressing.
Yes, exactly - there is no shortage of food and clean water where there is even a sliver of democracy and capitalism.
The excesses of Bentleys and Lambos are no different in that they deliver “more better” of every performance element in their class whether it’s luxurious leather or top speed handling.
The exit question is: how much clean water infrastucture can be built in Africa with the funds we’re spending on fighting AGW?
I like denalis and vineyard vines.
“So that’s Bentyaga, a sort of three-ton vehicular mountebank.”
what would be an example of a vehicular beef-witted applejohn?
Lamborghini Urus?
I study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain so that my sons may have liberty to study Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and Miley Cyrus’ worn out ass.
COTD
We asked these 10 people if they thought the new Bentley suv was the harbinger of societal doom, and you WOULDN’T BELIEVE WHAT WE FOUND OUT
New favorite baruth line: supplier-milled cross-eggcrate
But, is it safe?
Jack, you should have included a link to your previous article about the fleeting nature of modern luxury - clearly related and a further demonstration of the seismic shift we are seeing in Western society’s values. Also related - Iphones will now be a service, rather than a product.
“the pace of change has increased, but the pace of meaningful innovation has decreased”
I respectfully disagree. Consider: in the not-too-distant past, directed commercial spam with the strength and reach of a Thunderclap might have been investigated under the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act (18 U.S. Code § 1030). Now, not only does Thunderclap make that legal and accessible, but people opt-in to this! This innovation is social in nature. Somewhere deep down in our DNA, we should recognize that no good can come of whoring ourselves out as shills for corporate entities that don’t give two shits about us as individuals. This shift is both significant and important. Not particularly positive, mind you..
I’ve yet to find a compelling reason to surrender my stance that social media is a cesspool. And you kids stay off my lawn!
There have been a lot of silly “cars” on the road now for some time now. At least to a car enthusiast. However, as automotive engineer, I would happily design some doo-dads for this thing. It will probably make money for VW, which is a good thing for keeping people like me employed.
I think it’s the Bentayga, not the Bentyaga. Of course this doesn’t make a difference to any of the above…
You know Jack, I could get through your pieces faster if I didn’t have to keep looking up words.
Signed,
And I Was A Big Vocabulary Kid
You were probably joking; but today it’s stupidly easy to simply double-click a word, right click and choose ‘search google for “abcxyz”‘, which promptly will imbue you with that with which yo were not heretofore familiar.
A pleasurable side effect of the activity is that the joyous exercise of wading through a Baruthian screed lasts all morning, rather than—as it is for us sesquipedalianists—the usual 10 minutes or less.
Props.
As I recall, Thomas Edison’s first practical invention was a specialized telegraph device that became known as a stock ticker. That not only made him money, it gave him contacts in the financial world.
Later, most of the things the he and his team invented were indeed consumer or consumer related items, and if he introduced a technology, it was likely because there was already a demand for it. Electric lights competed with Rockefeller’s kerosene. He was one of a number of people looking to be able to record and reproduce audio - Emile Berliner’s flat phonograph record, not Edison’s cylinders, ended up becoming the standard, but in any case there was a demand. Motion pictures were an obvious next step for photography.
Edison’s greatest invention was the modern R&D lab, which is what Menlo Park was, but he seems to have been primarily focused with inventing things that had the potential to make a lot of money.
You’re home, in your natural element, Jack.
You can’t not discuss the rabbit hole, because you were designed & destined to, and we’re better off for it.
Welcome home.
Would there be an addon to Thunderclap that would enable me to get 100% ads with attractive women in them, and that would route all those overweight/obese/comfortable in their bodies women’s ads to those who believe that this is either desirable or necessary, as I find them to be neither.
Not that I would for a moment entertain this kind of crap, even if I had the kind of money the Sultan of Brunei enjoys.
A turbine powered modified Nissan Patrol clocking somewhere upward of 200 mph on desert roads, perhaps…but this abomination? It is so bad as to ruin whatever prestige the entire marque once enjoyed.
Today if I wanted to send subtle signals of enjoying massive wealth, I think I’d rather ride around in a restored Checker Marathon (see how I circled back to that dentist reference?) with a chauffeur. Bentley and R/R have jumped the shark.
I read that in Elliot’s voice from Mr Robot. It works.
You left out Fukushima is still pouring tons radioactive underground water into the Pacific ocean, resulting in near extinction level die-offs of many marine species which the MSM refuses to mention. TEPCO’s “ice wall” was a complete failure. So add to your dystopia a dead ocean in our lifetime which is probably going to suck for a lot of us in ways we’ve yet to imagine.
“We are awash, as a society, in the ephemeral, the navel-gazing, the narcissistic. Our larger problems go unsolved while billions of dollars are spent in search of the “next Facebook” without pausing to consider if we even needed the first one.”
…I wonder how the Golgafrinchans are doing?
“We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We oohed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah”
Surely this thing is an indicator of market top. Go short!
Lots of insightful comments so here is one that isn’t,
I’m fine with a world with more BBW’s and more cute puppies. So other then social media which can crawl back to the hole it came out of and die a slow painful death, Long live the future.
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