michael lewis agonistes

 

I have long liked Michael Lewis for one thing: the long essay he wrote after Hurricane Katrina about coming back to New Orleans. In that essay, he defended Nola from the foxification, that is, the racist demonization, that excused the inexcusable U.S. neglect of one of the world's great cities.

So, I felt I owe him one. Well, now the debt is paid. He "embeds' himself with SBF - already a vile and emptyheaded move for a reporter - and then gives us a portrait of a true privileged monster, a man who mistakes intelligence for the mastery of a few video games. A man with no ethics, no organization, and an insatiable greed. Who is his "hero". Whose innoncence, as he put it on Sixty minutes, is a thing he wants to communicate to the jury.

Michael Lewis is not, of course, the only one. The NYT coverage of SBF has leaned over backwards to tell his tale. This is a story of backstage image management that could only be explained by the fact that the parents of the involved know the media honchos who run the presses. But even with favorable NYT coverage - starting back from when they gave him a chance to "share" his story on their stage for some event after FTX fell apart - they are, reluctantly, covering the unfolding of eyewitnessed detail that pretty much sinks the image of Sam Effective Altruism Bankrobber-Fried. Lewis seems as clueless about cryptocurrency platforms as many people of his generation are about the Nigerian email scam.
Pathetic and so so typical.

The thing about that 60 minutes interview that is little commented is how bad the interviewer - Jon Wertheim - is. Whe Lewis says FTX collapsed because of a bank run situation, Wertheim should have stopped him and said FTX was not at all like a bank. A
bank is legally entitled to loan the money you deposit out. The FTX platform
was more like a safety deposit box. You are charged a fee for having the box,
but if the company actually opens the box and uses your stuff, that is called
theft. Pretty simple distinction. That Wertheim apparently knows NOTHING about
FTX makes me wonder - what is the use of television interviews? The NYT had a
story about the average age of network tv viewers now being like 65 - my age. I
think this is partly because tv viewers of a certain generation just got used
to this flatheadedness. But one of the wonderful things about social media and
cable is: this kind of bunk calls out to be de-bunked.