Dilettentrepreneuria, the compulsive putting-forward of Big Ideas, is a virulent, constantly mutating, society-sapping affliction and—even as our attention is rightly consumed with the ongoing tragedy of the Covid pandemic—we are keeping close tabs upon it.
Among risk factors, two are paramount to statistical precondition—
a college (or higher) degree, and
underemployment
Unemployed people and retirees are prone to the condition but the underemployed—those whose spare energies and capitalistic aspirations are not fully consumed by their day jobs—often exhibit the most dramatic outbreaks.
Sufferers can be hard to identify due to the masking effects of some common lesser contagions—chiefly Goldbricki fabulisi and Conceitus pompousum—that cause verbal eruptions regarding the great labors and privations they undertake for their paychecks. But do not be distracted from the underlying pathology—if you encounter an individual disgorging unasked-for cost-, labor-, time-, or society- saving schemes upon you—close your mind to their schemes immediately.
We have been noting isolated cases for years, but evidence is mounting that we are at an epidemiological tipping point. Following are transcripts of three recent observations conducted by The 914’s team of field reporters.
Case 1: More Efficient Refrigeration
SUBJECT 1
Your refrigerator, is it against an exterior wall?FIELD REPORTER
…SUBJECT 1
In other words, if you went through the wall behind it, would you be outside?”FIELD REPORTER
Ah. Yes. I think so.SUBJECT 1
You spend hundreds of dollars a year on electricity for that fridge. Are you familiar with how refrigeration works?”FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 1
A system of coiled tubes containing a chemical, generally a hydrofluorocarbon—a total scam by the chemical industry, by the way, ammonia is fifteen to twenty percent more efficient, far less deleterious to the environment, and a hundred times easier to manufacture than hydrofluorocarbons.FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 1
You see, because it’s so easy to manufacture, other players could enter into the market. And you know how tolerant corporations are of competition these days.FIELD REPORTER
Big business looking after itself, in other words?SUBJECT 1
So, these hydrofluorocarbon-filled tubes run inside your refrigerator and outside, too, generally right up against the back of the unit. And the work the appliance does—the actual refrigeration—involves pumping the chemical through these tubes.FIELD REPORTER
This is where the electric bill comes in?SUBJECT 1
Yes, electricity is used to power the pump that moves the liquid refrigerant, causing it to alternately condense and evaporate. Now, evaporation, as you may recall from high school chemistry tests, is a cooling process. In this manner, heat energy is taken from inside the refrigerator, and then released to the outside. You see the problem?FIELD REPORTER
It fights the air conditioning in the summer?SUBJECT 1
Yes, and it fights common sense in the winter.FIELD REPORTER
But—wait—don’t we not mind heat in the winter?SUBJECT 1
No. But people do tend to mind it when we realize that heat comes at a cost nearly ten times what your central heating system manages. And have you ever stopped to consider what the temperature outside is relative to inside?FIELD REPORTER
Colder?SUBJECT 1
You have an appliance inside that is—at direct detriment to your power bill—keeping your food cold inside your warm house when there is freely available cold air outside.FIELD REPORTER
Your idea is to cut a hole through the wall to the back of your fridge? What about raccoons?SUBJECT 1
Not a big hole—just a drill-through so the coils—which would be contained within an attractive, easily disguised modular unit—can live outside, passively conducting heat outside on cold days and, on hot ones, not adding to the internal temperature of your home!
Case 2: Reusable Local Delivery Bins and Bags
SUBJECT 2
Do you have your groceries delivered?FIELD REPORTER
Isn’t it expensive? I’m just a freelance—SUBJECT 2
If you look for deals and discounts, you find can savings as good as you can at any brick-and-mortar store.FIELD REPORTER
I guess I just always assumed it was for the, uh, more affluent.SUBJECT 2
In fact, especially during Covid, grocery-delivery is all-around more conscionable than in-person shopping.FIELD REPORTER
Because it makes delivery jobs?SUBJECT 2
That, and three other things. First, one truck driving to 20 houses in an afternoon is more efficient and better for the environment than 20 different cars driving to and from the store. Second, fewer people in the store means fewer chances to pass the virus. And, third, it reduces wear and tear—on your schedule, on your vehicle, on your shoes, on your soul.FIELD REPORTER
I hadn’t really thought of it like that.SUBJECT 2
But there’s one problem.FIELD REPORTER
Under-ripe bananas?SUBJECT 2
Actually, the delivery services are extremely vigilant about meat and produce. They know it’s the number one sticking point for customers making the leap to remote ordering—everybody thinks they need to grope the fruit themselves. But, let me tell you, I have never once gotten even a bruised peach. And they always check the eggs at the doorstep to ensure no breakage.FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 2
I’ve tried them all—Peapod, Fresh Direct, Whole Foods—and the only—FIELD REPORTER
Isn’t Whole Foods owned by Jeff Bezos?SUBJECT 2
We’re all owned by Jeff Bezos. But the new administration is going to take care of that soon.FIELD REPORTER
You think?SUBJECT 2
The problem is packaging.FIELD REPORTER
The bananas come in packages?SUBJECT 2
The services all use non-reusable bags. And that’s where I have a solution!FIELD REPORTER
No bags?SUBJECT 2
Recyclable bags and, or, crates! Like milk bottles in the last century—you leave out the old ones and they take them away and sanitize them for a future order.FIELD REPORTER
Nobody does that already?SUBJECT 2
Can you believe?
Case 3: Return of the Super-Ego
SUBJECT 3
Doesn’t it blow your mind that so many people are still such scumbags?FIELD REPORTER
Uh, sure.SUBJECT 3
Well, you journalists can fix it.FIELD REPORTER
We—what?SUBJECT 3
It’s a fall-down in reporting that has gotten us here. Scoundrels are getting away with scoundrelry in broad daylight—we’re putting con-men and serial plagiarists in the White House!FIELD REPORTER
That’s our fault?SUBJECT 3
The Fourth Estate has sold out and let the meat hogs into Democracy’s kitchens!FIELD REPORTER
Meat hogs?SUBJECT 3
The dollars-before-humans plutocrats!FIELD REPORTER
Wait. Are you lumping us all in with CNN and Fox?SUBJECT 3
Sure. There are a small handful of journalistic operations of un-besmirched probity. A few tiny farm-to-table operations not serving corporate sludge. And do you know what percent of the citizenry they serve at present?FIELD REPORTER
Well, judging from our newsletter list—SUBJECT 3
You know where we’re headed if we don’t turn things around, and right now?FIELD REPORTER
More Capitol riots?SUBJECT 3
Back to the stone age. Ken Layne, host of the Desert Oracle podcast said a brilliant, self-reflective thing about podcasts on another podcast called Trillbilly Workers’ Party. Do you know what he said podcasts are?
FIELD REPORTER
Audio programs available for free on the Internet?SUBJECT 3
Proof we are stepping backwards. For a brief time in our species’ history, we were a literate society. Literature—the written word—was our crucible for polity and policy, allowing us to forge codes that were semi-permanent, to pass wisdom from one generation to the next with a minimum of the erosion and exploitation that comes with a strictly oral tradition.FIELD REPORTER
I see. Because podcasts are oral.SUBJECT 3
We are witnessing the wholesale abandonment of reading and writing in favor of babble.FIELD REPORTER
But isn’t anything said aloud still words? I mean, what’s said in podcast could be written down—SUBJECT 3
And would that—in almost all cases—it were written down before spoken aloud. Sentences on a page are bricks. Sentences said aloud are sand. You can build pretty castles with either medium, but which are you going to find standing tomorrow? In which can your mind hope to take anything but the briefest residence?FIELD REPORTER
This podcaster said all that?SUBJECT 3
In essence, yes. Layne pointed out that podcasts are popular exactly because people no longer like reading text. And that it’s getting even worse than that because we are now so far along with abandoning the written word that pictographs—hieroglyphs!—are ascendant.FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 3
What are emojis but picture-words—reading aids for the illiterate!?FIELD REPORTER
What about Twitter? I mean it’s mostly still words, right?SUBJECT 3
Have you looked at Twitter lately? Put videos, memes, and misspellings on one side, and put English words on the other, and let me know what you come up with. And even among the few posts that are composed of proper sentences, the entire word-count is intentionally held so short so that it won’t exhaust somebody at a third-grade reading level. The platform is successful because it accommodates our collective illiteracy! Which brings me back to what needs to happen before it’s too late, before we slip back to an entirely sub-literate dark age.FIELD REPORTER
And which needs to be handled by journalists you were saying?SUBJECT 3
We’ve become a nation where one-in-maybe-three adults is a competent reader and one-in-five is in any longer in the habit of reading their news in anything longer than a tweet. Can you imagine when we’ve let it slip to one-in-ten? One-in-fifty?FIELD REPORTER
There will be even more podcasts?SUBJECT 3
If the Internet is still functioning, perhaps. If the wider infrastructure hasn’t collapsed. If we haven’t been reduced to speaking into glowing cockroaches, hoping somebody picks up our signal from across the radioactive rubble-heaps.FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 3
What needs to happen is that the words need to be pinned down in print and in such an orderly fashion that it causes the individual—for real—to behave like somebody whose actions might end up in the newspaper. We need to turn the Internet from an amplifier of entertainment and outrage—whose explosive discoherence is right now allowing scoundrels to disguise their he-who-dies-with-the-most-wins agendas—into proper, written-down stories. You’ve heard that old caution that you should never do anything online that you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of The New York Times?FIELD REPORTER
My mother says that.SUBJECT 3
No offence to your mom, but it’s the single biggest, most distracting lie of our times.FIELD REPORTER
Because The New York Times isn’t what it used to be?SUBJECT 3
I mean that we have no coherent system that enforces personal accountability on the Internet.FIELD REPORTER
I suppose some people are still getting away with some tall tales here and—SUBJECT 3
And we rubes are sitting around acting like it’s temporary, like our old-fashioned justice system with its years-deep dockets is somehow going to catch up with the terabytes of lies each of a million scoundrels is spewing each day!FIELD REPORTER
You don’t think it’s going to work out? Haven’t we just seen the voters—SUBJECT 3
The more truthful advice would be to tell young people never to put anything on the Internet they wouldn’t want to happen in Vegas. The paradigm is all wrong. This isn’t Big Brother dystopia—our every action recorded and monitored in live-time. This is a digital deluge operated by a bunch of corrupt plutocrats. This is the fountains in front of the Bellagio—spraying so much so quickly and loudly that we’re deafened and drowned and dazzled and don’t think to make sense of the fact that this glittering shiny thing is being funded by an entity—a casino—that exists simply to rob us. And that holds all the cards.FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 3
That’s why you reporters need to fight back. You need to help us restore our superegos.FIELD REPORTER
As in Freud?SUBJECT 3
The casino is just fine with id. Witness our trillion-dollar porn habit. Ego is fine, too. Witness our leaders and social media stars—local and global both. They pour themselves into the wires, spending their talents to keep us entertained. But superego—there’s no place for that! It’s too rigorous, too permanent, too requiring of fixed, long-form, written-down thinking!FIELD REPORTER
What are you proposing? That we write articles faster?SUBJECT 3
I’m proposing we give you reporters a centralized hub and a good wage to report actual facts and stories—real reportage about the superego-hating scoundrels among us. And I mean everybody—from Zuckerberg to Biden to your local political party chair and the head of the PTA.FIELD REPORTER
A good wage sounds all right to me. But how would it work? Like Wikipedia?SUBJECT 3
Sort of. But with a difference. Wikipedia’s system is too exploitable. And too removed from the sources—from the reporting itself. Have you ever been paid by Wikipedia for a reference to one of your articles?FIELD REPORTER
I’m still not sure I follow.SUBJECT 3
Okay, here’s the elevator pitch: Every person in a position of power—a mayor, a boss, a CEO, a congressional representative, a lobbyist, a movie star, a priest, a middle-manager up the road at Pepsico—gets a Facebook page. Except they’re not the owners and editors of their pages. The pages are built and monitored about them by a cause-based fraternity of reporters operating—and here’s the crux—under a code of conduct.FIELD REPORTER
Are you saying we should license reporters?SUBJECT 3
I’m saying that to post to this central site, this Wikipedia with a backbone, that you need to adhere to an oath, much like doctors and the Hippocratic.FIELD REPORTER
And what does this oath say?SUBJECT 3
That’s the part I’m still working at. But it seems to me it can derive from the laws we already have on the books covering journalistic freedom, slander, libel—all that.FIELD REPORTER
Well, that and figuring out the part where you can pay reporters like doctors.SUBJECT 3
That will be easy once it takes off. It will be the hub.FIELD REPORTER
So, written word, plus superego, plus website, plus reporters taking an oath—SUBJECT 3
Precisely. And then it’s no longer just the big Las Vegas fountains spewing their wasteful, quickly-evaporating nonsense among the shifting sands of the digital desert. It’s all of us drinking, once again, from the manageable taps of small-town America. Where what all of what we do gets fixed in writing and there for our fellows to drink in clear, sane, relevant-to-us portions. All the salient, reported things you’ve done, said—prioritized and judged by the adoring, or critical, public. A digital superego for each of us! The database technology has been there for twenty years—it only needs us to have the courage to get it off the ground.FIELD REPORTER
. . .SUBJECT 3
Intriguing, am I right? Would you be willing to work on the oath with me?
We had hoped Dilettantrepreneuria would have been slowed or even halted by life in lockdown—that, absent in-person social pressure and proximity, the disease would have loosened its hold on the minds of those not fully engaged with this moment’s capitalistic exigencies.
But these three examples come from a single week’s reporting—one parking lot conversation, one at a dog park, one pharmacy line. The person with the outdoor heat-exchange notion for refrigerators is a corporate attorney. The person with the idea for reusable grocery-delivery boxes and bags is a high school French teacher. And the person with the idea for an Internet-based superego that somehow pays reporters works in educational textbooks.
It appears that social distancing and the cessation of indoor activities ranging from religious worship to racquetball to commuting may have created ideal incubation conditions for another virus that diverts minds from their intended pursuits and shunts them onto tracks that do not stretch to capitalisms carefully determined destinations.
Fortunately, our reporters—journalists entirely dedicated to their chosen profession—are immune to the condition and we are hopeful the new administration in Washington, D.C.—in concert with local leaders including Administrator Shapiro, Supervisors Carr, Puglisi, Parsons, Fulgenzi, Shapiro, Lucas, Levenberg, Hansan, Morrissey, Slater, and Mayors Knickerbocker, Pugh, Pucinich, Scherer, Levin, Vescio, Rainey and Garcia—will direct their attention to this fearsome disease just as soon as the more immediately deadly virus has been vaccinated away.
The last thing our region of temporarily embarrassed millionaires needs is for this pipe-dream disease to distract from our economic build-back. Radioactive cockroaches could be the least of our problems if we do not get back on track, and soon.