In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights.
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Cryptobabble
/krɪptəʊˈbæbl/ (n.)

Contemporary madness among a mewling virtual crowd, cryptobabble is like yogababble, only for those who “hold on for dear life” while disdaining “right clickers”, in the mistaken apprehension that, because this time is different, “we’re gonna make it”.

Related, somehow, to the present market exuberance (@November 2021) which isn’t so much irrational as outright idiotic.

We humans tend to name our epochs in hindsight, by reference to the catastrophe that ended them: “antediluvian”; “pre-pubescent”; “pre-historic”; “pre-crisis”. This habit is wishfully revisionist, since the one thing that cannot define the people of a given period is the crisis that will eventually do for whatever consensus they happen to be in. Especially if they have no reasonable inkling of what is coming.

But these hysterical times may be the exception that proves that rule. We do know it is coming. It does fashion our behaviour: no-one with a functioning cerebellum is in any doubt we are in the end of days, and is making what hay can be made before the remaining sunlight blooms into supernova.

There is nothing to be done: our faith in experts is gone. Our trust in institutions is gone. Our belief in principles is gone. Our hope for the future is gone. No-one understands, or believes, anything any more.

And our collective conviction in a total lack of conviction seems now just to spur us all on: like plague victims awaiting the onset of symptoms, we act out a danse macabre: a desperate, decadent, delirious tarantella, because we are so fucked we might as well roll the wheel of fortune with whatever is left in our pocket, because why not?

Why not just enjoy the obliterated husk of what’s left of our post-historical project, and enjoy the fireworks when it goes up in smoke? We are falling to our deaths, but, like unharnessed skydivers, for whom there is no way back, we have unclipped, resolved to tumble, free and unchained, to make the most of our exhilarating gravity ride to the end.

What the hell: buy Shiba-inu, mint some dopey tweet on the blockchain and sell it for monopoly money, buy Tesla — who cares? We’re off the cliff and there are only moments left, so what else is there to do? Maybe it might even go up!

This is the bulltard era.

See also