On the Money,
Financial Advice for the Working Class
Too Much Information
The average human eyeball measures about one and a half inches in diameter. The population of the earth stands at about seven billion people. If we plucked the eyeballs out of every living human being on earth, we would have enough eyeballs to fill the Rosebowl, the Superdome and Wriggley Field with enough left over to supply three major driving ranges with a ten year supply of organic biodegradable golf balls. Of course many of these newly blinded golfers might lose interest in the sport, but my point is…well… My point is that there are some things we just don’t need to know.
Many say “Thank God for the computer, because now we can solve problems like this without actually blinding everyone. I think computers have blinded everyone anyway, at least to what’s going on in the real world. The computer gives us access to so much information, in fact, we can indefinitely delay any decision by continuing to gather and analyze data ad nauseum.
Take the Climate Crisis for example. By now, we’ve studied that problem long enough to know that its too late. We’ve blown it. Thank God we have all of those powerful computers, huh. The computers tell us that we can expect sea- level rise, polar ice-cap melting, and more extreme weather around the world. The computers tell us that millions of people and thousands of species will perish as a result. So what? Are we going to do anything about it? Fuck no! We know this is an insane way of life. We know we are ruining the planet. We’ve known that for a long time, and we didn’t need computers to figure it out.
Has any of this information improved the quality of our decisions? No. Did I have to Google anything to figure this out? Fuck no! I remember. Twenty years ago people could decide between whole wheat and seven grain bread without making a phone call.
Then, as now, most of the stupid decisions we make involve buying stuff we don’t need. Then, as now, we buy stupid crap we don’t need because most of the information we receive comes from people trying to sell it to us. Twenty years ago, we paid $5 a minute for someone to talk dirty to us. Today we pay $100 a month to look at porn on our phones. We call these “informed decisions” if we’ve seen ads for competing products and compared prices. That doesn’t make the decision any less insane!
Clearly, without this ocean of information gushing into our lives, we would buy a lot less stupid crap, and we wouldn’t miss it one bit. We would have never even imagined 90% of it in a million years, and we would have never wanted it, except that it seemed to make that sexy woman in the ad so happy. We can do without the information just as easily as we can do without the products.
Some see the internet as a great research resource. Hogwash, I say. Ultimately, facts really don’t matter that much in the great scheme of things. There’s nothing wrong with being wrong once in a while, and a little self-confidence will get you farther than all of the right answers in the world.
You don’t need Google, Lexus Nexus, or Wickipedia. Instead, rely on your best guess, eenie-meanie-miney-moe, or just make shit up. Remember that humans survived for thousands of years without the Internet, and most of what they thought for all of that time turns out to have been wrong. That didn’t stop them from infesting the whole goddamned planet with their wretched spawn.
Besides, look at how we treat people who were smart and right, like Galileo, Socrates, Jesus and Wilhelm Reich. Take it from me, smart and right are nothing more than character flaws that everyone would like to see snuffed out of the gene-pool.
Today, we remain every bit as stupid and wrong as our ancestors, and computers have only made us dumber. Information fetishists may quibble, but no matter how smart our phones become, we remain as stupid and wrong as ever. Stupid and wrong is our natural condition, and we’ve done just fine that way for millions of years.
So, If you want to make smart decisions in the information age, stay away from computers. There’s a view of “The Information Age” that’s On The Money.
