Project.CARS.2.Spirit.of.Le.Mans-CODEX Cheat Engine
Katerine Aldrige
Yes, ribbonfarm is totally premium mediocre. We are a cut above the new media mediocrityfests that are Vox and Buzzfeed, and we eschew low-class memeing and listicles. But face it: actually enlightened elite blog readers read Tyler Cowen and Slatestarcodex.
At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase. Premium mediocrity is a stand-in for the classy kind of post-scarcity digital utopia some of us like to pretend is already here, only unevenly distributed. The kind where everybody gets a mansion, is a millionaire, and drives a Tesla.
It is a class for which I have profound affection, and one whose eventual success I am sincerely rooting for. In a generally devastated global human condition, the Blue Bicoastal Millennials of the US represent The Little Demographic That Could.
At a more macro-sociological level, as my opening graphic illustrates, premium mediocre is a kind of modern proto middle class, born of a vanishing old middle class, and attempting to fake it while waiting for a replacement to appear under their feet while they tread water. It is a class sandwiched between the crypotobourgeoisie above and the API below.
About the only path to wealth-building available to the average premium mediocre young person in the developed world today, absent any special technical skills or entrepreneurial bent, is cryptocurrencies.
That leaves the cryptocurrency lottery as the only documented way up open to all, regardless of skills. Like many other denizens of the premium mediocre class, I too am aspiring cryptobourgeoisie, awaiting The Flippening.
For the most part, even as the too-big-to-fail 1% class and the tech-nouveau-riche consolidate a new nobility, there is no real equivalent to a haute bourgeoisie class today. The cryptobourgeoisie is a sign that one might emerge though.
People like me, old enough and lucky enough to have earned some freebie institutional capital, socked away some 401k dollars, and earned something of a professional career rep before the shit hit the fan around 2008, are somewhere in between.
This is the tense, fragile, calm of a social order pretending furiously that it is not unraveling, even as a new breed of zero-sum political opportunist is gaining power by pointing out its necessary hypocrisies.
The question is, why? Who is served by the pretense? To what end is it maintained? Is it a useful hypocrisy that leads to better things, or a toxic one? How can you too, be premium mediocre? Where should you get your premium mediocre lunch?
This exception exists because premium mediocrity is by and large sanguine rather than melancholic about itself. It does not wallow in brooding despair about its own precarity. It is not joyless. It likes to occasionally actually treat itself, instead of only pretending to, without disturbing the fiction it presents.
Unlike Blanche duBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, the premium mediocre actively conjure up the kindness of strangers with towel-based personal branding rather than relying on unfocused forces of cosmic serendipity. They make their own luck; they clickbait the kindness of the new elite into their lives by laughing over their salads.
And unlike Micawber, who lives a manic-depressive cyclic life between actual optimistic striving and debtors-prison despair, the premium mediocre merely collect Foursquare mayorships (is that still a thing?) rather than actually striving to become Mayor like Micawber.
Because after all, we live in a more complex age than even the most prescient premium mediocre French intellectuals foresaw. One in which an emerging, not-quite-there-yet middle class must put on a show of substance for two other classes that need to believe it already kinda exists: Boomer parents and universe-denting Big Man entrepreneurs.
In the blame-the-millennials generational war, we sometimes forget that millennials are the children of boomers, and that by and large, broken families aside, there is genuine affection going both ways. It is important for parents to believe that their hard work through the late eighties and nineties was not for nothing. That they succeeded as parents. That they set the kids up for a life better than their own.
It is stupid to doubt this. Parents everywhere generally want their kids to do better than they did, and enjoy advantages they did not. To this end, they will eagerly buy into even the flimsiest theater of success put up by the kids, and avoid asking too many pointed questions that might ruin the illusion.
Equally, it is stupid to think that average millennials actively want to hurt their parents. The minor skirmishing around entitlement, participation trophies, snowflakiness, and performative narcissism is a sideshow featuring other parent-child relationships, not yours. By and large, most young people I know simply want to spare their parents the pain of facing the fact that despite their best efforts at parenting, they are struggling.
And just to make things interesting, you are also saddled with debt from a white elephant college education your parents sincerely thought would be your ticket to a good life and you were too young and clueless to avoid. And to make it even more interesting, the entire economic engine of the Brave New Economy requires you to avow belief in the reality of meritocracy and pretend luck plays little to no role.
If the rear-facing part of the theater of premium mediocre lifestyles is designed to reassure parents that everything is keep-calm-and-carry-on fine, and not falling apart, the front of the house is designed to reassure the captains of new economy that yes, their meritocratic utopia is being constructed on schedule.
That there is not just a meritocracy in place, but that it is a broad-based meritocracy, one where most people, not just 10x programmers, can get ahead through cunning plans rather than desperate gambling.
This part of the false consciousness crafting is not so much a bunch of lies as a bunch of helpful, premature exaggerations directed at movers and shakers, a kind of collective visualization exercise. A kind of collective cheerleading to boost the morale of the heroic world-denters.
Because you see, while it is somewhat important that everybody drink some kool-aid, it is absolutely crucial that the leaders drink a lot of their own kool-aid. The geese who lay the golden eggs must not be killed by despair at the slow rate of progress. If they want to believe the wealth being created by the new economy is largely a consequence of their brave, individual, Randian striving, then that illusion must not be disturbed too much.
This little-recognized dynamic is why almost everybody gets the Episode of the Avocado Toast completely wrong. A clueless millionaire-next-door type, fooled by randomness into believing his own success to be a divinely ordained reward for grit rather than a matter of survivorship bias, thinks avocado toast is a substitute for home-ownership savings. This means the premium-mediocre illusion-crafting is working.
The Randian strivers will continue putting in their 100-hour weeks figuring out obscure crypotography and machine learning problems and 3d printed tiny houses so our premium-mediocre free-riding gets just a little bit more sustainable every year.
We help them believe the new economy is emerging faster than it is, they help us believe we are contributing more to it than we are, rather than mostly just free-riding and locusting. This is consensual utopianomics at its best.
Like wearing a nice sweatshirt, learning the lingo, and hanging out at a hackerspace with a code editor open, looking the part, but only scrambling to learn a new skill if somebody actually hints they might want to hire you if their funding comes through in a few months.
Like any option, the naked call option that is the premium mediocre life has an expiry date. LARPing a non-role in a meritocracy-by-consensus has a burn-rate to it. At some point you have to drop the pretense, yield your place in the lottery to newer players, and retreat to a cheaper small town and a life of below-the-API subsistence.
This is necessary of course, to bootstrap an economy built out of larger collective efforts, spanning hundreds or thousands of individuals acting in coordination on increasingly weird new platforms. And there has been progress. Making dollars driving Lyft is better than making pennies selling ads on a blog.
If we premium mediocre types in the metropolitan neourban cores of the developed world are naked call options, your friendly neighborhood hipster down the street and your friendly online-neighborhood vitamin vendor 12 time zones away are covered call options, but for smaller stakes. They largely only sell what they can already actually deliver. They do not like the high-risk/high-return/short-runway premium mediocre life as a naked human call option in rent-is-too-high places. They tend not to dream too big, like hoping to own an actual house, unless they get unusually lucky.
And at the other end of the spectrum you have the hustler, Max Millennial, arbitraging living costs and, with a bit of geo-financial judo, attempting a Boydian flanking maneuver around the collapsing middle-class script.
Whether he sells over-the-counter vitamins, high-quality backpacks, or internet marketing services, Max Millennial too is attempting to escape the premium mediocrity that his mainstream cousin has accepted.
Neither likes the idea of the performed life of a naked call option, of being a shell waiting for a ghost to be conjured up within. Both seek substance. One seeks financial substance within reach of non-exceptional individual striving far from white elephant student loans and high rents. The other seeks cultural substance far from centers of soul-sucking premium-mediocre consumption theaters. Both work hard at acquiring real skills. Max Millennial can actually market on the Internet and make memes happen. Molly Millennial can actually guide you to better coffee than Starbucks offers.
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