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Drew Austin on FTX, Silicon Valley scammers, and the ascension of "content" as our highest cultural value.

In October 2016, sports journalist Darren Rovell tweeted:

“I feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”

You can probably guess what he was talking about, but it doesn’t really matter—seven years later, the widely-mocked statement reads like a mantra, seeming to describe vast swathes of contemporary experience. Bad things, it turns out, are rich sources of content (tremendous or not). The collapse of crypto exchange FTX last November was an appalling display of fraud, but it also served as a powerful affirmation of the almighty content machine, that machine’s ability to reframe reality as entertainment, and our insatiable appetite for its output.

The content floodgates opened immediately as FTX collapsed. Twitter quickly became saturated with real-time updates about the ongoing meltdown as the social media hive mind documented and interpreted and memed every new revelation (even Sam Bankman-Fried himself attempted to tweet through it). Then came the thinkpieces and Substack posts, the interviews with SBF himself, and continuing coverage of the fallout. And finally, in short order, the TV and film deals: Individuals in the tech and crypto community, whose own livelihoods seemed to be threatened by what was happening, gleefully anticipated the already-in-progress Michael Lewis book and the spate of movies and TV shows that would soon flesh out the FTX mythology.

PROSPERITY GOSPEL

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