Reality is a fungible token.
You could tell Dave Grohl’s time had passed by the faint tendrils of disgrace and embarrassment curling off his admission that he had recently become the father of a new baby daughter, but not with his wife, Jordyn Blum.
“I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her,” he Instagrammed of his little bundle of schadenfreude, adding. “I love my wife and my children and am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”
I cannot help but feel that a more up-to-date celebrity woulda blown right past the trust and forgiveness content and leaned into the commercial possibilities. Instagram and TikTok accounts for the little one, of course, and an opportunity to get in on the founder level of a cryptocurrency pyramid for her new fans. No doubt Mr Beast would’ve been open to a pitch for a new line of infant lunchables, perhaps with a deal bundling THC gummies for super-stressed new parents.
Seriously, it’s missed opportunities all the way down, Dave. Did you not get the memo? Old-fashioned shame is out of style. The new shame ate its lunch. Truly. Madly. Bigly.
The New Shame™ is a bold, disruptive way to turn your regrets into revenue. Forget hiding from your mistakes—embrace them and watch your personal brand soar. In the attention economy, guilt is just another growth path. Don’t apologise – monetise!
Examples?
Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli, the dude who jacked up the price of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim from US$13.50 to $750.00 per pill, didn’t let his multiple convictions and six-year jail sentence for securities fraud slow him down. Nope. Dude got out of prison and launched his own crypto coin.
Did epic douche-brothers Jake and Logan Paul allow their malignant personality disorders to get in the way of making tens of millions of dollars? A better question to ask might be whether this pair of conjoined assholes could have made anything more than minimum wage if it weren’t for their malignant personality disorders and the sophisticated algorithms force-feeding them to a global audience of gullible incels.
The smart players have realised that infamy banks a lot easier than talent or integrity. And the not-so-smart ones, too.
But while Trump might feel like the OG grifter of the new schadenfreude - in which you take unbridled joy in your shameful shit, I suspect that politics might be downstream of culture in this.
Maybe reality TV broke our brains, not just by giving us an endless human centipede of compelling villains but by rewarding them with the richest prizes and biggest ratings. Or perhaps, as I saw somebody write the other day, it was all Seinfeld’s fault. The Show About Nothing had two cardinal rules. No learning and no hugging. “Its success helped pave the way for an endless stream of sitcoms populated by largely unlikable, self-absorbed characters that get laughs for doing inexcusable things to each other.”
At least four decades of terrible behaviour have been rewarded not just with zero consequences but with actual rewards. CEOs have crashed their companies and cashed out with massive paydays for themselves but a big Fuck You Very Much to their employers and customers. Cluster B personalities with powerfully antisocial personality flaws become ‘influencers’ and ‘creators’ by influencing their millions of followers to create a toxic online ecology that the rest of us have to wade through just to get our damned emails and cat videos. And in politics… well, do I even have to got there?
I got started on this column last week after the first reports of slave-curious ‘Black Nazi’ and self-styled pervert Mark Robinson started popping into my timeline. I really wanted to see where this one went, but naturally, it went where it was always going. The Republican candidate for the Governor’s office in North Carolina is posting through it.
And while a bizarre esclandre in a picayune American backwater might normally be notable only for its spectacular particulars — he did what with his sister-in-law? — in this instance, it’s worthy of note for the way it punctuated le discourse.
Not with a full stop to Robinson’s campaign, but a question mark about how he might go on.
With the support of Trump’s bearded mini-Me, JD Vance, as it happens, who ‘doesn’t not’ believe Robinson that hackers somehow used AI to travel back in time to plant hundreds of comments under Robinson’s login on various porn sites including the now famous Nude Africa. According to the Hillbilly Vanilli, it’s all simply a matter for public opinion to sort out, ie. Reality doesn’t matter; only what people think is reality, as though this ‘content’ exists in a state of being both real and unreal until the public’s attention decides which it will be.
Robinson’s risible claim that he was fucked by AI time travellers is perfect for a culture that prefers outlandish melodrama of Real Housewives over the biological autonomy of, well, women of any sort. Housewives or not.
Having started out assuming that what we were dealing with here and, more generally –*waves Kermit hands*– everywhere was the death of shame, I’d like to make a last-minute substitution.
I think it’s actually the death of reality, caused by… what shall we call it? Attention sickness?
This sickness didn’t happen by accident—it’s the outcome of an incentive structure designed to prioritise the capture and exploitation of attention above all else. The online platforms that now dominate our lives have perfected the science of dopamine hacking, feeding us a never-ending stream of emotionally charged, addictive content. More importantly, they’ve made this science available to the worst people in the world, and as a result, a vast economy has arisen where the most shameless behaviour is the most profitable.
It’s not just the platforms cashing in. Metastasising attention sickness creates fertile ecological niches for millions of little grifters, influencers, and ‘alternate reality’ creators, all of whom have learned to work the system. These monsters have realised that controversy, scandal, and shamelessness aren’t liabilities—they’re assets.
Reality is a fungible token.
The end result is a collective dissociative disorder, where we no longer live in the world as it is but in numberless, atomised pocket universes, all competing for the same quantum effect, for observation to collapse into reality. It’s like Schrodinger’s YouTube channel.
I thought the death of shame was the issue, but in fact, it’s just collateral damage.
I used to feel something about how much it helps to be a vile person to succeed in certain ventures in the USA. I don’t think it was envy exactly—but some kind of frustration. But as I get older and these people become more omnipresent I feel so much relief that I am not like this. It would like living next to a pile of burning tires or rotting offal. While they say when you get used to a smell, you stop smelling it—just the thought of what I was breathing…I would not want to get used to that. But it’s a drag to me as a parent that there’s a whole kids’ economy based on it==that my kid is being inundated with shitty people like this, that they are polluting the landscape.
Am I the only one who thinks that the tribal reality-deficit has a vaguely medieval feel to it? We're a hair's breadth away from pitch-forks and witch burnings (actually there already in some quite close places). And it's not all individualism and bubbles: some of the tribes (like Mr Beast's) are numerically huge.
It's sobering to think of how much of our "reality", the bits that we interact with every day, are not controlled or conditioned by the rules of physics or biology at all: they're stories made up and agreed to over time. The laws, the borders, the in-groups and the others. All narrative. All utterly and ultimately up for grabs.