The inverse Veblen

Elon’s Silicon Valley fanboys are deeply, deeply hilarious:

Watching people try to convince themselves that trying to charge for a bluecheck is a brilliant business strategery is like watching someone talk themselves into asking for an extended warranty twice the length of what the Best Boy salesperson is selling. Whatever material value you gain from Twitter comes from your followers, not an arbitrarily conferred checkmark, which is already mostly treated as a term of derision.

Anyway, the idea that bluechecks confer some kind of major value on the people who have them — let alone creating any kind of “caste” system — is absurd, people’s brains drowning in their own beaten-into-the-ground memes. And charging for the checks would make them the opposite of a Veblen good for the kind of people Martinez has in mind. The message paying for one would send to a non-MAGA audience would be “I am a tryhard dipshit paying a tribute to the world’s dorkiest plutocrat with the possible exception of Peter Thiel although he has no leverage over me at all.” This is not, to put it mildly, the status message to the intended audience sent by wearing a Burberry trenchcoat or getting your kid into Andover.

There’s no actual business logic here at all, it’s just “I need to do something to actually make money and this is something.”

The idea that any media organization is going to shell out the price of a new-model Macbook Air to get their employees a negative-value status symbol is even more absurd, but you can’t expect venture capital dudes to understand a narrow-margin business, their confidence that they can understand anything notwithstanding. What’s amazing is that Musk is running a company he massively overpaid for based on the beliefs of this kind of tech bro know-nothing.