I subscribe to the great newsletter Reimagined by Nicole Cardoza (who, by the way, turns out to be a magician and now I hope to see her whenever she tours next), formerly Anti-Racism Daily, and the latest piece was about the weird publicity stunt of Blue Origin sending Katy Perry and an all-women group up into to space, presumably to promote and normalize space tourism.
Cardoza points out that while many people think that the science that NASA does is important, space tourism isn’t exactly a priority.
Yet, the current Republican administration seems focused on doing the opposite of what we, the people, want, and the marketing campaign to send an all-women crew seems to be out of step with the demolishing of DEI and erasure of women astronauts, among other prominent women in other industries and in history in general.
These private companies need public dollars to achieve their goals – including their hopes to scale their own commercial flights. That means that for this to work, the government will have to cultivate awe – not just for space exploration, but the billionaires that now govern it. It doesn’t help that Bezos and Musk, the new faces of space exploration that own Blue Origin and SpaceX, respectively, aren’t exactly media darlings. We deserve to be treated as active investors in this endeavor, not just people in the audience.
I liked this part. I think it captures some of what bothers me so much in tech and in politics. Many years ago, I remember Microsoft was going to invest a lot of money into schools to teach copyright to the youth.
That sounds kinda great, except when I read that it was geared towards teaching them to respect the creative works of major companies such as Microsoft, instead of teaching them that they, too, can create and enjoy the protections of copyright.
Basically, instead of teaching how copyright is for everyone, they just wanted to train everyone to be good consumers.
It was gross then, and it is gross now.
The destruction of the American government that has occurred over the last few months can be summarized roughly as the incredibly filthy rich thinking that they should control the fate of everyone else. The rule of law, equality before the law, checks and balances, regulations, etc … all of that just gets in their way.
And they strongly believe that they have the right and duty to get rid of it, and that your role is to be subservient to them, to be good consumers.
They expect everyone else to passively accept it.
As Cardoza says, we deserve to be treated as investors. But the rich and powerful are moving fast, because breaking everything quickly before everyone realizes how invested they were in the existing system means it is harder to recover.
I’m not sure how many people have come to the realization that there is no reversal of course, that we can’t go back. Our reputation in the world is in tatters, our systems are broken, and the only options are to dream up a new world order that is more in line with what we, all of us, want rather than what a handful of incredibly wealthy people had come up with.