If you’re plugged into any of the modern conveniences, you’re probably exposed to some stories about the rich and famous. You could be watching TV, listening to the radio or a podcast, checking out a YouTube video or scrolling social media, and you will eventually get bombarded with what the big bankrolled billionaires are up to today.
Every journalist forces out stories for us to read on who the wealthiest people on earth are and what they are up to or thinking of doing, from Elon Musk to Warren Buffet and more. It’s almost inescapable at this point, and yet opulence remains a popular selling point for online content, so much so that it has its own genre commonly referred to as wealth porn.
What is wealth porn?
The term wealth porn is used to describe movies or shows that depict the out-of-touch lifestyles of the rich and famous, but at the same time claim to satirise decadence, which is used to soften the blow of the absurdity and gives the viewer an excuse to indulge in it.
This kind of work is more similar to those which cite lofty artistic ambitions as an excuse to become an influencer to only later spin up an OnlyFans account; we all know it’s preposterous but yet feel the need to entertain the excuse. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with playing to your audience’s enjoyment in watching beautiful people get naked, but doing so while claiming to be subversive is downright hypocritical.
Once you peel back the marketing layers, wealth porn is a straightforward celebration of outlandish excess that fiat money creates for those who are on the right side of the wealth distribution curve. They act as simple wish fulfilment, allowing the audience to vicariously enjoy the carefree world in which money really is of no concern.
This a concern that reaches more people as the wealth divide grows and money worries aren’t only a concern for the impoverished or blue-collar worker, but the working class and upper middle class too. As more people face financial hardships, it fuels more demand for wealth porn.
I suppose the most trite and obvious observation is that [wealth porn] is a form of escapism, particularly attractive at times when people are facing money pressures in their lives.
Rowland Atkinson, sociologist and co-author of Domestic Fortress
Wealth porn has become a widely popular subgenre of entertainment that spans different mediums, from:
Movies:
- The Wolf Of Wall Street
- The Big Short
- Mollys Game
- Crazy Rich Asians
Series:
- Billions
- Succession
- White Lotus
- Entourage
Reality TV:
- Keeping up with the Kardashians
- The rest of the derivative knock-offs of the above-mentioned reality show
Curious creatures venture into caviar coping mechanisms
As human beings, we are curious creatures and the walled garden that is the life and times of the uber-wealthy do fascinate us. In a fiat world where you’re glass ceiling is firmly set in place for most people, you’re never going to get to peek over that wall through sheer determination and work ethic, despite what Garry Vee tells you.
So if you’re cut off from something, you’re naturally going to want to find a way to experience it, even if it’s vicariously through some form of content. This demand for seeing what fiat success is like has been the driving force behind the shows I mentioned earlier and the massive success they’ve become today.
It’s normal to wonder how insane rich people live, and I get it. Their ability to acquire certain items and experiences or command others around sounds attractive and intoxicating when you’ve spent your life as a wage-slaving pleb, and a little escapism goes a long way.
So as we wonder how the rich live, the rich decide to get richer off of it by creating a genre of entertainment we can gobble up to feed our curiosity but seeing people live lives of decadence might sour your impression of them, so it needs to come in a more palatable form.
So many of these shows are either painting the wealthy as ruthless businessmen and women who have no soul and only an unquenchable thirst for more wealth and power, leading them into all sorts of trouble, or they’re complete bumbling idiots who never earned their wealth and their antics around spending wealth they don’t value.
This form of content is called “caviar cope”, depicting the lifestyles of the rich and famous for the déclassé professional-managerial class. Instead of diving into why the constant devaluation of your purchasing through the fiat system continues to rob you, and wondering why your degree and so-called white collar job isn’t offering you the lifestyle you were promised, shows as this provides you with solace.
Instead of having to deal with the reality of student loans, car loans, mortgage payments and how CPI erodes your ability to save up enough to live comfortably or enjoy real experiences. You can experience the low-cost option for the price of a streaming subscription.
It’s like going on a vacation you can’t afford and telling you the idea that while you can’t afford this decadence, at least you have your morals, or you’re not completely brain-dead dumb. That way, you can feel better about dealing with the next round of emails on Monday that “hope to find you well”.
Crypto culture and the new money morons
Crypto is the natural evolution of fiat money, hustle culture and the drive to attain wealth without work. The sector attracts a host of bad actors who are all willing to lie, cheat and steal their way into consolidating wealth and power for themselves.
In this race, the gloves are off, the risk is totally placed to the back of the mind, and it’s all about trying to make as much money in the shortest amount of time when that’s your goal; you’re willing to do anything to attain it.
Crypto, like wealth porn, is all about selling the dream and perpetuating the illusion, showing your acolytes the spoils of wealth and hoping to attract new followers who think that if they contribute to your Ponzi scheme, they will also receive a taste of that lifestyle.
As the crypto Ponzis compete with one another, eventually, one of them runs out of ways to finance itself, and it all comes crashing down spectacularly. Much to the delight of the average nocoiner, there is no better feeling for a nocoiner than seeing a crypto scam blow up and drive down the entire market and vindicating themselves with an “I told you it was a scam” or “I am so glad I never got involved in that mess.”
But that’s only the appetiser; the main course is when the media begins to cover the failure of these crypto Ponzis and the highly unqualified people behind them. As journalists dissect the fall of the crypto project and the backgrounds of those involved, you get to see, in hindsight, their obvious lies, flaws, and red flags along the way. You get to see behind the curtain and wonder no more about how someone who can hardly string together coherent sentences becomes a billionaire in a few years.
It’s all packaged into a 15-minute news story, and yes, the secret ingredient to their success, was crime.
The average person gets to smugly sit there and think wow, look at all these morons who got rich quickly and lost it all.
These new money morons are another form of caviar cope that only reinforces nocoiners ideas about the space and allows them to dismiss any nuanced look at bitcoin and simply paint over anything with a blockchain with the same brush.
Understanding bitcoin doesn’t only take time but the effort and personal responsibility. If you get into the bitcoin space and end up falling for a bitcoin scam or losing your coins, it’s all on you. There are no ways to reverse your mistake, and you only have yourself to blame. Asking people to accept that is a bitter pill to swallow, so why would you expect anyone to want to take it?
Guilty despite disassociation
Bitcoiners and bitcoin advocates have done their best to put some distance between themselves and the altcoin market, but if you’re not immersed in the culture, you’ll probably miss out on the nuance. To the outside, it’s not bitcoin versus everything else in cryptocurrency, but bitcoin is simply another cryptocurrency with a crowd yelling that their beloved token is better than the rest.
The translation as to why bitcoin is different is lost in the noise. Personally, I don’t blame any normie or nocoiner that takes one good look at all the perceived infighting online and narrative attacked and thinks it’s not their cup of tea, so they don’t bother to research any deeper.
When you live in a world where the media portrays accumulating wealth as losing your morals or being a complete moron, it serves as a coping mechanism for you not to try to attain any. You can sit passively while the little savings you can manage to muster erodes and feel that it’s okay.
Wealth porn and caviar cope are used as a sedative to avoid facing the truth that your wealth preservation isn’t in the hands of a financial advisor, a company or the government; it’s all on you and always has been.
With the help of bitcoin, you need not remain in this corrupt system and find ways to tolerate it; you can finally opt-out.
