Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose via defector.com

Read this whenever you are in doubt about pursuing goals because of what you think is moral or right or correct, when you question everything in the face of the prominent mouths “getting their bag.”

But now imagine believing that victory, whenever it arrived and on whatever terms it was accomplished, would automatically redeem all that debasement. If you believed that Trump winning would mean that everyone who supported him was right to have done so, because they had picked the winner; that the mega-rich AI industry buying its way into all corners of American society would mean that critics of the technology and of using it to displace human labors were not just defeated but meaningfully wrong in their criticisms; that some celebrity getting richer from a crypto rug-pull that ripped off hundreds of thousands of less-rich people would actually vindicate the celebrity’s choice to participate in it, because of how much richer it made them. Imagine holding this as an authentic understanding of how the world works: that the simple binary outcome of a contest had the power to reach back through time and adjust the ethical and moral weight of the contestants’ choices along the way. Maybe, in that case, you would feel differently about what to the rest of us looks like straight-up shit eating.