The Lameness of TIME's "Person of the Year"

In The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen held that the "habit of invidious comparison" was part of the package of barbarian rather than civilized thinking. Unsurprisingly in an age in which all that he described as barbaric makes up the "common sense" of contemporary life, not least inegalitarianism; and Big Media is living down to Veblen's view of them as a reactionary force in The Theory of Business Enterprise in promoting the tendency; said media subjects the public to ceaseless claims about who is the "richest," the "most powerful," the "most influential"--purveying a pornography of status calculated to appeal to the garbage that are the overlords of our polycrisis-ridden world and their certainty that they and they alone are the real population of the planet, the other eight billion people sharing it with them mere Non-Player Characters in the game in which they alone are players (the more easily in as a portion of those eight billion, without dignity or self-love, are happy to play their part in that lunacy).

Perhaps the single best-known, most-coveted, such distinction is TIME Magazine's "Person of the Year," the choice of which is almost always Establishment in perspective, as a result almost always lame, and thus almost always ridiculous to people possessed of any intellectual faculties. Thus in this year in which we have seen the hype about artificial intelligence become--short of genuine full-blown Singularity being imminent, and even Ray Kurzweil doesn't claim that--utterly unhinged, possibly to very dangerous consequence given that the financial bubble generated by the gap between the hype and the meager reality may well make the crash of 2007 look like nothing--they hail the "architects of AI" as the "person of the year" 2025 in what (again, they are Establishment, and lame) is yet another act of that idiot Silicon Valley worship that has long since lost credibility with the broad public. If different portions of that public dislike the tech elite for different reasons they are still all pretty well united in the sentiment of dislike, at least, while a significant portion of it would seem to have recognized the butt fugly faces of the tech overlords the media so loves shoving before their eyes as specifically the butt fugly faces of a brazen twenty-first century totalitarianism--and would do well to remember that TIME previously accorded Adolf Hitler the same honor back when it was still, the concession to gender-neutrality not yet made, "Man of the Year," all as one would be foolish indeed to forget just how many in high places looked upon that figure with approval before, for a time, but only a time, fascist sympathies ceased to be a thing that those desirous of respectability expressed in the open. Which time came to an end not least because of that crash of '07, of course, with all that implies about what lies ahead.