Lately, I've been lying awake at night, literally glued to watch repair videos: pinions, wheel train bridges, pallet forks, barrel axles. Am I interested in watches? No. I don't need to fall into a coma to lose interest in watches. My watch hasn't worked in months, and I may never want to know what time it is again. Standardized timekeeping just makes people expect different things from me, and I don't feel like I can fulfill them right now. I just want to be quiet and calm while people talk about amplitudes with tiny screwdrivers and repair parts smaller than the light in Robin's eyes. This is what the 21st century has done to me. I'm not a watch person. I already had my own interests. I'm built to lie awake while reading novels, checking current events, or binge-watching a Korean vampire medical action romantic comedy series. (Oh my, Korean vampires are charming.) Watches? In a normal world, I wouldn't care if someone told me the crown gasket was rotten or the balance wheel axis was warped. In a normal world, I have no idea what Patek Philippe you are referring to.
But this is a world where the internet doesn’t connect us with knowledge and power. The internet drowns us in a) cursed candles drawn by children b) fascist South African goblin money-making nightmares. Wealth addicts herd us for anxiety-inducing clicks and radicalize us as foot soldiers in a race war. Can elaborate computer programming based on the best research help rid humanity of work and sorrow? No. We got fucking AI. We didn’t want it, just like we didn’t want Clippy, but now it’s scraping data from everywhere in a flash, turning a rich tapestry of human achievement into a slurry of plagiarism, racism, and pornography, and serving it up in a disturbing beige blob. And if I need to write an email, I don’t want the AI to make me sound like a cursed mannequin pretending to be an intern while “helping out.” I want to sound like me. In a rational world, the power to save the planet or burn it to radioactive misery and bloody dust would not be placed in the hands of a Botox-injected Russian gangster with a tracksuit fetish and a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike bent on mass incarceration and possibly organ harvesting. At the very least, the vicious narcissistic fans who can't remember which women Hannibal Lecter has sexually assaulted would probably never go near nuclear football again. But how was that possible?
Disruptors treat reality like a snow globe and shake it and shake it and shake it until people break it so they can make money.
Trump’s debacle is the culmination of many poor choices. America’s still-mesmerized media watches Donnie collapse in the jacuzzi but never admits they helped him. Just as our media hyped Nigel Farage screaming “Don’t blame me for the riots.” Nigel is still on the Trump train, not Clacton. Liz Truss is also courting Trump supporters. Thank goodness. There’s a lot of frankly unsettling wishful thinking about populism, and wishful thinking can lead anyone astray, even when the doors to MAGA fame and fortune are off their hinges. Lizzy and Nigel stood up, voicing legitimate concerns about immigration, not to mention racism. As influential people distanced themselves from the rioters who burned down libraries to prove the superiority of Western culture, Truss’s perfect sense of timing kicked in and she began to promote freedom of speech as the right to say horrifyingly radical things without fear of consequences. Is she aiming to be the next Rosa Parks for those who might loot Greggs? If not, will photographing Jimmy Choos and burning bins be enough? A job is a job.
Stubbornly prioritizing wealth over sanity, profit over compassion, balancing facts with insanity, gives us Trump, Trassonomics, Musk, and more reclusive and insidious disruptors like Peter Thiel and Mike Flynn. Disruptors treat reality like a snow globe, making money by shaking people until they break. But even exorbitant wealth cannot overwhelm reality. In the end, reality always wins over illusion, but the damage caused by disruption remains. Do enough contrarian thought experiments, suppress all surveillance, suppress education, feed enough psycho-manipulative horror stories, supercharge every opinion, and you will reach a point where everything has to be reexamined. Should women have a say, are all people human, is starving a bad thing, is death an inevitable by-product of business and diplomacy, is dying from a preventable disease a big deal, dying from the cold at home… In summary, right-wing thought experiments are always about death. Your death and my death. Prisons, slavery, torture, Nazism, civil war, witch hunts, blood libel — there's not a filthy idea that hasn't been picked up and swallowed whole by the 21st-century masters of public discourse and information. And why do so many wannabe populist demagogues sound like Pennywise having oral sex with a satnav? They think we'll find that compelling?
I prefer the watchmaker, who, in a quiet, even voice, speaks of centuries of determined improvement in form and function, the pursuit of reliability, precision, usefulness. Centuries of improvement that make the world make sense. I want to see skilled people patiently understand broken but extremely useful mechanisms, treating them with delicacy and respect. I want to see expertise, kindness, and humility matter. And when I'm tired of people who take aim at beauty and rob us of joy, I want to see them open a watch case to reveal an unexpected beauty, placed there like a happy secret, for functionality, the joy of creativity, and the dignity of the craftsman who gives his best to strangers. The world has a way of welcoming strangers. We are all strangers sometimes. And sometimes we are people with skills, who know how to make and repair, how to be friends and neighbors. When the world shakes, we need neighbors. We are all neighbors. I like the feeling when the balance wheel turns again after lost years, breakage, death, and abandonment. Strong-willed people who understand the practical application of love like to believe that at least some of what is broken can always be repaired.
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