Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about lead singers, cooking screwups, whining children, and more.
Drew is off! I am your Dread Funbag Lord for today.
Onward, to your letters:
Ben:
The phrase "billionaires shouldn't exist" is commonly used by both Defector staff and the commentariat, seemingly always referencing shitbag owners and venture capital jackwagons, which is fine. HOWEVER, looming on the horizon is an athlete and a contract in the U.S. that is gonna pay them a billion dollars over the length of the contract. It could very well be someone cool like Victor Wembanyama as they move into their prime and start wrecking shit in the NBA. Should athletes who have dedicated their lives to their sport be "allowed" to earn their billions they make playing with no scorn from the fans?
Except perhaps in extreme (i.e. assassin-class) cases, Ben, people do not use the phrase "billionaires shouldn't exist" to mean that becoming a billionaire should, as a policy, trigger the end of a given person's existence. (Though I think it's fair to say that, on the whole, the world would be measurably better if acquiring your one billionth dollar of personal net worth did automatically cause you to blink out of existence, both for how it would cause the greedy and death-fearing to reconsider their life approaches and for who, specifically, would cease existing if the laws of the universe operated this way.)
Nor, I think, does the phrase mean that public scorn should be expected to cull the world's billionaires by shaming them into giving their money away. It is not based on the idea that the specific guys who are billionaires are bad (though they are), and therefore should not be trusted with a billion dollars (although they definitely should not). It is based on the simple and by this point inescapably evident fact that wealth concentration at that level has profound warping effects on society—on politics, policy, industry, media, and everything. It means that a functioning and appropriately self-defensive democratic society should make attaining, and sustaining, a personal net worth in the billions of dollars impossible.
Which, when you step back and look at it, is not so different from the idea of a progressive income tax scheme. The extremely dumb version is something like: The first however-many dollars of your net worth get taxed at a certain low rate; the next however-many dollars get taxed at a somewhat higher level; beyond your 999,999,999th dollar of net value, every additional dollar gets taxed at 100 percent—which is to say, it gets straight-up extracted—so that your personal net worth simply cannot crest that level. I am neither a tax professional nor a public-policy guy; I do not know what legal infrastructure would need to be in place for this to actually work as a billionaire-fortune-prevention scheme. But the basic idea is straightforward and, I think, unobjectionable: You don't get to amass, and keep, a net worth of a billion dollars.
Personally I would set the threshold much lower! I do not see why anybody in the world needs to have $50 million. A person with a net worth of $50 million is obscenely rich, rich enough to achieve escape velocity from the normal financial constraints of normal working people forever. A person with a net worth of $50 million can take care of their family and several other families and go on nice vacations year-round and make several times more income just off of interest on their savings than a normal person makes in salary in a year. This means that a person with a net worth of $50 million does not ever need to do a day's work again in their life—nor does anyone else in their household.
A person with a net worth of $50 million has a net worth roughly 250 times greater than that of the median U.S. household. 250 times! We are talking about king-to-peasant proportions here. A billionaire's net worth is 20 times greater than that. You could snatch away $950 million from the billionaire and they would still be richer than 250 median U.S. households put together.
Elon Musk's net worth, as of this writing, is estimated at over $400 billion.
What matters isn't so much how a person amasses that level of wealth—sure, there are ways more or less vile to do it, and on balance LeBron James's way is overall less appalling than S. Robson Walton's—though in looking for an index of a society's moral rot, you could do worse than to take a survey of how its richest guys got their wealth, by which measure ours should be purged from the earth. What's infinitely more important is the sheer injustice and perversity of allowing a fortune of that size to concentrate itself in an individual. It is incompatible with, and anathema to, things like democracy and free speech. It is hostile to the best interests of humanity.
In the form of money, Jeff Bezos can pump more of his will into society—into its politics, its information ecosystem, its decision-making and shape-taking—than all of the people who actually need society to function put together, doubled, and then squared. Peter Thiel, who by most reports is not nearly as rich as Bezos or Musk, not only killed a thriving independent media company, but meaningfully changed, for the worse, how this country's supposedly free press will or can cover society's most powerful individuals—over a fit of personal pique. This is not tenable! The knowledge that this type of arrangement is not tenable is older than the modern English language!
More to the point, and returning to your question: Victor Wembanyama already receives a good deal less than the total dollar value of his NBA contract, due to taxation. That is no injustice. It will not prevent Victor Wembanyama—should his health allow him to outlast the NBA's fucked-up rookie-contract scheme and reach his first full-sized max contract extension—from making far more than enough money in salary over the next decade to fund 50 years of leisure and luxury and travel after he retires from playing pro basketball.
If Wemby's work generates so much value in ticket sales and TV deals and so forth that he is worth a billion dollars in salary from an NBA team, then I will want him to receive that salary, because it is better for public interest in pro sports to pay off for a pro athlete than for the proceeds to be stolen by the inheritor parasite in the owner's box. But then I will also want that salary to be taxed to hell and back, because that is what is good for everybody.
Rob:
What criteria make somebody a "frontman" or "frontwoman"? Do solo artists like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles count, or do they have to be part of a real band band that has a more collaborative process (Robert Plant, Debbie Harry, etc.)? Is Bruce Springsteen the frontman of the E Street Band? Does he stop being a frontman when he's doing a show without them? What about groups like the Band and the Beatles who had different people sing lead on every song? I think the only way to avoid driving myself mad is to say yeah sure whatever they're all frontpersons and then get on with my day.
Hell, we've got the term, it might as well mean something, right? To my mind, a frontperson is the lead vocalist of a band that both A) has one clear, undeniable lead vocalist, and B) isn't just that vocalist's eponymous band. So like Chrissie Hynde, Courtney Love, Johnette Napolitano, Joey Ramone: frontpersons. But if the music act does its business under (or primarily under) one person's name—Taylor Swift, Charles Wright, Leonard Cohen—then it doesn't have a frontperson or a lead vocalist, because in that case the term is redundant. Taylor Swift is not the lead vocalist of Taylor Swift; she just is Taylor Swift.
And so like, by my reckoning, Bruce Springsteen is not the lead vocalist of the E Street Band, because it has been like 40 years since anybody anywhere who wasn't being a dingus would have been like "Oh, I was at the E Street Band show last night." They would say they were at the Springsteen show. (And then I would ask them, "Why?") The relationship between him and the E Street Band is not that he is their frontperson; it's that they are his backing band.
Accordingly, not every band has a frontperson: As you rightly observe, neither the Beatles nor the Band had one clear lead vocalist. Ditto Fleetwood Mac, the Cars, the B-52s, ABBA, the Beach Boys, and probably some bands that anybody under the age of 30 gives a damn about too. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones meaningfully split duties for the Clash; David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks did for the Temptations, and then the Temptations have had like 500 other lead vocalists since then. I guess I also regard Sonic Youth as fitting into this category too, not having listened to any of their albums in more than 20 years? Pink Floyd is sort of an edge case: David Gilmour did the overwhelming bulk of their post–Syd Barrett singing, but Roger Waters sang lead on too many songs for it to be just a novelty—like Keith Richards singing a handful of Rolling Stones songs or John Frusciante knocking out "How Deep Is Your Love" at concerts or whatever—on top of being the band's lyricist and artistic driving force.
I swear to God I have heard of some bands that are younger than I am.
Chris:
Is there anything worse than fucking up a recipe you've made countless times? Especially when it's for your family? I found some discount sirloin steaks in the cheap meat section and decided to season them up with some Montreal Steak Seasoning. I forgot how salty that stuff already is because I also seasoned generously with kosher salt. As a result, my insides are probably mummified and my wife couldn't even finish hers.
Another time, I threw some ribs on the smoker when my parents visited. For whatever goddamned reason I laid them on the rack meat side down and they came out dryer than a camel fart. I nearly commited seppuku.
Oh man, let me tell you. In the first week of 2017, I moved with my family to the hilarious log cabin where we live now; later that year, in the spring I think, I invited all the D.C.-area Deadspin folks over for a cookout. (My going full-time at Deadspin in 2015 had been pretty important in making it possible for us to eventually afford a house, and beyond that was super duper important to me personally, and my reflexive response to people and things and events that are important to me is to shower food upon them.)
So anyway, for this occasion, I went out and bought a huge friggin' brisket, to smoke and slice and serve with beans and potato salad and such. My plan was to spend pretty much the entire day prior to the cookout babying this sucker until a slice of it would practically melt on your tongue; then I'd wrap it and let it rest for a few hours, and it'd be perfect by the time anybody was ready to eat it. I'd done it a few times before, with great success, and felt sure enough in my abilities that I'd written and published a set of basic instructions (that differ in like half a dozen meaningful ways from how I would smoke a brisket today). Importantly, this would be the first time I cooked food for any of these people—including, notably, the very guy (Tommy Craggs) who'd contracted me to write about cooking for Deadspin and published my brisket cooking instructions on the goddamn website.
You can see where this is going. Everything went wrong! I fucked up every part of the procedure. For one thing, I let the morning get away from me, so that by the time I started prepping the grill, I knew I was looking at being up all night nursing this thing along to doneness. In haste, I skipped what I now consider to be an essential step to smoking basically anything in a charcoal kettle: once the charcoal is lit but before you're cooking food, clamp a lid on there and tinker with the vents over the next hour or so until you're sure—sure!—the kettle's internal temperature is holding steady somewhere between 220 and 250 degrees. No sir, I skipped to the part where I put the brisket in the kettle, closed the lid, set a timer to check it after half an hour, and walked away.
When I got back, I saw that the kettle's internal temperature wasn't even 200 degrees; it would take literally eternity to cook a brisket all the way at that rate. So I opened the vents a little wider, walked away ... and forgot to set a timer reminding myself to check it. Something like an hour later, a bell dinged inside my head, and I rushed outside muttering "Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck," to discover that the poor brisket had been roasting at 350 degrees for some undetermined period of time.
The thing is, the brisket very likely was already doomed to some degree of dryness by now, due to the excess heat having rendered out a bunch of its precious fat so early in the process—but we're talking about, at maximum, like one hour out of a job that can take up to 18. Moreover, because I'd been an inattentive dumbass, I had no way of knowing whether the inside of the kettle had been that hot for the entirety of the hour (or so) since I'd checked it, or if the temperature had just spiked within the past five minutes. Even-moreover, that brisket cost like 50 damn bucks! Bailing on it now would be insane. So I went ahead and continued cooking that sucker, all throughout the rest of the evening—during which I zoned out and unwittingly let it languish in The Stall for like two fucking hours—and deep into the night, when I dozed off for some period of time and let the poor brisket cook to nearly 230 degrees. The target temperature is 195. I'd ruined it.
By the time I discovered what I'd done, it was like three in the morning. I'd wasted a day, transformed 50 bucks worth of beef into inedible corkboard, and had no main course to serve the like 15 people who'd be at my house that afternoon. Also the grocery store was hours away from opening. Did I get more sleep? I did not!
Later that morning, sleep-deprived and fully brain-fried, I went to the store and bought a bunch of friggin' chicken-thigh quarters. But I forgot to buy more charcoal. So the fire in my kettle burned out long before the chicken was done. I had to transfer it to a roasting pan—in front of everybody!—and finish it in the crappy oven, which couldn't hold a high enough temperature to really roast that volume of food all at once. The chicken's skin was still beige half an hour later. By the time I served this worthless shit to my colleagues and friends, I had achieved phosphorescent levels of shame and self-hatred. I'm still embarrassed about it. It's been more than eight years.
HALFTIME!
Peter:
Is there anything more depressing than the mass acceptance of shitty business practices? I waded through a sea of humanity at 4 a.m. because "that's just how you have to fly these days." Nothing's going to change because people just deal with the inconvenience and airlines know it. I will feel no sympathy if an alternative mode of transportation ever supplants air travel but I'm not optimistic.
A persistent marrow-deep disappointment for, I think, just about everybody, is discovering as you get older just how diminished society's sense of possibility is, and feeling your own sense of possibility diminishing because of it, and being aware that you are also in your way contributing to everybody else also feeling that way. This is related to the endless tedious rant I went on up above, about billionaires: Probably 99,999 out of any 100,000 people would agree with basically any and every part of the argument against individuals being allowed to amass society-warping concentrations of wealth and power—so long as you are not suggesting that anything could, or should, actually be done to bring society in line with that argument's diagnoses and prescriptions. People will go as far as "Yes, sure, a world that worked that way would be infinitely superior in every way to the one we live in," but the moment you tip over into advocating on behalf of a concerted effort to achieve that world, they recoil: Their sense of the possibility of actually accomplishing that goal is so impoverished that their skepticism tips all the way over into outright opposition, based on taking fully for granted that the effort would be a futile, doomed waste of time.
That kind of attitude toward the world, I am ever more convinced, is the ultimate industrial output of capitalism. Whatever is not happening spontaneously, whatever is not driving a gold-rush frenzy among greed monsters, whatever is not obviously an effective means for selfishly motivated individuals to gather wealth to themselves, cannot happen. If it could happen, the rich would be starting up companies to do it; there would be an Apple of it, a Microsoft of it, an Amazon of it. If there are not those, then it is a pipe dream; everybody is too busy and harried and living on margins too thin to concern themselves with pipe dreams, to take on work that necessarily will take generations to complete, to extend our purposes out beyond the scope of narrow self-interest. Even the question of whether that's by design or simply a very lucky coincidence for the already-rich and the already-powerful isn't worth thinking about, because there's nothing to do about it in either case.
And so when confronted with stuff like the shitty business practices referred to above, I think people mostly passively condition themselves to skip past the critique to the part where they accommodate themselves to a reality they encounter as something like an automated car wash designed and operated by faceless and unaccountable rich guys. They even pride themselves on the totality of their defeat, not-news-ing it and what-did-you-expect-ing it and posting "Old Man Yells At Cloud" memes at the person who asks why life has to be an automated car wash. Here comes the hot wax; I, savvy, seeing through it all, remembered to bring eye protection. AI sucks shit and is destroying the planet and will ruin everything it touches; I, savvy, optimized for the future, use it daily.
A frog will not actually sit in a pot and allow itself to be boiled; that is a myth. Probably they wonder what the fuck our problem is.
Lauren:
Bojangles now uses an AI chatbot to take your order. As an AI skeptic, I have made little personal use of these LLMs, but the fast-food drive-thru is a place that touches the life of every red-blooded American sooner or later. This is not intended as a "should you," but rather a "will you" question: If you would otherwise say please and thanks to someone in an interaction, will you consciously choose to do the same when interacting with an AI chatbot?
I swear I did not order the Funbag questions like this on purpose. Also apparently Drew answered this question last week! Unfortunately for you, I do not "read blogs" or "pay attention," nor indeed do I "give a damn at all"!!!!
Anyway, Lauren, the answer is: No, I will not say please and thanks to a fucking AI chatbot. I will not knowingly speak to a fucking AI chatbot! If a given fast-food chain turns to AI to take drive-thru orders and handle customer interactions, I will simply not fucking buy food from it! Having to find a different variety of poisonous trash to eat, for the sake of at the very least ordering that trash from a company that pays wages to actual human beings, is not some fucking onerous quixotic luddite thing to do! Nor is it blinkered idealism! It is nothing at all in fact! Your life would be neither worse nor harder if you simply never ordered poisonous fucking trash through a speaker from the driver's seat of your car ever again so long as you fucking lived!
This is where people are conditioned to say annoying shit like "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism," and it makes me want to fucking scream. And so therefore ... what? Accommodate yourself to every way that capital asks you to be its accomplice in eroding human dignity? Passively accept one hideous bargain for the sake of another equally hideous one?
You do not have to simply shrug and get on with surrendering to each next incursion the machinery of capital makes into your one and only precious human life. You can at the very least try not to! Nobody is asking you to (yet) to decamp to the wilderness and take up guerrilla warfare. You can simply quit Twitter. You can simply not use ChatGPT. You can simply not entertain yourself by watching the worst imaginable people debase themselves and each other on television all evening. You can simply not go to Bojangles.
You will get no bonus points at the end of your lone passage through the miraculous world for having calculated that none of your plausible options were better enough than any others for discernment to have been worth the effort. You are here for more than just to narcotize yourself for a few decades and then die. I promise that you can have, and value, dignity.
Pete:
I just got back from taking my daughter/nephew up north, in Michigan. They’re both 7. Canoeing, smores, hiking, fishing, campfires … all the standard stuff. The kids complained about everything. All the time. Is there a time in your life when the kids just started enjoying shit, or am I just doomed?
The funny thing here, Pete, is that the kids are enjoying themselves. Your daughter and nephew had a great time. They will remember that trip to Michigan for the rest of their lives. In their adulthood they will spend money and time trying to organize vacations that they will hope can replicate the simple and unspoiled joy that will be all they remember of that trip to Michigan. If you are lucky, you will hear them talking about it, and you will smile a private little smile at your memory of how they complained the entire time, and if you are wise and merciful you will know not to spoil their memory by reminding them of this.
When my younger son was pretty little, he chose a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man costume for Halloween, one of those ones that has a built-in battery-powered fan that keeps it inflated while you wear it. He has always, from the time he was a baby, been a kid who gets sleepy early, falls deeply asleep all at once, and wakes up brimming with energy early in the morning. That is just the way he is. So by the time we actually went out trick-or-treating that evening, he was tired—in large part from the excitement of having and wearing his Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man costume!—and cranky, in addition to being (then) very small, and he was in no mood to walk around on his tired little legs through the bustling and noisy neighborhood where we took him and his big brother. He spent the entire time complaining about how he couldn't see through the eye-holes of his costume, and about how he was tired, and then he got really sad because none of this was going the way he'd hoped, and he didn't want to be carried but he also didn't want to walk, and he didn't want to wear the headpiece but he also didn't want to take it off, and he cried a little, and the whole thing sucked.
Now he is just about 15 years old and taller than I am, and all he remembers of that Halloween is the part earlier in the evening when he was so excited to have his Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man costume that, unprompted, he shouted "This is the best Halloween of my life!" When he is 35 years old, he will look back on the Halloweens of his childhood and wonder at how magical they were. He will hope his own children can have Halloweens like the ones he had in a world that certainly seems shitty and stripped of magic, and maybe he will get stressed out and grieve a little when they seem to spend all of one Halloween complaining and having a bad time. And then maybe he will do a little figuring in his head and it will dawn on him: This is just how it goes. They are having a great time. They are just too young to know it yet.
(Yes, Pete, they probably will stop complaining. On the other hand, re-read your email.)
