
Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche - petethomas
https://breakermag.com/trapped-at-sea-with-cryptos-nouveau-riche/
======
api
"I, too, was a lonely intelligent child who knew the special horror, as most
lonely intelligent children do, of thinking both very little and too much of
themselves at the same time."

Article is worth it for that line. What an outstanding description of my
childhood and likely the childhood of half this site's visitors.

Almost everything wrong with tech (at least socially) can be laid at the feet
of what it's like to grow up as an overly smart over-educated nerd. If I were
contracted by an evil genius to design a brainwashing program to turn kids
into sociopaths, I'd just design something exactly like my experience in
public school. There's a special kind of head fuckery that you get from being
constantly told by adults you're superior while at the same time getting
beaten, ignored, and humiliated by most of your peers. I spent most of my late
teens and early 20s on a semi-deliberate quest to deprogram myself. I like to
think I was somewhat successful.

------
tlb
This reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll
Never Do Again", where he goes on a Caribbean cruise full of retired people.
(Highly recommended. The story, not the cruise.)

Don't read this looking for insights about Bitcoin, any more than you'd read
DFW's article for insights about being retired. This is a fish-out-of-water
story, and those kind of stories are best when they're about the fish itself,
not about the water of lack of it.

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mindfulplay
Very well written and funny article documenting the shitcoin bros!

I thoroughly got exactly what I wanted: the exact same shilling I expected
from these fake-intellectual, tax-evading bros.

------
55555
I guess I'm in the minority but I thought it was excellently written and very
funny.

~~~
wklauss
I don't think you are. It is exceptionally well written and full of wit. Not
all articles have to be like this, but in this case, this works and works
wonderfully.

~~~
atomical
> I am not 10 feet tall and 22, but I am a tiny hyperactive white woman with
> weird hair and poor boundaries, so I revert to an old standby and start
> serving full manic pixie dream girl. It’s not exactly an act. I’m a terrible
> actor. It’s just about dialing up the parts of my personality that men tend
> to find most delightful, giggling a bit more, scratching my arse a bit less,
> and hoping nobody Googles me. It helps that I don’t have to fake ignorance
> of the crypto-scene drama. I only have to pretend to care.

Integrity and professionalism bordering on zero.

~~~
wklauss
> Integrity and professionalism bordering on zero.

Absolutely not. You are considering she's there as a journalist to produce and
informative piece of news. She's there as a writer to produce a feature about
how does it feel to be in one of these cruises.

By your standards, all gonzo journalism or, for that matter, any piece of new
journalism is unprofessional. That is just plain absurd. The reader knows she
is writing from a personal point of view and should be capable to understand
what that means in the context of the experience.

~~~
atomical
I'm going to flag all "gonzo journalism" submissions in the future. HN isn't a
cheap tabloid aggregator.

------
CPLX
“John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in
the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.”

That’s a well crafted line right there.

~~~
thisismyusernam
Yes, I laughed out loud with this line!

------
thetricia
This, unfortunately, is how most business'y events are, unless very corporate
or govt-related. Just slightly less blatant. I really envy people who have
this ability to filter it all out and still feel at ease.

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thisismyusernam
I really enjoyed this article. It really captures the weirdness of this kind
of event, and rings true to the bandwagon-crypto people I've met, with a bit
of good-natured caricature added. She also writes very well about the role of
women during the event.

------
orasis
This provides a condensation of what I’ve experienced visiting Silicon Valley
as an outsider.

~~~
TomVDB
As a Silicon Valley resident, it doesn't come close to what I've ever
experienced in my day to day life: one of your typical suburban grunt worker
at a big corporation how goes to work in the morning and goes home in the
evening for family dinner and invites friends over on the weekend for BBQ.

------
atomical
> In 2017, Salman says, it was relatively easy to raise funds for a nine-
> figure ICO.

There weren't many ICO's that raised nine figures. In fact most of them had a
cap far below nine figures.

------
shshhdhs
> I knew about bitcoin only as an investment vehicle favored by several
> essentially sweet nerds close to my heart—and I knew, too, that
> cryptocurrencies are the pet untraceable funding model of the far-right.

The author really hasn't been paying attention if she failed to realize it is
the pet funding model of drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, and money
launderers, and only instead opted to use it to mock the political spectrum
she doesn't agree with. This article is poor journalism at best.

I can't believe someone paid the author to go on this cruise and to write such
shoddy work. I'm not a fan of the cryptocurrency space, but I had to stop
reading this -- it was a Im-better-than-you hit piece to justify the paid
trip.

~~~
sandworm101
>> I can't believe someone paid the author to go on this cruise and to write
such shoddy work.

This is how this level of journalism works: CyproCruise has a promotion
budget. That budget includes "free" tickets for journalists. They offer these
tickets to hip/cool outlets but, as this is a cruise, they need the name of
the journalist before actually sending the ticket. So hip/cool outlet sends
bio/headshot of the journalist they want to send.

She is admittedly short, petite, young and has cool hair. In her headshot she
probably looks 22. Boxes ticked. Cryptocruise sees her both as another
attractive female and, being misogynist pigs, thinks her incapable of doing
any real damage. So she gets the ticket. Whether her bosses tell her they have
paid for the ticket, or that it has been provided, we can never know.

Everyone got what they thought they wanted. Cryptocruise got another
attractive female on their boat, and at a discount. News outlet got what they
wanted: a colorful description of exactly how misogynist crypto has become.
And we readers go our thing too: I actually read the entire article. It
reinforced my understanding and assured me that cypto is not long for this
world, at least in its current form. Everyone got their thing and made a few
bucks doing so. That's how journalism works.

[Think of how awful the article might have been. Imagine if they had sent a
45yo hetero guy, someone who might have fallen in with a very different crowd
on this boat.]

~~~
malvosenior
Except she's Laurie Penny who has been an extremely active anti-men writer for
a long time. If they were expecting anything other than the worst hatchet job
imaginable, then they didn't do even 5 minutes of research.

[https://www.theguardian.com/profile/laurie-
penny](https://www.theguardian.com/profile/laurie-penny)

~~~
sandworm101
You honestly think these people read her bio? The people promoting this cruise
didn't get past her headshot. I'm interested to see which other journalists
were invited.

~~~
malvosenior
I think she's perhaps more well known for this type of thing than you realize.

~~~
atomical
So they probably wanted her to write a piece like this to generate
controversy?

~~~
malvosenior
Possibly, but I don't think it's an accident to put literally the most hostile
journalist imaginable on board.

~~~
pjc50
Nah, the most hostile journalist possible would have been the FT's Izabella
Kaminska. Or possibly David Gerard.

~~~
davidgerard
FT would have been Jemima Kelly.
[https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/08/02/1533182400000/One-
for...](https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/08/02/1533182400000/One-for-the-
ladies----/)

If I'd gone I'd definitely have tried for the McAfee interview. As it was I
just made sure Laurie had read my book first.

(of course we know each other, it's the worldwide SJW conspiracy)

------
strikelaserclaw
I generally enjoy articles like this but this one was a hard read. Something
about the way the author jumps back and forth from people, events, ideas,
internal monologues, to random facts about chairs.

------
zackbloom
What a great writer!

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olivermarks
Hopeless juvenile article which is all about the writer and her naive
opinions. Wondering why this made it onto HN? Is there some nugget here I
missed?

~~~
LandR
No. Just typical Laurie penny nonsense.

I don't know why anyone pays attention to her.

~~~
steve_gh
Because she is funny. And possibly the bastard offspring of Hunter S Thompson
and PJ O'Rourke.

------
roguecoder
"For instance, in October, artist Kelly Donnelly released the feminist anthem
“I Am She” using Ethereum" \- has anyone heard of this? It's the first mention
I can find.

------
hh3k0
Authors nowadays have the tendency to (ab)use their own articles as vehicle to
talk about themselves -- and it's ever too often either completely unrelated
to the content or some superficial, forced connection. It's quite annoying.

~~~
pavlov
I know. Like when Mark Twain visited Germany in 1878 and then used his report
("A Tramp Abroad") to talk about his own feelings rather than objectively
describing the fascinating arts and crafts of Prussia.

~~~
roguecoder
Or how David Halberstam selfishly described his reaction to seeing a Buddhist
monk burn in Vietnam: "I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or
ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a
muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the
wailing people around him."

What an amateur. No wonder he only won one Pulitzer.

------
warp_factor
Typical example of poor journalism. Written to be sensationalist and carry a
narrative that was already all decided before setting a foot on that boat.

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amvalo
I tried to enjoy this, but as writing it kind of flaunts "show don't tell."
The author could have written half of this without ever setting foot on the
boat. Like, it feels like she came in with her burns prepared beforehand, and
only paid cursory attention to the people.

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sneak
It talks a lot about shame and misogyny and abuse of power, but doesn’t
actually report on any instances of it other than “they hired pretty girls to
party on the boat”, which I can assume were consensual transactions those
women engaged in voluntarily.

Where is the big dirt she keeps alluding to? Are we just supposed to hate them
by default for being rich and white and male and schlubby and tasteless?

~~~
wz1000
We aren't supposed to hate them, we are supposed to laugh at them.

