Evan Coopersmith
@Evan_Coop
Essayist, parodist | EVP @aestudiola, former baseball bettor, hedge fund guy (2008), government scientist (2016) | Rhyming rationalist
🧵 Thread
Edgar Allen Poe wrote famously about the sound and emotional impact of "The Bells."
Had he lived today, he might have penned
"The Memes"
I.
Read the emails with their memes,
Classic memes!
Princes from Nigeria and other sordid schemes!
...
Babies dancing, dancing, dancing,
Grainy cha-cha CGIs
Lines of hamsters’ endless prancing,
Spongebob squarepants now entrancing
With a theme to bastardize
Crypto-California! (Not quite a hotel, but still...)
The Eagles wrote about consumerism and materialism, but now, the world of opulence involves more blockchains and less pink champagne on ice!
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On an old superhighway
Unwatched laissez-faire
Faint whispers of Napster
And some data to share
Now instead, some persistence
And some encryptions for spite
A payment system and a pseudonym
Nakomoto’s delight
Bull markets and other BS
If you invested $1 in the S&P 500 in 1980, you'd have had $11-12 in 2000.
Even if you adjust for inflation, you'd still have had ~$6.
If you repeat this, investing $1 sometime in 2000, you'd be holding around $2.60 now, which is more like $1.60 after inflation is considered.
Income inequality often reduces to "did you have access to market returns from 1980-2000?"
I'm too young...but my parents aren't, and they paid my college tuition. So I received the benefit of a bull market that began before my birth.
The Tech Lead & The Manager (the modern walrus and carpenter)
Lewis Carroll described how oysters were led to their doom. Today, it's engineers...
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The boss was whining angrily,
Whining with all his might.
The ceiling bathed the boardroom
In a sharp, fluorescent light-
Ensuring wakeful discourse in
The middle of the night
The coffee bubbled lazily,
The hard disks whirred and spun.
Consultants each remained in chairs
As sleepy, hired guns.
The project was a misery
Of budget overruns.
"Mute Yourself": Silicon Valley isn't Eight Mile, and Musk isn't Eminem, but...
Look
If you had one spot, in all social media,
To say anything you ever thought up,
One platform,
Would you purchase it? Or just watch it sink?
He starts a frenzy, rich guy, cash a plenty
He bought like 9-percent-ish already, brash and petty,
Alerts us, and disconcerts us when he seems unsteady,
He takes over,
Californication in the Age of Cancellation
At @AEStudioLA, we believe cancel culture makes thinking complete thoughts dangerous. Cue up "Californication"
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Ostracized online by mobs of righteous indignation.
Dismissed into the void without defense or consolation.
A casualty of sophistry - the age of cancellation.
It’s the death sentence writ without the fuss of litigation
The plaintiff cries as the beast can feast on groveling - extorted prostration
The brotherhood of victimhood and endless cancellation…
Annabel Lee - If she were an AI.
Working at @AEStudioLA, one gets to play with the latest and greatest AI tools. They also let me write parodies of Edgar Allan Poe. Here's one about GPT-3.
When Annabel Lee dies, a protagonist is heartbroken. When login credentials are removed, the loss is similar.
It was many and many a job ago,
At a startup by the sea
When I first would try an OpenAI
By the name of GPT-3
And her beauty bespoke, with every keystroke
Of her scintillant NLP
"American Pie," parodied 50 years later, pondering the technology that defines our lives.
A long, long time ago,
Vaguely, I remember static pages filled with GIFs and style…
And each new CSS advance,
Would serve a site and not a trance,
And agency would linger, for a while…
But corporate interest made us shiver,
With every feature apps deliver...
Doomscrolls on your iPads,
From trolling farms and comrades
An AI Art Gallery
Artificial intelligence (AI), however nebulous and dynamic its definition, separates the creator (the algorithm) from the creative (the human at the terminal) and blurs the line between preeminent artist and pretentious arse.
By satirizing, manipulating, and penning commentary about these classic works, are we witty or effete, extending the reach of these masters or cheapening and diminishing their contributions?
Users, Code, and Crypto...the current analog of "Lawyers, Guns, and Money"
I wrote a parody of Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money"
Too bad his genius cannot be deployed to describe our times.
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The subprime bubble busted
My hedge fund days were through
Found a CTO
In a college friend I knew
Thought I’d found a YC startup
Addicted to the risk
Send users, code, and crypto,
Find exits out of this…