Table of Contents
Definitions
Fundamentals are anything valuable that has a real impact on our material conditions: total productivity, health, life expectancy, purchasing power, square meters of living space per person, quality of diet, and amount of free time.
A clown show is an organized performance, deliberately designed to make money by bamboozling you and grabbing your attention. That is legitimate entertainment, and it is not a bad thing when you willingly go to see the show.
The Line Is Blurry
In practice, it is surprisingly hard for people to differentiate between reality and performance. A clown show can sneakily infiltrate any area of life, and it might even be your current government.
When was the last time your government reported on fundamentals instead of promoting bullshit narratives that have no real value? A competent government would be busy with fundamentals, but most of us are living under direct clown rule. That is why discussing fundamentals is not fashionable and is borderline extremist.
Ask a serious question about housing, productivity, or free time, and watch the conversation die. The same people who can talk for hours about abstract bullshit and foreign policy have nothing to say about whether life at home is actually getting better.
Clowns All the Way Down
Social networks are a clown show. Their KPIs are likes, followers, impressions, and engagement. Most influencers are calculating professionals, and their online personas are a product calibrated for engagement. They are literal entertainers, but their audience is actually serious, captured and carried away by the performance. The platform is deliberately organized to turn that attention into money.
LLM hype is a clown show too, with its own set of metrics: tokens, benchmarks, context windows, and valuations. A model can climb every leaderboard and still produce nothing of value. In many cases, the model is not even the problem. The problem is that it was advertised to incompetent people incapable of doing anything non-performative. The metrics look great, but they change nothing.
The MAGA movement is literally a textbook example of the same thing. Its flagship issues, immigration and gender policy, are two of the most inconsequential things a government can spend its time on. Even by its own bullshit metrics, it achieved no progress, and the living conditions of its base only got worse.
Those are just three random examples. The same pattern shows up in almost every aspect of life. Making money is the whole point of a performance, of course, and the money ends up in clowns’ pockets if they succeed.
Clown Test
So how do we test whether things are real or performative? Ask three questions:
- What fundamental does this claim to improve, by how much, and how is that measured?
- Are the numbers, anecdata, and narratives being presented as a proxy for reality, or as a substitute for it?
- Who captures money and power if this succeeds?
Clowns will be happy to promote any abstract unit that might look profound but changes nothing. The real tell is their reaction to the questions above. A serious person engages with them, even when the answer is inconvenient. A clown gets angry and doubles down on performance.
I have found this test handy, and I use it all the time.