<
https://doctorow.medium.com/big-business-cant-stop-its-illegal-fantastically-lucrative-gossiping-f3139d6a3803>
"Seven years ago, I called Leonard Cohen’s
Everybody Knows “the perfect
anthem for our times.”
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
<
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/>
That was just after Cohen died, and while the world seems to want to settle on
Hallelujah as his totemic song,
Everybody Knows keeps inserting itself into
the discourse, in the most toxic, hope-draining way possible. Whenever some
awful scandal involving the great and the good breaches, we’re told that
“everybody knew” already, so let’s move on.
This current has been running through our society for decades now. Remember
when the Snowden leaks hit and a yawning chorus of nihilists told us that they
knew already and so should anyone else with the smallest iota of
sophistication? Back then Jay Rosen coined a rejoinder to this counsel of
despair: “Don’t savvy me”:
https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369
Everybody knows. It’s what we heard after the Panama Papers. Swissleaks.
Luxleaks. The Paradise Papers. Everybody knows! It’s what the
nothing-to-see-here crowd said about
Propublica’s explosive IRSLeaks, back in
2021:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest>
The leaks revealed the tax-dodges of the richest and most powerful people in
America, which were jaw-dropping in their audacity and shamelessness. Sure,
maybe you suspected that the 400 richest people in America paid less tax than
you — but did you really guess that the
means by which they did this was
through taking massive deductions on their elite
hobbies?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
