The presence of such ingenues within a movement is a very clear tell. Snowden, Damore, Greta, etc. etc. It's almost a sign of arrival for a larger grift, at cottage-industry scale (the unicorn scale for grift startups) when they find themselves a charismatic innocent to work with
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Note: this is not exclusively restricted to sensory beauty. Certain kinds of abstract beauty work too. You can aestheticize a problem with beautiful spherical cow economics, and paper over the problem with lovely infographics and chartporn. That's aestheticizing a problem too.
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Wonky investigation of the good sort is invariably very, very ugly. The data is a mess. The graphs are underwhelming, there is a messy mix of anecdote and tenuous trends. There is need for a good deal of repeated digging and refinement and ugly data dumpster diving.
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Covid is a GREAT example of problem that presents opportunities for both kinds of grifting. Sensory-aesthetic grifting: dumb-ass designs restaurants with beautiful perspex partitions, mask chic. Abstract grifting: endless pretty chart porn of case counts.
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I'll end with a small mea culpa. Yeah, a lot of what I do is also a bit of a grift. I aestheticize problems by finding pretty turns of phrase around which to build satisfying appreciative discourses. But in my defense, I'm ironic about it, and don't make much money off it.
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Bonus: South Park S11E7 Night of the Living Homeless has a great joke about problem aestheticization. Can't find a clip, but here's the script fragment. "We could give the homeless all designer sleeping bags and makeovers. At least that way they'd be pleasant to look at."pic.twitter.com/uugmtYXG38
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