Ignore the rich

The insidious feedback loop of conspiracists and the vampiric quest for eternal life

The conspiracy crowd quickly capitalized on the disaster in Maui by trading heartless memes about the wildfires being a psy-op.

Jason Shurka, who comes from a wealthy real estate family (one that’s been in litigation against other family members), now runs a conspiracy clearing house of social media handles and a subscription-based streaming service. He quickly spun up a low-budget sci-fi video titled “What really happened in Maui???”

During this Anonymous-style brain melter, the government is accused of shooting a laser (or a nuclear bomb; all conspiracies tend to bleed into one another) into the ocean to cause a tsunami because…a Hawaiian wildfire? New York, Boston, and Tonga are all mentioned. Don’t tie the threads, just be scared and subscribe.

Shurka declared that this incident is actually a conspiracy FACT as a way to market his content site:

The leap from this to Jewish space lasers didn’t take long.

(Shurka is Jewish; he was gifted a rare 175-year-old Torah for his bar mitzvah. As the news coverage at the time tells it: “Befitting a Gold Coast homecoming, the Torah was brought to its new home in a 1976 Cadillac convertible, followed by a caravan of Lexuses with horns blaring down Shore Road.” That said, Shurka attempts to make a distinction between “Zionism and Judaism” with his conspiracy-laden videos about the Rothschilds, and this “research” is the basis of the Maui video.)

The leap from space lasers to Jewish space lasers didn’t take long to reach an antisemitic fanbase on X.

Sorry, Chinese space lasers.

Nope, good ol’ fashion bombing.

There aren’t a thousand dead, but 93 (so far), making it the 5th deadliest wildfire in US history—and deadliest since 1918. Conspiracy theorists never let a tragedy go to waste, however. Meanwhile, the outlook isn’t good:

The Pacific Disaster Center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency previously estimated that more than 2,200 structures, the vast majority of which are believed to be residential, had been damaged or destroyed in the fires. Officials projected that rebuilding could cost more than $5 billion, and that 4,500 residents will need ongoing emergency shelter in the meantime.

I can’t imagine the emotional, physical, and economic toll this has taken on residents. All I can do from where I live is share this link to Hawaii Public Radio, which lists the best places to donate relief effort, and use it for my own donations.

Which is how most of us can realistically help. But watching people with more influence, like Shurka (159k Instagram followers; 162k YouTube subscribers), use this tragedy as an opportunity to promote his own service, I’m assured that the goal isn’t to “wake people up.”

It’s to ignore people actually in need.

The longevity of ego

Rebuilding Maui will take $5+ billion. Meanwhile, investments in longevity-related companies worldwide now total…$5.2 billion.

I don’t mean to conflate these issues. Yet it’s not lost on me that while thousands have lost everything, tech elite are hosting an online epigenetic leaderboard dubbed “Rejuvenation Olympics” to judge what wealthy person can “de-age” the best.

This leaderboard is the brain(?)child of venture capitalist multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, pictured below from an article this week.

As Vox reports about these Olympics,

Right now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who is 45 years old, is leading. But 45 is just what competitors describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which means, simply, the years that have passed since his birth date. According to one well-known “biological age” test, he’s aging at a rate slower than his chronological age. He has made waves for his outlandish lifestyle that’s oriented entirely toward the goal of not just appearing young, but becoming younger: He has claimed that he eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. His body fat once fell to a dangerous 3 percent (though it has since bumped up a few percentage points).

Johnson plans on spending $2 million this year to “de-age.” While he falls squarely in the tech space—other known longevity devotees include Jack Dorsey and, previously, Steve Jobs—the investment space is booming. Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal, and John Legend have all invested in biotech company, Tally Health.

This isn’t to claim that the rich aren’t helping wildfire victims. We can hold two thoughts in our heads: Jeff Bezos has invested in life extension company Altos Labs and announced a $100 million fund to aid Maui (which could have something to do with one of his houses being on the island).

It just seems so perverse to cheer on their hunger games while so many people are actually hungry.

We pay far too much attention to the rich and their expendable pursuits. Eking out a few extra years on a burning planet is nonsensical, especially when longevity protocols seem more like neuroses and eating disorders than an honest quest for health. To borrow a term from my wife when we discuss ridiculous diets, it all seems so joyless.

Then again, the basics for good health, like getting enough sleep, exercising, and hydrating come across as so pedestrian. Basics don’t make for good marketing, and those with most have the most money to market themselves. And so we’re swept up in their deluge of bullshit diets and blood transfusions, as if they’re going to help solve any of our actual problems.

Collectively, we decided to assign moral value and intellectual prowess to bank account status, then gawk at the extensive services available to people with money most of us will never imagine—though could certainly put to better purposes. Like updating infrastructure us proletariat rely on for our daily lives, and rebuilding what the consequences of our excesses have wrought.

More always leads to more. That’s a lesson more valuable than the invented paranoia about space lasers. And if those with more only focus on their own health and longevity, we need to ignore their selfish games.

Because as Fran Lebowitz so elegantly phrased it,

You make money by having money — that's what capitalism is. No one earns a billion dollars. You make it. You get it. You don't earn it.

People deserve better than thoughts and prayers—and certainly better than the fever dream of rich conspiracists and egomaniacs laughing in their shelters while the world burns.