A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wi…
Source: The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
long read, but worth it.
“At a more macro-sociological level, as my opening graphic illustrates, premium mediocre is a kind of modern proto middle class, born of a vanishing old middle class, and attempting to fake it while waiting for a replacement to appear under their feet while they tread water. It is a class sandwiched between the crypotobourgeoisie above and the API below.”
“dumb-luck” would have been me buying a few hundred or even thousands of bitcoin when I read initial white-paper (which I ‘didn’t fully understand), but a few hundred$ spent then would make me very rich.
“The name is synecdoche; the cryptobourgeoisie includes anyone who’s made it through any kind of mostly-dumb-luck Internet get-rich-quick scheme anytime in the last couple of decades.
About the only path to wealth-building available to the average premium mediocre young person in the developed world today, absent any special technical skills or entrepreneurial bent, is cryptocurrencies.”
“The traditional wealth-building strategy in the US, home ownership, has turned into a mix of a mug’s game and unassailable NIMBY rentierism.
The public markets are no longer reliable wealth builders, while the private markets exclude almost everybody who isn’t already wealthy.”
“And below? There lies the terrifying structural boundary of our times — the API. Today, you’re either above the API or below the API (the phrase “below the API” appears to have been coined by Peter Reinhardt in 2015). You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do. To crash through the API, and into what I previously termed the Jeffersonian middle class, is to go from being predator to prey in the locust economy.“
