One of the aspects -not all of them negative- that the digital revolution has given us is our diminishing ability to take things seriously or even minimally connect with reality. It is a phenomenon that has also taken over politics, to the point of turning it into little more than a grotesque farce without head or tail, a reality show ominously devoid of an outcome that is not catastrophic. Their lordships no longer govern, they barely legislate, mostly because they limit themselves to playing. Of course, each party tries to impose its own rules on the fly and on a whim. So much so that they themselves are the first to skip the laws they have just passed.
Pablo Iglesias -still with a ponytail- was portrayed the day he gave Felipe VI the series Game of Thrones before the cameras. Born in 1978, a decade after the monarch, the former vice president belongs to a generation that has sucked from the cradle each and every one of the digital advances that have reduced the vast real world to the little that fits on the screen of a smartphone, while he has been reducing political discourse to an exchange of witty tweets, outbursts and fake news. Iglesias has circulated in the fast lane of the circuit in which what distinguishes a university faculty from a television set, or a radio studio in the chamber of the Congress of Deputies, has been erased.
We face a problem that is very difficult to solve when our rulers conceive serious things - including eating - as a mere pastime, as if it were a role-playing game... or the Matrix, Game of Thrones or Game of the Squid...
It is possible to suspect that the leaders of the Catalan procés did not do - and some continue to do - anything other than play at setting up a republic that could only exist in their feverish imagination. Something similar happened with Brexit, although in this case without crossing the red line of legality. Even so, the playful factor that was and is in the antics of Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson cannot be subtracted. Trump was playing to be elected president of the United States… and he won!
The richest man in the world is Elon Musk, an enlightened prone to conceiving life as a game. His immense fortune allows him to fly over without blinking the harsh reality that grips other mortals. But perhaps the biggest problem that comes with the man who is supposed to have everything, is what the hell to do with so much money. It is no longer enough to collect as if they were cool stickers, luxury watches, yachts, mannequins, mansions or football teams. There has to be something else. Even beyond Tesla or SpaceX. But whatever that something is, you have to be aware, in your lucid moments, that it will come without any spiritual comfort. There will be no eternal reward; there will be no existential relief. The world is just a seedy casino from which he leaves every night with his pockets full. For now.
One of Musk's latest whims has been the acquisition -or not- of Twitter. And as much as he plays it like a game, the adverse consequences can be considerable. He first announced that he was going to take over 9.2% of the company, which sent the value of the shares skyrocketing. Shortly after, he expressed his desire to keep 100%. Nobody understood anything, not even on Wall Street. Then, in the midst of an atmosphere of confusion and panic created by him, he goes and says that he has decided to put himself on "pause", pending the results of an investigation into some allegedly illegal practices of Twitter. The value of the shares plummeted.
Musk plays, but he plays hard. He can afford it. He has offered 42.4 billion euros on Twitter, but if he breaks the agreement it would only cost him 1 billion, with the option of claiming that he has been the victim of a hoax. If his allegation prospers, the move will have been free, although not so for the thousands of shareholders, employees, families...
The richest man in the world develops his own game of thrones sitting on his own, as he has admitted that at least 50% of his tweets are written sitting on a porcelain throne, that is, the toilet in his house, because "that's how find solace." As surely as Trump, who longs to recover his Twitter account from the capricious Musk.
Somebody pull the chain before it's too late.
