Christine > Recent Status Updates

Levitzky’s Geese

Bulgaria 1934

I became terrified that the history of 300,000 murdered Chinese might disappear just as they themselves has disappeared under Japanese occupation, and that the world might actually one day believe the Japanese politician who have insisted the rape of Nanking was a hoax and a fabrication. That the massacre has never happened at all.

The American government also knew what the Japanese were trying to hide. A machine cypher had protected the Japanese foreign high-level diplomatic messages, but by 1936 crypt analysts from the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Services had cracked the Japanese code which the American government dubbed Red.

Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it’s an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes…

…But now it occurs to me that maybe Mark isn’t on the same page at all. Somehow, introducing him to global leaders and putting him on the world stage at the United Nations is having the opposite effect of what I’d hoped. He seems to be giving less of a damn. Saying things because they sound good. Posting things because they look good. Looking back now, I regret having enabled this.

the WEF has weaponized the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the 0.001 percent. Maybe that’s why they all seem to love this place. It’s like the status Olympics—a chance for them to measure themselves not just against their own industry but across business, politics, entertainment, and media.

“THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU. The thought comes to me whole, unfiltered, pure. This is the first of the cheat codes this incident creates for me. THE ONLY OBSTACLE IN YOUR WAY IS YOU.“

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY