This life gives you nothing

Jonah Wiener | Blackbird Spyplane | Dec 16, 2025

I worry that something analogous has happened in my relationship to looking. The same way that an idea would occur to me and I’d immediately reach for a Stock Twitter Phrase to give it form, whenever I see anything that interests me now, there’s a looming sense in which my phone is there with me, framing and constituting the sight, even if I never post the picture, even if I never look at it again and, weirdest of all, even if don’t take out my phone.

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There’s a lot of talk these days about the death of literacy. No one reads, video’s eating everything, we’ve grown stupid, and our alienation from written language is only making us stupider.

For me, this isn’t distant, theoretical hand-wringing. I feel it firsthand, in the erosion of my own ability to concentrate on a piece of writing of any significant seriousness and length.

I am, of course, not alone in this. Our attention has been transformed into one of the few remaining reliable “growth markets” by a parasite economy much better suited to sucking and siphoning than it is to building new things. This means that everything wants to get into our eyeballs, and it goes without saying that there are far more effective technologies for getting in people’s eyeballs — and turning a profit there — than books.

But your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.

For Every Winner a Loser

John Lanchester | London Review of Books | Sep 12, 2024

The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.

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Dalio created the biggest hedge fund in the world, and Stevenson was the top trader at one of the world’s biggest banks; but the all-time number one champion of pure finance was Jim Simons, who died in May. Simons founded and ran Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund whose Medallion fund, over a period of thirty years, averaged an annualised return of 66 per cent (before fees). That’s a hard number to understand: if you put in $10,000 and left it to compound at 66 per cent for thirty years, you would end up with $2.35 trillion. You would start out with enough money to buy a mediocre second-hand car, and end with enough money to buy Italy (current GDP $2.25 trillion). The only reason that wasn’t possible with Medallion was because the fund paid out its winnings every year, to cap its size – otherwise, it would grow too big to keep its tactics and technology secret. Oh, and the only people allowed to participate in Medallion were employees and former employees of Renaissance Technologies. These choices derived from Simons’s preference for staying well under the radar – which is probably the reason you have never heard of him, unless you have an interest in finance. But no investor, speculator, gambler or magician has ever come anywhere near the financial performance of Simons and his fund.

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Financial markets are zero-sum. Renaissance was making money, so someone else was losing it. Who? There were diverse conclusions about this inside the firm. Simons thought ‘the manager of a global hedge fund who is guessing on a frequent basis the direction of the French bond market may be a more exploitable participant.’ One of his colleagues had another explanation. ‘It’s a lot of dentists,’ he said, identifying ‘a different set of traders infamous for both their excessive trading and over-confidence when it came to predicting the direction of the market’. Another Renaissancer had a third view. ‘We’re mediocre traders, but our system never has rows with its girlfriends – that’s the kind of thing that causes patterns in markets.’ One way or another, whether it was made from dentists or hedge funds or people who had just had a row with their girlfriend, Renaissance enjoyed unprecedented success by predicting and profiting from other people’s mistakes.

Since all this activity sums to zero, the social cost or benefit of Renaissance has to be found not in the firm’s activity but in what its participants did with the money they made.