Source: Jacobin
by David Moscrop
Doctorow: “There’s this kind of performative complexity in a lot of the wickedness in our world — things are made complex so they’ll be hard to understand. The pretense is they’re hard to understand because they’re intrinsically complex. And there’s a term in the finance sector for this, which is ‘MEGO:’ My Eyes Glaze Over. It’s a trick. You give someone a prospectus so thick that they assume it must be important and good in the same way that when you give someone a pile of shit that’s big enough, they assume there must be a pony under it. And so I wanted to take that complex technical stuff going on with crypto, an arena in which I think there is mostly no ‘there’ there, and do exactly that: show how there’s no ‘there’ there in a story about someone who’s trying to figure out whether there’s a ‘there’ there.” (05/07/23)