From 'FOMO' to 'JOMO': The Woke Economy Is Imploding & Evil Media People Are Panicking
G.F.Y. !
“Conservative lawmakers have taken measures to resist ESG…manifest[ing] in legislative efforts across multiple states where lawmakers are pushing back against the injection of [equity] into the financial sector. The Global Sustainable Investment Alliance reported Wednesday that the total value of sustainable assets shrunk from $35 trillion in 2020 to $30 trillion in 2022. S&P Global Clean Energy Index reports a 30% fall in 2023. The United States alone has seen assets in ESG funds plunge by more than half, from over $17 trillion to $8.4 trillion. Call this what it is: Economic Terrorism.” — AFRU, a race-based “equity” organization funded by Google, The Ford Foundation, Amazon, the Kingdom of Norway and others
“So you are telling me, a bunch of incel losers from 4chan can destroy the richest and most powerful businesses in the entire world through pure meme shitposting online?” — Anonymous observation on AFRU’s website
$ $ $ $ $ $
It’s getting sooooooo obvious now.
Every day, you can’t help but see and experience the devastating economic and anti-Art results of BlackRock and other venture capital “Master of the Universe” types’ attempts to alter society and destroy talent-based capitalism, so they can have everything for themselves while “you will own nothing and be happy.”
This attitude and worldview is most perfectly summed up by BlackRock’s abominable anti-American aptronym CEO Larry FINK and his creepy quest to “force behaviors.” It plays out through a programmed victim mentality of low I.Q. Wokeness, blenderized with a resentment-rooted racism concocted and injected into corporations and creative companies whose priority should be making money, not programming useful idiots and useless eaters.
The ugly and aptly monikered Larry FINK is a classic “Bad For The Jews” cliché: A faithless finance-focused freak who thinks he can rule the world by bullying, money-management and name-calling. It’s like he got typecast straight outta dark 1930s propaganda, a caricature from Mein Kampf or a Father Charles Coughlin radio broadcast, all the way down the rabbit hole to the presumably paranoid accusations he’s trying to take over the world. Hey, he said it, not me!
The pockmarked septuagenarian’s not-so-Hidden Hand attempts to fistfully force “equity and diversity” (which actually seems to mean: anti-white, anti-morality, anti-normalcy, antiChrist, anti-Civilization) on Western economies have been a creep show’s creeping disaster for the economy, which would’ve collapsed long ago were it not for the irresponsible bipartisan “money machine goes brrrrrrrrrrr,” strategy of repeatedly conjuring more digital cash whenever it’s needed. All that’s required is a push of the Federal Reserve button to prop up a failed talent-ignoring ideology-driven financial scam that depends on a Gordian knot of spin, hype, secrets & lies.
If this is a multi-tiered war — and I sure think it’s the latest war-to-end-all-wars, seeking full-spectrum dominance, a war against humanity and the family unit and your precious soul, a Culture War that’s Civil War 2.0 but actually WW3 yet above all else a Spiritual War — one where “politics is downstream from culture” — then it would make sense that the first positive concrete results we would see in the critical thinking counter-offensive against lockstep goose-step globalist Woke Wetiko insanity and the War Upon the American Ideal would come in the Arts and the surrounding Culture War.
And wow, are we seeing it. Hollywood, advertising, publishing and everything else has taken a nail-gun to the noggin. The latest estimates of lost revenue due to active resistance to equity-driven/talent-ignoring DEI/ESG decision-making crossed FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS in losses, according to the panicked calculations of the Google propped-up organization AFRU. It’s much worse in the field of advertising than most are letting on.
Sounds crazy high, yes. But let’s note that, in November alone, the diabolical DEI anti-merit management demons at Disney, led by Bobby “Go Fuck Yourself” Iger, lost $750 million! In one month.
Disney Marvel’s poster child for Superhero “equity,” The Marvels, is now openly being recognized as the likely Biggest Bomb In Cinematic History. The morons at Marvel and devilish deviants in Disney P.R. threw up a white flag of sniveling surrender in a press release it crapped out Sunday afternoon, weaseling out of the movie’s final death throes: “With The Marvels box office winding down, we will stop reporting the title’s international/global grosses.”
OUCH. And here’s the kicker: Disney’s next flop, its 100th Anniversary animated feature Wish, is looking like it will end up making even less than The Marvels!
Here’s a big “tell” how far Disney has fallen: This past weekend Universal’s third Trolls movie, in its fourth week of release, put more butts in seats in fewer theaters than Wish (3,600 vs. 3,900), which is in its third week of release.
This Trolls flip over the Wish flop is a major signifier that Disney has gone from a FOMO brand to a JOMO brand, which is a profit-smothering devolution for any company, product or piece of content.
Let me explain: When I used to work for a now-dead digital subsidiary of the once-legendary-now-also-dead advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, one of the smarter and less abrasive women there popularized the acronym “FOMO,” or “Fear Of Missing Out.” She’d write white papers about it and appeared regularly on the morning chat shows, explaining the latest thing we all felt compelled to buy or participate in, whether we actually wanted to or not, because Everybody Is Doing It.
FOMO is one of the Holy Grails of product marketing. If you can reach that status, where the shallow and insecure members of the public feel it’s necessary to buy and/or consume something simply because everybody else is doing so, you are Golden. Madison Avenue Nirvana.
For many years, Disney and its Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar and parent animation studios had the market cornered on FOMO. Its movies and properties were making bank on the back of anxious consumer habitual behaviors, founded on Fear, Fear of Missing Out, one of the two most effective marketing tactics (Along with sex. Sex and Fear are the two strongest motivating strategies in advertising).
But FOMO has a flip side: JOMO, or the “Joy Of Missing Out.” JOMO is described as “the vicarious pleasure that comes from a situation where a person enjoys missing out on things.”
JOMO is very dangerous to any brand. When it becomes cooler to avoid something than to embrace it, when paying participants get mocked for giving their money to a company most Americans hate, or shelling out shekels to see an entertainment product now majority recognized as soul-corrupting garbage, when you reach an inflection point where there is more JOMO to be found in ridicule than in FOMO loyalty, a brand/company/corporation/conglomerate/nation is in deeeeeeeep shit.
That’s where Disney finds itself now, on the razor’s edge on an inverted Zeitgeist. It’s cooler to hate them. It’s cooler to avoid their product. It’s cooler to see the third Trolls movie than Disney’s 100th Anniversary princess musical multiplex offering.
It’s so hip to hate the Rat Kingdom that the alleged “richest man on the planet” Elon Musk (he’s not, actually; the richest people are so rich they can keep their names off any list — another reminder how you live a lie, a Narrative, “the whole world’s a stage”!) can take a calculated risk by telling Disney’s officious phony lying prick of a CEO to “Go Fuck Yourself,” and everybody not in the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate criminal clown media cheers like it’s the NFL or professional wrestling. Which should give you pause, ahem, since both are fixed (Don’t forget: NFL has won the legal right to fix outcomes to maximize ratings and popularity).
BlackRock (and other venture capital)’s Woke demands are killing Disney on the bloody alter of equity-over-talent, obv, natch. But it also came out last week that — another no surprise, duh — this stupid anti-capitalist mentality is killing the publishing business, too. Book publishers and literary agents have gone out of their way for the past decade or so to tell talented authors “No Straight White Men allowed.” The diversity decree mantra has become a priority over literary skill and merit.
As the noted feminist author Joyce Carol Oates decried last year: “A literary agent told me that he cannot get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”
According to publishing industry insiders, equity and anti-white racism have all-but-destroyed the publishing industry and are exacerbating an already-profound problem of a nation that does not read, which is particularly discouraging after J.K. Rowling spent a decade cultivating a new generation of ardent novel readers with her record-breaking series of Harry Potter books.
Several industry experts quoted in The Daily Mail noted a trend towards hiring “inexperienced” editors of color (“colored editors”?) in the wake of now-you-see-his-tattoos-now-you-don’t George Floyd’s shady death and the violent destructive wave of Democratic Party-promoted protests that followed. Publishing executives say these “ideological fanatics” have put politics over profit and made unprofessional and anti-capitalist decisions leading to massive sales slump.
Nobody wants to read their shit, because it’s written by societal minorities holding fringe opinions and living lifestyles well outside the mainstream that nobody gives a damn about. These writers have a tiny limited readership of choir members who want to be preached to.
For example: Former actress and self-admitted teen Hollywood sexual abuse victim Ellen/Elliot Page was paid a massive $3 million advance for Page’s bleak and depressing memoir Pageboy, which has so far sold a mere 68,000 copies (it needs roughly 600K book sales to break even).
But Page’s sad memoir, even if it is a commercial failure, is going gangbusters compared to some other fringe amateur writers who’ve been rewarded by “inexperienced editors of color who are ideological fanatics.” Dig this:
Carolyn Ferrell, a writing professor at Sarah Lawrence College, was paid $250,000 in 2021 for her debut novel Dear Miss Metropolitan, a story of three young girls, black and biracial, who are kidnapped and held captive in the basement of a decaying house in Queens. It’s sold a mere 3,163 copies in two years. It needs to sell 50K to break even.
Another example is Claudia Cravens’s 'queer feminist Western' Lucky Red, for which the author was paid a half-million bucks. It’s sold 3,500 copies and needs to sell 100K copies to break even. Then there’s Rasheed Newson’s gay/paranoid My Government Means to Kill Me, which sold for $250,000 and has sold under 4,500 books in nearly a year-and-a-half (needs 50K sales).
Disgraced ESPN host Jemele Hill’s memoir Uphill got a big advance and loud marketing push accompanied by a mass media blitz, with the writer stridently appearing across a variety of television networks. But the public recoiled from the screeching anti-white harpy’s printed screed: Uphill has sold barely 5,000 copies since its October release.
Keep in mind when accounting for these withering low sales that many of these books are purchased in multiple copies by the woke librarians running acquisition departments in our modern libraries. I go to Austin’s main library regularly, and the “New Books” shelves are loaded with these shit fringe titles from untalented amateurs that never circulate and nobody reads. Meanwhile, I can’t get a copy of the latest Jack Reacher novel for a couple days escapism.
But look! All 12 copies of Jemele Hill’s memoir are available! Not a single one is being read. All nine copies of Sarah Lawrence prof Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan are readily a-waiting on the shelves, too; despite the mass advance, nobody wants to read her book even when you can borrow it for free. Seven copies of Elliott Page’s Pageboy are patiently lingering on shelves. How about Claudia Cravens’s Lucky Red — You can pick it right up!
If I want to read the best-selling new Jack Reacher novel, however, The Secret, the Austin Library didn’t acquire enough copies to keep me from a waiting list 64 requests deep. I guess they needed those 12 copies of Uphill just too damn badly!
But consider this: If the Austin library alone has 12 unread copies of Uphill, and there are Woke librarians all over America ruining library collections, how many non-library copies of Uphill actually got sold? 100? 40? None?
Seriously: NOBODY CARES is a double edged sword. On one hand, this is a free country, do what you want. Live how you want. I literally Do Not Give A Shit. Most Americans feel this way. On the other hand, most Americans with a free moment to enjoy or cash money to spend are not interested in wallowing in the obsessions of “ideological fanatics” over race, sexuality, equity, a persecution complex, or whatever is compelling “editors of color” to plant they/their latest stake in the ground. Or through the heart of the publishing industry.
Ah well, O Hell. As I’ve written before (and before and before), the Invisible Hand will write the final chapter for all these cowardly mediocrities and the anti-greatness companies they run. And what’s being written was spelled out very clearly last week by the guy I’m not sure is the hero we want or deserve but we’re getting anyway: “GO FUCK YOURSELF.”
You might like this podcast:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-20-iq-what-is-it-and-how-it?r=31s3eo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Boom! There are so many fantastic turns of phrases in this, I lost count.
What a superb catalogue of ‘go woke, go broke’ failures. Especially the publishing industry. What a disgrace! It’s just about a dead field here in Toronto. And the trial by fire was at Penguin offices when it had the temerity to publish Jordan Peterson. The millennial staffers would said to be openly weeping and wailing!
This is so soul-satisfying to read Tom. The JOMO stuff is **chef’s kiss**.... man oh man, you almost feel sorry for the brands that get hit with this. But it’s SO true!!!