Kanye West wants his divorce to entertain you. The rapper—who is going by the name Ye lately—recently mocked up a Captain America: Civil War poster with the faces of him and his wife, Kim Kardashian. He has been spamming social media with taunts about her new man, the comedian Pete Davidson, whom he’s given the nickname “Skete.” He’s planning a new stadium show for the release of his album Donda II, a follow-up to last summer’s stadium event, during which he pretended to remarry Kardashian.

Defenders of West, and tons of them still appear in the replies to any given tweet about the rapper, might say that he is surviving a painful personal chapter by doing what he does best, making content. A skeptic of celebrity culture—who isn’t one of those?—might wonder whether his recent antics are a publicity stunt for all involved. The take from Kardashian (who filed for divorce a year ago): “Kanye’s obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation so negatively and publicly is only causing further pain for all.”

Few famous families’ agony has been publicized from within quite like this before. One of West’s recent Instagram posts said he speaks to the media in the same way basketball players speak to referees, and “WE HAVE A PUBLIC RELATIONSHIP BECAUSE WE ARE PUBLIC FIGURES.” This point of view—presenting marriage and fatherhood as sports; rallying fandoms to interfere in the lives of people he says he loves; denying his wife and kids privacy on the grounds that they are already famous—is, and there are many terms for it so I’ll just pick a simple one, messed up. But maybe I’m wrong to even express that opinion. This entire situation is none of our business.

Why, exactly, does West remain so hard to tune out? Is it because of goodwill from his music career, which peaked long ago? Is it interest in his fashion business, which still puts out sought-after sneakers? Is it the spillover from Kardashian’s own brand of fame, which turns living rooms into TV-show sets? Is it the difficulty of knowing how to deal with mental-health crises, which West has experienced in public previously? Or is it just voyeurism—the fun of watching the Kanye show?

Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, a new, seven-hour documentary about West, contains the likely answer. We pay attention to him because he wants our attention. West is a genius at confrontation, eye-poking, yelling “Fire!” in a theater—things that might be risky to validate but seem riskier to ignore. He has used that talent, over the years, to shape what millions of people listen to, how they dress, and even how they think. And in an era when influence is a currency in itself, West’s talent for pulling focus has often been treated as inspiring. But his power has stopped seeming glamorous now that its danger is all too clear.

Filming at a party in 1998, Coodie Simmons, the host of a public-access-TV show focused on Chicago hip-hop, interviewed a sharp-looking guy in wire-frame glasses who was barely old enough to drink. This was the up-and-coming producer Kanye West, who grabbed Simmons’s mic and began shouting out his friends. That encounter, Simmons says in Jeen-Yuhs, “would be the beginning of a brotherhood that would last more than 20 years.” The resulting documentary—which premiered at Sundance and has just begun its three-week rollout on Netflix—pulls from hundreds of hours of footage that Simmons accumulated while following West around.

Yet the film is not comprehensive, even if it is illuminating and charmingly ramshackle. The first two installments immerse the viewer in the lead-up to and the aftermath of West’s brilliant 2004 debut, The College Dropout. The fact that hours of screen time elapse before we see him in the studio for his second album, Late Registration, primes the viewer to expect a documentary series of Ken Burnsian proportions—which West’s career will some day, for sure, sustain. But that day is not today. After he became famous, the rapper distanced himself from Simmons and his filming partner, Chike Ozah, until the mid-2010s, when they returned to capture the footage for Jeen-Yuhs’s third act. This fractured structure gives the movie an unsettling asymmetry. First you meet the bright-eyed early West, who hustled for his voice to be heard. Then you meet the lost-seeming West of recent years, who speaks as forcefully as ever, but with a fluctuating sense of purpose and palpable inner strain.

Netflix

The young West really did seem impossible to ignore, though at first no one took him seriously as the thing he really wanted to be: a rapper. Back then, West was a dork with a surprising talent who was always taking out his retainer and putting it on shared surfaces (much to the disgust, at one point, of the rapper Scarface). When West visits his mom, Donda, at her apartment, he seems genuinely deferential to the warm and wise woman who raised him. She admires her son’s chain while also chiding him for buying jewels before buying a house. She also gives gentle advice about embracing his star potential while remaining humble to himself.

The advice, even at that early point, was warranted. West’s habit of launching into self-celebrating monologues—packed with visions of barriers broken, dreams achieved, and doubters silenced—is noticeable from the start of the documentary. So is his skill: The best scenes simply show him breaking into his verses in front of people whose polite tolerance quickly turns into amazement. Still, it took a while for his chops to translate into success. At one point, West and his crew show up uninvited to Roc-a-Fella Records and ambush various employees in humdrum offices with West’s music. The staffers seem slightly intrigued by his lyrical punch lines, and by his gall, but no record deal immediately results.

[Read: God may forgive Kanye West, but you don’t have to]

Music was his calling card, really, because of West’s ear: his knack for balancing hypnotic flows with jolting surprises, his taste for familiar yet futuristic beats, his choice of subject matter. (Early in Jeen-Yuhs, West identifies that his edge in hip-hop is that he isn’t deadly and battle-hardened, and that his parents instilled a political consciousness in him.) Like all great pop artists, West understood himself in relation to his audience, allowing him to deduce what would keep them rapt. Profitable controversy was not yet part of the equation. When a onetime mentor dissed West on Chicago radio in the early 2000s, West seemed hurt and confused—and, in a twist for today’s viewers, moved quickly to de-escalate the conflict.

“I guess things change when you get famous,” Simmons says in the third and final Jeen-Yuhs chapter, explaining why West started cutting the documentarians out of his circle over time. According to Simmons, “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for the world to see the real him,” because the rapper had begun consciously “acting” in public. So Jeen-Yuhs ends up using montage to depict many pivotal moments: the 2004 George W. Bush comment; the 2009 Taylor Swift incident; the man-made mountain of his 2013–14 Yeezus tour. When images of him and Kardashian walking a red carpet flit by as if in a side-view mirror, some pundit can be heard calling their relationship a “recipe for disaster.”

While we aren’t let in on West’s thought process throughout the long and productive second act of his career, we do see how many of his extramusical provocations drew upon the same qualities he had used to get famous in the first place: enthusiasm for confrontation; a faith in his own extemporaneous verbal abilities; the tendency to justify his own glorification as part of a larger social mission; and, most crucially, a knack for pushing beyond the lines of what society expects. Hearing him yell at the radio host Sway Calloway or declare himself a god to Zane Lowe, fans may feel a strange nostalgia for West’s old style of scandal, which at least always publicized great music.

Netflix

Simmons returned to the rapper’s fold a few weeks after West’s involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in 2016, which Simmons says shocked him: “When I would see Kanye go off in the past, I just thought it was a part of the show. I had no idea he was even struggling with his mental health.” Questions of intentionality and responsibility then came to surround West as he rapped about mania and murder, befriended Donald Trump, and made a swing toward evangelical Christianity. Perhaps the most eerie scene of the documentary takes place in 2020, as West sits with a group of real-estate investors in the Dominican Republic. He begins ranting, angrily and seemingly unprovoked, about genius and persecution. Simmons notes the “energy” shifting and turns off the camera.

West has, as recently as last week, made clear that he doesn’t want his actions to be justified or discounted because of speculation about his mental health. Late in Jeen-Yuhs, he pulls out his phone to watch Tucker Carlson praise the rapper’s 2020 rally in South Carolina, during which then-presidential-candidate West sobbed while speaking about abortion. Behind the camera, Simmons discourages West from watching Carlson—“he’s negative!”—but West remains rapt. Carlson acknowledges reports that West may be experiencing a bipolar episode and says, “It doesn’t mean what he said is wrong.” In response, West exclaims, “Boom!”

[Read: ‘6 months off meds I can feel me again’]

That South Carolina rally is typical of latter-day West in that, despite concerns about how he’s doing and the value of what he’s saying, he is operating in a way that is very hard to ignore—because these days he is flouting ethics, not just taste. West’s run for president came with potentially big implications: He was assisted by Trump surrogates who likely wanted him to shave votes away from Democrats. According to reports, his rally, which included the revelation that he had considered aborting his first child, upset Kardashian because she had not consented to revealing such information to the public. His violation of her privacy would seem to deserve condemnation. But that means publicizing it and him, fueling the sort of cycle that the media, entertainment institutions, and the public have been unable to resist.

West can no longer credibly argue that his ends justify his means. He wants to, as he puts it late in Jeen-Yuhs, “change sanitation, change meditation, change the way we think, the way we connect with Earth, the way we connect with God”—messianic goals that, at least, fit with his turn toward religion and politics. But his social-media campaign over the past few weeks to get Kardashian to take him back offers a reminder of why his supposed good intentions have never gotten as much notice as his methods of pursuing them. Sending a truck of roses to his ex’s house, encouraging his followers to yell at her boyfriend, posting her private text messages—this behavior, as many commentators have argued, resembles dangerous, stalker tactics.

On Wednesday, West relented somewhat by writing that he understood his posts had been “jarring and came off as harassing Kim.” He announced that he would no longer be writing in all caps, because it makes people think he’s shouting, and he added that “to be a good leader is to be a good listener.” These were vows for a recalibration of his communication style, nothing deeper: His form of listening has really always been about figuring out how to make others listen to him. He will challenge cultural norms again and again—but may well only make the point that some boundaries exist for good reason.

In football, when a quarterback “breaks contain,” he evades the oncoming pass rush, escaping into the open field. To break contain is to generate chaos; it can extend the life of an otherwise dead play, forcing the defense to scramble. It’s a concept I also find useful in thinking about trends: Almost all big trends are conceived in a subculture—gamers, rap fans, teen TikTokers, whoever—but most of the things that get popular within those groups never make it through the barrier to the outside world. But when a trend does manage to break contain, it becomes everyone’s problem.

As I watched the now-viral Tonight Show clip of Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon disinterestedly cooing about their newly acquired Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, it occurred to me that I had probably just watched NFTs break contain. “It reminded me of me a little bit, because I wear striped shirts,” Fallon said, meekly justifying the computer-generated doodle of an anthropomorphized monkey for which he paid about $216,000. “They look like they could be friends,” Hilton replied, as Fallon held their two monkey cartoons next to each other. Of course this is how it happens, I thought to myself. NFTs have been an obsession in some of the more tiresome corners of the internet for the past year, and an extended conversation between two massively famous people on national television is exactly how that kind of thing leaps into the larger culture. It’s the reason a retired relative texts you to ask if they need to know about NFTs.

Celebrity endorsements—of a product, a brand, an idea, a haircut—have been around for ages, but they’ve become especially thick on the ground in recent years, as stars have developed their own direct advertising channels on social media. For people with something to sell, a celebrity’s fan base provides an easy, responsive audience. You don’t even have to be all that famous: If you look up the Instagram profiles of cast members from C-list Netflix reality shows, you can reliably find them modeling Fashion Nova leggings or promoting some new app to their seven-figure followings. For products with regulatory red tape that makes advertising difficult, such as recreational cannabis, celebrities are the best way to get people talking about your product.

[Read: America’s best drug dealers are A-list celebrities]

Hilton and Fallon have abundant company on the Hollywood NFT hype train—Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Steph Curry, and Eminem have all hopped on recently. But even in a culture inured to celebrity shills, the Tonight Show clip produced an outsize response. A tweet of the video with thousands of shares called it “deeply strange.” The journalist Max Read described it as “profoundly unsettling.” There is indeed something disquieting about the whole scene—or maybe, that the scene took place at all. With NFTs, America may have reached the logical extreme of celebrity endorsements.

If no one has cornered you at a party to explain this to you yet, NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is an unalterable digital receipt that lives on a decentralized public transaction ledger called a blockchain. In current practice, NFTs are tokens that usually correspond to what can be generously called artworks. The Bored Apes are, if nothing else, a pretty good indicator of the quality of aesthetic vision that you can expect to find at the top of the market. And the top of the market can be very expensive; the artist Beeple sold an NFT in March for $69 million. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote, NFTs have also inspired a virulent backlash from people who worry about the environmental impacts of blockchain technology—buying NFTs requires cryptocurrency, and crypto requires an enormous amount of energy—but also from those who think they’re straightforwardly a scam. They very well might be entirely a scam, or the market may just be composed overwhelmingly of scams with some legitimate transactions here and there—feel free to split that hair however you’d like. Whether the technology itself will have more useful applications in the future is presently unclear. This is all speculative for now, in several senses of the word.

The murkiness around the point of NFTs makes Hilton and Fallon’s flippant conversation about their six-figure apes worthy of close examination, even if it wasn’t an endorsement in the narrowly traditional sense. A representative for MoonPay, the cryptocurrency-payments company that they name-dropped for facilitating their purchases, told me that the company’s celebrity clients all initiated the transactions themselves, were invoiced for their own NFTs, and were not compensated for public mentions of the company. The only placement MoonPay has paid for so far, according to the spokesperson, was for a recent plug in a Post Malone music video.

But because NFTs aren’t consumer products, the traditional understanding of a celebrity endorsement isn’t an adequate framework for understanding who’s profiting. As Read noted in his newsletter about the Tonight Show video, the Hollywood-NFT ecosystem seems particularly incestuous. Hilton, for her part, is already an investor in at least one NFT platform, and has sold her own Planet Paris NFTs for more than $1 million. There has been a gold rush into cryptocurrency start-ups in the past year, and because they’re private companies, it’s usually not clear who may have invested where, or who may be doing whom a favor. CoinDesk, a publication that covers the cryptocurrency industry, called the recent flutter of celebrity NFT activity and its questionable motivations “perverse deal-making.” MoonPay declined to comment on its investors.

Even if an NFT-owning celebrity has no financial stake in any of the companies battling it out in the crypto market, they have a clear stake in NFTs as a concept. When you buy one of these tokens, you aren’t buying ownership of the original artwork—the images are publicly viewable (and right-click downloadable) by anyone on the internet, and the original artists retain their rights to publish or reproduce the work itself. What NFT owners get is a new type of speculative asset, and for growth, they need the investment dollars of the general public to flood in after them. “Just as the pork-futures commodity trader is not principally interested in taking delivery of pig meat, so the NFT trader is not necessarily concerned with the usefulness or even the symbolic value of an ape,” my colleague Ian Bogost wrote recently. When Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon make dead-eyed conversation with each other on national television about how cool Bored Apes are, it comes with the very real likelihood that doing so will increase the value of their investment by recruiting new money. When NFTs break contain, NFT holders profit.

[Read: The internet is just investment banking now]

You know what? Fine. Fine. I don’t know that I care if some guy loses his shirt because he thought Post Malone or whoever else had provided him with a sound blueprint for securing his financial future via some type of computer-generated monkey doodle that’s particularly likely to get stolen. Someone should be out there protecting that guy from himself, but that’s above my pay grade.

Regardless, it’s gross. Watching two millionaires promote a mechanism of passive wealth accumulation while they unconvincingly pretend to be interested in “art” or “community” is viscerally revolting. Even Hilton and Fallon seem to be exhausted by going through the motions of revenue-creation in this particularly vacuous way. The Simple Life, the reality show that made Hilton a household name, may not have been incredible art (although I did truly enjoy it as a college student), but at least it was fun to watch. Perhaps the genre of celebrity that Hilton helped produce in the mid-2000s always guaranteed that wealth accumulation itself would be the endgame of celebrity endorsements. Hilton, like her Kardashian heirs and countless Instagram influencers after them, has never been all that interesting on her merits. Instead, watching people be rich is luridly entertaining, and what’s most fascinating about this kind of star is the way that they use fame as a portal through which endless stacks of cash can be pulled. Over time, the most successful among them have become more like traditional celebrities—the Jimmy Fallons of the world—but their enormous cultural influence has also forced other kinds of stars to behave more like them.

[Read: People really, really hate the future of the internet]

Stars have always done asset-based wealth building, just like any other rich person, but quietly—celebrities who buy up rental properties or fast-food franchises generally have not sought public praise for becoming landlords, or for extracting wealth from the labor of the working poor. Now everyone from Justin Beiber to Shaq wants to be treated as a cultural visionary for placing six-digit bets on the long-term value of a digital receipt for an ugly cartoon, and they want you to know this is the new cool thing, and there’s still time for you to get in on the ground floor. If Hilton and Fallon and their celebrity friends are going to go out there and pump-and-dump their way to additional wealth, they could at least do the rest of us the courtesy of being a little more discreet about it. Instead, they sound like they think this is stupid, and like they think the rest of us might be stupid enough to buy in.

On the subway this morning, I looked up and saw an ad for a new cryptocurrency. More specifically, I looked up at a bright-red rectangle behind large white font reading: It’s never too late to be early.

We’re in the midst of a speculation boom that has been variously compared to the Beanie Babies craze, the dot-com bubble, and tulip mania. A year ago, the average person might never have heard the term Web3. Now we all have to watch as Paris Hilton beholds a cartoon-monkey NFT (non-fungible token) that Jimmy Fallon spent $216,000 on, then remarks, “I love the captain hat.” Stories about this new vision for the internet appear in the tech and business sections of national newspapers more or less every single day, generally with the caveat that a lot of people sincerely believe Web3 to be a Ponzi scheme, a grift, a multilevel-marketing arrangement, and a scam.

This assessment has its own, swiftly growing army of adherents. “Web3 is a Ponzi scheme” has circulated as a meme, in widely cited manifestos, and in viral blog posts. Maybe soon it will be a political slogan. (Those who have a specific disdain for NFTs have already taken up the nickname “right-clickers.”) Likening Web3 to a Ponzi scheme is useful because, unlike Web3 itself, a Ponzi scheme is easy to grasp: We all know what’s wrong with scams, and we understand that Ponzi schemes are bad. We may not get what people mean when they talk about the blockchain, but we do get the sense that we’re supposed to be their marks, and that we’re under pressure to join them or die.

Whether that rhetoric is fair—whether Web3 is literally a scam—depends on which piece of a broad ecosystem of new technologies you happen to be talking about. (Clearly scams abound; the Federal Trade Commission has gone so far as to officially announce that scams abound.) At its most basic, Web3 imagines a massive shift away from the habit of accessing the web via centralized platforms such as Facebook and Google, and toward a norm of communicating, storing information, and making payments through a supposedly incorruptible, uneditable, fail-proof system. This would conceivably give the average person greater control over their personal data and the consequences of their interactions, but for various reasons it has so far been a bit of a farce.

The term itself—Web3—was first used by Gavin Wood, the co-founder of the popular Ethereum blockchain, in 2014, in an essay now referred to as “seminal” and “classic” by crypto enthusiasts. The vitriol that can erupt anytime his neologism is mentioned—the fuel that often takes these conversations from zero to 100—comes from the creeping feeling that Wood and others’ vision of the future is inevitable, that Web3 will come about in spite of anybody’s reservations, however much it seems to be a scam. The frenzy of speculation is being met with a counter-frenzy of resentment.

The people who say that Web3 is a scam have other issues with the whole idea. In fact, they hate it for a new reason every day. I’m not exaggerating: They hate it.

When the Associated Press announced last month that it would sell some of its photographs as NFTs, the decision was described as “spineless, amoral,” and the news organization was told to “eat shit.” (Dwayne Desaulniers, who is leading the AP project, told me that he spent eight hours combing through the Twitter responses. “The volume, I was surprised at,” he said.) In the fall, when the NFL star Aaron Rodgers said that he would take part of his salary in bitcoin, he was blasted for participating in what some said amounted to an endorsement of “money laundering.” When the “fan token” platform Socios got involved in British Premier League soccer, Crystal Palace fans showed up to a game with a banner reading, MORALLY BANKRUPT PARASITES SOCIOS NOT WELCOME. On Twitter, the anti-Web3 crowd has lately been circulating a digital poster in the style of 19th-century newspaper advertisements, with NFTs Fucking Suck and Open Your Eyes, Shit-for-Brains headlining in ornate script.

A person investing in crypto or a shared future on the blockchain is said to hate Earth and support the “hyperfinancialization of all human existence.” Or they’re a greedy doofus who deserves to waste millions of dollars on digital monkey portraits while Marc Andreessen gets richer, if not an embarrassing freak who is really just looking for cover to debate age-of-consent laws. But the simple insistence that Web3 is a scam—no more, no less—remains the most consistent critique. After Kim Kardashian was sued for promoting a dubious cryptocurrency-investment opportunity on her Instagram, Ben McKenzie, an early-2000s teen-soap star (is this odd?), wrote an essay for Slate with the journalist Jacob Silverman lambasting Kardashian and arguing that celebrities who promote crypto “might as well be pushing payday loans or seating their audience at a rigged blackjack table.” Sounds bad.

The anger at Web3 carries echoes of the fury over the subprime-mortgage meltdown almost 15 years ago. The gross behavior that event exposed and the government bailouts that came after helped motivate the early embrace of bitcoin, which was compellingly described as a financial system based on “proof,” rather than the sort of “trust” that had just gotten the world into a huge mess. Now, ironically, the same historical event serves as the grounds for Web3 backlash. “I have seen one fool’s-gold rush from up close in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis,” Michael Hsu, a bank regulator in the U.S. Treasury Department, said in a September speech to the Blockchain Association. “It feels like we may be on the cusp of another with cryptocurrencies.”

Last year, when a bunch of Reddit users spent weeks juicing GameStop stock just to mess with everyone—and when the New York Young Republican Club responded by staging a baffling reoccupation of Wall Street—they were thinking back to the 2008 crisis. (The bailouts were “still a plot point,” Paige K. Bradley argued in a report for Artforum. “People are pissed off.”) So too are Web3 resistors in the highly active Reddit forums r/CryptoReality and r/Buttcoin. In the latter, crypto enthusiasts are stereotyped and mocked as “the millennial male versions of MLM huns hawking diet shakes on Facebook” and parodied in posts with titles like “Are we living in the future? (Bought snacks with $USD).” But they are also framed as the villainous engineers of a portended collapse who are shoving us all into a future that is really history repeating itself.

An r/Buttcoin moderator, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of harassment and doxing, admitted that swapping bit for butt is juvenile, but told me I could not possibly know how annoying it is when “crypto bros” spam Reddit with their links and say that anybody who disagrees with them is a fool. (The longest-running bit in the r/Buttcoin forum is commenting “this is good for bitcoin” underneath any piece of crypto-related news that should ostensibly be disillusioning, in imitation of the crypto bros’ unflagging faith.) The moderator also said the forum serves as a public archive of the crypto bros’ predatory behavior.

“It’s not a question of if the market is going to collapse; it will collapse,” he said. “And when that happens, there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to pretend they were victims. And there’s a large group of us that feel we can’t let them get away with that. There shouldn’t be any bailouts for these people.”

The pandemic changed the way Americans think about scams. A few years ago, when Donald Trump was in office and the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was awaiting trial, grifting seemed to be the default mode of conduct in a society built on self-interest. The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino described it in her 2019 best seller, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion, as “the definitive millennial ethos.”

We were tickled by scams, found ourselves begrudgingly awed by them, and indulged a morbid curiosity in their inner workings. But somehow, the relentless misery and staggeringly unequal outcomes of the past two years have brought an unexpected correction to this mindset. A new exasperation has taken hold around the billionaires, out-of-touch celebrities, and dubiously talented influencers who couldn’t find it in themselves to act in good taste while others were suffering, and who were insulated from the worst of the pandemic by the money that kept rolling in. Calls rang out for crackdowns on all the liars, hypocrites, and opportunists exploiting desperation.

[Read: How the pandemic stoked a backlash to multilevel marketing]

The most online stretch in human history surely played a role in this reversal. On social networks, anti-scamming movements have escalated through likes and shares as quickly as the scammy movements themselves. Anti-scammers appear motivated by frustration with the way things work—and with the fact that they had no say in their arrangement. Likewise, with Web3, the anger seems to come from the knowledge that regular people may be unable to excuse themselves from the possibly tragic ramifications of a movement they neither pursued nor supported. “If it’s just a dot-com bubble, it sucks for the people who invested,” Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University, recently told Vox. “But if it’s [like] 2008, then we’re all screwed, even those of us who aren’t investing, and that’s not fair.”

When I spoke with Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum, and asked him whether he was surprised by the recent pushback against Web3, he seemed unfazed. People are just afraid of change, he said, and that’s okay, because, as with any major societal shift, Web3 will be brought about in waves. “First there’s the builders,” he said, “the people who are building the next generation of stuff.” Then there’s a broader group of influential people who “think quite deeply about how it is that they’re living their lives.” If this second group buys into a coherent argument as to why the major societal shift is to their benefit, they will “largely drag along the rest of the population.”

The being dragged along is what people really, really resent. And that resentment is becoming a force of its own.

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