The 100 Asshole Theory
A Scientific Way to Blame People
I’m still firmly planted in the honeymoon stage of my Substack relationship. I thoroughly enjoy writing, reading better writers, and connecting with fellow weird people. Compared to Twitter's cesspool of bots and TikTok's humiliation, Substack is a nice change of pace and serves our collective and vital need to express free speech.
Of course, Substack has its flaws. Hucksters proliferate my feed with offers to “grow your audience”, and like all forms of social media, you have to wade through an endless sea of boring self-promotion to get to the good bits.
Speaking of which, my debut novel, SPECTRAL VENGEANCE, is now FREE on Kindle.
As any social media entity grows, it naturally absorbs more corporate nutrients in the hopes of one day turning a profit. And yes, corporate anything sucks, but simply existing in this growth phase shows that a product is at least useful to authentic people.
Who knows what this space will look like in a few years? There’s an excellent chance Substack will be absorbed into some dying corporate monolith’s brute force survival tactics, similar to the New York Times firing its sportswriters and acquiring The Athletic.
Before that happens, Substack will slowly incorporate more big media tropes in a subtle effort to condition its readers to lower their intellectual expectations and exist in a keyword clickbait malaise of our own doing.
In that event, I’m guessing articles like these could become the norm.
I don’t know much about Jeff Fox. Grok tells me he has an interesting background, which includes being a technical director of Consumer Reports, another old man interest I hold close to heart.
Skimming through his work, Fox is clearly smart and funny in an obvious way, but leans into bullshit culture war “satire”.
He is no doubt influenced by the left’s nagging and unoriginal desire to lay our country’s systemic flaws at the feet of billionaires. And for the record, a sizable portion of billionaires are assholes, which I’ll get to in a moment.
The essay itself loses focus when it wanders away from a discussion of Substack’s natural evolution and instead assigns billionaire investor Marc Andreessen blame for the loudest and dumbest voices being heard.
Assigning ownership of the “worst” content (a purely subjective term in actual free speech) to one person is a bit silly. Andreessen is trying to turn a profit. He’s not some physical gatekeeping editor checking every Substack for accuracy and proper sentiment.
Substack is still a sprawling community of individuals (and plenty of bots) representing the best and worst of us.
A much better criteria to determine who’s to blame is a theory I came up with years ago called:
The 100 ASSHOLES THEORY.
It’s a simple theory that can effectively explain both social media trolls and douchebag doctors. (For reference, I thought of the theory working as a Cardiac nurse).
Just take any group of 100 similar people.
100 men. 100 women. 100 Americans. 100 doctors. 100 lawyers. 100 mechanics. 100 people who are still reading this post (I can dream). 100 Substack writers who post way too many AI-generated images.
Take 100 of anything and I guarantee you will find at least ten giant assholes. The kind of assholes that take nice things and ruin them for the non-assholes.
Of course, some groups are exempt from the theory, including TikTok influencers, Twitter book marketers with 26 followers, politicians, and big city funeral home directors (a story for another time).
They’re all assholes.
Others have lives so sad that they simply don’t qualify. I’m referring to the severely disabled, shut-in elders and anyone involved in middle management.
Out of all these groups, you will no doubt find at least 10 people who cannot cope with their anger, disappointment, lack of self-esteem, isolation, and all the other hundred things that make people lash out like annoying, yippy little purse dogs.
These people are no doubt the worst of us, all exhibiting the wonderous power to suck all the good air out of a space. Of course, some are entertaining. Just turn on your local Sinclair-owned news channel.
But assholes are entitled to free speech, just like the rest of us.
So, while 100 billionaires probably boast higher than a 10 percent asshole rate, it’s still unfair to blame them for human nature.
Except for one. Jeff Bezos. I blame him for my debut novel’s staggering lack of Amazon sales.
What an asshole.
Love the theory 😁
And the exception of Twitter and Tiktok.
But even with that I think there are a small minority of people on those platforms that aren't a$$holes 🤷♀️