FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL. 01:33 BRT, FRIDAY 18 DEC.
As good a place to start as any: this place is an island, and there’s treasure here in abundance. Palatial real estate, postcard-grade beaches, exotic women with male-friendly proportions… Floripa’s got the lot.
Worth a visit if you’re interested in the Diluted Brazilian Experience (TM), where you walk the streets wearing a watch or taking a call without the fear of being brutally mugged.
I asked an air-hostess here how bad the crime is in other areas of the country. She’s Brazilian in the extreme, and knows the country better than most of her countrymen thanks to her job. But despite street smarts and experience as impressive as her afro, she’d been robbed at gunpoint in Rio three times. When seasoned veterans get repeatedly rekt, what hope do the gormless gringos have?”
For some ‘digitable nomads’ (read: Airbnb Hobos), the threat of being shot in the face is all part of the Authentic Brazilian Experience (TM): not a bug, but a marketable feature which distracts them from their aimless ‘careers’ in web3 (read: blowing VC money on a product that few understand, and fewer will ever use).
Every time the ‘Ecosystem Lead’ for an NFT project takes their Apple Watch for a stroll within five miles of the favelas, the crushing weight of their meaningless occupation evaporates. Instead, a micro (or macro) dose of adrenaline brings all their attention into the present moment.
If they return safely to their Airbnb, they’ll feel comfortably in control of their destiny as they flop back down in front of their Macbook. For a day that is, until they need to take another spin of ‘Rio Roulette’ to make the voices in their trillion Slack/Asana/Discord channels go away.”
And just like that, we encounter yet another recreational drug trip disguised as a lifestyle from the Silicon Valley crowd. If only SBFs recommended drugs guide for new FTX initiates had included this!
I can imagine the opening line already: ‘A memento mori a day keeps the quarter-life crisis away…’
Hopefully a former employee will leak the original FTX drugs manual so we can fork it and add such valuable contributions to keep the text alive.
Until next time,
Jim Hawkins