It doesn’t exist? I’ll give you $32bn for it and call it a bargain!

Thank God it’s Saturday.Of course, it’s not Saturday really. In a sensible dimension, I would be hailing the rapid approach beer o’clock some 24 hours earlier than that. But we exist in a stupid dimension in which a one-day end-of-week Americanised Thanksgiving-related pre-Christmas shopping bonanza has dragged on relentlessly for a fortnight. As they say here in Montpellier: “J’en ai marre de ce putain de Blukk Freuday.”I wish it could be Christmas every day, sang Noddy, but there are only 12 days of Christmas. Black Friday, which nobody wished for, even for just one day, churned on for more than two weeks. It was so black it even obscured Cyber Monday, which everybody forgot about.Now that Bastard Friday and Shiter Monday are finally out of the way, in our fuckwit dimension today and the remainder of the year will be be Saturday. We shall reach Tuesday some time next April.During the darkest moments of these last two black weeks of fake discount shopping, I was urged to buy a variety of ‘tangibles’.

As it turns out, this is not a variety of citrus fruit. A ‘tangible’ is a thing that has shape and form, a tech product that you can pick up and use. In other words, a ‘tangible’ is something that exists, such as a laptop, a phone or some earphones.Except they’re not called headphones or earphones any more: they are now referred to generically as ‘earables’.Don’t knock it. This modern nomenclature employs an easy logic that works across the board. Smartphones could be ‘handables’; smart watches could be ‘wristables’; AR smart spectacles (poised for a comeback in 2023) could be ‘seeables’. Undershirts could be stored in a ‘vestibule’. A smart shoe could be referred to as a ‘footable’ … although I admit this could be confusing as it’s a homophone of the Italian word for ‘soccer’.Black Friday shoppers can be referred to as ‘gullibles’.At least we gullibles get tangibles for our money. By contrast, nobody in their right mind would spend, ooh I dunno, say $44bn on an ‘intangible’, would they?On that note, Elon seems to have gone quiet about his stated plan to turn Twitter into an app for making payments. I guess he is distracted by similar disruptive projects, such as trying to buy back PayPal so he can turn it into a social media chat app.Similarly baffling decisions abound among the Very Clever People who are inexplicably successful in our nutso dimension. I cannot resist but refer to the conceptual elephant in the theoretical space enclosed by metawalls, the ultimate nothingness, the intangible’s intangible: cryptocurrency.Following years of berating me for expressing my doubts about the over-bloated claims concerning Bitcoin – possibly the worst implementation of blockchain possible – fake money enthusiasts (sorry, I mean ‘fintech experts’) are now firing off press releases to all and sundry in the media, offering to be quoted on how FTX’s collapse came about.No doubt these same experts intend to be consistent with their earlier arguments made to me and other colleagues. That is, they will tell everyone that FTX has in no way collapsed, insist that its crapto platform remains a safe place to store your fantasy cash, and call any journalist who says otherwise a “cockwomble”.Sure enough, my press release inbox is heaped with bright new claims about how fantastic the cryptocurrency industry is at the moment. “1 in 2 18-24 year olds…” (for non-financially skilled readers, that apparently means half of them) “…would love an NFT or Crypto for Christmas” says the Bankless Times. Well of course they would: these are the same spoilt would-be stoners who 15 years ago insisted that you bought them a fucking Furby as if their lives depended on it.

Another desperate press release received just the other day hails: “Cryptocurrencies beat stocks as the number one asset Brazilians plan to acquire in 2023.” Well if the Brazilians are voting with their feet, it must be a good idea. Brazilians’ voting decisions are envied the world over.Most press releases focus on growth in the sector. According to Bitstacker, nearly 5,000 new cryptocurrencies appeared in 2022 despite this minor kerfuffle with FTX. Well of course they did: there has also been a growth in phishing, ransom hacks, revenge porn, muggings, melting icebergs, war in Europe and your electricity bill. Growth is a concept that demands context. The appearance of more cryptocurrencies could mean a wholesome slap on the back for investment in intangibles; or it could mean that more offshore hoods are trying to reel in more ‘gullibles’. Personally, I can’t see the problem. These craptos are intangible in every respect. They never existed in the first place, so nothing was acquired and nothing really lost. Fintech experts have for a long time claimed that crapto is what money should be and that it has gone mainstream, yet they always state their value in terms of dollars or euros. Why? I understood the idea was to replace those useless and unstable old fiat currencies. A Bitcoin is worth 1 Bitcoin, and doesn’t really exist anyway, and there it is. Surely if anyone is upset about losing a billion or two of non-existent, entirely intangible digital currency, just compensate them with another non-existent, entirely intangible digital currency to replace it. Maybe if I cup my hands around some air, I could donate it to them?No, hang on, air is a tangible substance, so they won’t like it. Commentators often refer to the Dutch tulip bulb market bubble of the 17th century but at least there were some tulip bulbs left at the end of that crisis. You may have been penniless but you could plant some bulbs and grow some tulips with them.Perhaps we should just remind people from time to time that unicorns such as FTX pop like a soap bubble not because journalists like me are cockwombles but because they are unicorns.You see, even in this batshit dimension, unicorns don’t exist. Someone just made them up.