The economy is just a VIP list now

There were a few ways to get to the World Cup final.

One involved lots and lots of lines: for the subway to Penn Station, where you stood in the sun waiting for a yellow school bus to come pick you up to take you to the Meadowlands, where you waited in another long line to get in. There, you waited in even more lines, for the bathroom, for food, for drinks.

The other way involved meeting a group of men in matching suits in Midtown who whisked you to New Jersey in a guarded Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van, past all the checkpoints, where you entered the stadium from the basement level and walked directly into a private suite. Or maybe you didn’t even have to get in a car, opting for a helicopter instead.

Like most thing in life have become, the event itself was the same, but the entire experience surrounding it, everything from how you arrive, to where you wait, to who you sit beside, to what you eat, to which rules apply to you, was sorted by how much you could pay.

“It’s the Super Bowl for the ultraprivileged,” one investor told The New York Times. “Inequality is taking it right in the face right now.”

Source: Conde Nast Traveler: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-does-a-dollar4-million-ticket-to-the-world-cup-final-get-you

Having wealth is increasingly about the ability to control how exposed you are to the world around you. And many rich people are bypassing public life altogether.

Privacy, in this context, is beyond just solitude or secrecy. It’s selective accessibility, the power to decide who and what gets access to you.

Status used to mean being seen

Status spending, in the past, required visibility. But what happens when the performance of wealth is available to almost everyone? Thanks to social media, you can rent the fancy apartment, buy the fake designer bag, put the vacation on Afterpay and construct an online life that looks much more expensive than the one you actually live.

I wrote about this earlier this year in “New Status Symbols”: in our modern…