Fastest Wastrel in the West
When the Bossman gets Bossed Around
Gratitude is something I think about a lot lately, having already been given so much in my life. I’ve got a solid family, loyal friends, and a Substack with a readership above 0. What’s not to love?
Economic and income statistics, that’s what.
When measured against the world at large, my income, the incomes in my country, the Philippines, and many other countries are absolutely dwarfed by those in the advanced economies. Whether that’s due to punishing exchange rates, low productivity, a failure to grow home industries, a lack of foreign investment, brain drain, weak institutions and a non-conducive culture, or whatever theories you advance, one thing’s for sure – they are what they are. It makes me think that in many cases, the insanity coming from the West simply comes from having a lot of money and power and simply not knowing what to do with it. Running out of difficult productive uses, people turn instead to easier, unproductive uses – lavish tourism, influencers, private jets – go for it if you can afford it, but make sure you’re not spending on it just to spend on it.
Enter Bossmanjack, the fastest gambler in the west. His story is chronicled by the Kiwi Farms, a gossip forum dedicated to following and laughing at people on the Internet, known as lolcows. Bossmanjack is a new standout among those lolcows, with an 800-plus page thread that I’m pulling from for this essay. All credit for the story of Bossmanjack goes to the Kiwi Farms, with the founder and site owner
here on his Substack, .The Tale of Bossmanjack
A nice video summary here.
Bossmanjack is a streamer whose main content is gambling of all kinds. Living in his room at his parents’ home and still drawing an allowance, he got his start playing Old School Runescape as a debt streamer. Borrowing millions of in-game currency (gold) off of his followers, and then carrying it all into a player versus player (PvP) arena against opponents who do the same thing. They fight, the loser dies and drops their gold and equipment, and the winner takes it all, winning the gamble. While this sounds like it should be boring to watch, the Bossman’s reactions and rages, quickly flying off the handle and smashing his room.
This got a lot worse in 2022 when he moved from Runescape’s pseudo-gambling into real gambling on Stake.us and BCGame, two online casinos where he streams playing the slots and coinflips. A compulsive gambler, he simply cannot stop gambling – streaming until he runs out of money, unless he wins it big, logs off, and then gambles it all away anyway. Once he runs out, he asks for money from his viewers, talking about how horrible his life is and threatening suicide. He’s down in the dumps, sodapressed, and in pain until he gets money to gamba it all away again. Or use it on crack, which makes him a paranoid madman.
You’d think a guy like that would be nicer to the viewers and parents he depends upon, but nope! They’re RATS, squeakin’ in the walls, rigging things against him, and making sure he always loses. These rats include his ratmom and ratdad who don’t help him, the viewing rats that don’t contribute to the gambling fund by juicing him a few dollars, and the biggest rat of them all, Edward “Eddie” Craven, owner of his gambling sponsor, Stake.us. This is what you get, rats.
I want to shout out the rats, though, who make some great content. There’s a Reddit for watchers of the Bossman, clippers like Colonel Rat on YouTube picking out the best of Bossman’s antics, and even some Suno.AI songs put out under the artist name Bitch Unomi, who takes common Bossman expressions and turns them into songs of varying genres. This stuff is funny.
Funny enough for us to laugh all the way to the grave.
Children Unworthy of Empires
Fellow Substacker and Actual Noble
put out a recent popular piece on raising children worthy of empires. In it, he describes the process of raising healthy children, ready and willing to take on the responsibilities that their parents’ shoulders. You can read about it at the link below.
Bossmanjack is nothing if not the child unworthy of his empire. A drug addict and compulsive gambler with no gainful employment other than amusing the rats on the Internet, going into rages and going all out on his parents, who appear to be trapped between punishing him and knowing that he can’t survive without them, he is clearly unworthy. Not only is he already destroying the family home and gambling away the money that belongs his inheritance, he is also happily spending other people’s money as well – also indicting those willing to give it to him for entertainment.
In my opinion,
better shows how things have gotten to this point, in his piece contrasting the Grosvenors of the United Kingdom with the Vanderbilts of the United States. To quickly quote from this excellent piece:That same lesson applies to civilizations. The West has now been abused by profligate heirs for generations. The wealth of the Industrial Revolution was wasted on World Wars, entitlements and welfare spending, tolerance of crime and other anti-civilizational activity, and on replacing God with materialism. But now that wealth is running dry and the land has been sold off, the roof needs repairing and the farms need capital improvement to continue functioning if we are to survive. That’s a bad place in which to be, though it is likely still recoverable.
This world encourages us to rid ourselves of commitments, rootedness, and property in favor of the liquid financial assets that can be gained and lost in a matter of moments. All the new wealth is made in stocks, large companies incentivized to chase good press rather than good operations, because that’s what moves the stock price, an incredibly managed metric that now judges the perception of a company rather than its true health or financial standing. Bossmanjack is here – he never cashes out a big win, enjoying playing the game and the highs and lows of winning and losing big, rather than taking some out and improving his lot in life[2]. This stands in stark contrast to the landed and propertied classes of the past, who were tied to their land, their people, and their business, and were very much incentivized to keep them in perpetuity, knowing full well that it’s a life of responsibility to do so.
All the Bossman has for a legacy is debt, Internet notoriety, and a terrible reputation - nothing of value, everything given to the casino.
King Nothing
As above, so below, and as below, so above. Bossmanjack is not the cause of these things, personal culpability aside, but a symptom. Kids staying in school longer has given them less responsibility and experience of the outside world. Corporate raiders, private equity, and other methods of financial strip mining are just the latest innovations in the world of alienated ownership, separating us from our wealth and the consequences of our actions. The asset profile of the general public moves from the asset-heavy home and farmstead model, requiring savings and judicious investment to maintain, to an asset-light rent and spend one that focuses on the liquidity of financial goods and financial gains, there is little incentive to work for variable profits over guaranteed interest payments. This mass diffusion of responsibilities has made relative children of us all compared to our forebears.
That great sucking sound is the few, the powerful, the bankers sucking up the legacies of others who were unwilling or unable to hold onto and put work into them. Be it through economic sabotage on the level of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, legally and administratively chipping away at your abilities in the form of the Middle-System technocracy, or simple attrition over a long period of economic shocks knocking some off the ladder, we have ended up with a world where there is a small, overworked minority that is incredibly asset-rich compared to the relatively asset-poor majority, set upon the path of doom spending and letting it rot.
As understandable as it is, it doesn’t change the fact that you don’t own assets, assets own you. Keep up on the path of Bossmanjack – one of abdicating our responsibilities to sit on a throne of ingratitude – and we will all soon be King Nothing.
Bossmanjack is funny. But a dark kind of funny - a joke that rings slightly too true for one’s liking.
P.S. The topic of responsibility seems to be my muse lately. Next week’s piece will make it really obvious, if the last few haven’t already done so. Maybe it’s because I’m in my late 20s and staring down the prospect of taking the reins of the family business, but I’m really worried about whether I’m cut out for the job.
[1] If you haven’t got time to read it, allow me to summarize: Nobility is the art and practice of popping the kid out of the mother right at the foot of the stairs of ever-increasing responsibility.
[2] Granted, it’s difficult to beat staying at home, all expenses paid, when it comes to comfort.
Thanks for the quote from our piece on the Grosvenors and the Vanderbilts! Very interesting article