The Jesse Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle

I've decided that just because I have no idea what the precipitous drop of facebook's stock price since its initial public offering means doesn't mean I don't understand it. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's not unlike the way I'm confounded as to the reasoning behind Ryan Seacrest's apparent wild success, but I feel like I know enough to base a deep and abiding resentment on. There are facts and there are things we know. The two are neither causal nor binary nor mutually exclusive. It's just that sometimes having a little bit of the former can really bung up a voluminous earth-mound of the latter that needs a hurried expressing.

What is the baseline amount of knowledge needed to form an opinion? It seems like with every iteration of the internet, the recordable amount gets progressively smaller, as did the diminishing base models of physical science from elements to cells to molecules to atoms to protons/electrons/neutrons to quarks to gluons to, the currently smallest known thing, dust mites. Every time I hear about dust mites, there are more and more of them theorized to be literally everywhere. 90% of my pillow's weight is apparently dust mites. As is nearly all of my bed, my clothing, my skin and hair, my pets and, inevitably, my gluons. The theorized ubiquity of these tiny little unseeable bugs living and breathing and eating and excreting all over your bed and skin and body holes is equal parts gross and terrifying. You're free to daydream all you like about inventing the machine, chemical or process that rids the world of dust mites. I have no such fantasy. On the one hand, no more microscopic bugs. On the other hand, the nullification of matter as a concept. That sounds like trouble.

With the facebook stock thing, I'm supposed to understand that there are hundreds of millions of eyeballs glued to this thing, literally* all over the world, which means that facebook commands the attention of an unprecedented global marketplace of adherents standing by to encourage one another to Like something at the same time, in exactly the same way HIV "likes" T-cells, spreading quickly into a happy, systemic infection, controllable but only with a significant financial outlay by the host organism.

But all of this we do... for free? I'm meant to buy stock in a business that produces nothing and throughout its life history has generated no sales and in its form and intent will, by definition, never approach doing either. And yet somehow the arbitrarily-set initial stock price was dismissed immediately and the subsequent plunge has been both precipitous and steady. See, I "get" it. But there are, no doubt, people lining up to explain to me market vagaries and the valuation algorithms used to price something as ephemeral as media in general and as imaginary as social media in particular and why, if we'd just hold on, this thing that produces nothing will one day pay off by producing nothing at a much healthier pace we can all get behind and agree to gouge each other over.

So while I think I get it, I clearly don't understand it. I can't. It's not because I'm stupid, it's because I went to college and read philosophy instead of economic theory. Even the philosophy guys who deigned to talk about money, like Marx, thought it was a good idea to get rid of all of it anyway. This is not an anti-capitalist manifesto, however. This is more the lament of a misspent youth. High-minded ideals and basic critical thinking skills are great, but I'd trade either one for the right Italian roadster or a summer place on St. Bart's. Either of these can be construed as opening offers.





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*I'm using "literally" in its traditional sense here, meaning "literally"