This week: We’re waging war against the oligopoly? Sure, why not. Anyway, did you know that the words Pluto and plutocrat share an Ancient Greek root? Let’s talk about it.
Shield Wall
Tumblr1 is the black sheep of the social media sphere. It's a weird and chaotic place that has survived its share of corporate shake-ups and revisions largely unscathed due to its dedicated and irrepressible user base. These users forms cliques and sub-cultures full of memes, self-referential jokes, and heartfelt screeds about...whatever it is that they're into. One of the things they're into, it turns out, is grabbing bits of content off of other social media platforms and re-blogging them without a whole lot of context2.
Which is how I came across a now-deleted tweet from Anand Giridharadas, a political writer and commenter, that read:
It's hard to read financial news without making Murdoch or Bloomberg richer. Now hard to tweet without making Musk richer. Hard to run a political campaign without making Zuckerberg richer. Getting harder to shop (not impossible!) without making Bezos richer. It's a plute siege.
Now, as tweets go, that is just about perfect: it's pithy, has a great repetitive rhythm, and makes good use of the character limit by dropping subjects. Indeed. This, Reader, is how you compose a tweet3. But none of that is what caught my attention. No, what grabbed my interest was that last sentence; what I need to know is, what the hell's a plute and what's it doing to my castle?
Plute, as it turns out, is an abbreviation of plutocrat. Merriam-Webster lists it simply as slang, while Oxford's Lexico site tells us that it is informal and used primarily in the U.S. and Australia. They also tell us that it is from...
Late 19th century; earliest use found in Vagabonds. Shortened from plutocrat.
Right. Cool. Cooool. Uhm. What's a plutocrat?4 I mean, I know, sure. But I just want to make sure everyone else knows. Back to Merriam-Webster:
Plutocracy:
1: government by the wealthy
2: a controlling class of the wealthy
And while that doesn't sound appealing, neither is it as damning as Merriam-Webster's list of synonyms:
capitalist, Croesus, deep pocket, fat cat, have5, money, moneybags, silk stocking
Thesaurus (dot com) does not have much to add, only magnate and tycoon. Not exactly words that favor the people, are they? And, not to belabor the point, but none of the other words are exactly positive are they? There is no trace of philanthropy or charity, kindness or humanity in any synonym or near-synonym for plutocrat. Something to think about.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Don't panic, but we've got a rabbit hole that is actually related to the main topic this week -- when I was a kid, Pluto was known as our solar system's ninth planet. Then some politics occurred and a demotion followed. But, as it turns out, and according to this article at Salon - Pluto wasn't the first: A brief history of our solar system's forgotten planets, what and how to classify all our local celestial objects has been an issue for centuries.
This begs the question, just how many things are out there anyway? We don't actually know for sure6 but this list on Wikipedia is a hell of a good start: List of Solar System objects, which has the added bonus of showing a Euler diagram with everything sorted by category. And once you've finished perusing that, stop by Space.com to get a good look at your favorites.
From the Archives
Let me draw a line from plutocrat to pluto to space to astrology for this week's delve into the archives. Back in December 2020, in Learned Volume 3, Issue 39: Ballet Space, I wrote about watching a meteor shower with my daughter. We have since gotten a small telescope and have plotted out when we can see some of this year's planetary alignments. I'm looking forward to it. Because I'm a Leo maybe?
Astrology is one of my favorite ways to cheat at character creation when writing fiction or playing D&D. It's so easy to just say, "oh, well, this character is a pisces which means they like..." whatever is that Pisces actually like. I wrote about this and the return of astrology as a social hobby back in Learned Volume 1, Issue 15: Neon, first published on July 9, 2018.
Tumblr is ancient in internet years. It was founded in 2007, which doesn't make it quite as old as Facebook or some of the others, but, on the other hand, it has stayed remarkably more consistent than everyone else at the table.
But always with attribution, which, in a lot of respects is far more important. In most cases, the thinking seems to be that you either already know the context, or, by providing the source and attribution, you can look it up for yourself. Reasonable and low-key, it is far too logical and respectful for the internet and will collapse in upon itself eventually.
And, also? He's not wrong. Media cross-ownership is the root cause of a lot of today's fake news and misinformation issues. The Wikipedia entry for this is remarkably well-sourced and works as a great starting point for further reading or discussion. Because regardless of how you feel about billionaires and their role in society, I think most of us can agree that having one person controlling all the news we see and hear is not a good thing.
Just 'cause I think it's interesting: plutocracy shares a root with Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld. Both words stem from Greek's ploutos, which, in an absolutely unsurprising twist, means wealth.
I love the idea that "have" by itself is a synonym for plutocrat. Damn Bezos and the rest of the haves! Also, the antonyms just make me feel bad: have-not, pauper. Like, rub it in why don't you?
My kid has a half-dozen books on space and the planets, each published at different times over the last couple of decades. We find it truly amusing that the more recent the publication date, the more moons Jupiter has.
I still struggle to not consider Pluto a planet. I was finishing high school when this was discovered, but I first heard of that fact late, around 2014 or so. To think there were others like that before is mind-blowing to me.