Twittering Recession Depression Aggressive Obsession

“Internet craze plays on fascination with banking culture” is the tagline to Financial Times’ recent about @GSElevator, the anonymous Twitter account that taps into the unruly world of banter in the Goldman Sachs Elevator. What’s going on?
Anyone’s moral compass would immediately respond with, well – the indicators are clear, Occupy has reached the front page of nearly every newspaper, the public is outraged and disgusted at the game bankers played while chuckling through a fat Cuban cigar and the breeze on a new 30ft yacht. But are they?
Upon reading the article I found myself looking through that same Twitter feed, cringing at posts like “Some chick asked me what I would do with 10 million bucks. I told her I’d wonder where the rest of my money went.” Or perhaps a slight smirk at “if you have a job where you have to wear a name tag, no one gives a shit what your name is.” After more than 20 minutes I had saturated my desires of self-assertion and finger pointing and I was ready to move on with my life. Not quite: I realized that along with my “oh what baseless, primordial folk” thoughts were thoughts of dare I say, attraction? I immediately wrote it off as some sort of primitive psychological mishap – but I understood what it was indicating. Despite the ever-enduring moral arguments about bigger-than-life bonuses and the recklessness of the firms like Goldman Sachs, people are simply captivated by its events. The fall of the ‘big boys’, the annoying popular crowd that finally face-palmed in the dirt with its pants down.
Goldman Sachs is a prime example of this. The general population seems to have associated this specific image of arrogance to the entire financial industry. Doing so is just as unfounded as saying that all music is bad because Justin Bieber is a star. An understanding of subtlety is due o the part of the ‘rest of the world’.
The entire drama over the financial crisis is part quantitative and a dumbfounded desire for an explanation to how it all got so bad so very quickly. The other part seems to fall into the category of the jersey shore phenomenon – with viewers watching in perplexed, entertained and repelled ways but still, watching season after season.
As the turmoil of the credit crisis rolls on, I don’t hesitate to say that the fascination will ride along with it. Nearly four years after the crunch, it is only now that tents are being pitched and tweets retweeted. I think a degree of acceptance is due – that we feed off of the mess we are victims of, that through the excessive media attention we give bankers, we empower them. Surely this recession –depression- crisis- speed bump, whatever you wish to call it, will come to pass and hopefully our strange twisted fascinations with an industry that has caused so much harm will too.