New Management
Yo…imagine if I wrote something like, “Elon Musk has made an offer to purchase Low Lift Ask.”
Dude…😂😂😂 That would be fucking wild. Like, imagine if I wrote something along the lines of, “Elon Musk to perform bear hug (term I learned from Succession) in takeover bid of Ritam and Nabeel’s Low Lift Ask newsletter.” Could you imagine?
Straight up—try to picture that. I think that would be well within the the realm of what we’ve established here, that I would possibly publish something like that. But to picture me actually following through with it—and writing something like that? Imagine 😂
I feel like I would make it somewhat topical. I would incorporate current events, nodding at the fact that Elon Musk and Amber Heard used to date, and potentially use that, as well as her current legal proceedings, as fodder for an offhand comment. I would most likely make a joke about Tesla’s share prices tumbling, so that maybe the guy won’t even have enough cheddar to buy the damn newsletter in the first place. I might link to this TikTok account of legendary Chinese Musk impersonator Yilong Ma. I would even, in all honesty, somehow reference that video of the white girl perfectly rapping King Von in the middle of it all, which I cannot stop watching and now find kind of hot.
And, like, imagine if I did all that in a successful manner? Like it was actually funny and subversive and shit? And it made sense as a satirical document, landing body blow after body blow re: free speech and content moderation and America’s tech oligarchy? Imagine if I did that on this freaking Substack, where we usually take the piss out of various current events and trending topics 😂
You guys would lowkey eat it up, too. All of you would read it and internally respond with, “Yup, that’s exactly where I thought they were going this week.” Most of you would see the first image and a couple of sentences and click the back button on your email knowing that, yeah, you got the gist of whatever was going on this week. I’m imagining that’s what would happen.
What I don’t imagine would happen, though, is anything changing, materially. I don’t imagine that if I wrote some shit like, “Low Lift Ask sells out—just like Bell’s Brewery and Goose Island before it—to the corniest member of the PayPal Mafia,” that much would change in the world. It certainly wouldn’t reach his corner of the world, let alone reverse his decision to buy Twitter. And I’ll be damned if it did anything to change my life.
No, I imagine my life would go on as normal. I probably wouldn’t be approached by a literary agent of some sort, and Ramadan would still have two more days to go. I would wake up the next morning and still be unable to eat or drink from sunrise to sunset. I would still be paralyzed by fear and uncertainty at various junctures in my life, and the impending threats of time and adulthood would still loom large over my bruised psyche.
The world would, I imagine, still prove cold and unsparing to the majority of its inhabitants. Nuclear war would not be deterred, fascism in India would remain steady in its approach. Water would not magically regenerate in California, nor would its forest fires miraculously die down in severity. No, I imagine that even if I wrote some wildass shit like, “We’ve weighed the options, and the shareholders of Low Lift Ask have decided to sell the rights and future management of our newsletter in exchange for two Tesla S3s 😂,” God would still go on meting out his judgments by some moral code we humans cannot begin to comprehend.
But lowkey…if I did that though, it would be funny as fuck 😂😂😂
Ritam’s Footnote
Indian Fascism… Ramadan… California Droughts… sounds like a You problem, brother!! 😂
No one wants to buy this.