Hacker Cinema
Promised Land
2012 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Gus Van Sant
A salesman for a natural gas company experiences life-changing events after arriving in a small town, where his corporation wants to tap into the available resources.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
It's more complicated than that, at least now. Having land, even crummy land away from the ancestral homeland, is better than not having land, because:
a) you can afford to live there, as an extremely economically disadvantaged group.
b) your tribe is in one place, instead of scattered, which makes it possible to continue to have a group identity and
c) you have at least limited autonomy.
I know people in tribes that have been shafted by the BIA and refused official recognition or land. It hurts. See the documentary "Promised Land" [0] for their account.
0. https://www.promisedlanddoc.com/
I was going to say the same thing.
My feeling is that "Wall Street" mostly ignored the book, which they expected to have no lasting impact. And even that turned out to be an overestimate. Not only has it had no lasting impact, I wouldn't say it had a fleeting impact either.
In fact, I can't think of a single measurable impact the book has had on Wall Street. At most it gave people who already distrusted the financial industry a few more reasons to do it, but it led to no new laws, no new regulations, no prosecutions, no anything really.
And if you ignore the headline and look at the article, Lewis's main argument seems to be that he made some very rich people "angry". Which is 1) a far cry from "shaking wall street to its core" 2) something he offers zero evidence—even anecdotally—to support and 3) also not true, as far as I'm aware.
Don't get me wrong; I've read several of Lewis's books, I like his writing, and I'm sure he's a great guy. But I kind of doubt even Lewis believes this spin; it's just marketing.
Edit: It's also worth remembering that the losers in the rise of HFT are overwhelming the big institutional players in the market. People have this weird idea that HFT is all about big banks victimizing small investors, but in reality the big banks are the losers, and the small investors are the winners. (Yes, really.) Which makes Lewis's claim that he was making the richest people in Wall Street angry so ironic. They were already angry at HFT, and they tried to use Lewis as ammunition in their ongoing fight against HFT. It's a bit like making a movie about how fracking is terrible, then priding yourself about how you must have made the big oil majors very bad...not even realising that they were the ones funding you all along, because fracking is a threat to them, not an opportunity.
(And yes, that happened. Matt Damon's film Promised Land turned out to be heavily funded by the UAE, who has a vested interested in discouraging domestic fossil fuel production in the US. I'm sure Damon thought he was standing up to Big Oil, but reality is more complex.)
I don't like conspiracists. I think their motive is good, but the result is always poor and often irrelevant because it's politicized.
That story is just over-reaching.
Conspiracy is a dog biting its own tail, I'm sure many people try to use conspiracy for political goals, just like Nazi propaganda did.
If I were a politician, there are many ways I could use conspiracy theories to change the public opinion. I don't think it entirely make any conspiracy theory wrong, but as always, be careful of movements of groups of people.
If you don't understand what I mean, watch Promised Land (Gus Van Sant movie with matt damon about fracking in a small US town). It describes very well how to use FUD in politics to efficiently change the public opinion.
I think you are conflating "Gasland" (documentary) with "Promised Land" (movie from Matt Damon).