What’s up, Holmies?
Ironically iconic. Or maybe that was iconically ironic. Also, 7 other things worth your time.
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Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced founder and former CEO of the defunct health care technology company Theranos, once upon a time the youngest self-made billionaire woman in U.S. history, is standing trial on conspiracy and wire fraud charges that could send her to prison for 20 years.
She’s also become a very strange and unlikely icon. From The Guardian:
There are posters, stickers and coffee mugs, flags, T-shirts and masks—all celebrating Silicon Valley “girl boss,” Elizabeth Holmes.
The fraud case of the Theranos founder has given way to a burgeoning cottage industry for merchandise venerating the disgraced CEO.
As Holmes stands trial in a California courthouse, hundreds of listings have sprung up across online marketplaces including Etsy and Redbubble, catering to “Holmies” – the name used by some followers of the former executive.
One shop called “We Are Elizabeth Holmes” has 26 products sporting original designs of the founder’s stenciled image. Some feature a favorite quote of Holmes: “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.”
OK, that’s it, I give up on understanding anyone anymore.
Except that, thankfully, at least, part of this is extraordinarily self-consciously ironic. Elle magazine’s Rose Minutaglio was early to recognize the phenomenon:
On TikTok, the Holmies congregate using the hashtag #GirlBoss to praise their "leader" and "queen" Elizabeth Holmes. They look up to her as an inspiration who, as one TikTok-er put it, "made billions over a complete lie."
While many Holmies do, in fact, recognize the inherent wrongness of celebrating a fraud who endangered the health of tens of thousands of people, they remain unapologetic in their support for the embattled techpreneur, who currently faces a dozen felony fraud charges.
There has to be something deeper to think about here, right? Maybe it’s about how people aspire to become whatever it is they idealize, only to lose control completely of what they come to represent.
Think of all the college sophomores over the past few decades wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, displaying either ignorance or ninth-level irony, given that Che would have put people like them up against a wall in any society he ran.
Or else, more recently, the news last week that Katie Couric edited out criticism that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had for former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem.
Couric claimed that she was “conflicted” because she was such a big fan of Ginsburg, and didn’t want to cloud her legacy among her most devoted followers—most of whom would have supported Kaepernick.
Or at least, Couric thought they’d support Kaepernick. Who can know for sure? Anyway, she took her admiration for Ginsburg to a Byzantine level, to the point of changing what Ginsburg herself said she believed.
Anyway, when it comes to Holmes, I feel pity—not sympathy, surely not empathy—but I’m bathing in the irony, especially given that the Holmies image is so far from what Holmes herself actually (didn’t) accomplish, and that this is true in large part because Theranos itself was such a big lie.
But it was a lie that only worked for a while because supposedly sophisticated and wealthy people wanted to believe it.
Ultimately, the joke’s on almost everybody.
“I get a good amount of people who ask why I support her if she is a fraud,” one Holmie entrepreneur, who has sold about 1,200 Elizabeth Holmes masks, t-shirts, and mugs to fans, told Minutaglio at Elle. “I think it’s funny to act daft in response and say things like ‘girl bosses support girl bosses’ followed by a string of pink emojis.”
7 other things worth your time
A Haitian gang that has “sown terror” over the last few months kidnapped a group of 17 missionaries — 16 Americans and one Canadian, including five children over the weekend. Sadly, the missionaries are victims in just one of at least 328 reported kidnappings so far this year in the troubled country. (Axios)
LinkedIn will shut down the Chinese version of its site due to a "challenging" operating environment. (CNN)
“Lawmakers in Philadelphia have passed legislation barring cops from making minor traffic stops that critics say unfairly target minorities— becoming the first major US city to do so.” The law is “designed to reduce ‘unequal police practices’ against minority motorists, or what’s been called ‘driving while Black,’ for minor offenses such as busted tail lights or expired inspection stickers.” (NY Post)
“Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic. Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first.” The theory now? “The girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.” (WSJ)
Penguins can match their friends’ voices to their faces—a skill that is highly unusual in the animal kingdom; only a few species like apes, crows, and dolphins can do this. (IFL Science)
Gardening experts have given you permission to stop raking your lawn. (USA Today)
A Kazakh businessman is attempting to trade a decommissioned Soviet space shuttle for the skull of the last Kazakh khan, who rebelled against Russian rule in the 1840s. (Futurism)
Thanks for reading, as always. Photo: Fair use. Want to see all my mistakes? Click here.
Since the advent of social media, in particular, I have seen this phenomenon of some people blindly following "influencers," celebrities, prominent people. .I just don't get this fawning over Elizabeth Holmes. I suppose all of us "cherry pick" certain good attributes of someone whom we worship and ignore the rest but I would say we have to draw the line on some of this. In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, for some, there may be a feeling that she represents a brand of feminism, being one of the youngest and first self-made female billionaires and so we have to support her in order to remain a true feminist (an argument which I find ludicrous). I am a second-wave Feminist and I don't care to blindly support a female's questionable decisions if I don't believe in them.
Several years back, former President Obama, spoke to the problem of a lack of critical thinking amongst some in this country. I don't want to pontificate too much but we really have to objectively look at issues, the harm that seems to have been caused to Theranos patients who put their trust in the claims of accuracy of lab results, as well as financial harm of investors, and keep out all the "fluff." Okay. she is young, attractive, obviously talented and smart but there is a lot of "image" that people are latching onto in their worshiping of Elizabeth Holmes. I have been following this case closely.
There is so much hype of prominent people. Maybe we project a lot of ourselves on prominent people and want to bask in the glow of their success, perceived or otherwise.
She had a carefully crafted image of wanting to emulate Steve Jobs down to the black turtleneck and so forth. Let's call a spade a spade. The jury will decide of course the ultimate fate but speaking in broad terms, I am appalled at some of the unquestioned hero worship I see today.
One of my favorite sayings is "things are rarely as good as they seem nor are they as bad as they appear." Take everything with a grain of salt. If it is too good to be true, it probably is!
I've read quite a few stories about Holmes and Theranos and am a bit surprised that no one mentioned the similarities to Enron. Recommended viewing: "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." Similar scheme and the collapse was spectacular....