CEO of Alameda Research and the erstwhile girlfriend of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison has been labeled a “Harry Potter fangirl” because of comments made on an alleged Tumblr and elsewhere, though that’s not quite right. She loved Harry Potter, but the blog has a lot of posts specifically about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Yudkowsky’s infamous plodding rewrite of the series which launched the entire genre of rationalfic. The central hyper-competence fantasy of rationalfic is central to understanding Ellison’s apparent fannishness, which is in turn central to understanding her as a person. She actively oriented her life around becoming the type of protagonist who exists in these stories. There is, or was, a sort of LARP going on, which this Tumblr narrates.
The blog also includes lots of Taylor Swift, including an assertion that “if I were the sort of person who wrote such things I would definitely write Heloise and Abelard fanfic based on Cruel Summer.” Ellison also wrote wordy Goodreads reviews, including of books by Naomi Novik, a co-founder of Archive Of Our Own. There were also multiple posts on the Tumblr tagged with “#matt levine is my internet boyfriend” and, in the grand tradition of being on Tumblr to post about Tumblr, tagged long posts about internecine rationalist drama with “#this blue website.”
Someone showed Matt Levine the tag bc he was subtweeting Ellison as part of his FTX writings, which… instinctively struck me as not cool? Somehow analogous to showing an actor fanfiction of themselves? Like I get tumblrina here committed financial fraud on a massive scale but just bc someone else is Bad doesn’t mean one ought to cross the streams. Standards!
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