The Goldfish Gambit

Or: What happens when we train an entire civilization to forget

There's a Goldfish crackers commercial running right now with the tagline "Be like goldfish" - literally marketing amnesia as a lifestyle choice. Turns out this might be borrowed from Ted Lasso, that therapy-speak sitcom where folksy optimism solves institutional problems and forgetting bad things quickly is presented as emotional wisdom. The joke writes itself, except we're all living inside the punchline and nobody's laughing because we've forgotten what we were supposed to be laughing about.

I’ve never actually watched Lasso, because the idea alone feels like a personal affront. A comedy-drama about sportsball? Pass. (I might be being unfair, but in my defense: I don’t care.) This isn't about snack food, either. I’m thinking again of how we’ve systematically trained ourselves to celebrate forgetting, and why that makes us spectacularly bad at both telling stories and governing ourselves. Turns out these aren't necessarily separate problems.

The Case of the Missing Romulan

Yeah, we’re going with something near and dear: Trek. With knives out. Bear with me.

Let me start with something that should be trivial but isn't: what happened to a character named Elnor in the final season of Star Trek: Picard. For two seasons, he was a main character - the first full-blooded Romulan to join Starfleet, essentially Picard's adopted son. Important stuff, right? Heavy with implication and portent. Or at least it seemed like it should be.

Then Season 3 happened and... he vanished. Not written out with dignity. Not even killed dramatically. Just erased, as though he'd never existed. When fans asked where he went, the showrunner had to confirm on Twitter that the character wasn't dead - he just wasn't worth including in the show's final season.

Same thing happened to Laris, Picard's ostensible Romulan love interest who'd been waiting for him at the vineyard. And Dr. Jurati, who'd become a benevolent Borg Queen by doing a will to power through the time space continuum. And Soji, Data's android kung fu "daughter." Two seasons of character development, relationships, plot threads - gone. Forgotten. Replaced by TNG nostalgia and familiar faces.

The real kicker? You probably already know it. Maybe even agree! Critics praised Season 3 as the best thing the show ever did. Because it delivered the dopamine hit of seeing the old gang back together, and that was enough. Nobody seemed to mind that it required total amnesia about everything that came before.

When beloved legacy characters like Ro Laren and Elizabeth Shelby did appear, it was only to be killed off for shock value. Ro, whose story had been unresolved for 29 years, got blown up in a shuttle after one meaningful conversation. Shelby, brought back from decades of absence, was gunned down by her own crew just minutes after her return. They mined decades of fan goodwill for a few moments of manufactured drama.

This is what passes for brilliant television now: the systematic demolition of your own story in service of delivering comfort food to an audience trained to reward forgetting.

When Stories Actually Remembered Things

Here's what makes this both galling and particularly depressing: we used to know how to do this better. Yes, we’re taking a detour into a “we’ve forgotten how” polemic.

The Star Trek movies from the 1980s - Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, Voyage Home - work because every choice has consequences that ripple through all three films. Kirk's ego and rule-breaking in the first movie directly causes his son's death in the second. Spock's sacrifice creates the conditions for his own resurrection, but that resurrection costs Kirk everything he's gained. The Genesis device that saves Spock becomes the mechanism for saving Earth.

Nothing gets forgotten. Every callback serves the larger story. Characters change based on what they've experienced. The emotional weight accumulates because the films remember what happened and make it matter.

This wasn't accidental - they planned it as a coherent three-film arc from the beginning. The creators committed to telling a complete story that would deepen with each installment, rather than just providing nostalgic comfort food.

Try to imagine that level of narrative commitment today. Marvel created the opposite problem - where they do attempt continuity, it becomes a glut of mandatory homework where you need to watch seventeen movies and four TV shows to understand why purple man sad. They've managed to make interconnected storytelling feel like consumer indigestion. People are now excited about DC's new Superman specifically because it promises to be a standalone story, or at least one that retains some internal coherency. We've trained audiences to see both continuity and discontinuity as burdens, but it isn’t quite sticking.

The Smooth Over

Here’s where we leave Trek: what we're witnessing isn't just bad storytelling - it's the systematic replacement of anything challenging with something easier to consume. The rough edges get filed away. Complex character development gets traded for instant recognition. Emotional investment gets swapped for frictionless entertainment. We’re losing narrative literacy as a culture in ways we probably didn’t nor couldn’t fully anticipate.

We didn't lose our memory - we replaced it with replicas. Low-friction, high-engagement stand-ins that look like recall but behave like marketing.

The goldfish crackers ad isn't selling snacks - it's selling the ideology that makes all this possible. Forgetting isn't a failure - it's the feature being sold. Memory is burden. Continuity is constraint. The eternal present of constant stimulation without consequence is the goal.

Meanwhile, In the Land of Sandwich Felonies

Which brings us to this week's headlines from Washington, where reality has officially given up trying to make sense.

A 19-year-old former government efficiency staffer nicknamed "Big Balls" gets beaten up in an attempted carjacking. The President uses this to threaten federal takeover of the nation's capital, despite crime being at 30-year lows. Meanwhile, a Justice Department lawyer throws a Subway sandwich at a federal agent and gets charged with felony assault for "disrespecting law enforcement." The U.S. Attorney - a former Fox News host named Jeanine Pirro - announces the charges in an official video where she tells people to "stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else."

This isn't performance art masquerading as governance - it's governance that's given up and gone full performance. It’s the spectacle machine at work. We have a system where a guy whose online handle is "Big Balls" becomes justification for federal intervention while someone gets a felony for sandwich assault and the top federal prosecutor makes puns in official statements. I didn’t even mention the UFC cage match that’s been discussed as being hosted at the White House!

The kicker is how perfectly this mirrors what happened to Picard. Both cases involve systems that have learned to prioritize spectacle over substance, recognition over coherence, engagement over meaning. Both have trained their audiences to reward amnesia and punish anyone who asks "wait, didn't this used to make sense?"

The Bar at the End of the World

The best metaphor I know for understanding this comes from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where five terrible people are trapped in a bar, constantly watching and manipulating each other in an endless feedback loop of mutual surveillance and escalating dysfunction. Yep, we’re back at Paddy’s Pub.

They can't leave (attempts always fail), they can't change (growth would end the show), and they can't stop performing for each other. Every episode ends where it began - back at the bar, ready to launch another doomed scheme. Most importantly, they have no origin story. We never see them before they were dysfunctional, never get a baseline of normalcy to return to.

Sound familiar?

We're all trapped there now. Constantly watched, constantly performing, caught in feedback loops where authentic behavior becomes impossible because every action is simultaneously surveillance and spectacle. The platforms have turned us into the Gang - unable to escape patterns we can see clearly but cannot break, forgetting how we got here, performing increasingly extreme versions of ourselves for an audience that includes ourselves.

The recursive joke is that analyzing this pattern might itself be part of the pattern. Even this piece risks becoming content in the machine it critiques—one more goldfish swimming in circles, hoping someone remembers the way out. At this point, this note itself is a recursion of the past note made about same. It’s mirrors all the way down.

Everything Is Tuesday, and Tuesday Is Fungible

What we're experiencing isn't dramatic collapse - it's something weirder and more insidious. Everything feels simultaneously catastrophic and routine. Democracy dies not with jackbooted authoritarianism but through gradual replacement of governance with entertainment, policy with performance, accountability with amnesia. Americans want products, not relationships.

The genius of the system is that it doesn't need to suppress dissent - it just administers it. Packages resistance as content, times outrage for maximum engagement, converts democratic energy into harmless scroll-time while actual power operates through technical channels we're not watching.

Every scandal that should bring accountability instead brings... more content. Every crisis becomes an opportunity for both sides to perform their authentic outrage for audiences who've forgotten what they were originally outraged about. We now have the counter-force on the scale, with Newsom happily sliding into place, glad-handing through podcasts and spamming me personally to ask for money. (I don’t even live in California. I’ve only ever been there once! My phone’s got an east coast area code!)

We've devolved into a civilization that runs on forgetting. Not the dramatic, traumatic forgetting of authoritarian regimes, but the gentle, profitable forgetting of consumer culture. Why remember yesterday's promises when today's stimulation is so much more engaging? Of course, the tidy part is that this methodology is very much amenable to any authoritarian regime that wants to pull the levers. So here we are. Entertain us.

The Goldfish Gambit

The goldfish crackers ad represents the endgame of this process: the explicit marketing of amnesia as aspiration. "Be like goldfish" means accept that memory is limitation, continuity is constraint, the eternal present of stimulation without consequence is freedom.

But goldfish actually have decent memories - they can remember things for months. The "goldfish memory" myth is itself a perfect example of how we've learned to believe comfortable lies rather than complex truths.

We're not actually becoming like goldfish. We're becoming like the Gang at Paddy's Pub - trapped in recursive loops of performance and surveillance, unable to remember how we got here, incapable of imagining coherent alternatives.

The difference is that unlike the Gang, we still have a choice. We can choose to remember. We can demand stories that build rather than reset. We can insist on governance that governs rather than moderates.

But only if we stop celebrating amnesia and start valuing the hard work of continuity, consequence, and actual thought.

The alternative is eternal Tuesday - swimming in circles, forgetting where we've been, performing our dysfunction for an audience of other performers, while the water slowly gets murkier and the bowl gets smaller.

Time to choose which kind of fish we want to be—one who forgets the punchline, or one who remembers the joke was always on us.

The Neutral Ambassador is ending diplomatic relations with Paramount+