It’s not rocket science to work out that investing in the likes of Elon Musk might be a risky business

Welcome to Blame Game 2019! Think of this as your in-journey entertainment, like a quick round of I Spy or 20 questions, only the trip in question is our collective descent to hell in a handcart. Let’s pass the time by arguing about who helped set these cursed wheels in motion.

One popular suggestion might be Sir James Dyson, even though he says his decision to relocate the headquarters of his hugely successful firm to Singapore is nothing to do with Brexit. He campaigned to leave the EU and rubbished fears of a no-deal Brexit. Or there’s Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland, a frat-bro fraudster who, thanks to a hit Netflix documentary, has come to represent all that’s awful about our culture of Instagram influencers and monetised Fomo.

Vote Leave’s dastardly data guys also get a look-in, especially those too shadowy to be mentioned by name in the Channel 4 drama Brexit: the Uncivil War. And then there’s my personal love-to-hate hero, Elon Musk. To date his habit of talking up his own business prowess on Twitter, while allegedly intoxicated, has led to two lawsuits, a series of staff redundancies and last week’s fall in its stock price that wiped $7.7 billion off Telsa’s market value.

Besides their current unpopularity these guys have something important in common: they’re all entrepreneur-innovators, the kind who, ever since the dotcom boom, have been widely revered as modern-day prophets. Now that things have started to go wrong, blame shifts to these same tech-wizards — but shouldn’t fault also lie with any fully grown adult who chose to believe in their magic?

There are no shortage of willing believers — although the likes of Fyre co-founder Ja Rule would probably prefer to style themselves as “mentors”. It’s Arthur C Clarke’s third law in action — “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — but it’s also just flashing dollar signs. Everyone wants to get in to the good books with the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg because the potential rewards are demonstrably huge. You don’t have to understand the business model. All you have to do for the dough is nod encouragingly then get the cheque book out.

Such starry-eyed credulity is understandable up to a point. It’s takes a special charisma to do something that’s never been done before — be that launching a new business onto the market or a new rocket into space — and these guys had it. Entrepreneurs have to get people enthused if they are to deliver on their bold claims and they have to make bold claims to get people enthused. But sometimes — often, in fact — that circuit shorts, resulting in… well, you’ve seen the Fyre doc. That’s how investors become enablers and colleagues become co-conspirators.

Sure, it takes money to make money, but that’s not all. A little bit of judgment wouldn’t go amiss either. Because, come on: when someone in wrap-around shades starts popping bottles and talking about “investment opportunities”, alarm bells should ring. Didn’t your mother warn you about guys like that?

Psychic torment for the self-employed

Never mind the winter solstice in December, the mystical date around which psychic energy converges is now midnight on January 31 — the online deadline for self-assessment tax returns. This was once only of interest to cowboy builders and their accountants but in a freelance, side-hustle economy such as this one, more people have to get their heads around class 2 national insurance contributions, unique taxpayer references and other such joys.

Already strange phenomena can be observed. Earlier this month a gremlin in the HMRC computers sent out £100 late-payment penalty notices to hundreds of people who had filed their returns early. In Liverpool, a disgruntled — or perhaps demonically possessed? — freelance contractor was overheard shouting: “That’s what happens when people don’t pay their wages!” as he smashed his digger through the wall of a newly completed Travelodge.

On the plus side, the frantic fervour of en masse procrastination should soon start to bear creative fruits for us all. There is no limit to the ingenious memes, hilarious tweets and inspired slow-cooker soups that people can come up with when they’re supposed to be collating receipts.

*One of the lesser-considered problems with the coarsening of online debate is that amid all the misogynistic dross and sub-par sub-tweets, it can be hard for a triple-A, high-carat insult to sparkle. No such problem for rapper Azealia Banks who really is spectacularly rude.

Her latest wheeze is to call Canadian pop star Grimes a “brittle-boned methhead” who smells “like a roll of nickles”, but every time she goes off on one it’s an illicit thrill: part scurrilous gossip, part wordplay enjoyment, and two parts sheer relief that it wasn’t directed at you.