Martin Shkreli released from prison into increasingly Martin Shkreli-shaped world

When Martin Shkreli became a “thing” back in 2015—which is to say, when he became generally infamous for unrepentantly hiking the price on life-saving medicines while possessing a truly awful case of Resting Shkreli Face—it was in a world where his behavior could be charitably written off, by many, as an outlier. (The “self-appointed troll” part, anyway; the relentless profiteering was already depressingly baked in to the landscape of Big Pharma.) Life in 2015 was a garbage fire, sure, but it at least had the feeling of being a controlled burn, and most people were basically able to agree that the things Shkreli were doing were, y’know, bad.

Which does not feel like it’d be the case in 2022, an era in which there is no take so bad that 100,000 people won’t retweet it, and which has just received an unwelcome injection of Shkreli straight into the body politic. Which is to say that, per Consequence, Martin Shkreli is a free man, having been released from prion this week after spending five years in jail on two counts of securities fraud and one of conspiracy to do the same.

Shkreli served a bit less than 5 years of his 7-year sentence, and is reportedly residing in a halfway house for the next few months. He re-emerges into a world that it now feels like he was the accidental and inept harbinger of, one where trolling is not only an artform but a political philosophy, the one-and-only PR tactic going, and a rule of nature itself.

Take, for instance, the fate of Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album Shkreli bought and then held hostage like a sort of rap-focused wannabe supervillain several years back. The album was seized, as part of roughly $7.3 million in Shkreli’s assets by the government…then auctioned off to a cryptocurrency collective. Netflix is supposedly going to make a movie about it! It’s like, by locking Shkreli away (for defrauding investors, mind you, not the whole, totally legally price hike stuff), we somehow allowed his essence of unearned confidence and his conviction that there’s no such thing as bad “being told to go fuck yourself” to seep into our collective DNA.

Shkreli previously petitioned the courts to let him out early, on the grounds that he might be instrumental in creating a cure for COVID-19. He’ll probably be president in 20 years.