There are many benefits to a networked world but there are many destabilizing aspects to opening up the world to all of us. I’ve been slogging through Vladislav Zubok “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” which refutes the widely held belief that the collapse was inevitable.
He argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union destabilized the country.
Now as an American I might see that in a somewhat positive light but imagine America being broken up and you can see why it’s worth studying. It is worth understanding that with scale and access, a networked system has risks that we have not previously encountered in a political or economic system.
The last time we experienced a modern collapse at large scale, we had a fraction of the networked infrastructure that we do now.
Artificial intelligence becoming the current bugaboo belies just how little the general public really understands the nuts and bolts of our information rich world.
The complexity of how it operates obfuscates how easy it is to tilt the cart and upset fragile hierarchies and understandings.
I wish I could persuade more people to this viewpoint. The strange bedfellows of professional misunderstanders are constantly infighting with murky agendas of state and corporate preferences.
We are all useful idiots to someone. An alliance between orthodox Christians and a rationalist sex cult is the sort of “only in America” marriage of convenience that fights for very particular reasons.
The technocrats having lost the battle with modern complexity (and along with it the Mandate of Heaven) are in the process of playing whackamole with uprisings of paranoia that is a pox across every type of community. And that sucks as sometimes the paranoids are actually right. We just are never quite sure when.
While I’m not economist, because, well there wasn’t money to pay for graduate school, so I could not dedicate myself to the study of monetary policy. I had to go make money in the markets like a capitalist should.
So I’m aware that my thought experiment is not how any of this works, it’s against free market principles to arrange markets like this, but let’s do a thought experiment about buying back our industrial capacity.
That “industrial process” is a technology that lives in the heads of people and that it was a mistake to let so much “low value” industry be offshored due to the loss of tacit process capital
So what kind of companies would America want to acquire if we were so inclined to pursue a strategy of industrialization? Our biggest success is that we are a highly financialized economy.
So why not use that cash to buy some shit? I know I don’t like planned markets either but for our industrialists let’s say we find a way for America’s markets to buy us back some process knowledge.
Let’s take a stab at what we’d even want in that day. For me my starting point is the top ten Korean chaebols, we take back AMD from Europe (we licensed it anyways) and look to acqui-hire former Nokia Finnish & Baltic system engineers.
Now maybe you want 1 or 2 Indian pharmaceutical generics providers to come to American. And for fun let’s buy the Japanese fastener company YKK. And also buy back the meatpackers. I asked Grok what it would cost and I was honestly pretty pleased by the price tag.
Based on current data (Sep 2025):
Top 10 Korean chaebols (flagship mkt caps): ~$879B
AMD: $261B
Nokia: $26B
Top 2 Indian generics (Sun Pharma, Cipla): $61B
YKK: Private (N/A)
Major meatpackers (JBS, WH Group): $30B
Total: ~$1.26 trillion. Note: Estimates for groups; exact values fluctuates
We would probably need to buy the shareholders and the workers so let’s assume it’s kind of a buyout but you are getting the talent too.
We get the best possible new Americans and we make their shareholders money. Capitalism buys American bonds. Usually. So then I think how much of our GDP would that be?
Current US GDP (2024): ~$29.2 trillion. 2025 projection: ~$29.7T. The $1.26T total is about 4% of annual GDP. Affordability for acquisitions would depend on financing, government subsidies, or private capital, but the economy’s scale makes it feasible in theory
Now I start to get greedy. I want the top 10 best Shenzhen manufacturers and asked for Grok’s best estimate on cost. No facts checked here it’s vibe economics ok?
Based on Sep 2025 data and estimates (public caps in USD; privates approximated via valuations):
Huawei (telecom/electronics): ~$300B (private)
BYD (EVs/batteries): $133B
Luxshare Precision (components): $70B
Mindray (medical devices): $41B
ZTE (telecom equip): $25B
TCL Technology (electronics): $20B
Inovance (automation): $20B
Goertek (acoustics/wearables): $15B
Sunny Optical (optics): $12B
Han’s Laser (laser equip): $6B
Total est. acquisition cost: ~$642B. Feasible under your presumptions, ~2% of US GDP
So just vibe economics here but like how much did we spend on pandemic stimulus?
Total US COVID-19 fiscal stimulus (2020-2021 packages) was about $5.6 trillion, per Tax Policy Center estimates, including spending and tax relief. That’s roughly 19% of current GDP—way more than your 6% shopping list. Feasible in scale, if the will is there!
So again just vibes not how it works but stay with me here to keep the American consumer spending (which I am not saying didn’t work because it did) but we spent 19% of our GDP in stimulus. And we didn’t get better companies or better Americans.
My husband and I are both sick. It’s the kind of “not quite respiratory, not quite sinus, not quite right” viral infection that always seems to take twice as long to clear as you expect.
Aging and stress is part of it but so is the damage we both have from covid-19 infections that turned into pneumonia. We’ve never been the same.
The good/bad news is that everyone we know seems to have the same basic set of physical degradations that we do. Varying levels of impact are met with varying levels of healthcare and wellness routines. From peptides to hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, no one is taking this shit sitting down.
I was already chronically ill before the world changed forever. It’s now common to have a flavor of autoimmune inflammatory chaos. I feel both less alone but much more frustrated at the crisis in American healthcare.
My medical billing codes as ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis in my spine) and psoriatic arthritis (psoriasis but it’s inside your body and it hurts!) but the tldr is constant pain, occasionally losing the capacity to walk, and the persistent exhaustion of chronic inflammation.
As we both cancel travel plans (for a charity event we’ve supported for years) and struggle to manage food and medication, I am reminded of the grief we are all carrying around.
As the world goes on with the “before times” as l memory for older generations, and the idea of any kind of positive “before” is unimaginable to the young, the grief comes and goes. The elders we stopped civilization to keep alive are dead or dying and our youth are distraught.
I remember being so angry and afraid for him when he left for cruise as lockdowns went into effect. I begged him to cancel the trip. I was afraid he would get sick or die.
He didn’t share those fears. He got stuck on the boat for an extra week or two, as no port would let them dock. He had the time of his life. I was locked in an apartment in Manhattan.
I don’t think he ever got Covid. For which I am grateful. I know far too many who did. I know many angry Zoomers grieving lost high school and college years.
Housing went up by 50% as we printed to survive the crisis. Strange times for us all and now we face the Great Ravine where the choices we made catch up to us.
My investment thesis of an increasingly chaotic world was novel when I first began and now it’s the same pitch every Tom, Dick and Harry espouses. What was once unclear is now the consensus. I am I am alive to see it and find no satisfaction in being right. The grief is all around us. Grief is for the living.
I slept rather poorly last night. I get anxious before medical appointments. Interfacing with America’s medical system can range from merely uncomfortable to actively hostile so I suppose some heightened vigilance isn’t irrational.
I really yearn for an uptick in qualitative metrics I associate with higher quality of life like energy for my favorite physical activities (weightlifting and hiking). The fatigue and stress from the pain, and downstream side effects are constant reminders of poor health.
So I am looking for improvements in basic markers like my CRP and Sed Rate as those inflammatory markers should coincide with the qualitative improvements.
The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.
We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.
The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.
I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.
Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.
Someone acquired a new piebald
Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.
The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.
I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.
I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.
What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.
I am quite jet lagged today so I am unsure if this will be coherent but “it’s practice” so here I am.
I am in the middle of my own biochemical storms as the wider algorithmic storms of the web remain at hurricane strength. My own teapot tempests hardly matter against the gale force nihilism of the raw power games buffeting us all about this online.
The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, is not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45.
Since I began writing specifically about online nihilism in 2022, the FBI has even created a new domestic extremism category: NVE (nihilist violent extremism). These aren’t fringe concerns — or even new ones, the Internet didn’t invent this particular despair, it only gave it new outlets — they’re central to understanding what’s happening online. Default Blog
Nihilism being algorithmically amplified has given audiences to people who might have otherwise been dismissed as cranks, loons, and agitators in the past.
To have a counter culture meant having a dominant culture to press against. Now we have a thousand splinters and millions of different audiences to that splintering fighting symbolic battles. That they are spilling into real violence isn’t new, surprising or even native to the Internet.
It’s merely that we are being fed into the maw of reinforcement learning and algorithmic preferences until we have nothing left but smoothed archetypes battling tribal signals.
That we see people who takes these symbols to a violent extreme should be the expected outcome of persistent othering by algorithm. Digital cultural scissoring breaks apart the collective “we” of all types affinity from national and ethnic identities to sexual preferences and other more abstract ideologies.
Just remember that if a group kicks out too many people they may find themselves with nothing left but sycophant audiences driven by adaptive code. And while that may sound scary, I agree with Lebowski that nihilists are nothing to be afraid of when you are sure of your own principles. So take stock of what matters to you and feed that back to the algorithms. Despair only wins if you let it.
As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.
It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?
In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.
I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.
In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.
The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.
It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.
Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.
Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.
I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.
I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.
Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything
As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.
I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”
I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.
Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.
As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.
A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.
The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.
It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.
I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.
The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.
We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.
Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change. Kenzo: What game? Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse
Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.
This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.
Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.
But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.
I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.
The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.
It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn
There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.
The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.
Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.
“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling
Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.
One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.
