Tag: Geopolitics

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Politics Preparedness

Day 1546 and Present Ephemera

I am backing off some of my “current thing” hyper vigilance for a moment. I need to shake off the noise and find my signal.

The band of possibilities is simply so wide that it feels pointless to react. Who you are will determine everything from here. You must go into the future based on your values. I must strip back to see myself clearly.

The complaints about our geopolitical moment (true and righteous as they may be) are set against a great power conflict that will play out over multiple decades of technological change.

It’s yet unwritten though I have some ambition that we can all play a part in the restructuring of a knowledge abundant world.

The trouble with accelerating into the turn is the sheer stress. We know we need change but how we achieve it is messy.

It seems in some areas we will take the low road. It is a reasonable worry that we are seeing all of the downsides of American choices while the upsides are harder to see. I feel as I’ve only seen the fears I’d had and the changes are made at great cost.

We fucked around and it is finding out season. The present is all ephemera. I need to hold it lightly. The stress it induces serves no purpose. It will pass. I will adapt.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1542 and Future Blind

I am confident in my capacity to judge directional trends over time. I’ve been doing it consistently for close to twenty years. I’ve made solid bets that outweigh the wrong calls.

But right now I feel lost. I feel blind to short and medium term outcomes. I don’t know what happens next or in what order.

I’ve got a lot of working theories about how we orient over the next decade or two but I’ve got low confidence on anything nearer.

Perhaps this is because I simply don’t want my near term predictions to be true. They are too depressing and too cynical and too heartless.

An essay from Venkatesh Rao today titled Low Roads to High Places emphasizes why.

If a necessary historical evolution can occur via a low road or a high road, it will almost always happen via the low road.

He notes the law of the low road may simply be a an emergent consequence of thermodynamics. Entropy being what it is the path of least resistance wins.

Or maybe, as Rao suggests, the low road is a corollary to Abraham Thomas’ principle that to call macro-trends correctly you have to have “boundless optimism about technology and bottomless cynicism about humans.”

I’m just not ready to have bottomless cynicism about humans though I have optimism about technology. It’s possible to change our consensus and narrative direction and we do so regularly. Vibe shifts happen once an hour these days

Abraham Thomas has a theory that venture investing is temporal arbitrage. We are front running narrative consensus.

That’s why we look like herd animals eventually no matter how contrarian the bet was at the start.

Because being optimistic about the material changes that technology can bring has been the road to success. But I can’t decide how cynical I am able to be about my fellow humans.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1537 and Copy Cats

A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.

Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.

Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.

Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.

Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.

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Emotional Work

Day 1530 and Pandemic Anniversary

March 11 2020 was the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. It’s been five years since we had our once in a century pandemic that changed everything. Honestly it feels like it just happened.

You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.

The pandemic changed a lot of people’s lives. The New York Times has a feature with 30 charts about how the world is different that I found interesting.

My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.

We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.

Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.

Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.

Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.

Categories
Finance

Day 1529 and The Detoxing Economy

Do you recall the first time you heard the term detox? If you were a hippie kid I’d bet you grew up with it. If you were a striver maybe it arrived in your email inbox with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.

Or if you are a banker, maybe Scott Bessent introduced you to the term just this week. Which tbh I wouldn’t entirely believe as the entire dating pool for the professional upper middle class is obsessed with wellness.

“The market and the economy have just become hooked. We’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period,”

Scott Bessent at the New York Economic Club March 6th 2025

Hippies and anxious white women usually use detox as a kind of catch all for methods of various efficacy for flushing out unwelcome…toxins. Being specific can make you sound like a loony tune.

Turns the same logic can be applied to economic and fiscal policy. If you get too far into monetary policy and the Federal Reserve you too will sound like a loony tune.

But it’s hard not to be persuaded by those who rightly point out that America has been printing money and that has downstream effects.

Many an empire has fallen for debasing its currency. Something I am sure a man like Bessent understands. It’s not so much a pleasant white girl cleanse but managing through opioid addiction. Which isn’t an encouraging metaphor.

Categories
Politics

Day 1526 and PE Owned Rump State

I’ve been trying to not explicitly discuss politics for a couple weeks as it’s hard to have any sense of consensus reality. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well as reading news. It’s only served to further muddle my mind. I’ve regularly discuss the hostile information environment.

Given the chaotic scene it feels both foolish and necessary to send up signals to others. Venkatesh Rao has me considering cross publishing more of my general rambles to Substack. Especially as other channels become more hostile.

Rao leaves fantastic little notes like the below on whether Americans should prepare for a private equity owned rump state. A thought experiment which feels less far fetched than usual.

Just chagrined bewilderment and embarrassment and private-equity-owned rump state services shambolic-debacling along (ht Bruce Sterling for that turn of phrase). Whimpers over bangs.

As state capacity declines and social cohesion degrades it wouldn’t surprise me if the new institutional powers we trust most are corporations. Imagine Americans in twenty years as scarce but almost mythic progenitors of a corporate governance future.

Sure America may still be a nation state in that future but a United States of corporate charters isn’t all that far off from our original conception. No really check out the Virginia Company.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1523 and Do Not Disturb

It is in the nature of dysfunction to misuse resources. Something goes wrong and a system that once grew or self sustained finds itself in decline.

What to do? One can apply palliative care certainly. But you can go to the root of a problem and hope systems can be righted by bitter medicine.

I’ve had some degree of measured doom about topics like debt and monetary policy my whole life. I grew up with concerns of peak oil which turned to climate change. There is always a new crisis anytime we find ways to be resource constrained.

But we are resource constrained. That’s just a variable to be accounted for in the engineering of a solution. I care about energy. I mean it in the abstract as in fuel. But I also mean the energy I control.

I don’t have to expend expensive attention for all problems. Maybe becoming “do not disturb” is a scarcity mindset. But sometimes the poison is in the dose. And I want to keep pushing for better.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1512 and Thumbs Down

It’s been a bad month for me. It seems like a bad month in general. But that’s February for you right? It’s a thumbs down kind of month. I’ve enjoyed the nonstop snow but we’ve finally gone above freezing.

Icicles

As the sun melts down our power into icicles I’ll try not to dwell on the negatives.

Reading

The Brussels Effect or Denialism in Europe

Are you a Frankfurt School student? I certainly am. If you are, you may find John Ganz’s review of Alex Karp’s new book The Technological Republic to be an amusing read. His Substack also has some gems including this imagine of Adorno which I intend to use everywhere.

Theodor W. Adorno giving a thumbs down

Categories
Politics

Day 1511 and You Are Here

Watching institutional powers and public figures goes through the Kübler-Ross grief cycle as they grapple with technical and political change sucks. People are all over the place.

Institutional distrust from the public has America and Europe at odds just as our geopolitical position relative to China is most precarious. And yet this strange new world cannot possibly be coming. Having spent the last year in denial Germans have moved into anger.

Imagine what bargaining will look like as power shifts over the next few years. I’ve seen the depression stage already in technology as the shift in intelligence and computing washes over us.

I’ve come to acceptance only because I’ve got a head start. I didn’t look terribly sane at the time and now I am sitting pretty. Taking action while we grieve the loss of the world we knew is the human condition. If you can accept change is inevitable you might even start to enjoy the process.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1507 and Apocalypse Narcissism

I’ve been very wrapped up in my own problems of late. I have plenty of good reasons to be focused inward. When you feel as if you are fighting for survival, physical or otherwise, you can’t see anything else.

As I’ve looked up from my issues, I am seeing countless others caught in their own reactive spirals. Many of them are even directionally correct in their diagnosis of the problems facing them and the world as we know it.

The apocalyptic bent is especially strong in America at the moment. From politics to artificial intelligence to cultural wars, Americans are on the edge of change.

If your world is ending you probably can’t see beyond the horizon of the issues bringing about its end. Your view is myopic. Let’s call this phenomenon “apocalypse narcissism.”

It’s understandable to be wrapped up in fear when faced with all kinds of mortality. Your life, your nation, your culture, your planet and even your species all face world ending questions at some point. Sometimes change is so great we can’t see it as anything but death. Even if something better rises from the ashes.