Of Two Minds

In a real recession, what seemed safe and rock-solid melts into air.
We haven’t had a real recession in forty years (1981-82) and so only those who were in the workforce back then have any experience of how far and how fast things we think are solid can unravel.

So what’s changed? Everything, but mostly beneath the surface churn of circus and theater.
2023 is echoing 1973 in potentially consequential ways.

Everything’s abstract until it happens to us.
Dominoes falling are abstractions until one falls on you. Lines of dominoes toppling are an apt analogy to highly centralized systems that are tightly bound, that is, all the transactions that flow through the centralized hubs are interconnected, so when one domino falls, it topples chains of dominoes that then topple other chains.

In the real-world, the costs are all we know for sure and profits remain elusive and contingent.
No one knows how the flood of AI products will play out, but we do know it’s unleashed a corporate frenzy to “get our own AI up and running.”

One Deep State is bad enough, but a renegade, predatory private-sector Deep State is intolerable. In 2007, well before the term Deep State entered the common lexicon, I sketched the interconnected public-private pieces of the Deep State, which I termed the elite maintaining and extending global dominance.

We can all pretend to be fantastic until the floor collapses beneath us. At that point, complacency / denial gives way to panic, but it’s too late to effect any realistic reversal of fortune.