Of Two Minds

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.

Now that the overlapping crises are upon us and the banquet of consequences is being served, we’ll see just who our elites and leadership really are. The erosion of trust doesn’t require intent, it only requires the blind pursuit of self-interest above all else.