Of Two Minds

So sorry, but the lifestyle of low-cost credit and all the goodies it could buy is permanently out of stock. In focusing on geopolitics, we lose sight of the dependence of every economy on a functioning global economy of low-cost goods, services, materials, shipping, transport, capital, labor and financial instruments, all flowing freely across borders and around the world.

The decay in quality reveals that the collapse of the neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model has already occurred.

All this suggests a strategy that’s only available to those few nations with these capacities: weaponize global depression. Before we get started, I need to stipulate that I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about weaponizing global depression: I don’t agree or disagree, I don’t “like” it or dislike it,

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly. Imagine making this simple change in your life: whatever you don’t control, you stop paying attention to it.

What’s interesting is the really hard problem AI has not been applied to is how to manage these technologies in our socio-economic-cultural system. The world is agog at the apparent power of ChatGPT and similar programs to compose human-level narratives and generate images from simple commands.

The net result of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization is the crumbling of the middle class. Neofeudal societies and economies lack a vibrant middle class. This is the defining feature of feudalism and its updated V2.0, neofeudalism: a nobility (based on birth or finance, it doesn’t matter) controls the vast majority of wealth, political power and productive capital, all served by a powerless peasantry.