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Yet it still comes as a great surprise to everyone when ‘doing more of what’s failed spectacularly’ ends up collapsing the whole rotten structure. Systems and nations are designed to fail without anyone even noticing: nobody set out to design the current broken system to fail at critical points, but now failure can’t be avoided because the incentive structure has locked in embedded processes that enrich self-serving cartels and insiders at the expense of the nation and its populace.

If you don’t discern any of these dynamics in the present, what are you choosing not to see? The reason why history rhymes is that humanity is still using Wetware 1.0 and so humans respond to scarcity, abundance and conflicts over them in the same manner. I am struck by similarities between the conflict-torn mid-1600s and the present: global climate change (The Little Ice Age in the 1600s), political upheavals and wars which intertwined civil and imperial conflicts.

If we have indeed begun a sustained “reversal of fortune”, it might be prudent to consider the possibility we’re only in the first inning of a sustained run of back luck. In our self-deluded hubris, we reckon we’ve moved beyond the influence of fortune, a.k.a. Lady Luck: our technologies are so powerful and our monetary policies so godlike that nothing as random as luck could ever crush our limitless expansion.

All the tricks to hide our unaffordable cost structure have reached marginal returns. Reality is about to intrude. There is much talk of tyranny in the political realm, but little is said about the tyrannies in the economic realm, a primary one being the tyranny of high costs: high costs crush the economy from within and enslave those attempting to start enterprises or keep their businesses afloat.

Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve–thanks for perfecting ‘legalized looting’ and neofeudalism in America. The problem with pushing a pendulum to its maximum extreme on one end is that it will swing back to the other extreme minus a tiny bit of friction.

One of the dishes at the banquet of consequences that will surprise a great many revelers is the systemic failure of the Federal Reserve’s one-size-fits-all “solution” to every spot of bother: print another trillion dollars and give it to rapacious financiers and corporations. Though 2020 is widely perceived as “the worst year ever,” it was only a snack.

When the top 10%’s bubble pops in 2021, the loss of illusions/delusions of security and wealth will be shattering to all those who believed artifice and illusory “wealth” were real. A great many people are living in bubbles that are about to pop.

So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous. Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.”

Choose wisely, America, or the options for a positive outcome will vanish like mist in Death Valley on a clear July afternoon. From the point of view of evolution, the most hopeful scenario for 2021 is the sudden and complete collapse of everything that is obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic.

We think we’re powerless because we don’t have wealth and power over others, but nothing could be further from the truth. To have agency is to have power over your own life and control of your assets, options and resources.

What happens when America finally admits its middle class is a phantom of feel-good fantasy? We may well find out in the next four years. Of the many things we cannot bring ourselves to admit, one of the most consequential is that our vaunted middle class is illusory, a phantom of our imagination rather than a reality.

The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy. The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus.

Extremes get more extreme until risk breaks out; then the reversal will be as extreme as the bubble expansion. What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist?

This devaluation of financial wealth–and its transformation to a dangerous liability– will reach extremes equal to the current extremes of wealth-income inequality. Financial capital–money–is the Ring that rules them all. But could this power fall from grace?

Extremes become more extreme right up until they reverse, a reversal no one believes possible here in the waning days of 2020. The absolutely last thing anyone expects is a collapse of all the asset bubbles, i.e. a deflation of assets that reverses the full 20 years of bubble-utopia since 2000.

Regardless of what happens with vaccines and Covid-19, debt and energy–inextricably bound as debt funds consumption– will destabilize the global economy in a self-reinforcing feedback. Back in the early days of the oil industry (1880s and 1890s), the product that the industry could sell at a profit was kerosene for lighting and heating.

There is no way a status quo that is completely dependent on the permanent expansion of these interlocking extremes, asymmetries and imbalances can unwind them all and retain its myriad parasitic elites. Thanks to my friend and colleague Mark Jeftovic, the audiobook of A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet is now available.Hands-free grokking is now accessible.