Howdy y’all

Greetings most finest and noblest of countrymen. I offered to offer my offering of off-putting remarks from hither and yon in this fair land and in Admin’s great judgment and/or moment of weakness he/she/it/they/them said yes.

In all seriousness though I have appreciated Admin’s capacity over the years for equal parts extended – nay wordy – exploration of the minutiae of finance and economics and concise snippets of sarcastic insights into this head scratcher we call humanity. The thing about being a lurker is that it’s low risk. And picking up the vibe that I’m a tad younger and more liberal than the median, I haven’t really wanted to crash anybody’s party uninvited. I came more for the Occupy Wall Street commentary than caring about Donald Trump 11-d chess or whatever it’s up to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as sarcastic and curmudgeonly as anybody. Age is just a number, and generational differences get exaggerated by researchers who have to sensationalize everything to get funding. But there is something captivating about cycles and turnings and so forth, something real and authentic about living through shared experiences at a moment in time that can’t be recreated or felt in the same way by anyone before or after. And so I’m hoping to add my voice to our glorious efforts of equal parts bemusement and truth seeking. You know, so long as the internets keep working and all that.

I tend to be more interested in good questions than resolved answers, in being curious about why other people think things than in promoting a particular thought to think. A couple of perspectives I will try to hone and explore over time are captured really well by something that Ben Thompson wrote about a decade ago in the early days of starting a new tech venture blog called Stratechery:

But there’s a second, more fundamental issue at play as well: the absence of friction in searching for, purchasing, downloading, and installing apps…

…Friction was the foundation of sustainability, and now friction is gone…

…The Internet has removed the friction of time and place, and I am benefitting greatly.

Of course it cuts the other way; I grew up in the Midwest, which means this isn’t my first exposure to the intersection of work and geographic independence. Usually it’s the jobs that move, while the workers are left behind.

Friction was the foundation of our job market, and now friction is gone.

This blog will soon return to the more concrete world of high-tech strategy, value chains, and app store economics, but underlying everything is the seismic change that is only just beginning: if there is a single phrase that describes the effect of the Internet, it is the elimination of friction.

With the loss of friction, there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. And that’s only three examples! The Internet is pulling out the foundations of nearly every institution and social more that our society is built upon…

If you had the attention span to get to that last sentence, it’s where we’re at. Sure Thompson was talking about value chains in tech, a much different area of political economy than TBP typically covers. But that’s where this turning is unique, where the variables are jumbled in ways that don’t have neat historical precedent. The foundations of nearly every institution and social norm have crumbled simultaneously. It’s all fake. All of it. Show me an administrator making a quarter million dollars a year and I’ll show you somebody whose skill set is in self-advocacy groveling at the feet of a central planner, not somebody whose labor produces meaningful value for the purported ‘customers’ of the organization, never mind society at large.

Authenticity is the currency of millennials because our elders across every part of the power structure have modeled everything else but that. It’s not one or two convenient, evil villains. It’s an entire generation of micromanaging busybodies across every federal agency, every big bank, every big hospital chain, every big university, every big media company, etc. The Social Security Administration publishes one of the best public data sets we have on wage inequality. In the most recent year available, 4 million workers earned more than $250,000. Sure, a tiny handful of them are highly talented musicians, actors, athletes, anesthesiologists, etc., at the top of their game. The vast majority, though, have no defensible reason to make notably more money than anybody else. They’re simply greedy, self-centered careerists who have entrenched a system, in POSIWID fashion, whose only real purpose is the ever growing concentration of wealth and power for connected insiders.

This realization that trust is crumbling is confusing and scary if you think that what we have right now is a sovereign nation-state governed by responsible stewards of fairness and justice and human rights. That crumbling would be quite disconcerting indeed. On the other hand, it’s exciting if one is able to accept the deeply depressing truth that every component of that sentiment is lacking. We aren’t a nation of leaders governed by Americans. We’re a nation of mercenaries in the employ of, well, it doesn’t even really matter that much.

And that’s perhaps the most rebellious component of my point. Half a century ago it might have mattered if there had been some way for Boomers collectively to organize at scale against the globalists that had overpowered elected governance and Constitutional rule. But there wasn’t precisely because the massive benefits of centralization possessed by the central planners were massive. That’s the main point that’s missed about the 20th century – we scaled larger and faster than humanity has ever done. There is simply no analog, in government or private sector activity, prior to the 20th century to the corporate pooling of human capital that happened in global governance during the 20th century. I do mean global and will be interested in putting together a bit of a primer or guide over time on the visible parts of that. I think it helps make so much sense of otherwise unfathomable and disjointed things that are said and done by individual, uh, ‘leaders’.

But.

We are at an inflection point. Central planning has run its course. To state my proposition more formally, the marginal utility of scale has turned negative. The central planners are having trouble even managing what they’ve got, never mind trying to grow bigger still. The most obvious criticism of my perspective is that I’m too optimistic. It’s a valid point. This turning might end in catastrophe, some combo of the Hunger Games and, well, simply hunger.

But.

I think the power structure has hit the proverbial wall. While sure lots has been accomplished with the bank bailouts and COVID response and so forth, they haven’t been able to go full totalitarian. The friction they’ve removed through centralized tools has turned out to require the consent of the masses after all. They can’t turn off the internet, or electricity, or anything else, because the credentialed class upon which they depend to keep the masses in check depend upon those same systems, too. Yet every time they censor somebody or force some company to take some action against a customer, they reveal how weak their position has become. They have little credibility left, and thus little persuasive power. It’s not a left/right thing or Dem/Rep or young/old or any other identity politics wedge issue. They had 6+ decades to stamp out the American spirit, and they thought that controlling large institutions (particularly the federal government, corporate media, education, and healthcare) was the way to do it. But instead, they’ve managed to weaken the very institutions upon which they depend to keep Americans in service to global coordination. After all, if they could do it without us, they’d just leave us alone. You know, to rot in the awful backwater of a pitiful North America unable to participate in the wonderful socialist utopia of EuroChinaStan.

How things resolve none of us know. Truly none of us, because this is an unprecedented confluence of events. But as long as the internet is still going, I think there’s a decent chance the excesses of central planning unwind in a way that is more like an anti-climactic dissolving away rather than some grand existential cataclysm. No analogy is perfect, but more like Leipzig in 1989 than Bavaria in 1933. The Hunger Games is commentary, perhaps the zeitgeist for Millennials if there can be one for a generation, on the system we have now, not on what the turning will bring.

It’s almost like there’s been a concerted effort to demoralize folks, to browbeat people into believing that a horrific outcome is the only possible outcome, because that gets people to participate in avoiding the reality that today we are an occupied country. The risk isn’t in the future changing markedly from the present, but rather in the future not changing. I’m not here to bash people voting for Donald Trump; I understand that motivation. I’m just offering a perspective that democracy – meaning our genuine federal republic, not the globalist facade of Our Democracy – isn’t what Important People do on Election Day. It’s what ordinary citizens do all the other days. Millions of genuine individual choices, not decrees by a handful of VIPs in DC or NY or wherever, will decide how this turning plays out.

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