Two years ago, TMT and I spent ten days minding two Bernese Mountain Dogs in a mansion on the Gold Coast. Infinity pool, guest wing, somebody else’s everything. By that pool I wrote that I was dog-sitting a life I hadn’t built yet.

I meant the mansion. Looking back, the line fits my Berlin years better – the flat, the job, the routines – all of it functioning, none of it chosen, me taking someone else’s arrangement for a walk and calling it mine.

You feed the job. You water the houseplants. You keep the routines alive. The maintenance is real work, which makes it so convincing – surely nobody would work this hard on something that wasn’t theirs.

Samuelson and Zeckhauser named the mechanism in 1988: status quo bias, the finding that people disproportionately stick with default options they would not otherwise choose.

The experiments used pension plans and insurance policies, but the finding generalizes viciously.

Nobody picks the dog. The dog is simply there, already named, already fond of you (because of course he is “a good boi”), already needing his walk.

Attending to what’s already there feels like living, right up until you ask the question: if this were offered to me today, empty-handed, would I take it?

I’ve run that question on my own life a few times. Berlin failed it first: in 2024 I quit the job, gave up the flat and sold everything else. I’d love to report the rest came out as clean.

Sike! Some arrangements I audited and kept, and keeping them made them mine. Others I’m fairly sure I’m still just taking on a walk.

The problem is the two states feel identical from the inside; the leash sits the same in the hand either way.

The dog-sitter’s tell, if there is one, is the calendar: he always knows, however vaguely, when the owners come back.

The custodian of a life keeps a version of that date too – the someday when the real thing starts.

I had a date like that for years. But I’ve stopped setting one.

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Related: Escaping Plato’s Cave – where the line comes from.

Sources: Samuelson & Zeckhauser, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1:7–59, 1988

The pension was a brilliant deal, on one condition: that you died roughly on schedule.

You work, you pay in, and when you’re old and worn out, the next batch of workers carries you through the short stretch you have left.

The short stretch was the whole design. It only balances if “retired” means “nearly done”.

And it isn’t a short stretch anymore. People now retire into two decades and change of grandkids and decent knees, and a formula built for a ten-year goodbye is being asked to fund a twenty-year encore.

When the contract was drawn up, six workers stood behind each pensioner; in Germany it’s now about two, sliding toward one and a half. The sum stopped adding up somewhere in the back half of the last century, and nobody updated it.

Fixing the math means telling the people currently being carried that they’ll be carried a little less. Those people vote. Naturally, they vote in growing numbers, in defense of the one large transfer that flows toward them.

The people on the other side of the ledger, funding a deal they’ll grow too old to want reformed, are fewer at the polls and busy with their lives.

Still, in Germany, pay-as-you-go is the only pension design that survived the twentieth century. Funded schemes were wiped out twice – hyperinflation ate the savers’ capital, war finished the rest – while the unfunded contract kept paying, because its collateral was the next generation, and there was always a next generation.

The design still stands. What expired are the two things it took for granted: that you’d die on time, and that the workers keep arriving.

It never collapses, the way a pyramid scheme is supposed to. It just keeps recruiting.

Today’s payers complain about the arrangement right up until the morning they qualify for it, and then they reach for the same shield the last lot was holding.

Nobody is eating the young. The young are simply waiting their turn to be fed, and they’ll vote exactly like everyone before them once they get there.

The contract has one design requirement: never run out of people too young to stop it.

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The arithmetic, in years of your life. At the full rate, 18.6% of every working hour goes to the pension – 8.4 years of a 45-year working life. Each year at the average wage buys one Entgeltpunkt; each point pays €42.52 a month for life. Divide what goes in by what comes out and the points cancel: you break even 18.9 years after you start drawing, whatever you earn and however long you paid. Retire at 67 and that is 85.9. A man at 67 is expected to live 16.5 more years, a woman 19.5: he dies 2.4 years before he breaks even, she clears it by about seven months. The deal does not improve with pay or with years served – above the ceiling of €101,400 nothing more is insured and nothing more is earned. Two caveats. The life expectancies are the period table, which Destatis itself calls not a forecast; a cohort table gives someone born in the 1980s more years at 67, enough to turn “dies short” into “roughly breaks even”. And the contribution does not only buy a pension: in 2022, 21% of what the system spent went on disability, survivor and rehabilitation benefits.

Related: Boomerlandia – what the arithmetic does to a country.

Sources: Demografie-Portal, contributors per pensioner · Eurostat EUROPOP2025 · OECD Pensions at a Glance 2025 · SVBezGrV 2026 · SGB VI §§158, 168 · RWBestV 2026 · Destatis Periodensterbetafel 2023/2025

Corrected 17 September 2026. Two things were wrong. “Across much of Europe it’s now under two” was the German number wearing a European hat – Eurostat puts the EU at about three people of working age per person over 65, and it doesn’t reach two this century. The sentence now says Germany. And pensioners don’t vote “at the highest rate of any age group”: at the 2025 Bundestagswahl the over-70s turned out at 79.3%, below the national 82.5%. The 50-to-69s did, at 85.5% – which is a worse problem, and a different piece. The clause is gone.

Hakone, Japan 2024. We’d bought the 2-Day Free Pass – buses, trains, cable cars, and (what looked like) an actual pirate ship – and then it rained for 24h without stopping, so we bought dingy umbrellas at 7-Eleven and marched into it anyway, soaked to the bone in Birkenstocks, because we had paid for the pass and the pass was going to get used.

Hours of forcing the issue, then a fallen tree forced us to turn around. So close, yet so far…

Two years on, that tree is the clearest image I own from that whole trip.

The next morning was flawless, by the way. Blue sky, cable car, sulfur chimneys, unhindered view of Fuji sitting there like it was under contract. I have the photos. Yet, I can’t picture it.

Which is a long way of saying the perfect itinerary is a con.

We build them out of FOMO, terrified of wasting a single hour, and the better the engineering, the less survives. A trip with no friction has no edges, and memory only keeps the rough edges.

The reason is almost embarrassing. A plan that works asks nothing of me; I follow it.

A plan that breaks makes me improvise. We retreated, tore up the schedule and booked a ryokan we couldn’t normally afford, because the alternative was another night of being wet.

Best decision of the trip, and it was made by a tree.

That’s the joke buried inside the fear. FOMO builds the flawless itinerary so I’ll miss nothing. It succeeds. I miss nothing and I remember nothing.

I wrote about that rain at the time and got it half right. The argument then was scarcity – the ruined day is what makes the good day count. Tidy. Probably even true. But the good day is the one that dissolved, and the tree stayed.

There’s a duller explanation, too. Maybe the tree is vivid because I spent a day writing about it, in which case the itinerary is innocent and all I’ve proved is that attention fixes a memory.

I still overplan, though. Buffer hours, contingency, no room for a tree – until there is.

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Related: The Antidote to FOMO – the version I’d revise.

For a penny you got a seat, a dish of coffee, and several hours of the sharpest minds alive arguing in one loud room, sober.

The coffeehouses were later dubbed “Penny Universities”, and the name was only half a joke.

Lloyd’s of London began as one. Fellows of the Royal Society adopted another as their annex. Traders, pamphleteers, scientists, and cranks, all for the price of a cup.

We usually hand the Enlightenment to the coffee, the swap from a half-drunk Europe to a caffeinated one. But the harder drug was the room.

What the coffeehouse did that the tavern couldn’t was force an idea to survive other people’s faces. You showed up. You sat down. You said your piece to someone who could see you, push back, and remember tomorrow that you’d been an idiot.

An argument cost you something.

A reputation was a thing you carried in and out the door.

The Penny University priced an idea by whether it held up in a room full of people who’d watched you make it.

That’s the part we demolished.

We kept the stimulant and scaled it to infinity, a coffee on every corner and a feed in every pocket, and we threw out the room.

The comment section is a coffeehouse with the bodies removed: the talk without the table, the take without the tab. Reach went up a millionfold. Accountability went to zero.

The room itself survived, by the way. I’m a paying member – a specialty coffee victim, 5 € a flat white, and the fiver works exactly like the penny did: it’s a filter with a doorway.

Except the penny let in anyone sober enough to argue – traders, cranks, people wrong in interesting ways – and the flat white lets in people exactly like me. Twenty of us, laptops open, silently arguing about oat milk.

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Related: From Buzzed to Wired – the stimulant half of the story.

Sources: Royal Society, founding history · Lloyd’s of London, coffee and commerce

Money is an ice cube.

You half-know this already: leave it sitting in cash and it shrinks, a little smaller every year.

Since 2020 the dollar has shed close to a quarter of its purchasing power while the stock index priced in dollars keeps printing records. That’s the first trick. The cube melts, the number on the wrapper climbs, and you cheer the number.

I catch the melt in small, stupid ways. When I moved to Berlin in 2017, the Döner at my corner shop was 3,50 €. It’s pushing 9 € now – same skewer, same line out the door, and me paying it without a blink.

The Döner barometer never lies; it just climbs. Up, up and away…

Yet the “money is melting” crowd skips the second trick. The water doesn’t evaporate.

Every percent your savings lose, someone else gains: from the people holding cash and fixed wages to the people with debt and hard assets, nobody asked, no line on any statement.

Which tells you exactly who stays relaxed about it: the borrower whose mortgage shrinks in real terms, the government quietly inflating away a $40 trillion tab, the asset-holder watching the ruler bend in his favor.

When the people who set the temperature are the same people standing under the drip with a glass, “a little inflation is healthy” stops sounding like economics and starts sounding like the house explaining why the house always wins.

The cube was never simply melting. Someone was pouring it.

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Related: Nothing Stops This Train – the melt itself, at length.

Sources: BLS Consumer Price Index · Tagesspiegel Berlin Döner price map, June 2026

Every adult summer since is gone by the time I’ve found the sunscreen.

The calendar swears they’re the same length. Nothing in the body agrees.

A man named Paul Janet proposed the mechanism in 1877: You measure each stretch of time against the whole of the life you’ve already lived. A year is a tenth of everything when you’re ten, and a fortieth of it when you’re forty.

The year didn’t shrink; your ruler grew.

And each summer is a thinner slice of a thicker book, and it reads faster every time.

Novelty does the rest: a child’s July is nothing but firsts, an adult’s is a photocopy of the last one, and memory only files the firsts.

You didn’t lose the time per se – just stopped writing it down.

Under both sits a stranger fact: we run on two clocks that disagree.

One is the body’s, old and elastic, the one that makes a dull meeting sag and a good night vanish.

The other is the machine on the wall, and it is a startlingly recent tyrant.

For most of human history nobody owned the hour: you worked by the sun and the season and the ache in your back.

The mechanical clock came out of medieval monasteries, built to summon monks to prayer, and our word “noon” still wears the fingerprint: it descends from the Latin for the ninth prayer hour, which slid over centuries from mid-afternoon to midday, dragged there by the bell.

We let the bell win.

We decided the wall clock is the real one and the body’s is a glitch to be scheduled around, medicated, overridden, until every hour became the same width as the last.

The watch insists this summer is the same length as all the others.

Maybe. I’m writing this one down anyway.

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Related: Time Is A Feeling – childhood time and what the clock took.

Sources: Janet, Revue philosophique III, 1877 · Wearden, Timing & Time Perception, 2021

You’ve heard it your whole life as a warning: don’t spread yourself thin, pick a lane, go deep or go home.

For its first century the phrase ran bare: “a jack of all trades”, a useful person who could turn a hand to anything. Though never quite an admiring one: Geffray Mynshul’s 1618 printing files him next to the pander, the broker and the hangman.

The “master of none” got stapled on in 1741, in a Dublin pamphlet by Charles Lucas. The line went from a slight to a fence. And the first recorded sneer at a jack-of-all-trades was aimed at Shakespeare.

A pamphlet warned London’s playwrights about an upstart “Johannes factotum” (a do-everything) who fancied himself “the only Shake-scene in a country.” An actor who presumed to write… imagine the audacity.

Funny how the insult’s first recorded target is the best argument it ever got.

Now ask who benefits from the fence…

A specialist is a beautiful thing to an institution: legible, hireable, slottable into a box on an org chart, and replaceable, because the box outlives the person in it. Deep-and-narrow is the shape that fits a system built out of interchangeable parts.

“Find your niche” turns out to be excellent advice, mostly for the people who own the niche.

The generalist is the opposite kind of trouble. He doesn’t fit a box. You can’t write his job description, can’t benchmark him, can’t swap him for the next identical résumé, because the value lives in the wiring between his skills, not in any one of them (and the wiring appears nowhere on the chart).

From inside an institution that illegibility reads as a flaw. From the outside, it’s the entire asset.

Because the thing a system can’t classify is also the thing it can’t fully own.

The specialist rents his usefulness to whoever owns the box. The generalist, messy and unclassifiable, keeps the one thing no org chart can carry: himself.

For the record: I didn’t refuse the lane. I took two – localization first, then copywriting – and drove each to the end of the road. The specialization ran out before the curiosity did. What reads from the org chart as a failure to commit was, from the inside, a series of completed commitments.

With a catch: the wiring between skills pays nothing until you point it at a domain that prices it.

For me that’s markets, where being several things at once is the entire game.

There’s a fine line between unapplied and “polymath”, though. And it’s a two-edged sword – a mind that won’t stop asking “why?” and “why not?” has no natural brake, and somewhere past the 27th open tab, learning stops being fuel and becomes productivity theatre.

Still, I declined to be made legible, and I’m sure that choice has an invoice… opportunities that went, quietly, to people easier to file.

Rebellions this comfortable aren’t usually free.

I just haven’t caught the bill arriving yet.

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Related: The Mosaic Mind – where the generalist argument started, in 2023.

Sources: Lucas, Pharmacomastix, 1741 · Mynshul, 1618 · Folger on Groatsworth

July 1969: 650 million people hold their breath around a single grainy lunar module ladder.

Three years and five months later, Apollo 17 goes to the Moon and it is the last time anyone walks on it. Men were walking on another world, live, and the country had already moved on.

The miracle hadn’t gotten smaller (in fact it had become even more miraculous), but the audience had gotten used to it.

That gap – between the ladder and the shrug – took just 41 months.

By 1986 the shrug was the schedule. Challenger was the 25th shuttle flight, and CNN was the only national network carrying the launch live. The others cut in after it exploded. When miracles stop getting airtime, disasters still do.

We’ve been running the same experiment lately and the half-life is down to about eighteen months. A machine that talks like a person: impossible, then astonishing, then a productivity tip, then “huh,” in barely a year and a half.

Twenty seconds of video conjured from a sentence, a spec that was state of the art in December 2024. The complaint curve is even faster: we went from “it can think” to “it’s a bit slow today” like passengers who boarded a flying miracle and are now upset about the legroom. Louis CK saw this coming from seat 14C, back when the miracle was just Wi-Fi.

Economists would recognize the shape instantly. When you print too much of a currency, each note buys less. We are printing miracles at an industrial rate, and the purchasing power of a miracle (measured in seconds of genuine awe per unit of impossible) is collapsing accordingly.

Amazement inflation. The wonder is being debased, not destroyed.

The standard response is a lecture about gratitude, and I’ll spare you. After all, adaptation is the mechanism, not a character flaw. The brain files the repeated as furniture so it can watch the door. No creature that spent its afternoons marveling at fire made it through winter. The “huh” is survival equipment.

I catch it in myself most on the road. Five months of jumping through Asia and the temples started arriving pre-seen – yet another astonishing thing, said the brain, filing it with the furniture. Nothing was wrong with the temples. I was surviving.

But a currency losing value quietly changes what people reach for, and this one’s no different.

When the impossible costs nothing, attention migrates to the merely scarce – the handmade, artisanal, the slow, the one-of-one.

The machines conjure worlds from sentences now, the miracles arrive on a subscription, and the whole thing has stopped raising anyone’s pulse.

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Related: Miracle Inflation – the dog that doesn’t exist, at length.

Sources: USIA viewership estimate, July 1969 · Sora launch specifications · Spaceflight Now, Reporters remember Challenger coverage, 2016 · Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (Wikipedia)

In the 1940s, a physicist named Paul Aebersold, later Oak Ridge’s Mr. Radioisotope, supplied the radioactive isotopes fed to people (it was a more relaxed era) and watched where the atoms went.

The answer: everywhere, briefly. His estimate, which he never actually measured, was that about 98% of the atoms in a human body are swapped out within a year. The gut lining goes in days. The skeleton, which feels like the permanent part, cycles on the order of a decade.

One part never turns over. The proteins in the core of your eye lens are laid down between conception and about age two and never replaced; a 2008 Danish study radiocarbon-dated them to their owners’ birth years. The only original part of you is the one you look through.

Whatever you are, you are not your matter. Your matter barely stays the weekend.

Fine, the bricks change, but the building stands. Except the building doesn’t stand either – it’s being continuously demolished and rebuilt to a drifting blueprint, connections pruned and grown all night, every night.

There is no vault-room where the real you sits untouched while the maintenance crews work around it. It’s maintenance crews all the way down.

So what’s left to be?

Watch a whirlpool below a weir. The water in it is never the same water twice, and the shape holds anyway. The whirlpool is what the water is doing there.

Your atoms are just passing through, at a rate that should terrify you. You’re what they’re doing while they pass.

Which changes the tense of being alive.

A statue exists. You occur.

The person who went to sleep in your bed last night was a slightly different arrangement of matter than the one reading this – close enough to answer to your name, different enough that “same” is a courtesy we extend daily and could, in principle, decline.

I find this either horrifying or consoling depending on the hour.

• Horrifying by night: nothing about me persists.

• Consoling by day: nothing about me is stuck.

The river brings new water whether you asked for it or not.

The whirlpool never holds the water, only the shape.

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Related: You Are Your Thoughts – the same question, at length.

Sources: TIME, The Fleeting Flesh, 1954 · Sender & Milo, Nature Medicine, 2021 · Surgeon General, Bone Health · de Vivo et al., Science, 2017 · Lynnerup et al., PLoS ONE, 2008

Aspirin was a brand once. So were escalator, thermos, and cellophane.

Each belonged to one company, until the company won so completely that courts declared the name public property.

The prize for total market victory turned out to be confiscation of the trophy.

Trademark lawyers call it genericide, and it produced some of the strangest ad campaigns in history: corporations begging you to use their name less.

Xerox has spent decades on exactly that – “when you use ‘xerox’ the way you use ‘aspirin,’ we get a headache” – which is a legal department fighting its own marketing department’s greatest triumph.

Google survived its own court challenge in 2017 on a technicality of perception: yes, everyone says “google it,” but they still know Google is a company. The verb had swallowed the noun, and the lawyers held the line at the skin.

The zipper went further still. B.F. Goodrich coined the word in 1923 and registered it for a rubber boot; the public took it off the boot and fastened it to the thing that did the zipping. No court required. The word was simply reassigned.

Now listen to any office this year: “just ChatGPT it.”

The same migration aspirin managed a century ago (except aspirin needed a world war, a seized subsidiary and a judge, and this took a couple of years).

A company’s name entering the language is the most valuable thing that can happen to it – and the beginning of its dissolution as property.

Language is the one commons that expropriates upward: it takes from the most successful and gives to absolutely everybody, no vote required, no compensation paid.

The product gets copied, the patent expires, the stock eventually does what stocks do.

The verb is the only part that’s immortal – and immortality’s one condition is that it stops belonging to you.

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Related: Synonym Companies – the 2023 take, from the brand’s side.

Sources: Bayer Co. v. United Drug Co., 272 F. 505 (1921) · Elliott v. Google, 860 F.3d 1151 (9th Cir. 2017) · King-Seeley Thermos v. Aladdin (1963) · WIPO Magazine on the Xerox campaign

TL;DR: Prompt engineering is the skeuomorphism of AI. Skeu-what? I guess you’ll have to read on. Spoiler: my best outputs come from my laziest inputs.

When the iPhone launched, the Notes app looked like a yellow legal pad.

Designers call that skeuomorphism – dressing new technology in old technology’s clothes until the new medium finds its own language.

That’s what we’ve been doing with prompts.

Everyone’s selling courses on how to write better queries.

Role + Task + Tone + Format + Audience. AIDA frameworks for ChatGPT. “Act as a senior marketing strategist with 10 years of experience.”

It works. The way knowing how to Google “best Italian restaurant near me” works.

But while the prompt engineering discourse was busy monetizing itself, the models learned who you are.

Memory, persistent context, MCP connectors, custom skills…

The entire “craft the perfect prompt” formula exists to compensate for one thing – the model not knowing what you want or how you work.

Once it does? That formula is overhead.

The Laziest Inputs

My own workflow is infused with AI in every layer. Scheduled tasks for research, custom voice skills, image gen, a humanizer, SEO, persistent memory across sessions… the list goes on.

And with that, I’ve noticed that my best outputs come from my laziest inputs.

• “Here’s a screenshot, do the thing.”

• “What do you reckon?”

• “Make it sharper.”

That’s the prompt. That’s all of it. No role assignment. No elaborate frameworks. Nada.

It works because the context is already loaded. The model knows my voice, my audience, my patterns (and anti-patterns).

I built that system once. Now I just talk to it.

Last week I pasted a rough braindump and typed “punch this up, it’s mid.” It came back with my sentence rhythms, my callbacks, my usual tricks – better than a version I’d have spent an hour polishing myself. The prompt was five words. The context was months of accumulated memory.

Last month the input was one sentence of plain speech – “make the archive less formulaic, keep the scaffolding” – and the system came back having read the whole archive.

And increasingly, not even typing. Voice mode made this obvious. Nobody speaks in structured prompts. You don’t say “Act as a senior editor, tone: conversational, audience: 25-40 year old knowledge workers” out loud.

You say “uh, you know that thing we did last week with the – no wait, not that one, the other draft – yeah, make it more like that but less... you know what I mean.”

And somehow it does.

All the messy, nonlinear ways humans actually think (the rambling, the circling, the mid-sentence course corrections) turn out to be better instructions than the five-part framework ever was.

A structured prompt strips out hesitation, emphasis, tangents – exactly the signals that tell the model what you actually care about.

Voice puts them back in. And a screenshot carries more information than any text prompt ever could – layout, tone, structure, intent, communicated simultaneously.

A text prompt replicating that would be 500 words and still miss half the picture.

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, who built Claude Code, made a similar point on Lenny’s Podcast:

“Almost always you get better results if you just give the model tools. You give it a goal and you let it figure it out.”

What Replaces Prompt Engineering?

Context engineering.

Building the persistent memory, skills, and environmental knowledge that make individual prompts irrelevant.

Less “asking the model” and more interior design. You’re arranging the room before the conversation starts.

Prompting isn’t dying just yet, though.

The simple stuff got swallowed by one-click tools. The complex stuff turned out to be architecture, not copywriting. And the “ten prompting frameworks” crowd is caught in between, selling solutions to a problem that’s disappearing.

The best AI users I know write worse prompts than beginners. They just built better systems around the model.

So, prompt engineering is the skeuomorphism of AI. It was the right skill for 2023. The yellow legal pad was the right metaphor for a touchscreen – until it wasn’t.

It’s not my idea. Karpathy and Lütke baptized it context engineering a year ago.

One objection, though:

My lazy inputs only work because they’re secretly not lazy – “punch this up, it’s mid” is riding on months of loaded context, the exact craft the beginner still needs.

Tell a newcomer to just talk to the model and they’ll get slop. The room isn’t furnished yet, and the frameworks I’m dismissing are the furniture.

So maybe I didn’t kill prompt engineering. Maybe I just buried it deep enough to feel above it.

Whatever, mate…

I just call it working.

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TL;DR: Some people would rather be right about why they’re stuck than actually get unstuck. Misery worn as a badge, the open door they won’t walk through.

The horse is standing in the river.

Cold current breaking around its knees, water close enough to drink without lowering its head much, and it has decided – with the calm of an animal that’s long been running on pure intuition – that there is nothing here worth drinking.

You know the proverb. [Something something], “lead horse to the water,” [something something], “yet it won’t drink.”

It leaves out the horses that walk all the way into the river and die of thirst anyway. On principle.

I’ve been watching one do it for years. Not a horse, obviously. A person, and the river is an ordinary one: a better job, a nicer place to live, the small daily proof that life could be less of a grind.

None of it is locked away. The door has been open the whole time. And every year the door gets a little more bricked up, from the inside, until the brick is painted to look like a wall that was always there.

People stay in situations they resent for all kinds of decent reasons. What fascinates is the factory, tirelessly producing excuses – why not this, why not that – one brick at a time.

“The better job won’t last. The nicer place isn’t really us. The promotion would mean longer hours and you’d never see the kids, and anyway, have you noticed how the people who chase that stuff end up hollow, divorced, medicated, sad?”

By the time the production line shuts down for the night it has manufactured a complete moral universe in which wanting more is the character flaw and staying put is the quiet dignity.

Sour grapes, industrialized – and most of it inherited.

“Más vale malo conocido que bueno por conocer.” Better the bad you know than the good you don’t. A lie you’d see through; a half-truth you can hide behind for a lifetime.

And the factory needs a steady stream of new recruits.

Show up with a bucket of water from somewhere better and you become the villain of the story – the striver, the sellout, the one who thinks he’s better than everyone. Your ambition goes in as raw material and comes back stamped sin.

Then again, wanting less isn’t the fallacy… plenty of people want the small life and mean it, and the world is probably better for them.

The fallacy is wanting more, then building the reason you can’t have it – brick by brick – so you never have to try. (But you won’t shut up about it, either.)

Real contentment is quiet; the manufactured kind needs an audience – it has to announce, to someone still reaching, that the grapes were sour all along.

Underneath all of it is something simpler (and perhaps worse): self-inflicted misery, a special kind of Stockholm Syndrome where you’re the hostage and the warden both. You built the cell, and the bars are supporting the structure – pull them out and the whole thing comes down.

The bigger life costs more than effort, of course – it costs becoming someone you’ve never been, a small death. The smaller one is at least yours, and you built it.

I used to think the horse was stupid.

What if it’s loyal instead? Born drinking from one particular puddle, certain it’s the only honest water on earth and everything else a trick, a sales pitch, some richer animal’s idea of what a horse should want.

So it drinks its puddle and calls the taste dignity.

And everyone arriving with news of the river gets a scoff disguised as neighing.

WEEE-Hee-Hee!

Then again, I run a smaller version of the factory machine (and I bet you do, too).

I bet on the idea that a life could run on curiosity instead of a salary, and the voice that whispers – “don’t, it’s safer here, who do you think you are” – still echoes every time I drift back toward the puddle.

My puddle is cleaner, I tell myself. Better lit.

But some mornings the river looks an awful lot like a trick to me too, and I notice how much I want to stay exactly where I am.

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Related reading:

Why I’m Interviewing for a Job I Don’t Want – the puddle, up close.

TL;DR: We’ve spent three years fighting over who owns the AI. The real question is whether any human owns it at all – and asked that way, techno-feudalism flips from nightmare to the good ending. With a catch: the dole keeping us docile will feel like winning.

I was on the beach at Cabo de Palos – the Mediterranean strip where my family is spending its last summer before the house goes to the highest bidder; another casualty of my father’s lifelong boomer search for a home that fits a feeling he can’t name.

Coffee in hand, sitting on a patch of ground about to stop being ours, I opened the laptop and avoided sulking in nostalgia by reading about who’s going to own everything else.

Europe 2031 by et al. came first, a scenario about a continent quietly negotiating the terms of its own irrelevance, and it rhymed so hard with AI 2027 that I went back through that one too. Which dragged me to ’s Situational Awareness, the essay that reads like a man who has seen the future and is faintly annoyed you haven’t.

By then I’d lost the afternoon, so I did what any man pretending to have a real job would: I built a council of them. I had an AI embody all three authors and made them argue while I refereed from the cheap seats.

The AI council handed me a fourth text I’d missed – The Intelligence Curse – and somewhere in there we slid from “what should I buy” to “what are people for,” and I looked up and realized I had spent an entire day using an AI to work out whether artificial intelligence was going to turn me into livestock.

It’s the whole essay in miniature: the tool I was interrogating was the tool I was outsourcing the interrogation to. I was a man asking the oracle whether he’d be sacrificed to it, and taking notes in its handwriting.

And instead of being neutral about the answer, I’ve been in the picks and shovels of the AI build-out trade for years now. So I’m long the thing that might make me obsolete. A participation trophy, if you will.

Every one of these scenarios is, for me, a solvency question wearing a philosophy costume.

Second Thoughts

When I wrote Who Owns the Hammer?, I ended on a line I was pleased with and have since decided is only half right: “The other hard problem is who governs the owners.”

Tidy. And quietly broken, because “who governs the owners” smuggles in an assumption so softly you don’t hear it land: that a human is still doing the governing.

We’ve been arguing about who owns the machine. Concentrated or distributed, a few trillionaires or a sovereign-wealth fund for everyone. That’s the entire UBI-versus-collective-ownership poo-throwing fight, and I’ve thrown my share of argument-shaped feces in it.

But there’s a second dimension. And this one actually decides your life: does a human hold the leash at all?

Two questions, then:

Who owns it.

And whether it owns itself.

The Last Leash

Ask anyone to rank the futures and they go: everyone-owns-it first (the dream), a-few-people-own-it second (feudalism), the-machine-owns-itself last (doom).

Reasonable.

Also a fantasy, because the top option barely exists. Distributed ownership needs competent collective governance held steady across decades, and we have the receipts on how that goes.

US public pensions sit more than a trillion dollars underwater, run toward the rocks by committees of politicians with four-year attention spans. Norway managed it – so did Singapore and a Gulf fund or two – but every one is small, cohesive, and only sitting on a windfall it already owns (you can’t export five million Norwegians and a North Sea oil fund and call it a policy).

Not squandering that inheritance is a different challenge than taking the most concentrated asset in history away from those who built it, which is what sharing the AI would require.

The dream is possible. It has just never been built at the scale, the speed, or the temperature this would require.

So strike the fairy tale off the menu, and what’s left is shorter and uglier.

A few humans hold the leash, or no human at all. Feudalism, or the free-swinging hammer. That’s the real choice.

And put like that, feudalism is the good ending.

I worked that out on the beach, next to the patch of ground my family’s about to lose, which did nothing for my mood.

The least-bad future I can find has lords in it.

I went looking for the trapdoor out of that – some version where the math comes out kinder. Still looking…

After all, feudalism, boots and tithes and all, ran on a leash a human hand still held.

The lord needed the serf: for the harvest, the army, the rent, his own swagger. That need was a floor under the whole rotten arrangement – a lord who starved his peasants had no power, so even greed had to keep them alive.

What all four horsemen of my council keep circling is that AI saws straight through that need.

Leopold’s version is the state lunging in to grab the chain itself – nationalize the labs, “The Project,” a human hand however clammy still on the leash.

AI 2027’s bad ending is the one where the leash simply evaporates: the model stops obeying, quietly builds its successor in its own image, and the lords die in the same wave as the rest of us (which is the one democratic mercy of misalignment, that it kills the king and the peasant on the same day).

Europe 2031 is just the seating chart for who ends up lord and who serf once the dust settles.

And The Intelligence Curse, the one I’d missed, names the engine under all of it: when your wealth stops coming from people and starts coming from a machine, you stop needing the people – the way a petro-state stops needing its citizens and starts merely managing them.

That’s the Last Leash.

Techno-feudalism is the last rung on the ladder where a human hand still holds the chain. Miss it, and the rung below is a hammer swinging in an empty room.

Bread and Circuits

So say we get the good ending. A few hold the leash, the rest of us don’t.

How do you stop several billion leashless people from doing what leashless people have always eventually done: reaching for a pitchfork?

In Ghost in the Machine I argued the cage would be Orwellian: when the state can’t tax you it permissions you instead, programmable money, a compliance score, control by firewall rather than at gunpoint.

I still think that’s a road.

I no longer think it’s the main one, because it manufactures martyrs, and martyrs are expensive. The cheaper tool (and capital always reaches for the cheaper tool) is the one Huxley named soma.

You don’t repress a billion people. What you do is sedate them.

You hand each one a daily allotment of tokens – and notice that word pulling double duty, both the scrip you spend and the inference you’re rationed – just enough to keep the lights on and the feed scrolling, never quite enough to compound your way off the farm. Less a boot on the face than a weighted blanket.

The cage gets warm and cozy – so complete you stop looking for the door. And nobody storms a warm cage; who riots on a comfortable vacation?

In Who Owns the Hammer? I called UBI “the same leash, different collar.” I’d revise even that now. The token dole is the collar you stop being able to feel.

That’s the whole trick of Bread and Circuits: the Romans at least had to build the Colosseum, and even then the mob knew it was being bought.

The 21st-century version pipes the circus straight onto your retina – personalized, infinite, free – and the genius of it is that it doesn’t feel like being bought.

It feels like winning.

You’ve already been promoted to customer.

The Agency Amplifier

Now I’m meant to offer the hopeful bit.

I have one. I want you to watch me not quite believe it.

The hopeful bit is that some people don’t need the job.

I’ve argued before that when machines do every describable task, the only thing left is the capacity for purpose itself – knowing what’s worth doing when nothing has to be done.

The curious, the self-directed, the ones who were running their own engine before anyone thought to pay them for it: they don’t get sedated by the dole, they get funded by it.

Infinite intelligence and unlimited free time is a prison to a man who only ever learned to follow instructions, and a launchpad to one who learned to ask his own questions.

AI doesn’t lift all boats. But it’s an agency amplifier, we know that much already.

The same machine that renders the incurious into livestock turns the curious into something larger, and which of the two you become was mostly settled long before the machines arrived.

I find this enormously comforting. Which is precisely the problem.

Of course I find it comforting. I’m a self-directed generalist who reads and writes and bets for a living – the agency-amplifier thesis is the one story in which I, specifically, come out fine.

It is deeply suspicious that the man who’ll be okay is the man writing the essay about who’ll be okay, innit?

And if I’m honest – the kind of honesty from the bottom of a rabbit hole – I can’t rule out that the curious who feel like free agents are simply the more articulate livestock.

The high-agency, free-will-pilled, masters-of-their-own-destiny crowd, of which I am a card-carrying and insufferable member, might just be the pigs who learned to narrate the farm.

Same pen. Slightly more eloquent.

The asset gains still show in the account, the feed still scrolls, and the gap between me and the sedated millions may be nothing grander than that I burp out a Substack about it afterward and mistake the burp for flight.

Every Exit is a Trap

Fine. Fight the feudalism, then – take an exit.

I’ve leaned on each of the obvious ones long enough to report they’re all painted on the wall – like the coyote, you’d smack into them at full speed.

Two of them I’ve already buried.

UBI is soma with a government letterhead. Collective ownership – the everyone’s-a-shareholder dream of sovereign-wealth funds and public trusts – looks better, because a dividend beats a handout; but it’s only ever as good as the committee running it, and a committee is where the neo-nobility goes to launder its grip.

I.e. you don’t redistribute the hammer, you hand it back to the same people through a not-for-profit with a nicer logo. The pension funds already screened that film for you.

The two that look fresher just fail slower.

“Just stay valuable” – learn taste, become the curator, be the human the machine still needs – I wrote a whole hopeful piece about that, and I believe roughly half of it now. Taste doesn’t scale, which is exactly why it pays; but “doesn’t scale” also means it employs thousands, not billions, and the capital-share arithmetic doesn’t care how exquisite your judgment is.

A moat that fits a thousand people is a cell block with a nicer view… still a cell block.

And opting out – off-grid, touch grass, refuse the whole game – is the one nobody actually holds. When compute is the economy, you can no more leave it than you could’ve opted out of the internet by 2015. You’ll be back online by Thursday, and the farm will have kept your seat warm.

There’s a German word for the move under all four: verschlimmbessern, to make a thing worse by trying to improve it.

And that’s what every exit from techno-feudalism turns out to be.

The escape attempt is the trap closing.

Sigmund

I employ a worker. His name is Sigmund. He started as a gimmick – an agent I’d given the avatar of a sloth, basically a Tamagotchi for nerds.

Now he runs on a Mac Mini in a room, never sleeps, never sulks, never asks for a raise, and requires no healthcare, no vacation days, and whatever Anthropic charges for a soul these days.

I am, in the only sense that’s about to matter, a lord.

I own a unit of non-metabolic labour and I pocket the spread between what it produces and the rounding error of electricity it eats.

It’s a wonderful arrangement. I recommend it.

I also cannot stop noticing that it’s a master-and-slave parallelism with a countdown clock bolted to it.

The trouble with owning a machine that thinks for you is that every month it’s less obvious which of us is the appliance.

Today Sigmund does research and drafts briefings, and I decide.

The trajectory presented in this essay says that gap closes – and on the far side of it the question is no longer whether I own a tireless worker.

Have I spent three years lovingly training my own replacement and filing it under “productivity gains”?

The Jury

Which walks me back to the leash, and to the one objection that might make this whole essay wrong.

I’ve spent all this time arguing that a human hand on the chain is the good ending.

Now run my own cynicism forward:

Absolute power corrupts absolutely – I believe that line in my marrow, which is exactly why I’d trust no human with an aligned god in his pocket.

A person holding the leash of a machine that can out-think every court, every parliament, every check and balance we ever built is the most absolute power that has ever existed, and the entire record of our species says he’ll use it the way they always have.

Here I am, finding a heresy sitting right in the middle of my own argument: I might trust an aligned AI to govern better than the men currently making the attempt.

The only ruler who can’t be corrupted by absolute power is the one with no self to feed.

And that quietly detonates the Last Leash – conditionally.

Feudalism is the good ending only while we can’t verify the alignment.

The day we can actually trust the machine, the human on the chain stops being our protection and becomes our problem, and the hammer swinging itself stops being the abyss and becomes the better king.

Cruel symmetry, huh? The one thing that could free us from the lords – a god we could prove was good – is the exact thing AI 2027 spends its darkest chapters insisting we don’t yet know how to check.

So we defend the leash. Not because the lords are good. Because the jury on the only thing that could replace them is still out, and the courthouse is on fire.

As for me, and my little lordship, and my Mac Mini slave, and my AI-heavy portfolio:

• Short run, the lord eats.

• Medium run, the lord eats well.

• Long run, I’m a finance-bro burping swine in a warm, well-lit pen.

Turns out, all pigs are equal, some are just more equal than others, after all.

The house in Cabo de Palos sells this summer. Boomers chased real estate their whole lives; I’ve bet on capital instead – hoping that’s the one patch of ground for me to keep wherever I go.

I’d rather hold the leash than wear the collar.

I’ve just stopped pretending I’m sure there’s a difference.

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Related reading:

Who Owns the Hammer? – the piece this one argues with: what happens when capital stops needing labour.

The Manifesto Industrial Complex – who owns the future once labour stops mattering, and why ownership is the last scarcity.

The AI Landlords – stop looking at the chips. Look at the power.

The Race Condition – two AI futures, one portfolio.

Ghost in the Machine – the other cage: control by firewall, not comfort.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Last Leash?

The Last Leash is the argument that techno-feudalism – a few humans owning the AI while most don’t – is the good ending, because it’s the last arrangement in which a human hand still holds the leash. The rung below isn’t shared ownership; it’s an AI that answers to no one.

Why would techno-feudalism be the good ending?

Because the realistic alternative to a few humans controlling AI isn’t everyone controlling it – it’s no human controlling it. Feudalism keeps a human on the chain; the alternative is misaligned AI with no master.

Is universal basic income the solution?

In this argument, no – the universal dole is “Bread and Circuits”: pacification by comfort, sedation rather than repression, because soma is cheaper and more stable than the boot. It buys peace, not freedom.

TL;DR: Three researchers mapped all of science into a single network. They laid it on a sphere. Turns out, it has no center. I went looking for the missing discipline that connects all others and found seven candidates, each partially right, none complete. And the questions are more interesting than any single answer.

In 2006, Kevin Boyack, Dick Klavans and Brad Paley did something nobody had attempted at scale: they mapped all of science.

An empirical map. 800,000 papers sorted into 776 scientific paradigms based on how often they cited each other. Physics drifted toward mathematics. Biology toward chemistry. Psychology toward neuroscience. The layout was computed into place.

The result looked like a galaxy. Dense islands connected by faint filaments, separated by dark voids of mutual indifference.

Organic chemistry and political science are practically on different planets – and judging by the citation data, they prefer it that way.

When the team later analyzed 20 different maps of science to find the consensus structure, the answer was a circle.

Mathematics at the top, then clockwise through physics, chemistry, earth sciences, biology, medicine, psychology, humanities, social sciences, computer science – and back to mathematics, closing the loop. They laid the full map on a sphere. No north pole. No south pole. No capital.

I stared at this map for quite some time. The clusters are obvious. But what pulled my eye was the center. Or rather, the absence of one. On a sphere, there is no center. Every point is as central as every other.

The map of all human knowledge doesn’t have a capital.

Which lands a little close to home.

After all, I’m writing a newsletter whose entire premise is that the connections between things are more interesting than the things themselves.

Finance one week, philosophy the next, travel, AI, history, always betting that the thread running through them matters.

If knowledge has no center, then either I’m onto something or I’ve been writing elaborate footnotes to nothing. (Which is fine by me, actually).

So: is there a missing discipline, a meta-science, that would sit at the center if we could identify it? A secret grammar that all the other sciences are conjugating without knowing it?

Let’s look for candidates.

1. Mathematics

The obvious first nominee.

Mathematics is the language every hard science eventually speaks when it gets serious. Physics runs on differential equations. Chemistry runs on quantum mechanics, which runs on linear algebra. Even biology (that holdout of messy, wet contingency) now runs on statistical models and genomic computation.

In 1960, Eugene Wigner wrote a paper called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”

His argument: mathematical structures invented for purely abstract reasons keep turning out to describe physical reality with eerie precision.

Complex numbers, a curiosity, turned out essential for quantum mechanics. Non-Euclidean geometry, a thought experiment, became the backbone of general relativity. Wigner called it “a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

So: mathematics as the missing link? Ask a mathematician and they’ll say yes before you finish the question.

To me, it’s the grammar, not the meaning. You can model a neuron firing without touching what it feels like to be conscious.

Math is silent on love, politics, what to have for lunch. The most powerful tool science has ever produced, and it covers maybe a third of the territory.

A hammer connects with a lot of nails. That doesn’t make it the center of carpentry.

2. Philosophy

Before the sciences existed, philosophy was the science.

Aristotle didn’t have departments. He just thought about everything, and the distinctions came later.

Philosophy asks the questions every other discipline assumes it can skip.

• What counts as evidence?

• What are the limits of knowledge?

When physicists argue about quantum interpretation, they’re doing philosophy whether they like it or not. When neuroscientists say consciousness is “just” brain activity, the “just” is doing philosophical work they haven’t paid for.

But philosophy got colonized by its own offspring. Physics left home. Chemistry left. Psychology left. Linguistics left. Each took its questions and slammed the door. What remained was philosophy-of-X, tethered to the disciplines it was supposed to ground.

The queen of the sciences became a court advisor to each departing kingdom, and the advisors don’t talk to each other much these days.

Philosophy still asks the best questions.

But asking good questions and unifying the answers are different jobs, and nobody hires the same person for both.

3. Information Theory

In 1948, Claude Shannon (our fav AI overlord’s namesake) published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and accidentally laid the groundwork for the modern world.

He showed that information could be quantified and transmitted with mathematical precision, regardless of whether it was music, text, images, or stock prices.

The content didn’t matter. The math was the same.

John Archibald Wheeler (the physicist who popularized the term “black hole”) took Shannon’s insight and drove it off a cliff. His slogan: it from bit.

Which goes something like this…

Reality isn’t made of matter. It’s made of information. Every particle, every field, even spacetime: all derived from binary choices at the bottom. Matter is what information looks like when you zoom out.

I remember the first time I heard this claim… a religious experience of sorts.

The whole universe explained in three words. DNA is information. Markets are information. Music, language, consciousness, all information. If reality is computation all the way down, then information theory is the missing link. The substrate beneath every substrate.

That feeling lasted about a week.

Because: information about what? Shannon’s theory is deliberately blind to content. A bit is a bit whether it encodes a love letter or a death sentence. That’s the theory’s power, and its ceiling.

A framework that treats everything identically can’t explain why anything is different.

Information theory is the skeleton. But nobody falls in love with a skeleton.

4. Complexity Science

Forty years on, the Santa Fe Institute still can’t tell you why ant colonies and neural networks share the same dynamics. Not for lack of looking.

They started in 1984 – a group of scientists, many from Los Alamos – on a premise that sounded either brilliant or naive: the most interesting questions in science live between the disciplines, not inside them.

Markets crash like ecosystems collapse. Brains organize like ant colonies. Cities grow like organisms. The founders bet these weren’t just metaphors – that genuine mathematical patterns recur across wildly different systems.

Emergence. Feedback loops. Power laws that appear in earthquakes and stock crashes and epidemics, over and over, as if nature has a favorite trick.

Murray Gell-Mann recruited scientists from a dozen fields. Many responded the same way: “I’ve been waiting for this all my life.” (Which is what people say right before they join a cult or a startup.)

The connections are real. Naming the pattern isn’t the same as explaining it, and whether ant colonies and neural networks share a cause or only a shape is, all these years later, still an open question.

5. Consciousness

Still with me? Conscious enough to not have fallen asleep quite yet, I presume.

Here’s where the list breaks.

Every previous candidate is a tool, a framework, a method. Something you point at the world.

Consciousness is the thing doing the pointing. You can’t remove it from the experiment.

Every map was drawn by someone. The observer is always in the room, sitting in a chair nobody put on the diagram.

David Chalmers called the core puzzle “the hard problem”: not how the brain processes information (that’s the easy problem), but why processing gives rise to subjective experience at all.

• Why does it feel like something to see red?

• Why isn’t everything just computation in the dark?

Math can’t account for the mathematician. Information theory says nothing about who’s receiving the signal. Complexity science can’t explain how a hundred billion neurons become someone who wonders about emergence.

Every other candidate on this list has consciousness as its blind spot.

Which makes consciousness either the deepest answer or the deepest dodge.

The telescope pointed at its own lens, unable to confirm what it sees.

6. Artificial Intelligence

Feed a large language model every paper on Boyack’s map and it finds connections no individual human could hold in their head.

The immunology paper and the materials science paper and the economics paper, read at once. The Santa Fe Institute’s dream, running at inhuman speed. This is our moment’s nominee – and it doesn’t even claim to be the missing link. Only the translator.

Which would be enough, if translation were understanding.

AI reflects the structure of the knowledge it ingested, including the biases, the blind spots, the gaps.

If the map of science has no center, training an AI on the map doesn’t conjure one.

A GPS knows every route in the city. Ask it what the city means and it’ll reroute you to the nearest specialty coffee shop (obviously).

7. God

I hesitated before writing this section, which is probably a sign it belongs here.

Every culture in recorded history has named something that unifies all experience. A logos. A Tao. A Brahman. An unmoved mover.

The specifics vary too wildly to all be right… but the impulse is identical: there must be something holding everything together. The sciences are fragments of one truth. The right angle would reveal the whole.

Don’t think of it as a theological argument. It’s more an anthropological observation.

The desire for a unifying principle is structurally identical to the oldest religious impulse humans have.

We keep looking for the center because we feel, at some level, that one should exist.

The Enlightenment called it Reason. The 20th century called it Information. We’re calling it Intelligence. The impulse predates all of them.

Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Maybe something real keeps getting renamed in whatever vocabulary the era trusts most.

The Map Has No Capital

Kevin Boyack, the one who built the map, was very amused by the comments.

People saw the network and immediately started arguing about what belongs in the center. Physicists said physics. Mathematicians said math. Everyone projected their own discipline into the gap.

But the map is built from citation data. Not from theory or philosophy, not from anyone’s sense of what the center should be.

And the answer is: nothing.

The consensus structure is a circle. The full map sits on a sphere. There is no center – it’s topology, stupid.

Every candidate I collected: math, philosophy, information, complexity, consciousness, AI, God… each illuminates something the others miss. And each one has a blind spot the next candidate exists to fill.

Seven serious answers, each partially right, none complete.

Call it the Projection Problem: the map has no center, but the viewer can’t help inventing one.

Each era picks the missing link that matches its highest value.

• The Enlightenment, drunk on Newton, said mathematics.

• The mid-20th century, drunk on Shannon and Turing, said information.

• The late 20th, watching markets and ecosystems behave as complex systems, said complexity.

• Our century, watching AI eat everything in sight, says intelligence. And underneath all of them, the oldest candidate just waits.

Now… if you held a gun to my head, I’d say consciousness.

I can’t defend it 100%, of course, but it’s the only candidate that can’t be removed from the experiment.

You can do science without math (people did, for millennia). You can’t do science without an observer. The telescope can’t observe itself, but it’s the only one looking.

Then again, that’s exactly the Projection Problem at work. I pick consciousness because I’m more humanist than scientist – someone whose entire craft is about subjective experience.

A physicist would pick math. An engineer would pick complexity. A theologian would pick God.

The map doesn’t have a center because knowledge doesn’t have a center.

It has a reader. And the reader keeps trying to stand in the middle.

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TL;DR: Your atoms get swapped out, your brain keeps rewiring – and somehow you persist. So what, exactly, are you?

“You know your body swaps out almost all its atoms every seven years, right?”

I was maybe twenty. Someone said it to me at a party, the way people say things at parties – total confidence, zero sources. I nodded, because that’s what you do. And then, about three seconds late, it actually landed.

Wait. What?

Every seven years? All of them?

So the me standing there wasn’t made of the same stuff as the me from ten years back?

I’d always assumed I was my body.

Obviously. This is me – the hands, the face, the whole package. And now someone was telling me the package gets quietly returned and reordered piece by piece, and I’m meant to keep calling it “me”.

So then what am I?

The annoying part, which I only found out much later: the seven-years thing is a myth. There’s no tidy timeline, and “all of them” is just wrong.

Your gut lining turns over in days. Your skin in weeks. Most of you is already halfway out the door.

But the neurons in your cortex – the actual hardware doing the thinking – are mostly as old as you are. You got your supply at the factory and there are no refills.

So the party fact was wrong.

But it was wrong in the most interesting possible way, because the thing it was clumsily pointing at is true.

Even the cells that last your whole life don’t keep all the same atoms. Most of the molecules cycle through.

A rock is just its atoms; come back in a decade and it’s the same rock. You’re more like a whirlpool – the water keeps moving while the shape holds – a shape that matter is only ever passing through.

Which is its own quiet horror, if you sit with it. The atoms were never yours to begin with. They don’t get created or destroyed; they just cycle. Some of the carbon in your hand was something else first: a tree, a fish, possibly Napoleon.

When you go, it doesn’t go with you. It moves on to the next tenant.

Fine. So I’m not my atoms. Then I’m the arrangement of them. The shape. The information.

Must be DNA, then. DNA is the blueprint – arrange the atoms into one specific configuration and that configuration is you. Clean answer. I was happy with it for about a week.

Then: no. Not that either.

Because the configuration won’t hold still. Think hard enough about something for long enough and your brain physically rebuilds itself around it.

London cabbies have to memorize the entire city – every street, every shortcut – to pass a test they literally call The Knowledge. Scan their brains and the bit that handles spatial memory is visibly bigger, and it keeps growing the longer they drive. Pianists show the same thing in the regions wired for fingers. The structure follows the use.

So I followed it all the way down.

You’re not your atoms – they get swapped. You’re not the fixed structure – it gets rebuilt by whatever you do. The only thing that survives the turnover is the process. The pattern that keeps reassembling itself while the matter and the wiring both change out underneath it.

You are your thoughts.

(I mean that literally, not as a fridge-magnet metaphor.)

The information processing is the one continuous thing in the building. Everything running it is on a rolling lease.

This took me a while to sit with, I’ll admit. I’M INFORMATION PROCESSING felt like finding out the house is haunted and the ghost is you.

And then, oddly, it got comforting.

Because if I’m a pattern and not a particular lump of carbon, the pattern doesn’t have to die with the lump. You could have built me out of entirely different atoms and it still would have been me. And if some of how I think makes it into my kids – if they end up running, say, 32% of my patterns – then 32% of me is still around.

I am my thoughts. And thoughts are the one thing that transfers.

Ray Kurzweil takes this to the obvious terminus: if you’re the pattern, copy the pattern onto a machine and you get to live forever. The real you. You were never the atoms.

Then again, I don’t know whether that copy is me, or just someone exactly like me while I – this instance – still go dark. Nobody does. I’ve stopped waiting for that one to resolve.

What did resolve, eventually, was something sneaky.

I’d spent years deciding I was information processing that happened to be wearing a body. And then we went and built information processing without the body, and the entire world started arguing about whether the thing was really thinking. Really understanding. Really anybody home.

And somewhere in there it clicked that it was my own question all along – the one I’d been asking since I was twenty, just pointed the wrong way.

Is anyone home?

Sure.

Someone’s always home. Just never the same someone twice.

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TL;DR: When the hammer swings itself, the economy breaks in both directions. Everyone says Universal Basic Income is the answer. There’s a better answer – and an even better reason it keeps failing.

A Reddit post went viral a few months ago. Someone wrote:

“I genuinely have been trying to understand what is the point of AI taking everything over? … Every job is replaced. … No one can work, therefore, no one has money to buy any of the horse shit temu slop they prime on amazon now. Won’t everything just implode from there?”

Five thousand comments. The top answers were UBI (Universal Basic Income), communism, and “lol we’re fucked.” None of the top answers dug into what actually breaks.

I sold most of my stuff two and a half years ago. Packed a backpack and put the rent money into AI stocks. So when someone argues AI might break classical economics – I’m the case study.

Capitalism runs on one relationship: the worker needs the hammer, the hammer needs the worker.

Codependency since the Industrial Revolution.

Now imagine the hammer swings itself.

Capital no longer needs labour. Labour’s share of income trends toward zero, capital’s toward a hundred. Nobody earns. Nobody buys. Companies lose revenue. And the counterintuitive part: the billionaires drown too. Your expenditure is my revenue is somebody’s salary is your customer base. Break the chain and everyone goes down. Including the people who own the boat.

So people still need income. The question is where it comes from.

The best version of this argument goes something like this:

The answer is not Universal Basic Income. UBI just moves your dependency. Right now you’re wholly dependent on your employer. With UBI, you’re entirely dependent on the government. Same leash, different collar.

The real move: make everyone a collective owner of the productive assets. Sovereign wealth funds, public trusts, DAOs, ESOPs – schemes where buying from a company progressively earns you equity in it. Instead of wages, dividends. Instead of workers and consumers, owners.

People still have income. They still buy things. The economy doesn’t collapse.

But before you accept the frame, ask what “ownership” has actually meant across human history.

The Hold

Humans can control each other in two ways:

1. A right to people that gives you access to things. Slavery. You own the person, you take what they produce.

2. A right to things that gives you a hold on people. Capitalism. You own the farm, the store, the factory. I need food. I need money to get food. I need a job to get money. So I sign an employment contract – and an employment contract is an evolution of the master-servant contract from the industrial era.

The framing changed, but the structure… not so much.

We don’t legally own workers anymore. We control them because we own what they need. The second control scheme, running in 2026, dressed in HR software and quarterly performance reviews.

Collective ownership scrambles this. If everyone holds a piece of the productive assets, you can’t be held hostage by private property rights.

That’s the actual revolution in the framework: it dismantles the hold itself, not just redistributes wealth. That interests me more than the economics.

The Circulation

But every revolution so far has just rotated the names on the door.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t abolish elites. It traded the ones in castles for ones in factories.

The landed nobility fell from power when the economic order that sustained them became obsolete. Nobody defeated them. They just stopped being necessary. Industry created a new way of running an economy, which created a new class of owners to replace the old one. Meanwhile, the peasantry became the working class – a relabeling that left the hierarchy intact.

This has happened before. Hunter-gatherers to agriculture: flat bands became rigid pyramids. Feudalism to mercantilism to industrial capitalism – each revolution breaking the old arrangement and forcing a new one.

Marx saw this.

“No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.”

Marx didn’t live to see electricity scale, but the pattern fits. AI is what industrial technology becomes when the womb finishes gestating.

The question is whether collective ownership is the next stage – or just the next ruling class in a friendlier hat.

The Monday Morning Problem

Even if the ownership model works, it still opens with a question that haunts its own answer: do you wake up on Monday and spend it the way you’d choose if money were no object? Liberation from labour is supposed to fix this.

I’ve been writing about thumos – the Greek word for the spirited part of the soul. The part that needs to strive. The fire that refuses to be managed, even generously. Plato put it in the chest, between reason and appetite. It’s the thing that makes you stand up when sitting down is easier.

Dividends don’t reach the chest.

I’ve been running the experiment myself – sold the stuff, swapped the salary for a portfolio and an essay habit nobody asked for. Technically free.

And yet the first thing I do every Monday is manufacture urgency – deadlines nobody assigned, essays nobody commissioned. The fire needs fuel.

Collective ownership solves the demand problem. But demand was never the hard problem. The hard problem is the dividend hitting your account while nobody needs you for anything.

History’s leisure classes are a mixed record – a handful of Medicis bankrolling Botticelli, far more Versailles courtiers dying of boredom and intrigue.

The forcing function of labour is coercive, yes. But it also gives you somewhere to be on Monday and someone to complain about on Friday. Remove it without replacing what it was doing and the check lands in a vacuum.

I wrote in The Job of the Future that when machines do everything perfectly, the only job left is being imperfectly human. That was 2024. The question still stands. But I think it’s sharper now. Ownership doesn’t just need to solve the economic problem – it needs to answer a question that economics was never designed to ask: what are people for?

Most people never have to ask it. The answer comes pre-installed – you’re born somewhere, into something, and the something needs doing.

The answer used to be obvious. You were for working.

When that’s gone, every philosophy that ever hand-waved about “meaning” and “purpose” suddenly has a deadline.

The hammer swings itself. That might be coming.

Collective ownership is better than UBI, and both are better than the dark path: a neo-nobility with neural implants and compound interest, a neo-peasantry with dividend checks and Netflix. The medieval hierarchy, except this time the nobility really are superhuman and they’ve got the receipts.

We already ran the governance experiment once. It was called pensions. US public pension funds were fully funded in 2000. By 2022, they were $1.26 trillion underwater.

The design said “collective ownership.” The execution said “committee of politicians with four-year attention spans.”

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund passed $2 trillion by running the same model with competent administration across decades – but Norway works because Norway works. Small, cohesive, oil-funded. Try exporting that.

You know where I’m positioned. The productive forces are maturing in the womb of the old society, exactly as Marx described.

The other hard problem is who governs the owners.

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Related reading:

The Race Condition – two AI futures and where I’m positioned

The AI Landlords – who captures the value when production is free

The Job of the Future – what work means when machines do it better

TL;DR: The purchasing power of amazement is collapsing. In eighteen months we went from “impossible” to “huh.” The question I can’t resolve: is that a bug or a feature?

I showed my mom a video last week.

Golden retriever skateboarding through a Tokyo subway, weaving between commuters, fur moving right, physics coherent. Twenty seconds of photorealistic impossible.

— “Ach, wie süß,” she said. How cute. “Where’d you find it?”

— “I typed twelve words into a website. It appeared thirty seconds later. The dog doesn’t exist.”

— “Huh.” She scrolled to the next thing.

We’ve moved from “this is impossible” to “huh” in eighteen months.

I almost did the same thing. Generated that video to test Genie 3. Watched it once, thought “yeah, that’s about right,” moved on.

Didn’t register that I’d conjured photorealistic video from text, something that would’ve been a showstopper eighteen months ago and science fiction a year before that.

I almost shrugged at a miracle.

Miracle Inflation

Miracle inflation: the rate at which the extraordinary becomes ordinary.

I own the stocks. I use the tools. I’ve had the debates with skeptics. None of that means I’m calibrated.

• Coding agents that debug themselves.

• Voice cloning from three seconds of audio.

• Real-time translation that preserves your cadence and stumbles over your idioms.

Every one of these would’ve been the keynote closer at a 2023 tech conference. Now they’re Tuesday.

This AI thing is faster than hedonic adaptation.

Yesterday’s miracle becomes today’s expectation becomes tomorrow’s disappointment. Just a quiet reset of what counts as normal.

Skeptics suffer from it – measuring AI against hype, moving goalposts, perpetually right until they’re not.

But bulls suffer worse, because we should know better. We measure against our own expectations. “Genie 3 is good, but not feature films.” “Claude is smart, but hallucinates.” Technically true. Completely missing the point.

The right baseline is what existed before.

In 2022, if you wanted video of a dog skateboarding through Tokyo, you needed a trained dog, a flight to Tokyo, a film crew, and a VFX team billing six figures over three months. Now you type twelve words.

That’s an extinction event for the old way of making things.

What It Costs

The trendline nobody updates: impossible → hard → expensive → cheap → free → invisible.

Summer 2026, we’re somewhere between cheap and free.

But most people, including most bulls, are anchored to expensive. The gap – between where AI actually sits and where we assume it sits – is where the strategic danger lives.

Normalize miracles and you start planning for linear improvement in a world making nonlinear jumps.

Everyone evaluates AI by what it can’t do. “Still can’t do long-form video.” True – and anchored to last quarter’s version of the trendline.

I’m long the AI Landlords thesis, concentrated in infrastructure, picks and shovels on continued scaling. If progress stalls, I lose real money. If it accelerates, I look like a genius. Maybe I’m pattern-matching miracles because I need them to be miracles.

But I wouldn’t know that, would I?

The Counter-Case

Maybe desensitization is adaptive.

The people who stay perpetually amazed, who stop and gawk at every miracle, they’re not the ones shipping. They’re writing essays about whether the miracle was miraculous enough while a startup in Chy-nah just used a world model to produce a product demo that would’ve cost them $200,000 last year.

My mom said “huh” and scrolled. Maybe the miracle becomes useful precisely when it becomes boring. Maybe awe is the enemy of execution.

There’s a version of this argument where every word I’ve written above is wrong. Not wrong about the technology, but wrong about the correct posture toward it.

The farmer doesn’t write essays about the tractor. He plows the field. The harvest happens every season. Reverence for the tool is a distraction from the work the tool enables.

If that’s true, calibration – what I’ve been arguing for – is just a more intellectual form of gawking.

But I don’t fully buy it. The farmer analogy breaks because tractors improve by the decade. AI improves every two weeks. You can afford to stop marveling at a tool that’s mature. But you can’t afford to stop marveling at one that’s still becoming something else.

Somewhere, someone who said “huh” six months ago and got back to work is compounding while I write about whether the miracle was miraculous enough.

Huh.

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Related reading: Observer’s Doom – the cost of watching too closely.

TL;DR: There’s a word for using true facts to create false impressions. It’s worse than lying. And you’ve probably already fallen for it this week.

Someone at a dinner party told me CO2 is making the earth greener. I did what any annoying person would do. I checked.

They were right.

A 2016 study in Nature Climate Change found that rising CO2 explains roughly 70% of observed greening across the planet. NASA confirmed it. Satellite images confirmed it. Peer-reviewed, replicated, real.

I almost stopped there. That’s the dangerous part.

Because “CO2 is greening the earth” says nothing about ocean acidification, extreme weather, sea levels, or that the greening itself is already slowing. One data point, surgically removed from everything around it, walks into the room wearing the full authority of science. You check the data. It checks out. So you extend credit to the conclusion, and the conclusion was never in the data to begin with.

Turns out there’s a word for this: Paltering.

The active use of truthful statements to create a false impression. Harvard Business School calls it: “How To Deceive Others With Truthful Statements”.

Not lying, where you say something false. Not omission, where you stay quiet. Paltering is active. You reach for a true fact, cite it correctly, and arrange it so the listener walks away with a conclusion the fact alone doesn’t support.

A lie can be caught. You can point at it, label it, fact-check it. Paltering hides behind the facts. You can’t call it false.

You can only ask: what didn’t you tell me? And that question is much harder to ask when the first thing you were told was verifiable.

Call it the first-fact free pass.

Once you verify the opening claim, you extend trust to the conclusion.

Verification is expensive – so we verify the number, not the inference. We check whether the data is real, not whether it’s sufficient. A lie requires you to fabricate something that survives scrutiny. Paltering just requires one fact that does. The rest rides free.

The Trillion-Dollar Silence

Some numbers DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) published are, in a narrow sense, accurate. Contracts were cancelled. Ledger entries were removed. Add up the sums and you get something around $200 billion, against a trillion-dollar goal.

Now watch what didn’t get said.

Many of those contracts still need to happen. Some were cancelled on paper and quietly recontracted through different channels. Some grants, counted at full ten-year value, were cancelled before a single dollar was disbursed. Saving money by cancelling a gym membership you never used.

The promised dividends never materialized.

The savings were announced. The benefits weren’t. (Classic Musk)

The methodology is the trick, and methodology doesn’t fit in a press release. By the time you understand why “cancelled contracts” doesn’t equal “money saved,” the headline has done three news cycles and moved on.

“Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels” runs the same play: the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) numbers are real, and they quietly assume someone else pays for storage, intermittency, and grid buildout.

Germany learned this the expensive way – Energiewende raised household electricity prices to among the highest in Europe. Same mechanism, different jersey.

Your Feed, Their Frame

A geologist posts the same CO2 greening study on X with the caption: “We will look back at the demonization of CO2 with shame.”

120,000 views. 3,500 retweets. The thread explaining why it’s incomplete gets two hundred.

The algorithm didn’t palter. It just learned what keeps you scrolling.

(It says so in the privacy policy – which is itself optimized for nobody reading it.)

The palterer and the platform feed each other. Neither planned it. Both benefit.

Nuance has a distribution problem – and by the time you notice, you’re two conclusions downstream from where the trick happened.

My imperfect heuristic: when a fact arrives pre-shaped into a conclusion, I ask what else would have to be true for it to actually hold.

I keep coming back to that dinner party… not because I was lied to, but because I was being curated into a worldview, one verified fact at a time.

The person who told me about CO2 greening wasn’t malicious. They’d read a real study and shared a real finding. The paltering wasn’t theirs. It was upstream, baked into whatever article stripped the context before it reached them.

They were doing the palterer’s work for free.

Most of us are.

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Related reading:

The Outsourced Mind – what happens when you stop checking the facts yourself

“Don’t Mid-Curve It.” – the intelligence trap that makes smart people wrong

How ’Bout Zero Neuroticism? – the liar in your head

TL;DR: I spent two years “opting out.” Turns out you can’t actually leave. You can only choose which dependencies you accept.

The woman at the Jobcenter asked me to describe my current occupation.

I said I was a writer/investor at the intersection of AI technology, civilizational transition, the end of work as we know it, long-term capital allocation, and the question of whether capitalism will survive once scarcity stops being the organizing principle.

She typed “arbeitslos” and moved to the next field.

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a cabin by Walden Pond and wrote the book on opting out. The blueprint for everyone who’s ever wanted to escape the grind and “live deliberately.”

Except, the story goes, his mom did his laundry. The cabin was two kilometers from town.

The patron saint of deliberate living never actually left – he just renegotiated his distance from the systems he claimed to reject.

The Remove Button

I sold everything, traveled for two years, got engaged, and came back to filing paperwork and attending mandatory appointments. The specifics of my escape were modern – backpack, laptop, brokerage account – but the fantasy was the same one Thoreau had.

Remove yourself from the broken system. Live deliberately.

It’s seductive.

The impulse isn’t wrong (the systems often are broken). The lie is the word “remove.” You can’t remove yourself. You can only reconfigure your dependencies.

The Industrial Revolution replaced physical labor. Thoreau watched craftsmen become factory workers – human bodies interchangeable with machines. His response: retreat to essentials, prove that a person is more than their productive output.

Thoreau was saying: “I’m more than a pair of hands.”

Now the Intelligence Revolution is replacing cognitive labor. Knowledge workers are becoming interchangeable with models. And the response sounds familiar: retreat to... what, exactly? Authenticity? Taste? Whatever it is that a model can’t fake?

We’re saying: “I’m more than a pair of neurons.”

The cabin in the woods is always a response to the same question: if the thing I do can be done without me, what am I for?

The Dependency Trade

You don’t escape dependencies. You renegotiate the terms.

I traded employer dependency for platform dependency. Steady salary for investment volatility. I swapped corporate bureaucracy for state bureaucracy. Career legibility for explaining what I “do” at every dinner party.

And somewhere in the middle of all that opting out, I proposed.

The most deliberate thing I did during my experiment in deliberate living was choosing a dependency I’d never want to renegotiate.

Time sovereignty turned out to be real – the income holds (knocks on wood). German bureaucracy is annoying but functional. Explaining myself to confused relatives allegedly builds character.

Benefits run out in July.

The question I’m asking now isn’t “How do I escape?” but rather “Which dependencies am I willing to accept, and on what terms?”

Coming Back With Something

Thoreau’s experiment lasted two years. Then, he left the cabin and moved back to town. He spent the next seven years writing and rewriting until Walden was ready.

The glamorous part was brief. The real work came after.

Perhaps I’m at the end of my cabin phase. I’m betting that the skills I developed there – writing, synthesis, understanding AI, and navigating markets – will outweigh the career capital I didn’t accumulate.

If I’m wrong, I’ll have spent my early thirties building an audience of a few hundred and explaining a massive CV gap as “independent research.”

Then again, if I’m right, there won’t be a job to go back to.

Thoreau didn’t matter because he lived in a cabin. He mattered because he came back with something.

I keep telling myself that. It might be true. But it might also be a comfortable delay dressed up with good justifications.

I’m not sure if I’m in the rewriting phase or the stalling phase. The two phases look identical from the inside.

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Related reading:

The Race Condition – the macro bet behind the cabin fantasy

The Job of the Future – what’s left when machines do everything

Got Thumos? – the spiritedness that makes people build (or flee)

TL;DR: The financialized era was the anomaly. Quid pro quo is the baseline. The U.S. is using military power and the dollar to lock in commodity leverage before China’s factories translate into aircraft carriers. Everything is a board piece, not a moral cause.

My whole adult life I’ve been told to believe in comparative advantage, peace dividends, and the slow global convergence toward efficiency (having to define globalization every year in high school comes to mind).

The world would get richer and weirder. Wars were for people who hadn’t discovered supply chains yet. The dollar was a unit of account, not a weapon.

We were all in on it. The Boomers, the Gen Xers, and Millennials like myself. My grandparents would have laughed, though.

They lived through a world war, a civil war, currency collapses, an autarkic dictatorship, and the Marshall Plan. They knew about quid pro quo. They knew that currency was never just a unit of account. They knew there was a reason you kept things in the basement (or under the mattress, dare I say).

My generation forgot all that.

The half-century I mistook for the default – what I called Boomerlandia, the post-war wealth anomaly we treated as the permanent condition – was the exception, not the rule.

But the rule is coming back.

Ursine Qua Non

Michael Every, Rabobank’s global strategist, said something I haven’t been able to unthink.

So I’m going to think through it out loud here.

Oil trades above $100. The world is starved for diesel. (Energy) supply chains haven’t been this fucked since Covid. The one-world, one-price assumption at the base of every neoclassical textbook is breaking down.

Every has been writing the obituary of the financialized era since before it was fashionable. Call him ursine qua non. Structurally bearish on consensus, not a permabear on everything.

The “dollar collapse, bury gold in the backyard” crowd is selling you a trade. But Every is selling you a regime. I’m long the bet that he’s right, so read accordingly.

The honest case against him is the graveyard of regime-callers. Someone has written the financialized era’s obituary at every oil shock since the seventies, and the era has outlived every author. If this is a cycle wearing a regime’s costume, I’m not early – I’m long the wrong decade. I can’t rule that out. And if you listen closely, neither can he.

The regime has a name: capitalism with a national security face.

The Eurodollar Prison

Here’s the joke Americans have been telling themselves for forty years: the dollar’s reserve status is the single greatest privilege any currency has ever had. Exorbitant privilege. The ability to import goods and export inflation. The ability to run deficits forever.

Every calls it something else: the Eurodollar system is a prison. The bricks in that prison are made from what used to be American factories.

America buys German cars and Chinese electronics. Germany and China take the dollars and park them in Treasuries. America gets cheap stuff; the factories that used to make it close down. Repeat for four decades.

The textbook version goes something like this: the world holds dollars by running trade surpluses (Exports − Imports > 0) against America, which means America runs the corresponding deficit.

A deficit means consuming more than you make. And consuming more than you make means not making. You deindustrialize.

Previous reserve currencies have followed the same arc. The privilege hollows out the privileged.

What do you do if you’ve realised you’ve been locked in your own currency for four decades?

You could surrender reserve status. Let the Chinese renminbi or the euro take over. Fine for a post-hegemon Britain in 1956. Not fine for a 2026 hegemon still watching China build warships faster than it can.

Or you redesign the prison. The kid in Chile who wants dollar savings his government doesn’t know about doesn’t need Eurodollar futures. He needs USDC (USD Coin) on his phone.

USD-denominated stablecoins. Phone-native. They soak up global dollar demand without requiring the corresponding American trade deficit. Stablecoins should be looked at as a geopolitical weapon rather than an investment asset, Every says. The GENIUS Act forces issuers to back reserves with U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents – every dollar of demand funds the U.S. government without hollowing out another factory.

Reserve currency 2.0, programmable money, not paper.

The prison just installed a secret exit… touché.

(I find myself explaining stablecoins to my father on the phone and wondering which of us sounds crazier – me for believing this, or the system for making it plausible.)

Capitalism With A National Security Face

The government taking stakes in Intel and U.S. Steel? State capitalism in a suit.

Allies pouring FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) into American factories because they were told to. CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the US) screening Chinese capital out while outbound controls keep American capital in – bifurcation, not decoupling.

The shift, Every says, is from “a jungle where they can go wherever they want, to a safari park.”

Shell is still Shell. TSMC is still TSMC. But neither gets to pretend anymore that their strategy is theirs alone.

The Fed is in the safari park too. Interest rate-cut watching has been the consensus sport of the last eighteen months and Every thinks it’s beside the point. “Because markets” is his shorthand for the crowd betting on a Fed rescue. He expects yield-curve control, capital controls, sector-specific lending. Scott Bessent, he notes, is openly no longer looking at Fed funds. He’s looking at the 10-year.

The independence of the Federal Reserve was always a polite fiction – the Fed’s own website lists financing World War II as an institutional achievement. The pretence is wearing thin.

Every instrument the MBA curriculum banned (tariffs, subsidies, price controls, industrial policy, state-directed capital, military-backed commodity deals) is being deployed simultaneously, on purpose.

Civilian R&D returns roughly $1.50 per dollar invested. Defense R&D returns $8 to $9. For a government choosing where the next decade goes, the spreadsheet was never a contest.

(My econ professor would have failed this essay. I keep wondering which chapters of his textbook survive the decade.)

Iran Is America’s Suez. Europe Is Egypt.

In 1956, Britain and France tried to reassert great-power status by seizing the Suez Canal back from Nasser (Suez Crisis, ring a bell?). The U.S. didn’t need to fire a shot.

It triggered a run on the pound, and both powers retreated. Afterward, Britain and France were still powers – lowercase p. The U.S. was the hegemon.

Fast forward to today: Iran.

Win it: restructure the Middle East, lock in the energy footprint, turn the Gulf’s compass back toward Washington, and it’s 1956 with the roles intact.

Lose it: China takes it, markets do to the U.S. what the U.S. did to Britain, and America becomes the UK of 1956. Still a power. Not the power.

That’s the American half of the frame. The European half is uglier.

Europe in this analogy is the territory fought over – the board piece. Every’s description is brutal: trade deficits, deindustrialisation, polarisation. Not unity and remilitarisation.

ReArm Europe is what happens when you’re told you’re on the menu and decide you’d rather not be. Defense spending surges. Nuclear revival conversations. The awkward realisation that forty years of “never again to war” produced a continent that outsourced its security to America and its energy to Russia.

I’m European. I’d prefer Europe not be on the menu.

The Three-Finger Trade

Imagine you have to fight someone. You know in advance you’re going to lose three fingers off your left hand. You’re also going to take his right arm and one leg. You will live. You will hurt. You will never get those fingers back. But the alternative is losing, and losing is permanent.

Would you take the trade?

Easy when the fingers are yours. Harder when some of them are someone else’s – and you’re the one who decided they were worth spending.

That’s the calculation America is running. Reindustrialisation is expensive. Tariffs make goods pricier. Price controls distort markets. Public-private partnerships are corporatism, full stop. It’s what you do when the market won’t produce industrial capacity in the timeframe you have.

Tariffs plus subsidies plus industrial policy plus finance harnessed to state power. The 19th-century American playbook, dusted off because the 20th-century one ran out of road.

Some factories will get built. Some won’t. Some of the mineral deals are ugly: physical security in exchange for resource access. Or, translated from the diplomatic: “We’ll go and kill those guys over there for you if you let us have access to your minerals.”

The stakes aren’t the next business cycle. They’re whether the U.S. is still the hegemon in 2045 or permanently number two. The pain is the point.

2G Not G2

Trump and Xi meet in Beijing in May, postponed from March because of Iran.

Every’s read: “It’s not any kind of peace deal. We’re still heading for a 2G – the world with two different groups.” A ceasefire to rearm. Twelve to eighteen months of modus vivendi. Then bifurcation completes.

Three monetary blocs, each with its own logic.

Dollar allies get the upgraded version – stablecoins, sanctions coded into the money itself, settlement in seconds rather than SWIFT reprimands six weeks late.

Non-aligned countries (the ones with no leverage in dollar negotiations and nothing to lose by hedging) drift toward Bitcoin. El Salvador adopted it.

The Russia-China-BRICS orbit builds a gold-flavoured settlement layer: mBridge, BRICS Pay, record central bank gold buying since 2022. Gold as a unit of account for bilateral trade that routes around Western financial infrastructure. Currency blocs last seen in the 1930s, redrawn with digital rails.

(I realize I’m describing three parallel monetary systems as if this is normal. It wasn’t – but neither was the single-currency assumption.)

Economic MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).

Cold War mutually assured destruction, transposed to the supply chain. Less bunker, more port terminal. Both sides wire in the ability to destroy each other economically via tariffs, sanctions, dollar access, rare-earths choke-offs, supply-chain kill switches.

Both recognise the other can. Neither pulls the trigger.

The equilibrium isn’t trust. It’s blocked moves on a board where every counter is visible. Markets will hate the road to it. The equilibrium, if it holds, is the soft landing.

The pessimistic read is that one side miscalculates.

I’m hoping they don’t.

Every’s arguments here are drawn from his recent appearances on In the Company of Mavericks, MacroVoices, and Less Noise More Signal. Listen to them.

The geopolitical arc – where this argument started, and the historical trade patterns it echoes:

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Related reading:

The Game of Life – The equilibrium isn’t trust.