If you’re not even slightly annoyed about your country’s national debt then consider that each unit of national debt is a claim on the productivity of the nation. And also consider that productivity growth went parabolic in your lifetime (internet and computers) and that your time, your life, was commoditized during this process, on purpose. You got to keep your typical work weeks, if you were lucky, and your time was then repackaged and sold back to you as 401ks, PTO, low quality goods, and bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy becoming one of the only ways to work a job (not in finance or tech) and (sort of) keep up with inflation by positioning yourself slightly closer to the printer. Wages for all others were kept stagnant or if possible decreased in real terms and governments, and the “independent” fed banks, worked together, along with mega corps, to capture the spread…

And they all want to run the same exact playbook in age of AI. Except now they’re not going after your time, they’re going after your children’s and grandchildren’s future.

Annoyed yet?

So, what to do about it? As the late economist Chris Farley once said, “No idea.”

To me it seems there is a common thread out there that “we” need a “reset”. But it has been hard for me to pin down exactly who “we” is and exactly what a “reset” means. Maybe because it doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Some think we are headed for another Great Depression (capital destruction), some think we are heading towards a quick hyperinflation (paper/debt destruction), and almost nobody thinks we can grow or cut our way out of the situation.

Seems this last one is most desirable for everyone, almost. It only works for most as long as it isn’t co-opted by politicians, the fed and banks, and the “global elite” and as long FANG companies don’t suck dry the next productivity boom. That’s a lot of variables that need to stay constant for growth to save the world for most people.

More likely, value from productivity is captured by these other entities, as they have done before, unless they are forced somehow to behave while the reset happens around them, or they are unable to capture the value by removing them from the new monetary system, or more likely, they are convinced it is in their interests to not be bad actors.

FANGs (an extremely apt term for their business models) are not nationalistic. They will gladly abandon their birth country, and its people, if it means more profit elsewhere - many already have. And Bezos will live at sea, Zuck et al will live underground. It seems in the current monetary system the way to stop this was if there was nowhere to hide. Which could be partly why so many people seem to worry about another world war - nowhere to hide.

Politicians are almost never for the people they claim to represent. If they were they would be universally hated. Right now most people seem to only hate the other side. Ipso facto, most politicians seem to be mainly sycophants, narcissists and opportunists these days. Again, all willing to sacrifice your future to the very last second, until it means obvious and imminent consequences for themselves. Which could be why so many worry about a civil war.

I wonder if a way out is for everyone to have more skin in the game. There’s a lot of ways this can happen. So many relinquished responsibility for their own lives to government and tech. Recapturing personal responsibility would mean reputation may matter more than attention again. At least, there would be a more immediate cost to destroying your reputation, so it’s not so comfortable, sometimes profitable, to just start over, indefinitely. Several paths exist: top down mandated responsibility combined with ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement (socialism sticks) or restoration of true incentives (capitalism carrots), probably more exist too.

I like the second path. True compensation for time, quality products for people’s money, quality education for their families, quality environments in which to live their lives. These would all create true losses for those that try and manipulate to their advantage and get caught. But more than that: it creates achievable wants, small, daily wins to those that work for them, and maybe that staves off this nihilism people keep talking about.

I also wonder if, to achieve any of this, the virtual world needs to fade into the background. And I think it is, slowly, which is probably preferable to quickly. AI could be a catalyst to speed up the process though, dramatically. Most people don’t want to have to know about AI, they want AI to simply do the thing. Then they won’t have to search, and prompt, and read LLM screeds, and then make more decisions, and then interact more with other websites to do the thing. Once all of that can be obfuscated for any user, maybe thats when the “virtual world” they’ve all been talking about for the past 50 years could take a back seat to the real world again.

It’s tricky though because obfuscation creates opportunities for bad actors. If the value created from this is packaged and captured for just a comparative few, either directly, or indirectly as it was last time, the inevitable consequence will be that we again will find ourselves in a position of needing another “reset”. And probably sooner than the last time it happened.

I don’t know though.