FREAKING COOL TIMES MTV 1981 It was so freaking cool at the time. To be there. T

FREAKING COOL TIMES

MTV 1981

It was so freaking cool at the time. To be there. To know we were going through the change.

THE EXPURGATION OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT 1985

It was freaking cool to see it. At the time. To know that American business, like american politics, was abandoning the socialist method of production. And to sell franchises of every sort to those newly unemployed middle managers.

THE BERLIN WALL 1989

It was o freaking cool at the time. To be there. To know the world was changing. To lose that feeling of possible nuclear war. The relief of it all.

THE MICROSOFT-ING OF SEATTLE 1992

It was so freaking cool to be there. To be part of it. The flood of money and wealth and nerds everywhere. The Entros Restaurant. The Galleries. Reasonably inexpensive housing. The feeling that the future was a straight vertical line into infinity.

QUAKE 1995

It was so freaking cool to be there. The feeling that the world had changed. That everything was changing. That the future we read about in science fiction was happening. That William Gibson didn’t imagine a future – he created it.

WEB BOOM 2000

It was so freaking cool to be there. Just to participate in it. Just to do a startup and have it explode overnight with everyone else’s. To know that none if could possibly work, but to run with the pack, economically naked through the financial streets wearing nothing but network cables and no chance of crossing the finish line.

SEPTEMBER 2001

It was freaking horrible to be there. To see it. To experience it. To know that the world was forever changed.

HOUSING BOOM 2006

It was so freaking cool to be there, Just to revel in it. I means, stores were full of interesting stuff, and consumption was everywhere. Knowing all the while that we were running naked through the financial streets wearing nothing but fiduciary instruments made from toilet paper.

IPHONE 2007

It was so freaking cool to be there. To know the world just changed. To know that the problem of teaching people the use of computing hardware, was the abstraction created by the need to use a keyboard to control a machine, rather than the intuition of touch, was gone forever.

NOW

It pretty much sucks since then. And really, I am pretty sure that somewhere between 2017 and 2025 it is gonna suck on a scale that no one alive remembers. I dont know what that suck is going to look like. But it’s really, really gonna suck.

Just no way these economic conditions, the world’s demographics, the state of existing knowledge, can function with the current allocation of power and capital given the allocation of individuals.

Just no freaking way. It isn’t a complex model. It is just napkin math.

Pretty curves. Pretty lines. Very un-pretty conclusions. There is no rainbow there.

Because the incentive to protect the existing order is such that there is no means of easily transitioning

The only hope for the USA is the secession and nullification movement.

Otherwise, there will be something very bad.

I don’t know what.

But the disruption of world patterns of power, transit and trade will mean a lot is up for grabs. It’d be like the USA didn’t survive the second world war, and everyone ran around picking up the british empire.