Rebooting

After much galloping around the many matters of curiosity (to myself)... sparks. Retirement sucks and I'm only 41. WTF am I doing?

OK, I have read a tremendous amount over the past 2 years and observed enormous change unfolding throughout the Western world. I have observed this both first hand and also second hand via the uncountable internet comms channels to which I’m sure everyone can relate.

It’s time for me to start writing again and then in due course… building.

This blog was previously aimed at the sad woes of our political system and describing the systemic flaws that are inherent in the continued underperformance of mature Western democracies in an age characterised by me as ‘acceleration’. Our dominant place in the world was once protected by strong institutions with excellent and seamless leadership succession handing knowledge and critical thinking capabilities from one generation to the next. This has proven a very competitive system dominating the world for the past 400 years, but all good things…

Really the failings or rather the fadings of this once greatest of systems are down to the uncontrollable changing landscape of affairs, the intended ossification of the institutions themselves and the regrettable yet unstoppable advance of entropy, that is entropy of the organisations that operate them (fyi- entropy is the progression towards disorder). Organisational entropy is real, it is powerful, it ruins everything given enough time. Founders are mortal and their succession of stewards whilst able to prolong the lifespan of the institution itself, do not wield the same authority and thus lack the same entropy cleaving sword of founders. Peaceful succession was an excellent invention for avoiding regular leadership crises from screwing things up, but it seems peaceful succession leads to another fate… it eventually succumbs to entropy.

That is to say, all organisations will trend towards disorganisation given enough time.

This is true of everything from the Roman Empire, to the British Empire, to the Apollo Program, to Google Inc. Nothing holds forever. Second law of thermodynamics seemingly applies to emergent macro phenomena like Google Inc, just as much as Maxwell’s Demon.

This also applies to the institutions of Western leadership, over time these systems trend to disorder. The vehicle into that world to exercise change and improvement is the political party, as discussed previously in this blog. Democracies are designed with legal and lawful vehicles of change and with mechanisms for executing that change in accordance with the interests of the resident population. Political parties are the vehicles for recrystalising low entropy governance across the West. There is perhaps no bigger prize, no tougher task in the West today.

The issue for a long time has been that the populace interests have been largely apathetic to the plight, the plight of the populace not sufficiently worrisome to them. This may well have been true for a very long time as Westerners enjoyed generations of peacetime a long period of robust and stable economic growth, a rising tide that lifted all boats…

but is that our future too?

The arc of technology burns brightly and the event horizon to which the future seems predictable keeps getting closer and closer. Certainly during covid the fog of war regarding the predictability of the future was almost disorientating and likely was very disorientating for anyone involved in strategic decisions, forcing many organisation leaders to plan for multiple scenarios and just accept high levels of waste as the price of survival… Maybe we can go back even further to 2016? When a number of people were knocked off balance by dramatic unplanned events of historic proportion? Brexit, Trump, the death of David Bowie.

The fog of uncertainty has only accelerated ever closer since 2016, we have had pandemics, wars and the thunderbolt undeniable emergence of AI, in coming years we will soon see dramatically more space systems including all kinds of surveillance and real time monitoring, of everything, we will see mass production of autonomous products from cars to robots to home appliances. The things that we desire and the things that we do are going to change, dramatically, as is the value of our individual contribution to the wellbeing of our fellow citizens is redefined, more than once, and in shorter and shorter loops. Social contracts with the state and with one another are going to get diluted and rewritten and it’s going to feel disorientating, especially if you are unaware of the 9,000 lb technology dragon we are all now riding.

Energy supplies are also going to change, they have already dramatically changed in Europe and this will in turn change geopolitics, allegiances and adversaries will flip. Moscow have torn the map and you can’t un-tear it now, historical friends and foes will shock people by changing sides and complicating things.

Mass produced embodied AI (robots), solve the vanishing tax base of the Malthusian disaster that is facing all major economies with deteriorating demographics (basically all of them outside India). Geopolitical powers and their long term strategists can now legitimately ask… if we expect to have robot workers in 15 - 20 years… do we still need all this inward migration to preserve our tax base? Do we still need to collect all these pensions? Assumptions around robotic workers and when they hit the market will play total havoc with politics and geopolitical strategy. Many errors will be made. Many large. Some calamitous. Established political parties will blunder and startup parties will rule most major economies within 15 years.

Essentially everything is up for grabs, all the institutional anchors of past have slipped, new agents of change are afoot, there be dragons, few people are cognisant of the direction and fewer still are involved. Nobody has the reigns. Understand… Nobody.

All your conspiracies are dead, the past no longer exists. Where is it?

So what am I rebooting??

I am rebooting my writing, I intend to write various things here on a fairly regular basis and will probably rebrand this substack, maybe to something broader? But I find it increasingly difficult to navigate the enshitified internet for places of robust discourse on topics of suitable meaningfulness.

My writing is intended to distil and what I really intend is to build something significant. I believe I have two 15 year projects left in my professional life, maybe three 10 year projects if we really believe the acceleration thing? But that seems like a lot still to offer and I should aim to always go bigger than before. So the real intention here is the distillation of mission and the gauge of impact.

What’s the BHAG that is most worthwhile? What is the most audacious and yet undertakable objective?

I would welcome all kinds of feedback, what is worth looking at?
Also if you hate this I would love to hear why.

Yours unoffendably,

stu255