Every so often, things fall apart.
In the words of those who lived it, here are the vibes and the semantic signatures of the twentieth century’s most devastating social collapses.
From the meaning in their words, wisdom for our future emerges.
Recent major media stories that feel to us like they’re part of a larger narrative campaign.
Recent major media stories that feel to us like they’re part of a larger narrative campaign.
The cure for the cancer of gun culture and police culture is not to be found in reform laws around guns and police, but in reform ideas around culture, ideas that create a new dimension of American society that rejects LARPing and LARPers alike.
Inflation
What made Bitcoin special is nearly lost, and what remains is a false and constructed Narrative that exists in service to Wall Street and Washington rather than in resistance.
The Bitcoin narrative must be renewed. And that will change everything.
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Crypto
Recent Notes
Get Me Tools and a Beer!
There is nothing wrong with wanting the US to bring back certain critical manufacturing industries to its shores.
But don’t buy the narrative that a crazy scheme like the Kodak grift is the only way to make it happen.
Deep Sociopathy
Is murder bad? Hmm, I dunno. What are the chances I will be caught and what price will I pay if that happens? If the odds are high enough and the price steep enough, then yeah, I guess THAT would be bad. But the act of murder itself? I mean, I’m sure whoever I murdered – if I were to murder someone, that is, because I really don’t think you can prove that I did – was getting in the way of something that was very important to me. When you really think about it, they were doing the bad thing! Why do you ask?
Welcome to the world of commodity trade finance.
The Mountain and the Molehill
There ARE real threats to both the rule of law and our cherished capitalist system today.
But you won’t find either on the streets of Portland or Seattle.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Market
If you’ve never seen the 1963 comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, do yourself a favor and check it out. Phil Silvers and Spencer Tracy and Ethel Merman and Jonathan Winters? Yes, please.
ET contributor Pete Cecchini remembers. Better yet, it’s the perfect foil for figuring out a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Market.
The Grifters, chapter 1 – Kodak
We’ve been assaulted by three brutal grifts in just the past week … three smacks from Bobo and his bag of oranges … each deserving of an Epsilon Theory note.
Here’s chapter 1 – the ludicrous crony capitalism of the US government giving Kodak $765 million for “pharmaceutical supply production”.
That’s the Thing I’m Sensitive About!
Like all abstractions, extremes can be misleading. They can also be revealing. Using extreme times to learn what our leaders and institutions are sensitive about is a critical, unmissable lesson.
Taiwan is now Arrakis
“He who controls the spice controls the universe.”
The world’s principal supplier of semiconductors – the spice of OUR global empire – is now Taiwan.
Thanks a lot, Intel. Thanks a lot, Bob Swan. Thanks a lot, Jack Welch. Thanks a lot, all you Wall Street wizards of financialization.
Taiwan is now Arrakis. And we WILL fight over it.
Overserved
Everyone is in a tizzy about day traders and Robinhood. “Ooooh, they’re going to have such a hangover when the bubble pops.”
Pffft. They’ll be fine.
The investors facing a hangover are small family offices, plied with endless offerings of fee-heavy SPVs and SPACs by multi-billion dollar asset managers.
The Stupid War
The war over reopening schools is a proxy war.
The real war is between political parties, but they’ve set up the fight as teachers on one side vs. parents on the other.
This is not our war. This is THEIR war.
How to stop it? We refuse to fight.
Snip!
Both Trump and Biden have proposed $2 trillion spending plans for next year, confirming exactly what we wrote last December. To the dollar. To the word.
We can’t always write tomorrow’s headlines today. But we do try!
We the People? We the Pack.
I still believe this will be our finest hour.
Not of the America that was. But of the America that can be.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
An Advantageous Contagion
Sometimes good news comes from unexpected places.
And sometimes it’s best just to go with it.
The Anti-Anarchist Cookbook
Defund the police? No.
Demilitarize and Deunionize? Yes.
Police reform is just the start.
Harrumph!
There is an emerging narrative structure that places a lot of demands on us as citizens – and justifiably so.
But the claim that “silence is complicity” becomes something else entirely when we redefine silence as the failure to say exactly what we demand.
The Lost Art of the Jawbone
Market propaganda used to be an art form, I tell you! What happened to us?
The transformation of capital markets into political utilities happened.
Office Hours – 6.30.2020
It’s the June 30th edition of Office Hours, an interactive livestream in which Ben and Rusty discuss all things narrative in the world today.
Sideways: Observations on Pain and Privilege
A sideways moment is when your life becomes a probabilistic exercise, where you are at the mercy of one of two merciless social institutions: hospitals or the police.
My life went sideways a week ago, and here’s what I learned about pain and privilege.
The Anxiety Algorithm: An interview with Adam Julian Goldstein
Epsilon Theory contributor Neville Crawley is back with an interview of Adam Julian Goldstein, discussing Adam’s fascinating new work on anxiety. If, like me, you have the entrepreneurial bug (and it is a bug, not a feature), this is a must read!
What is Permissible
The slow wave that has moved America’s largest asset owners from direct positions in American companies to indirect pools of passive ownership has been a good thing for costs and diversification. It has, however, contributed to our present breakdown in corporate governance.
The past revolutions to fix this have failed for predictable reasons. Future revolutions don’t have to.
It is time to take back your ownership.
The Lystrosaurus
There is practically no information in knowing that everybody is talking about something. There is some information in knowing that everybody is using the same language to talk about something.
But there is a lot of value in knowing that people and publications with no underlying connection are simultaneously inspired to use the same language to talk about different angles of the same issue.