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
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money
Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff is now Facebook’s chief lobbyist. Big Tech just gave the Internet Freedom Award to Ivanka Trump. The head of the antitrust division of the Justice Dept. is a former Google lobbyist.
They’re. Not. Even. Pretending. Anymore.
truth and Truth
Great Truths can be important engines for social unity and shared identity. In the hands of some, however, they can become tools for obscuring actual truth – facts – in service of cynical use of the emotional memes attached to those Truths.
Superstorm Powell
The narratives of Central Bank Omnipotence and Trade & Tariffs have merged into a superstorm.
We are tracking its movement across the map of narrative-world, and as you might expect … it packs a punch.
The ET Election Index – May 2019
This is the second installment of Epsilon Theory’s new monthly feature – the ET Election Index. Our aim with the feature is to lay as bare as possible the popular narratives governing the US elections in 2020. That includes narratives concerning policy proposals and candidates found in the news, opinion and feature content produced by national, local and smaller outlets.
Whatever It Takes
It’s the truest thing I know about the State: what begins as emergency government action ALWAYS becomes permanent government policy.
So now here we are, where “whatever it takes” has morphed from saving the entire European project to … [checks notes] … preventing a garden-variety recession.
A Zeitgeist Portfolio
In today’s narrative-connected news, New Mexico makes a major shift in their portfolio allocation, away from broad equity indices and core fixed income, and towards real assets.
It’s a very Zeitgeist-aware portfolio shift, and boldly done. I love it!
Office Hours – 6.4.2019
Ben and Rusty update subscribers on the shift from cooperative to competitive games and our narrative research program, with a focus on the China Trade War and US electoral politics.
The Weekend Zeitgeist – 6.2.2019
It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist! In which we get a flood of flood coverage, everybody is a contrarian, Bloomberg covers abortion, Time magazine does Time magazine things and Raleigh invites an unexpected guest or two to the 2019 Zeitgeist.
Fellow Contrarians Unite!
We spend a lot of time on our trade ideas, and do a lot of hand-waving at what we believe that everyone else believes. It’s a core problem for investors, and one that can’t be avoided.
Space for Rent
The pecking order is a social system designed to preserve economic inequality: inequality of food for chickens, inequality of wealth for humans. We are trained and told by Team Elite that the pecking order is not a real and brutal thing in the human species, but this is a lie.
On Tilt
It’s like he’s a drunk dentist in Vegas for a convention, sitting down at the poker table and getting bored after three hands. So he decides that he can “impose his will” on the table by opening up out of position with rags and making a continuation bet all the way through the river. Like everyone else at the table doesn’t see him for EXACTLY who he is.
Citizen Trump / Citizen Xi
This isn’t a US thing. This isn’t a China thing. This isn’t a Trump thing. This isn’t a Xi thing.
This is a social animal thing.
The words are not lies. The words are not wrong. The conflict may be just.
But you are being played nonetheless.
B3 Debt is the New Black
I’m not sure that people who aren’t immersed in this world realize how crappy B3 debt is. Or how much of it is getting pushed into the market.
THIS is financialization.
Red Dawn
How will you know that the US-China trade narrative is shifting towards a protracted game of Chicken?
When the narrative becomes dominated by national security language and clusters.
Rusty and I have been all over this for a year. More to the point, we have been right. If you want to know what’s happening with the Trade & Tariff narrative structure, you should subscribe to ET Professional. This is what we DO.
Spree
The word “spree” is so evocative in narrative-world, implying at a minimum some sort of wantonness and excess, some sort of moral bankruptcy.
How threadbare and slow-growing is the financial services world today? It’s a “hiring spree” just to open up a New York office. With 30 people. By 2022.
Amazon, Facebook and the Modern Trust [the ET Zeitgeist]
Facebook is a master at implementing price increases under the narrative of “optimization”, as if the company was doing you a favor by raising their ad prices so much. Now Amazon is reading from the same playbook in their advertising business.
Time to break up the trusts. Again.
Never Run the Same Gag Twice [The ET Zeitgeist]
It’s the best line in a movie full of great lines: You don’t run the same gag twice. You run the next gag.
Elon Musk is running the next gag.
A Song of Ice and Fire
We are the human animal.
We are non-linear.
We ARE a song of ice and fire.
It’s a song that has built cathedrals and fed billions and taken us to the moon. It’s a song that can do all of that and more … far, far more … if only we remember the tune.
The Pack remembers.
A Holy Day
If Memorial Day is anything, it is a day for telling and re-telling stories about Full Hearts. Let me tell and re-tell you the story of Milton Lee Olive III.
The Holiday Zeitgeist – 5.26.2019
It’s the Holiday Weekend Zeitgeist! In which we see an election season narrative make its way into other topics, hear the FDA’s plans to deal with expiring salt, hear from local man about local bear, hear from local man about local swimming hole, begin to doubt our judgment about the political import of impeachment proceedings, and read some perverse New York Times fanfic.