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.
This is an exclusive subscriber-only preview of the first six chapters of Rusty Guinn’s upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. The book explores how evolution, polarization, and technology are slowly transforming humanity into a hive mind - and what we can and can't do about it.
The Long Now is everything we pull into the present from our future selves and our children. We are told that the economic stimulus and the political fear of the Long Now are costless, when in fact they cost us … everything.
Tick-tock.
Men of God in the City of Man is a nine part series about a Narrative virus that infected the charismatic and Pentecostal churches in the United States. It isn't a story about Christian Nationalism. It isn't a story about January 6th. It isn't a story about why people voted for Trump. It is a story about a story. It is a story about the language that created a self-sustaining movement defined by its unwavering belief in a fundamentally corrupt electoral system.
Men of God in the City of Man
Amid the Widening Gyre of politics and the black hole of financial markets, the only anchor is us, together, walking with Clear Eyes and Full Hearts. Experience Ben's original 4-part series.
Outsourcing Consciousness
The Long Now
Men of God in a City of Man
Things Fall Apart
Recent Notes
The Fall of Wuhan
Containment has failed. And so now we must fight.
That means doing everything possible to bolster our healthcare systems BEFORE the need overwhelms the capacity.
That means calling out our leaders for their corrupt political responses to date, and forcing them through our outcry to adopt an effective virus-fighting policy for OUR benefit, not theirs.
Kitchen Sink It
To receive a free full-text email of The Zeitgeist whenever we publish to the website, please sign up here. You’ll get two or three of these emails every…
Thanksgiving
A moment to say thanks and accept responsibility.
Office Hours – 2.18.2020
This Office Hours is all about Coronavirus, except it’s not – it’s all about how institutions who solve for narrative outcomes invariably create bad results in the Real World.
Love in the Time of COVID-19
Within a few months, the reality of COVID-19 will overtake the propaganda of the CCP and their toadies at the World Health Organization, as real-world companies begin making real-world economic decisions to maintain their enterprises in the face of a real-world threat.
Those decisions will be led by sports franchises.
The Industrially Necessary Doctor Tedros
To date, WHO leadership has simply been part of the Chinese Narrative Machine.
It’s not just a betrayal of the researchers and clinicians who do important work under WHO auspices. It’s a betrayal of the world.
Options
Our social institutions require of us many songs. One of those songs is about the roots of poverty in immorality. If we’re going to stop singing their songs, this may be a good place to start.
Body Count
China is fighting nCov2019 exactly like the US fought North Vietnam … with policy driven more by narrative control than by what’s best to win the war.
That was a disastrous strategic mistake for the US then, and it’s a disastrous strategic mistake for China today.
We Hanged Our Harps Upon the Willows
Because the danger of powerful memes, cartoons and narratives is not that they demand our acquiesence. It is that they demand our participation.
Credit and Debt Monitor – 1.31.2020
The decline in the strength of the Q4 Narrative of a risk of “collapse” in credit markets continued in January. Uniquely among our macronarratives, cohesion…
The Promised Land!
Every once in a while, narrative-world gives you a gift that just keeps on giving. So it is with outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty’s regime of despair at IBM.
Today my focus is on the IBM-sponsored hagiography that is springing up like slime molds on the underside of rotting swamp cabbages.
The Inevitable Afterbirth
Two weeks ago we were being told about the coronavirus outbreak. This week we are being told how we should think about it. Right or wrong, it is important to have clear eyes about this kind of Fiat News.
Once You Buy a Prize, It’s Yours to Keep!
Outgoing IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has filed 167 SEC Form 4s detailing her stock transactions in the company.
So I downloaded and compiled all of them to see how much money she has sucked out of IBM, just like I did for outgoing Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.
Stuck in the Middle With You
There is a median narrative theorem that can serve as a central pillar of a NEW approach to social choice theory, an approach less pedantic in its assumptions about human nature and less naive in its assumptions about modes of social power.
The median narrative theorem generates powerful predictive hypotheses about elections, hypotheses that predicted Trump’s Republican primary victory in 2016 and – if current data holds – predicts Sanders’ Democratic primary victory in 2020.
The Curious Case of Candidate Sanders
Everyone complains that their favorite candidate isn’t being treated fairly in the media. It’s the Bernie Bros’ turn…but are they right?
You Had One Job
Forget about impeachment and its partisan Kabuki theater. It’s a joke.
If there’s some rich dude who bought his way onto that Wuhan evacuation flight, and you know there is … if this Administration is forsaking its ONE JOB to protect American citizens, and you know they are …
THAT’S what brings down this government.
A New Road to Serfdom
There are many roads to serfdom, and they have all become faster and more perilous. We are walking down one of them now.
Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name
It’s the one thing that Donald Trump and Rachel Maddow can agree on … “who the hell cares about the budget?”
If you don’t see that every government in the developed world is about to embark on a massive deficit spending spree, with modern-day ziggurats constructed in every burg and hamlet … you’re just not paying attention.
The Drum Major Instinct
On MLK, Jr. Day, we present an excerpt from a powerful and under-read sermon about status delivered to the Ebenezer Baptist Church.