The Last Revolution?

For a while, it seemed as if history had ended. Not in the banal sense that nothing would happen any more. Events would continue, politicians would embarrass themselves, wars would break out, markets would wobble, technological wonders would appear and human beings would still find ways to queue badly. But the great ideological argument appeared to have been settled. Communism had failed. Liberal capitalism had won. The market had not merely proved more efficient; it had acquired a moral aura.

This last step matters. It is one thing to conclude that the Soviet Union was authoritarian, stagnant and doomed. It is quite another to conclude that capitalism, in the form developing in the West in the 1990s, was therefore morally vindicated. Yet that is largely what happened. The collapse of communism did not simply remove a geopolitical rival. It removed the restraint that had forced Western capitalism to behave itself.
Continue reading “The Resumption of History”

There are moments when the future arrives not as a prophecy, nor as a cinematic catastrophe, but as an executive classification scheme. Builders build. Sellers sell. Measurers measure. The formula is neat, memorable and slightly terrifying, which is often how history chooses to introduce a new social order. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, recently explained why his company had laid off more than a fifth of its workforce despite strong growth and healthy revenues. It was not, he argued, because Cloudflare was failing. It was because artificial intelligence had changed the shape of the company itself. Some people were still needed to create products. Some were still needed to sell them. But the large category of people who measured, coordinated, checked, reported, audited, managed and interpreted the organisation to itself could now, in many cases, be replaced or compressed by AI systems.
Continue reading “The Pope, Prince and Golgafrincham”

You might have read Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening and/or the recent Citrini Global Intelligence Crisis report – or perhaps just read about them in the press – and be wondering how they relate to the line of thought I have been developing in the two recent posts, Why Everything Actually Adds Up and Why This Does Not Stabilise.

Continue reading “On Shumer, Citrini and the Question of Stability”

In the previous essay, I argued that several apparently unrelated developments form a single pattern: the quiet erosion of professional value, the absence of visible productivity gains, rising political volatility and a growing dependence on housing wealth to maintain living standards. Together, these point to a slow but profound shift in where value now sits in the economy.

Continue reading “Why This Does Not Stabilise”