Around the year 200, a lawyer turned theologian in Roman Carthage looked at the world and declared it full.

Human beings had become a burden to the Earth, Tertullian wrote; nature could scarcely sustain us, and he counted plague, famine and war as a merciful pruning of overgrown nations. When he wrote that, the entire human species numbered about two hundred million. Indonesia holds more people than that today, on one archipelago, eating better and living longer than any citizen of Carthage ever managed.

Tertullian’s complaint is the oldest surviving version of the argument you’re hearing on every degrowth podcast and in every doomer-laden comment section: the planet is at capacity, its future already spent, so the most irresponsible thing you could add to it is a child.

Every few generations someone makes the argument all over again - theology first, then political economy, then ecology, and now carbon accounting. Every generation updates the numbers but they keep the same, flawed conclusion - and it’s been wrong for eighteen centuries straight.

I see no reason to expect that it will be correct, now.

Malthus writes the workhouse into law

In 1798 an English curate named Thomas Robert Malthus published, anonymously, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Food production grows arithmetically, he argued, but population grows geometrically, and humanity lives permanently on the lip of famine. To Malthus, misery was nature’s own corrective measure, and any attempt to relieve the poor would only let them breed their way back to starvation.

The world held about a billion people when Malthus published. It holds more than eight billion now, and the average person today eats more calories per day than the average Englishman did in Malthus’s lifetime, when England was one of the best-fed countries on the planet. Malthus treated famine as a permanent feature of human life, but it has become so rare that almost every famine of the last half-century took the carnage of war or a cruel and deliberate policy to produce.

Tragically, his novel ideas were granted currency.

Parliament drew on them for the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced parish relief with the workhouse on the theory that comfort would only encourage the poor to multiply. A decade later, as Ireland starved, senior British administrators reasoned in openly Malthusian terms that the famine was a natural correction it would be unwise to interfere with too vigorously.

The doctrine that there are just too many people has never once stayed on the page.

Someone always volunteers to decide which people count as surplus.

And the volunteers never nominate themselves.

Borlaug feeds the world Ehrlich gave up on

In 1968 a Stanford entomologist named Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in butterflies, published The Population Bomb at the urging of the Sierra Club’s David Brower.

Ehrlich opened by declaring the battle to feed humanity already lost, and predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s no matter what anyone did. He was so very charming and so very certain that Johnny Carson had him on the Tonight Show again and again through the 1970s. His book sold in the millions.

He suggested that England might not exist by the year 2000, and floated adding sterilants to the water supply if voluntary measures failed.

While Ehrlich taped television appearances, an agronomist was already doing the work that would prove him wrong. The son of Norwegian immigrant farmers from near Cresco, Iowa, Norman Borlaug had worked in Mexico since 1944, crossing thousands of wheat strains in obscurity for the Rockefeller Foundation. He bred semi-dwarf, disease-resistant varieties that put their energy into grain instead of stalk, and Mexico, a wheat importer when he arrived, was self-sufficient by 1956. In the mid-1960s, with India and Pakistan facing exactly the famines Ehrlich was predicting, Borlaug shipped his seeds across the Pacific. India’s wheat harvest went from around twelve million tonnes in 1965 to more than twenty million by 1970. Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat in 1968, India by 1974. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, while The Population Bomb was still selling. Historians credit the Green Revolution he started with saving hundreds of millions of lives, and his obituaries put the figure as high as a billion.

Ehrlich looked at a projected number of mouths and, in his arrogance or his hatred for the human condition (pick one), saw only the mouth; but every one of those mouths was attached to a brain and two hands, and one of the brains belonged to a farm kid from Iowa whose existence no model of 1914 could have valued at anything much.

The economist Julian Simon argued in The Ultimate Resource (1981) that human beings originate resources, since resources are useless rock and goo until a mind figures out what to do with them. Simon and Ehrlich settled it the old-fashioned way. In 1980 Simon offered a wager: Ehrlich could pick any basket of raw materials, and if scarcity was tightening, their prices would rise over the following decade. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, a thousand dollars’ worth. By 1990 the world had added about 800 million people and all five metals had fallen in price.

Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 but spiritually, he didn’t concede jack shit.

The same years produced The Limits to Growth. In 1972 a group of industrialists and academics calling itself the Club of Rome commissioned an MIT team under Donella and Dennis Meadows to feed a computer model named World3 with assumptions about resources, food and pollution, and the team published the output as a book that sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. Its standard runs showed industrial civilisation overshooting and collapsing somewhere in the middle of the century you’re now living in. Tertullian had scripture, Malthus brought arithmetic, Ehrlich owned television, and the Club of Rome rented a mainframe, and in every case the audience mistook the machinery of the argument for evidence of the conclusion.

Governments enforce it on the poor

You could file all this under “forecasters miss,” shrug, and move on, if governments hadn’t kept enforcing the forecast on actual bodies. They did, within living memory, with the enthusiastic backing of respectable institutions.

During India’s Emergency, between 1975 and 1977, Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay ran a sterilisation drive that handed quotas down to local officials. Those officials sterilised more than six million people in 1976 alone; they told teachers to produce candidates or lose their salaries, and police pulled men off buses. International development bodies funded and applauded the campaign, having treated population control as the central problem of the poor world for a decade, with the World Bank under Robert McNamara at the front of the queue.

China went further. The one-child policy ran from 1980 to 2015, and officials enforced it with ruinous fines and job loss, and in millions of documented cases with forced abortion and sterilisation. Because families limited to one child often made sure that child was a son, the sex ratio at birth climbed to 120 boys for every 100 girls at its peak, and China today has tens of millions more men than women. The state that once fined people for a second baby now offers cash subsidies for any baby at all, and in 2022 China’s population fell for the first time in six decades. The bureaucracy built a birth-suppression machine over thirty-five years and is discovering that the machine has no reverse gear.

The track record of treating children as a quantity to be managed downward: a workhouse, a famine memo, a sterilisation quota, and a missing generation of daughters. The people who paid were never the theorists; they were the poor, the rural, the folks one administrative layer too weak to refuse.

Degrowthers bill the unborn

Today’s degrowthers make the same case in carbon instead of calories. The Austrian-French philosopher André Gorz coined the name, décroissance, in 1972, and the economist Serge Latouche turned it into a movement three decades later. They argue the rich world must deliberately shrink its economy, and by polite implication its population, to stay within planetary limits. Their sacred number comes from a 2017 paper in Environmental Research Letters, where Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas ranked lifestyle choices by emissions saved and announced that having one fewer child saves 58.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, dwarfing everything else on the list. You’ve met that figure a thousand times, usually as a bar chart in which a baby towers over a transatlantic flight like a war crime.

Wynes and Nicholas borrowed the method from a 2009 study by Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax: charge a parent half of their child’s lifetime emissions, a quarter of each grandchild’s, an eighth of each great-grandchild’s, and so on down the centuries, all computed as if per-capita emissions stay frozen at present levels forever. The modellers assume the world achieves no decarbonisation at all, ever, and then bill your hypothetical child for the failure in advance. Analysts who re-ran the calculation under countries’ existing climate commitments found the per-child figure collapsing toward a small fraction of the headline, because your child’s emissions depend on the energy system she lives in, and that system is what the whole climate effort exists to change. A child born this year in a country with a decarbonising grid will emit less per year than you do now for most of her life, and her child less still. Emissions are a function of technology and policy. Population is the variable the modellers hold still because it’s the one that goes viral.

In 2021 Caroline Hickman and her colleagues surveyed ten thousand people aged 16 to 25 across ten countries for The Lancet Planetary Health. Roughly four in ten said climate change made them hesitant to have children, and more than half agreed that humanity is doomed. In 2019 a British musician named Blythe Pepino founded a group called BirthStrike, for people publicly declining to have children until governments resolved the crisis; she later wound it down, worried it had become a vector for despair rather than action. The despair was the product all along: adults told a generation that bringing a child into the world is an act of harm, and the generation believed them.

The data says otherwise. A century ago, natural disasters killed hundreds of thousands or millions of people a year. Today, with four times the population and a warmer planet, annual deaths from disasters have fallen by well over 90 per cent, because people protect each other with wealth, forecasting and infrastructure, and they build all three.

Climate change is a real engineering problem, and tens of millions of engineers, scientists and builders are working on it, and every one of them was once a baby some couple decided to create and raise as a generational, against-the-grain fuck-you to Ehrlich and his crew.

We’ve yet to crack grid-scale storage, scalable carbon removal, and fusion that pays for itself.

But I’d bet on humanity all the way down.

Now the shortage is people

The population bomb already fizzled. The world’s total fertility rate has fallen from about five children per woman in 1960 to roughly 2.2 today, hovering just above replacement, and more than half of all countries are now below it. South Korea’s rate hit 0.72 in 2023, the lowest any nation has ever recorded. Japan and Italy sit at about 1.2. UN demographers project that the human population will peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion and then decline, the first sustained decline since the Black Death, and they have revised that peak downward with each new round.

The arithmetic of who cares for whom has flipped: fewer workers per retiree, fewer young people to staff the hospitals and pay into the pensions, towns hollowing out, and fewer of the unreasonably energetic 25-year-olds who do a disproportionate share of the world’s inventing, a loss no pension model prices. South Korea and China and Hungary and Japan are now spending billions to coax births back, and finding they can barely move the number with those subsidies, because you can’t pay people to want a future they’ve learned to dread.

Nobody audits the people they love

Apply the footprint logic honestly and you can’t stop at children. Your spouse is a consumer, your best friend flies, and your aging mother draws down medical resources at a rate that would horrify a sustainability auditor. Every human being you love is, on the ledger, a stream of emissions and consumption stretching out for decades, and nobody runs the audit on the people they already love, because everyone understands privately what the framework’s defenders deny in public: the people you love are ends in themselves, and no ledger captures them. The child-footprint chart only works on people who don’t exist yet, because they’re the only ones who can’t look back at you.

And the prophets themselves never lived by the prophecy. Malthus married Harriet Eckersall in 1804 and had three children. Paul and Anne Ehrlich raised a daughter. The men who built the intellectual case against other people’s children went home at night to their own. When a doctrine’s own authors won’t live by it, you can decline too.

If you don’t want children, don’t have them; there are decent personal reasons on every side of that choice, and a person who knows their own mind owes nobody an explanation. This essay is for a different reader: who wants kids, who feels the pull every time a friend’s toddler grabs their finger, and whom the forecasters are talking out of the deepest thing they want. The doomers ask you to pre-grieve a future nobody can see, and to pay for that grief with the largest love available to a human life. And for what? A reader who believed Malthus in 1800 forgoes children on the eve of the greatest improvement in human welfare ever recorded. A reader who believed Ehrlich in 1970 forgoes them at the exact moment Borlaug’s wheat is coming out of the ground. A reader who believed The Limits to Growth in 1972 waits fifty years for a collapse the model’s own commissioners outlived. Every generation back to Carthage was born into a world someone credentialed had already declared finished, and every one of those worlds turned out to have more room and more future in it than the experts could imagine, largely because of the very people they advised against.

The doomers will tell you they’re protecting future generations from suffering. They do it by making sure those generations never exist, so that their suffering rounds to zero, along with everything they would have built and everyone they would have loved. No one who has watched a child learn to walk believes the ledger balances, and the people selling the trade have, for two and a quarter centuries, kept their own children off it.

Your child will be born into a declared-finished world. She’ll also be born into the wealthiest and longest-lived civilisation that has ever existed, one her great-grandparents would mistake for heaven, and she’ll improve it in ways you can’t predict, the way Borlaug’s parents couldn’t predict him.

The world Tertullian called full went on to hold everyone you have ever loved.

It hath room for one more.

This is the case for proportion: for caring without becoming unbearable, improving without worshiping optimization, and refusing to let every trend, outrage, or ideology annex your nervous system.

The most radical thing left is to just be normal about things.

For all we’re obsessed with wellness, we’re not well, are we?

It’s not that we care too much; caring is good, and conviction is good, and discipline is good etc etc etc. Wanting to improve your life, your body, your work, your politics, your relationships, your finances, your mornings, your sleep, your habits, your dinner, your sense of meaning, all of that is fine.

I’ll grant it.

The sickness that concerns me is that everything has become so very totalizing.

Nothing is allowed to be small anymore. Nothing is allowed to be moderate, partial, ordinary, seasonal, boring, or just good enough. Every preference must become an identity, every habit must become a protocol, every disagreement must become a moral emergency, every meal must become a philosophy, every viral post or breaking news item must become a referendum on civilization, every feeling must become a public performance, every hobby must become a monetized personal brand, and every single decision must be optimized, defended, aestheticized, and turned into something approximating Von Clausewitz’s total war.

You can’t just go to bed earlier - you have to sleepmaxx.

You can’t just eat a balanced diet - you have to eliminate seed oils, and track your glucose, fear vegetables and consume nothing but beef, drink raw milk, and talk about “ancestral living” and “blue zones” on your longevity TikTok.

And of course, you can’t just exercise. You have to train like a tactical athlete, buy recovery wearables, plunge yourself into ice, supplement like a racehorse, and describe walking as “zone two.”

And of course, you can’t just disagree with someone’s politics. You have to decide they’re either a fascist, a communist, a groomer, a traitor, a neoliberal shill, a terrorist sympathizer, or a brainwashed NPC.

You can’t just dislike a movie, a celebrity, a book, a brand, a podcast, a tweet, a hairstyle, a product launch, a parenting choice, or someone’s annoying opinion.

You have to turn it into a statement about the death of culture.

Everyone is bloody exhausted and bloody exhausting; and somehow, the solution offered everywhere is to become more extreme. More intense. More pure. More optimized. More committed. More certain. More aligned with the right tribe. More hostile to the wrong tribe. More suspicious of ordinary pleasure. More contemptuous of ordinary compromise.

Well, here’s my radical position:

Just be normal about things.

That’s it.

Be normal, and opt out of the deranged belief that the only way to take something seriously is to take it to the most extreme possible conclusion.

Normal is the condition that makes meaning possible. A normal diet works fine without a manifesto. A normal sleep schedule doesn’t need a name ending in “maxxing.” A normal political view allows for uncertainty, tradeoffs, and the possibility that your opponents might be wrong rather than the evil descendants of Satan and Satre themselves. A normal reaction to the news is to be concerned and to want more information - not to succumb to immediate emotional combustion. A normal life has habits and preferences and inconsistencies and repairs and occasional contradictions.

That’s what makes it all a life.

Part of the problem is that “taking it too far” is highly legible, in a way that moderation simply isn’t. Extremism photographs and posts well. It gives people a script, and it creates instant belonging. If you’re “all in” on something, anything, people know what to do with you. You’re carnivore. You’re anti-seed-oil. You’re doing hustle culture. You’re trad. You’re poly. You’re antiwork. You’re 995ing. You’re pro-AI. You’re anti-AI. You’re sober. You’re feral. You’re an accelerationist. You’re post-left. You’re in founder mode. You’re living a soft life. You’re a doomer. You’re based. You’re cringe. You’re whatever the algorithm currently finds most useful as a sorting mechanism.

But if you say, “I try to eat pretty well, but I try not to be weird about it,” there’s just nowhere for that to go, and nowhere for the world to put you. It doesn’t polarize, recruit or inflame. It doesn’t invite a pile-on, or signal total allegiance. It doesn’t make strangers feel either validated or threatened - the two things left that seem to make the world go round.

Platforms don’t reward “normal.” In pursuit of profit, they reward mania, purity, escalation, and novelty. They reward the person who says the thing with absolute certainty and maximum contempt, who can turn a minor observation into a civilizational diagnosis - the man who has no off-switch, no sense of proportion, and no respect for the idea that some things are not that deep.

And because we live inside these systems for hours a day, we keep confusing their idiotic, base incentives for reality.

But most people don’t need a biohacking protocol.

They need to stop scrolling in bed and get as many hours of sleep as their schedule allows.

Most people don’t need to become zealots about nutrition. They need protein, fiber, vegetables, water, fewer candy bars, and a less hysterical relationship with their lunch.

Most people don’t need a complete ideological conversion. They need to read more than one source, stop confusing vibes with facts, and admit that complicated problems are - in fact - complicated.

Most people don’t need to turn every social conflict into therapy language, legal language, war language, or liberation language. They need to talk like adults, apologize when they’re wrong, set boundaries without staging a press conference, and let small things be small things.

Most people don’t need to go “all in” on every trend, every cause, every discourse, every outrage, every self-improvement system, every productivity framework, every moral panic, every luxury, every fear.

They need a life with enough structure to support them and enough looseness to let them breathe.

The culture of extremity flatters us by telling us that intensity = virtue. If you care about your health, you must care in a way that consumes your personality. If you care about justice, you must be angry all the time. If you care about success, you must sacrifice rest, friendship, and dignity.If you care about the planet, you must perform guilt on command. If you care about your body, you must monitor it like a hostile asset. If you care about your mind, you must turn every feeling into an analytics dashboard.

There are many things worth caring about.

But the more something is worth caring about, the more dangerous extremism becomes.

Being weird about shit - extremism in all its forms - might burn hot, and it might perform well, but it always collapses.

Being normal about shit compounds.

Someone who eats normally for twenty years will likely do better than someone who cycles between puritanical restriction and indulgent rebellion. Someone who sleeps decently most nights will likely feel more rested than someone who turns sleep into a neurotic performance and then panics every time their watch gives them a bad score. Someone who reads widely, updates slowly, and resists political possession will likely understand the world better than someone who receives every event as ammunition for a pre-existing narrative. Someone who can have an ordinary disagreement without annihilating the other will likely have better relationships than someone who treats every conflict as evidence of abuse, betrayal, or ideological contamination.

Extremism might give you a feeling like control, but it’s usually a signal of possession. You think you’ve chosen a system, but pretty soon the system is choosing for you. You no longer ask, “What do I think?” You ask, “What does someone like me think?” You no longer ask, “What does this situation need?” You ask, “How do I perform my allegiance?” You no longer notice reality, so much as you complain when reality either fails to confirm, or threatens your identity.

This is how people are made ridiculous.

The seed oil wanker can’t eat dinner at a friend’s house without making everyone aware of their purity hierarchy. The political obsessive can’t watch a natural disaster unfold without immediately sorting victims and responders into ideological categories. The productivity extremist can’t enjoy a walk unless it’s contributing to a measurable objective. The social media addict can’t experience a private emotion without imagining its public framing. The wellness convert can’t be tired without interpreting it as a hormonal, spiritual, dietary, environmental, or civilizational crisis.

Sometimes tired just means tired.

Sometimes hungry just means hungry.

Sometimes disagreement just means disagreement.

Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day.

Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake.

Sometimes a preference is just a preference.

Sometimes a joke is just a joke, and sometimes it’s just bad.

Sometimes a person is annoying without being an existential threat to Western Values.

Sometimes the news is upsetting without you becoming catatonic for the rest of the day.

Sometimes your body is asking for a ham sandwich, not a new ideology.

Proportion is the ability to respond to things at the right scale. Not everything deserves your whole nervous system, and not everything deserves a boycott, a confession, a thread, a pivot, a diagnosis, a feud, a rebrand, a protocol, a purge, or a ten-year plan.

Some things deserve a shrug.

Some things deserve a nap.

Some things deserve a private conversation.

Some things deserve a week of thought before you speak up.

Some things deserve attention, but not obsession.

The internet hates proportion because proportion slows the machine down. A proportionate person is harder to manipulate. They don’t instantly buy the supplement, join the mob, share the outrage, adopt the label, or panic at the headline. They have a buffer between stimulus and response. They can say, “Maybe,” “Not enough information,” “This seems overstated,” “I’m not convinced,” “I don’t need to have a take on this,” and, most dangerously of all, “I’m going to log off.”

A lot of what passes for conviction is poor emotional regulation. A lot of what passes for discipline is anxiety. A lot of what passes for moral clarity is group belonging. A lot of what passes for being informed is being repeatedly agitated by people who profit from repeated agitation.

If the house is on fire, go right ahead and scream. But if every room you enter feels like it’s on fire, check whether you’ve just trained yourself to smell smoke everywhere.

The point is to stop living as though maximum intensity is the same as maximum truth.

A normal person can still have principles. In fact, they probably have better principles, because theirs aren’t constantly being rewritten by adrenaline. They can oppose cruelty without becoming cruel, and they can pursue excellence without despising rest. They can care about food without fearing either dinner, dessert or the noble tradition of the cold pizza midnight snack. They can care about politics without surrendering their entire personality to politics. They can be ambitious without turning every hour into a transaction. They can be online without letting the timeline assign them a worldview.

It sounds modest, but it’s hard. We are constantly bombarded with a thousand and one tiny invitations to madness. The invitation to escalate; the invitation to simplify; the invitation to belong through hatred; the invitation to turn insecurity into doctrine; the invitation to convert ordinary discomfort into emergency; the invitation to treat your own life as content; and the invitation to substitute intensity for depth.

Eventually, you have to draw a line in the sand and start saying no to the dopamine hit you get from going too far.

You’ll likely disappoint the folks who want you to be more extreme - because your extremism would validate theirs. The zealot wants company, and the obsessive wants a mirror.

The algorithm wants fresh meat.

The mob wants your voice added to the chant.

The brand wants you to feel deficient.

The guru wants your uncertainty. .

To be normal about things is to preserve a private center that doesn’t get annexed by every passing demand. I can care about this without becoming it. I can improve this without worshiping it. I can be concerned without being consumed. I can participate without surrendering judgment. I can change my mind without staging a conversion narrative. I can be imperfect without making imperfection my brand. I can be serious without being unbearable.

A normal life has room for contradiction.

You can care about nutrition and eat cake at a birthday party. You can care about sleep and stay up late sometimes. You can care about politics and have friends who don’t share your every worldview. You can care about your work and still close your laptop when your kid wants you to play Uno. You can be spiritually curious and still be skeptical of people selling enlightenment subscriptions. You can be disciplined and still be fun. You can be principled and still be kind.

This shouldn’t sound radical. None of it should sound radical. It only does because our culture has become so stupidly binary.

We keep building identities out of overcorrections. One group is reckless about health, so another becomes hysterical about purity. One group ignores politics, so another makes politics metabolize every human interaction. One group glorifies workaholism, so another insists ambition is inherently pathological. One group pathologizes every emotion, another denies emotions matter at all. Back and forth, forever, everyone reacting to the worst version of everyone else.

Stop letting the most annoying person in the opposite camp design your life.

You don’t have to become the inverse of someone else’s stupidity.

You can just be normal about things. You can live a life where you don’t need to make every decision under the pressure of symbolic meaning.

It puts the bar where a human being can reach it repeatedly without becoming deranged.

Refusing to be yanked around by every discourse preserves dignity. Refusing to overfit your life to trends preserves intelligence. Habits that don’t require witnesses build strength. Letting some things pass without turning them into proof of your worldview is maturity.

Just be normal about things.

Eat food that makes you feel decent. Sleep enough. Move your body. Read things that challenge your priors. Be kind to people in real life. Don’t outsource your politics to the angriest person on your feed. Don’t make your body a battleground for someone else’s theory. Don’t confuse self-improvement with self-surveillance. Don’t confuse certainty with wisdom. Don’t confuse being a dick with courage.

Have beliefs. Have standards. Have ambition. Have taste. Have boundaries. Have causes. Have things you refuse to tolerate.

But don’t give every part of yourself to every fight.

Most things need attention, not obsession.

Care, but keep your head.

Rest, but don’t turn it into a competitive sport.

Eat, but don’t join a cult.

Think, but don’t let politics eat your entire personality.

React, but not to everything, and not at full volume.

Learn what deserves your whole self and what deserves a normal, proportionate, adult response.

At the very least - at the bare minimum - it might make us all less annoying on Twitter.

The competent rehearse, revise, double-check, and lie awake wondering when they’ll be found out, while the truly underqualified often move through the world with terrifying confidence.

If you feel like an imposter, that feeling may not be evidence that you don’t belong. It may be evidence that you care enough, and see clearly enough, to keep getting better...

The psychologist Robert Bjork called them desirable difficulties. Learning sticks better when practice is made harder, rather than easier. Students who have to struggle to retrieve an answer remember it longer - and clearer - than students who are handed the same answer with minimal effort on their part. The effort is where the knowledge is actually built. Without effort, knowledge slips away.

Writing runs on the same principle. When you do battle with the language, when you fight a sentence into shape yourself, tooth and nail, you earn the finished prose. You know where the argument bends, you know where the logic goes thin, where one word can do the job of three.

Your struggle leaves fingerprints.

But if a machine hands you a clean paragraph in five seconds, while you sit back and daydream, there are no fingerprints. There can never be fingerprints. The paragraph can be genuinely good, and for all I know, it probably is genuinely good, and that's part of the trouble.

A half-baked idea, that sounds produced and polished and painted is far more dangerous, for any writer, than a rough draft that sounds rough. The rough draft challenges you to aspire to a degree of perfection, or as near to it as you can reliably get. But the polished draft tells you to fuck off, and leave it well enough alone - because isn't it good enough?

Bjork never actually claimed difficulty was a Good on its own, and for its own sake. And I agree - I still believe drudgery is worth killing off, and the tools that kill it are well worth paying for. But the difficulty that builds judgment, and the difficulty of drudgery sometimes look identical from outside; and the only way to tell them apart is to stay close enough to your work - and your words - to feel out which one you're dealing with.

Before you ship the polished and untouched paragraph, ask what part of it you actually decided.

If you're honest, and the answer is "not very much at all,” your work is not done.

You've produced something that looks done.

But it’s not the same thing.

Jean Buridan was a 14th-century French philosopher and logician who twice served as rector of the University of Paris. His subject was the will, and he made an austere claim: the will follows the intellect. Show a rational creature the greater good and it’ll pick the greater good. On Buridan’s account, the will keeps one freedom - the power to defer the intellect’s verdict and call for more inquiry before it acts.

But if the will only moves once reason names a winner, what happens when the options come out entirely even?

Buridan’s posthumous critics illustrated the problem with what became known as Buridan’s Ass: put a standard-issue donkey midway between two identical bales of hay. It has no reason to prefer the left bale to the right, so by Buridan’s own logic it can’t move, and it must stand in place until it starves. The rational animal should hold off and keep deliberating. Suspend action, wait for new information, look harder, and trust that more reflection turns up some asymmetry that lets the animal move. Give reason enough time, and the tie breaks.

While the intellect waits for a reason to decide, the donkey is still hungry. Deliberation happens over time, and living things have to actually eat. A theory of choice that says “wait for sufficient reason,” for an indeterminate stretch, assumes an animal that can afford the wait. So does any other decision process that lets you burn weeks at a time hoping the data will tip on its own.

The donkey’s problem is a constraint that holds for arbiters, circuits, and in fact any system forced to convert a gradient of reasons into a binary act. Even a perfectly rational decider, handed perfectly balanced inputs, has no guarantee of choosing in time. The tie isn’t always breakable on demand. The computer scientist Leslie Lamport argued that “a discrete decision based upon input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time,” and that this “appears to be a fundamental law of nature.” He called it Buridan’s Principle.

Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but the donkey is back.

He’s sitting at your desk, in front of a chat window, asking an AI to help him decide between two product decisions, and he’s getting nowhere.

The donkey is, in fact, you. Before you clutch your pearls or retreat to a safe space, rest assured, he’s me too. He’s every one of us, caught in the recursive loop of AI iteration and feedback, gradually receding into AI indecision.

Let me illustrate. You have to decide whether to sunset a product line that three people depend on, or pour money into it for two more quarters. It’s a captain’s call, and a hard one. So you open a chat and lay it out. The model gives you a clean, fair breakdown: the case for sunsetting, the case for keeping it, and the risks on each side.

Useful, surely?

Helpful, surely?

You then ask it to weigh the factors. And it does, with hedges about how only you know your values. You ask it to assume your values. It asks clarifying questions. You answer them. It generates a recommendation, then notes that the recommendation depends on assumptions you might want to revisit. So, with its help, you revisit them, and the loop begins again. An hour passes, two hours, three days, three weeks of talking and weighing and feeding back again and again, and somehow you’ve still not actually decided anything. You’ve only refined the shape of your indecision.

The models mirror human uncertainty with endless patience. The only thing standing between you and an unbreakable loop is your willingness to keep asking, keep prompting, keep pasting.

Ask a language model whether to take Path A or Path B and it won’t refuse the request entirely. It’ll lay out the considerations on each side, and if you’re using a more recent model it may push back with a hint of firmness. But ask again, and keep asking, and it’ll offer a balance and then immediately surface the conditions under which the recommendation would flip. The model is doing what it was trained to do: give you an analysis and respect your autonomy, while avoiding the confident pronouncement that might mislead you. You came to the model wanting to be pushed, wanting someone or something to break the tie, and you got an oracle that hands the tie-breaking back to you with every prompt.

Decision paralysis predates AI by, conservatively, all of human history. The Stoics worried about it, and so did the medieval scholastics. Thinking and rethinking so thoroughly colonized action in Hamlet that no amount of further thinking could break the loop, with every reflection generating new reasons for more reflection, leading to the famous lines: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

William James, in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, described how deliberation can become its own pathology, a condition he touched on in his discussion of the “obstructed will.” The mind in deliberation generates resistance to its own conclusions, and weighing options can become a posture instead of a passage. James was working within the limits of unaided human cognition, where most people, faced with a hard decision, would eventually exhaust their available perspectives and either decide or not decide, which meant the deliberation had natural endpoints. But AI changes the scale, and those endpoints are now deprecated. You can always generate one more angle, one more historical analogy. Your willingness to keep asking is the only constraint.

Eisenhower, planning the D-Day invasion, gave the order early on June 5, 1944 to launch the next day, despite meteorological uncertainty that would have justified more delay. He’d had his weather briefings and consulted his commanders, but the cost of more deliberation, in his judgment, exceeded the cost of acting on imperfect information. By then, any more information-gathering would have been a way of avoiding the actual act of choosing.

Most of the content of your chat-based deliberations is already known or knowable to you, on some level, before you start typing. The long deliberation will never produce new information; it produces either a permission structure or a way of justifying the choice you’ve already made to the internal critic who’s never, ever satisfied.

AI is the patient ear of that critic.

Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, wrote that we should “live the questions now,” that some answers can only be found by living forward into them. You make the call, you walk down the path, and the path teaches you whether it was the right one. Even that teaching is partial, because the path you didn’t walk is closed and its lessons are unknown.

A Zen story: a student asks the master how to achieve enlightenment. The master says, “Have you eaten your rice?” The student says yes. The master says, “Then wash your bowl.”

Sooner or later, you have to take the next action.

You have to close the tab and make the call.

You have to wash your bowl.

You have to pick a bale of hay and chow down.

The alternative is to starve.

In 1841, Charles MacKay - a Scottish journalist - published a book about the way we lose our minds en masse. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds catalogued tulip speculation, alchemy, the South Sea Bubble, witch hunts, and the slow-burning lunacy of folks who grow so attached to an idea that they can no longer see their way around it.

A few of the ideas Mackay catalogued were, genuinely stupid. But that wasn’t the point; the point was that people were quite easily captured anyway.

People can in fact be captured by any idea that arrives polished enough, at the right moment, to do their own thinking for them. The quality of an idea barely matters, next to the timing // need.

We have a word for this now, thanks for the Wachowskis, and that word is pilled. It seems appropriate; a pill is something you swallow, something that is dissolved into you, that changes your chemistry. After a while, you can’t point to where the substance ends, and you begin. To be pilled is to hand a whole chunk of your perception to a belief system that runs without either your intervention, or your supervision. You take the red pill, the black pill, the doomer pill, the trad pill, the e/acc pill, etc.

I’m not arguing against having strong views. Strong views are, broadly, how anything actually gets done. But you run into all sorts of trouble when your views start holding you, instead of the other way around.

You can test for it, actually - when you meet a new fact, do you ask what it means, or do you simply ask what your framework says about it? If the framework does the answering for you, every time, before you’ve even bothered to look, you’ve stopped using the idea, and the idea’s started using you.

Eric Hoffer saw this, in 1951. He was a Longshoreman, who wrote philosophy on the docks; and he understood how easily fanatics could move between opposing causes. A communist could flip to being a fascist over night, and a fascist could become a communist, etc. The doctrines can change, while the appetite stays the same: an appetite fore belonging to something total, surrendering judgement, and feeling the relief of never needing to weigh the world and its troubles ever again.

The strength of your conviction tells you almost nothing about whether you’re wrong or right; rather, it tells you about your own appetite. Hoffer experienced it up close, among dockworkers and drifters during the Depression. He understood the converts to this cause and that without sneering them - and the pull he describes is the pull toward a self (and a worldview) that, finally, makes sense. A loose, uncertain, contradictory person joins a movement and is made whole, with a villain to blame for their troubles, and a future to march toward, and a tribe to march with.

But the price of a self that makes sense is a self that can’t easily change its mind.

The internet industrialised our appetites. A meme, in the sense and definition that Dawkins gave the world in The Selfish Gene is a unit of culture that replicates by getting copied through human minds. The stickiest ideas spread the furthest - while the truest ideas go approximately nowhere. The winners simply grab onto some emotional circuit and ride it all the way to hell. Which means the ideas competing for room in your head are rarely selected for accuracy; they’re selected for transmissibility, which is hardly the same thing.

Clever people who forget this difference end up sounding like a forwarded email chain or a cooker Facebook thread. I’ve watched it happen to folks a good deal smarter than me, and I’m sure I’ll watch it again. They read a few good threads on a subject, are flattered by the sense of safe refuge, and within a week they’re deploying the standard vocabulary as if they were born to it. The cadence, the in-group references, the ready-made counterarguments, the jargon and all.

They sound incredibly fluent.

But fluency in a worldview is not the same as understanding the world. Not by a long shot.

In fact, it’s frequently the opposite.

You can see it yourself, on every timeline and every feed. The same arguments arrive, in the same order, with the same emphasis - thousands of people, convinced they’ve reasoned their way to a conclusion that was actually installed for them last week by an account they’ve already forgotten.

But they’ll defend that conclusion like it’s in their own blood.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay on politics and language showed how a captured mind stops generating sentences, and pretty quickly starts assembling them from prefab parts. The phrases come pre-stacked, ready for you to reach for the slogan, before you reach for the thought, if you reach for the thought at all.

Orwell had seen the pattern on his own side, among folks fighting for the things he himself believed in. They’d fall for a bad cause - or a bad application - as easily as they’d fall for the good.

A few things help...

1. Take the test. Can you state your own position in plain words you built yourself, right now, without any of the movement's stock phrases? If you can't, you may not actually hold the position. It may be holding you.

2. Keep company with at least one person who disagrees with you and whom you still respect anyway. Not a strawman, and certainly not a useful idiot you keep around to feel superior. You need a sharp mind who still thinks you're wrong about something that matters and still pokes back. As long as they're in your orbit, you know the question is still open. Most of the pilled have purged everyone like that from their lives - which is why they feel so certain. Certainty is relatively easy to maintain, once you've removed every voice that might puncture it.

3. Read the strongest version of the thing you reject - the book your smarter opponents cite, not the dumbest tweet you can find from the other side. If you can't argue their case well enough that they'd nod along, you don't understand your own position either. You simply understand a cartoon of both.

4. Watch your own vocabulary. When you catch yourself reaching for the same five phrases your tribe uses, stop and force yourself to say it differently. If you can't, you might be borrowing the thought underneath.

5. And keep a record of what you predict. The captured mind never tracks its predictions, but it's the only way you discover that your beautiful framework has been wrong for two years. Write down what you expect to happen and check later. Nothing dissolves a pill faster than a record of its failures.

I think it's worth remembering: the un-pilled state isn't actually natural.

We didn't evolve to seek truth. We evolved to stay in the group, win arguments, and feel certain enough to act. You were never built to prize accuracy. You were built to prize belonging, and a totalising idea hands you exactly that.

You have to keep re-earning your state, daily, against your own wiring and against an information system built to capture you for profit. The platforms want you pilled, because a captured user is a predictable user, and a predictable user pays in a way a thoughtful one never does. Right now thousands of people whose whole job is to install a worldview in you and keep it running are aiming at your attention. Some sell politics. Some sell crypto or wellness or productivity or a well-honed flavour of nihilism. The pill varies from seller to seller. The business model underneath stays suspiciously stable.

Hold your ideas in your hand where you can see them, instead of letting them see for you. Learn to love a framework while staying willing to break it. And never mistake the cheap (and getting cheaper) relief of certainty for proof.

Be thou not pilled. The only conviction worth having is the kind you could lose tomorrow and survive the loss of it.

At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry one good version of a thing, refuse the other nine, and eat the customers you lose in exchange for the trouble you save everyone else.

Jim Sinegal, his mentee, carried that habit into Costco in 1983. A Costco warehouse stocks around 4,000 items; while a supermarket runs 30,000 or more, and Amazon runs into the millions. A Costco buyer looks after fewer than 200 products and spends the extra time that buys deciding which ones earn the floor space, killing the underperformers, and doubling down on the winners. By the time you push your trolley through the door, someone has already rejected almost everything that could have been there.

Most of the internet runs on the opposite instinct. Pile the shelf higher, add the SKU, take the margin, say yes to everything. And the people using it are worn out.

I'd bet the next decade runs the other way. People don't want infinite choice anymore; they want fewer decisions inside places where someone has already thrown out the worst options.

Call it the Costco theory of the internet.

For 20 years we built the internet around abundance: more products, more creators, more opinions, more newsletters, more podcasts, more apps, more tools, more marketplaces, more feeds. The founding promise was access: anything, from anyone, anywhere, instantly. No gatekeepers, no scarcity, no permission. The shelf went infinite.

For a while that felt like freedom.

And then it turned into drudgery...

Every ordinary decision now comes with a research burden. Buying a toaster means reading reviews, scanning Reddit, distrusting half the reviews, checking YouTube comparisons, searching for "best toaster no affiliate," then wondering whether the person recommending the toaster is paid, deluded, or defending the thing they already bought. Choosing project management software turns into a 6-week intellectual collapse involving Notion, Linear, ClickUp, Basecamp, Airtable, Todoist, Things, a whiteboard, a notebook, and some founder on X insisting that the wrong task app is why your company has no momentum...

The internet gave us access to anything, and then forced us to consume everything, and then made us responsible for sorting all of it.

The modern consumer has become a part-time procurement department. We audit quality, decode incentives, compare vendors, scan reviews, avoid scams, dodge subscriptions, read refund policies, assess creators, inspect screenshots, and attempt, against all odds, to tell actual expertise apart from people who bought a microphone.

This is considered normal behaviour now.

And it's deranged.

The sane response to all this is, I think, a form of bounded trust.

Costco never promised perfect quality or the best product in every category; and it isn't doesn't claim to be a temple of taste. It sells enormous muffins, bulk socks, patio furniture, protein shakes, car tyres, petrol, hearing aids, rotisserie chickens, appliances, and tubs of dip large enough to drown any and all sorrows.

But more than that: Costco sells a higher floor.

Their promise comes down to two things:

1. you probably won't get ripped off, and

2. you don't have to inspect 900 versions of the same item.

Costco doesn't necessarily take judgement away from you. But it does absorb enough of the evaluation that shopping feels sane again, limiting the shelf, buying with discipline, backing Kirkland Signature with its own name, keeping prices legible, and standing behind the lot with a return policy that assumes you're honest. You don't wander a marketplace full of fake brands, sponsored clutter, manipulated reviews, counterfeit risk, and algorithmic sewage.

Nobody walks into Costco believing every item is elite. They walk in trusting that the floor is higher than the open market, and they'll pay for that trust.

The internet doesn't need more curation in the precious boutique sense. It needs operators who cut fraud, noise, decision fatigue, and bullshit, and who clear the garbage off the floor before you arrive.

Amazon deploys abundance logic in soul-destroying reverse. It has everything, which by now means it has too much. You can still find good things there (or so I'm told), but you do the sorting, and it's very much a case of buyer beware - seriously, buyer fucking beware: parsing the brand names, the reviews, the images, the delivery dates, the sponsored placements, the counterfeit risk, and the chance that a product with 18,000 5-star reviews still singes off your eyebrows is down to you.

A world drowning in options will pay good money for someone else's refusal. Because refusal has become a premium service.

More results stop helping once the results are polluted. Reviews that are fake, incentivised, or written by people with no standards don't improve by multiplying. Creators performing expertise for an algorithm don't add up to expertise. Tools that keep making the same bullshit claim to replace every other tool cancel each other out. And more options stop being a gift the moment you have to become an amateur fraud analyst to choose between them.

The internet's problem has moved from access to trust.

We can find anything. We can't easily tell what deserves our belief, our money, our time, our attention, or our adoption. The old internet solved scarcity; the new internet has to solve filtration, and filtration and aggregation are vastly different jobs.

Aggregation scales because it dodges responsibility. Open the gates, index the world, invite the vendors, let the users sort, take a cut. That became the dominant model because it suited the economics of software: more supply made more surface area, more surface area made more searching, more searching made more money.

Every open system becomes a target for the people gaming it. SEO gaming, review gaming, marketplace gaming, social gaming, recommendation gaming, affiliate gaming, attention gaming. The larger the platform, the stronger the pull to manipulate it. Eventually the user starts paying the tax, spending more time verifying, comparing, doubting, checking, and defending themselves against the system.

Costco-style trust starts when the operator takes - at least - some of that tax back.

A trusted operator narrows the field first, making the choices in advance and accepting the cost of everything it leaves out. Then it absorbs the complexity, doing the dull part before you get there: testing, comparing, rejecting, negotiating, standardising. Then it holds the floor. It doesn't have to make every item extraordinary, it only has to clear the obvious junk and keep a baseline you can feel the moment you walk in.

Most internet businesses miss this. You build trust by making the customer feel less exposed. Announcing your own excellence does nothing.

A marketplace makes you inspect everything. A trusted operator lets you relax, and in some categories that relaxation is the entire product.

Think about the felt difference between buying from a chaotic marketplace and buying from a retailer you trust. In the first, you're on guard the whole time, because every image might mislead you, every review might be bought, every brand might be a shell, every discount might be bait, every result might have paid its way to the top. You'll probably still get what you need. You'll get it defensively.

In the second, you still choose, but you choose inside a zone of lowered suspicion, because the retailer has put skin in the game. Sell you something bad and its reputation pays. Price something absurdly and the relationship cools. Make the returns hostile and the trust drains out. You might never put any of this into words. You feel all of it.

The internet is starved for that feeling.

And it goes well beyond retail...

A Costco-shaped media company wouldn't publish 200 takes a day. It would publish fewer pieces with a higher floor. Readers would show up because it spares them the feed, and it would earn its keep through what it refuses to run.

A Costco-shaped software company wouldn't sell a platform with 70 use cases, 11 pricing tiers, and a thousand features. It would make a clear promise to a clear user. It would end the internal debate. It would say: for this kind of team, doing this kind of work, this is the system. Use it and // or move on.

A Costco-shaped agency wouldn't offer every service that can technically be billed. It would define its shelf. It would turn down bad-fit clients, weak briefs, vanity deliverables, pointless retainers, and work that makes the operator richer while leaving the client more confused. Its standards would be part of the offer.

A Costco-shaped community wouldn't confuse growth with health. It would moderate hard, keep its standards visible, and guard the useful conversation from people who treat every room as a stage, because the health of a community depends on who it removes as much as who it lets in.

A Costco-shaped creator wouldn't post every half-formed thought chasing reach. They'd become a reliable filter. Their audience would trust their judgement because they show restraint, and in a world of constant output restraint becomes a signal.

The internet trained all of us to fear leaving something out. More pages mean more search traffic, more products mean more revenue, more posts mean more shots at virality, more features mean more markets, more services mean more deal flow.

Saying yes has become cheap. Yes to more inventory, more formats, more creators, more sponsors, more categories, more features, more partnerships, more slop, as long as it performs.

The next premium goes to whoever can say no and survive the revenue they walk away from.

Bullshit pays, at least in the short term. Low-quality suppliers pay, bad-fit clients pay, sponsored placements pay, mediocre content pulls clicks, extra features close deals, fake urgency lifts conversion, confusing pricing pulls more money out of people, dark patterns move the metrics. A growth team can always find a way to monetise confusion - and plenty of internet businesses start to rot the moment they work out that confusion is profitable.

The Costco theory says: sell relief, instead. Make people feel that someone competent is handling the market for them.

This is why the membership model works as well as it does. Costco runs as a relationship with an institution, and the annual fee puts the trust down in a contract, in black and white. You hand over money, habit, attention, and your default preference, and in return Costco has to keep the thing worth renewing every year.

It's a different game from the open web's casual opportunism. The mass internet wants traffic and optimises for clicks. The Costco internet wants repeat belief and optimises for "I'll just get it there."

"I'll just get it there" means the customer has taken you out of the comparison set. You've stopped fighting transaction by transaction. You've become infrastructure in someone's life - AKA, the default answer before the question is even formed.

Every founder says they want loyalty, but (time and time again) they build the machine that kills it. They overcomplicate the product, dilute the brand, chase adjacent customers, bolt on tiers nobody understands, publish filler, wave bad actors into the marketplace, swap human judgement for engagement metrics, and reach for pricing tricks, urgency tricks, retention tricks, interface tricks...

People commit when commitment lowers their anxiety. They pay when the payment buys them standards, accept fewer options when the survivors are safer, tolerate constraint when it comes from competence, and come back when the operator has proven that trust beats another night of searching.

A brand is a pattern of kept promises. Over time, people learn what you allow, what you reject, what you repeat, what you protect, what you punish, and on what and where you refuse to compromise.

Digital brands (and particularly the current era of influencer founded DTC companies) run this backwards, blurring their standards over time. They start with a point of view and end as a marketplace, or they start with taste and end as inventory, or they start with a community and end as a growth channel, or they start with a product and end as a bundle of loosely related monetisation experiments.

At no point do they stop to answer:

What do you let in? Who do you let near it? What do you push? What do you kill? What do you refund? What do you ignore? What earns the no?

AI means we can now produce content, software, images, video, music, analysis, pitch decks, landing pages, sales emails, reports, strategies, and whole micro-products at near-zero marginal cost - and so the shelf expands again, and the flood rises. The average unit of internet output gets cheaper, faster, and less trustworthy at the same time.

When production turns abundant, selection turns scarce. Raw output stops being the scarce thing - because the scarce thing is someone willing to tell you which output deserves your attention, which vendor is real, which product works, which argument holds, which plan makes sense, which tool is worth adopting, which document to read and which to delete before it costs you another minute.

The winners here will be operators with both A) taste and B) the power to enforce it. Taste without enforcement turns into slop. Enforcement without taste turns into bureaucracy.

The shallow version of this will be boutiques, directories, newsletters, AI wrappers, and "handpicked" marketplaces that wrap a tasteful interface around ordinary affiliate arbitrage; and of course, it won't last. People can smell fake standards. They know when a list exists to help them and when it exists to monetise their confusion. They know when the operator has actually turned down good money to protect the shelf.

The better version will be companies and people who make trust operational. They'll publish their criteria, keep the offering narrow, explain the tradeoffs in plain language, cut the items that underperform, and refuse to become a dumping ground, so that every interaction leaves the customer's life a little simpler.

The test: does dealing with you lower the load in someone's head, or add to it? If it adds, you're part of the noise.

A Costco-shaped business sells:

1. relief from evaluation

2. the feeling that someone competent has gone ahead with a machete and cleared the path

3. a smaller world that works better than the larger one.

The internet's current default setting is actively hostile to sustained attention. Everything asks for a decision, wants a preference, requests a subscription, a rating, a login, a notification permission, a plan, a personalised feed, an upsell, a dashboard, a profile, a follow, a like, a reaction, a review. The strongest customer experience on offer might soon come down to three words: we handled it.

It can be whole business model, if you let it, but only when it's true.

You can't fake the Costco theory with branding. You can't write your way into trust while the shelf is garbage, can't design your way out of weak standards, can't pose as a filter while the market dumps trash through your side door. It takes operational severity, the real kind.

The operator has to disappoint suppliers, partners, clients, contributors, sometimes the customers themselves. They have to pick the long-term trust account over the short-term revenue hit, and accept that every low-quality thing they wave through taxes the whole system. One bad product makes you inspect the next ten. One lazy essay makes you doubt the whole publication. One weak hire makes the team start to lower the bar. One incoherent feature makes the user wonder who's steering.

A low tolerance for bullshit has to run as an operating system, built it into how the place works.

In practice that means you remove things, you simplify, you say no earlier than feels comfortable. You define what good actually means and then make the standard explicit enough that people can test you against it. You refund when you fail, cut the features that confuse the product, stop publishing when you've nothing worth saying, turn down the clients who'd drag the standard down, and refuse any form of scale that lowers the bar.

Anyone can launch a store, start a newsletter, build a course, spin up a community, publish a directory, open a marketplace, wrap an AI model in a UI. Creation stopped being the test a while ago.

Literally, anyone.

The test now is whether people can trust you to exclude.

The Costco theory of the internet is simple. People are tired of sorting. Tired of comparison, fake reviews, infinite tabs, marketplaces that play like casinos, creators who recommend everything, software that needs a consultant to explain its pricing page, experts with hidden incentives, brands that treat their attention as something to strip-mine.

Most of the time they'd take a safer set of things over the theoretically best one. They want fewer decisions and a higher floor. They want someone with the reputation and buying power to bin the obvious garbage before they walk in. They want the kind of constraint that protects them.

None of this kills abundance. The infinite shelf stays. Some people will always want to browse, research, compare, optimise, hunt for the edge. But across a lot of categories the centre of gravity is moving.

The new edition of Permissionless is now free

I’m releasing a new edition of my book Permissionless today. I've rewritten it from the ground up: clearer, sharper, and rebuilt around the ideas I think matter most in this moment. And it’s entirely free.
You can read it here!

A man named Harry Readford once stole close to 1,000 head of cattle from Bowen Downs station in central Queensland and drove them south, down through the Channel Country and along the Strzelecki Track into South Australia - across a stretch of desert the squatters swore no herd could cross alive.

Redford pulled it off. A jury even acquitted him, so taken were they with the sheer cheek of it all that they waved the evidence away. The cattle, for their part, walked across a desert and nobody asked how they felt about it.

Rolf Boldrewood turned Readford into Captain Starlight in Robbery Under Arms in 1888, and the colony fell for the thief and forgot the herd entirely.

Cattle don't get dramatic novelisations, you see.

Cattle are only driven.

And that word - driven - eats at me.

We apply it to each other all the time; but we don’t think about what it actually means. Well, it means a fellow at the back of the herd, a stockwhip in his hand, driving in a direction the animals never picked. "Drive" comes straight off the stockyard. To drive a beast is to push it somewhere it would never wander on its own.

When somebody calls me driven, I picture a herd.

I know it’s intended as praise; that’s why it shows up in profiles and eulogies and Linkedin exultations and so on. He was so driven. She was the most driven person in the building. Look at the driven founder, head down, half-possessed, etc.

But “driven" is a past participle, the passive shape of a verb that can't function without an actor. A door gets opened by a hand. A fence gets built by a crew. A person gets driven by...well, that's the question, isn't it?

To take the compliment, you have to accept that something outside of you is doing the pushing and you're merely the load being shifted. It’s the preposition tucked inside the word - driven by - pointing back over your shoulder, at a parent, a wound, a rival, a share price etc.

Whoever holds the goad picks the route. Give it to a quarterly target and you'll chase the target down. Give it to an old humiliation and you'll chase that instead, for 30 years, until you’ve nothing left to give. You'll cover enormous ground at speed and arrive somewhere you never chose.

When someone is described to me as driven, I watch what they do when the pressure comes off. The driven get restless inside a week and pick a fight with their own calendar. They can't sit still in an empty afternoon, because an empty afternoon has no one in it to run from. The drivers, with their hands on the reins, ease off and look around, then start moving again once they've decided where to go.

Readford’s herd covered more distance than I ever will.

But it never got to say where it was headed.

Or whether the walk was worth the dust.

Demosthenes lost his first appearance before the Athenian assembly. His voice came out thin and failed him mid-sentence, and the crowd laughed him off the platform. Plutarch tells us he walked home with his cloak pulled over his face, certain his public life had ended before it started.

What he did next settled the rest of his career. He dug out an underground study and shaved half his head, so that he'd stay indoors at his exercises for months, too ashamed to be seen. He crammed pebbles into his mouth and made himself speak around them. Climbing steep ground, he recited long passages, and he pitched his voice against the crash of the sea so that a hostile crowd could never break his rhythm again. He walked out of that hole as the finest orator Greece produced, the man who roused Athens against Philip of Macedon.

Nobody handed him any of it. He built it out of repeated failure and a stubborn refusal to accept the verdict of one bad afternoon.

The story we keep telling

We tell ourselves a flattering story about greatness. Some people get born for it, the gift already in them, coiled and waiting. We keep that story alive because it lets everyone off the hook. If you have to be marked for it from the start, then the people who reach it were always going to, the rest of us were never meant to, and nobody has to attempt anything that might hurt.

Anyone who reads the biographies finds the opposite. The people we file under genius turn out to be the ones who put in absurd quantities of hard, unwitnessed work before anyone noticed them. Some of them carried obvious aptitude, sure, but they fed it for years before they made it into something worth paying to see.

Where the "naturals" come from...

People reach for Mozart first to defend the destiny myth. They point at a child composing music at 5, call it proof of something supernatural in the blood, then skip what came before: Leopold Mozart, a professional teacher who wanted a prodigy for a son, started drilling the boy before he could read. By the time Wolfgang wrote anything we still perform, his father had put him through daily lessons for more than a decade.

The psychologist Anders Ericsson studied expert performers for most of his life and set out his findings in Peak, published in 2016. He found the same thing wherever he looked, among violinists, chess players, athletes and surgeons. The standout was the person who started young and put in more hours, whatever wiring they happened to be born with.

Ted Williams, who has a fair claim to being the best hitter baseball has seen, swung until the skin came off his hands. He liked to point out that nobody turned into a hitter by strolling up to the plate. Eliud Kipchoge, in his 40s, still grinds through the same training blocks he ran as a nobody, out of a bare camp in Kenya's Rift Valley, logging every kilometre by hand.

James Dyson built 5,126 failed prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner across the early 1980s before the 5,127th held together. No factory backed him and no investor believed in the idea. The established manufacturers turned him away one after another, because they made their margin selling bags and his machine needed none. The man with a multibillion-pound company today was broke through all of it, alone in a workshop, getting it wrong more than 5,000 times before anyone called him an inventor.

None of these people waited for a calling. They went and earned the thing, one repetition at a time, while it was still ugly and unrewarded.

...And what the myth costs

People who believe in destiny pay a price for it. They turn brittle, because they take their first hard setback as proof they were wrong about themselves, a sign the gift has run dry. Carol Dweck documented this in Mindset in 2006. Children praised for being clever, rather than for effort, dodged hard problems and folded when stuck, because failing one would expose the label as a lie.

The rest of us sit on our hands. People wait for a sign that they belong, and no one ever sends it, because that's not how any of this happens. Demosthenes got no sign. He got an underground hole, a half-shaved head, a mouthful of pebbles and the roar of the sea.

The people who make it tell the destiny story too, once they've arrived. Looking back, they compress the grind into a clean line and leave the years of doubt out, until what remains sounds like a gift that unfolded on schedule. By retelling it that way, they teach everyone behind them the wrong lesson, and another generation believes it.

Earned greatness looks nothing like the myth.

Picture the thousandth repetition of a thing you fumbled on your first attempt, and the long stretch when nobody is watching. Behind that are the friends who lose patience, the savings that drain, the steadier job you turned down and the years that pass with no proof you were right. Other people add the glamour later, once the result is plain to see and you've already paid for it.

There's a version of you that keeps waiting to feel chosen, and a version that goes down into the hole and gets to work. The first one keeps waiting.

Nobody is born holding greatness.

People build it in the dark, with pebbles in the mouth, long before anyone arrives to applaud.

In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical student dissecting a cadaver. The work was painstaking, derivative on its face, and (as it turned out) the foundation of everything Bach would become. Once he'd absorbed the architecture of the Italian concerto, he produced the Brandenburg Concertos, music that sounds nothing like Vivaldi and could only have come from Bach.

The conventional warning is that you shouldn't copy because copying is theft. Austin Kleon's bestseller (Steal Like an Artist, 2012) tried to rescue copying from this stigma by reframing it as the basis of all creative work. He was right; but what does the heist look like, when it works?

The transcription test

When you copy a Vivaldi concerto into a manuscript by hand, you're not producing a Vivaldi concerto - nobody would think that. But you are forced to interpret a thousand small decisions about how the music coheres, why one voice enters on a particular beat, what makes the ritornello structure hold. You learn, through your fingers, why something works.

Hunter S. Thompson did this with prose. In his early twenties, working as a copyboy at Time magazine, he typed out the complete texts of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. The point was never to plagiarise Fitzgerald or Hemingway; Thompson wanted to feel, in his hands, the weight of a good sentence.

Two motives separate good copying from bad copying.

One copies to produce a finished thing. The other copies to understand a process. The first motive yields imitations; the second yields apprenticeships.

What surface imitation gets wrong

A young writer who reads Cormac McCarthy and decides the trick is zero quotation marks is making a classic error. The aspiring filmmaker who thinks Wes Anderson reduces to symmetrical framing and warm yellow tones is doing the same. Steve Jobs gets reverse-engineered into a black turtleneck; Brian Eno collapses into longer reverb tails. Etc.

These are cargo cult creators.

The South Pacific islanders who built bamboo control towers after the war ended believed that if they replicated the surface details of an American airstrip, the planes would return with cargo. The towers were elaborate, and the construction careful. But the planes never come back.

Cargo cult creativity makes the same error. It assumes the visible artefact is the cause of the result, when the visible artefact is the consequence of something deeper and hidden. McCarthy's omitted punctuation is a consequence of how he thinks about voice, about the unbroken pressure of a sentence, about what a comma costs in narrative momentum. Strip the punctuation from another writer's prose and you don't get McCarthy; you get a manuscript that's harder to read for no good reason.

The imitators fail because they copy the wrong layer.

Influence as collision

Picasso said he wanted to draw like Raphael, and then spent his life learning to draw like a child. In 1957, at age 75, he locked himself in his villa in Cannes and produced 58 paintings reinterpreting Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656). He preserved the composition and the spatial relationships; the cast remained intact: the infanta, the dwarf, the dog, and the painter in the background. He produced a body of work that no one would mistake for Velázquez.

The Velázquez composition served as the immovable object. Picasso's cubist habits and Spanish political grief served as the moving force. The 58 paintings record what happened at the point of impact.

A violent collision is closer to the actual mechanism of influence than any of the polite formulations about being "inspired by" something. Influence operates as collision; the thing you make becomes original to the degree that your own concerns and limitations distort whatever you took in. Bowie cut up his lyrics using William Burroughs's method. Hilary Mantel built Wolf Hall on the bones of Holinshed's Chronicles. Sondheim wrote Sweeney Todd through the lens of Bernard Herrmann's film scores. Tarantino made an entire career out of the friction between exploitation cinema and an obsessive's encyclopaedic memory of it.

Their motive was to absorb something specific and put it under pressure. The originality came out the other end as a by-product.

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) maps, episode by episode, onto Homer's Odyssey, written some twenty-seven centuries earlier. Joyce kept the scaffolding intact: the wanderer, the long way home, the underworld, the encounter with the dead, the suitors at the gate. He even prepared a private schema (the Linati and Gilbert schemas) mapping each chapter to a Homeric episode, an organ of the body, a colour, and a technique. The borrowing was total. And the result is a book that nobody mistakes for Homer, because the friction between an ancient epic and a single day in 1904 Dublin produced something the original Greek could never have generated. The structural borrowing freed Joyce to do what was actually new: a prose technique that bends to fit each chapter's subject. He took the bones precisely so he could invent the flesh.

The two questions

When you encounter a piece of work that moves you, there's a fork in the road. You can ask "what does this look like?" or you can ask "why does this work?"

Saul Bellow once said that a writer is a reader moved to emulation. The emulation he meant was the urge to do, yourself, what you had felt done to you by a great book. That urge has very little to do with sentence structure and a lot to do with effect: I want my readers to feel this thing I just felt.

The means come second.

If you can articulate what a piece of work is trying to do, you can borrow its method without inheriting its appearance. But if you can describe only what the work looks like, you'll produce a version that looks awfully similar and actually does nothing.

The fingerprint problem

Beginners worry about whether their work is original. Pros worry about whether their work is honest. These anxieties are incompatible - and they produce different working lives.

Originality, as a goal, is incoherent. Nobody starts from nothing. Every painter has seen paintings. Every writer has read books. The mind that produces "original" work is a mind that's already been shaped by thousands of inputs, most of which it can no longer name.

What we recognise as a personal style is the particular ratio of influences. Murakami plus Carver plus jazz plus marathon running is what produces a Murakami. Subtract any of those and you get someone else.

The question "is my work too derivative?" tends to be the wrong question entirely. The better question is whether you've absorbed enough different things, and absorbed them with enough seriousness, that the combination is uncopyable. A writer who's only ever read three contemporary literary novelists will produce derivative work no matter how hard he pushes against it. A writer who's read those three plus Cicero plus Joan Didion plus theological treatises plus aviation manuals has too many vectors to ever come out sounding like any one of them.

Range is the cure.

When the surface is free

For most of history, surface-level imitation took a good deal of effort. Only a talented painter in their right could forge the work of another - producing something that looked like a Caravaggio meant spending years learning to paint. Producing something that read like Hemingway meant writing thousands of pages of bad sentences first. The skill needed to imitate the surface was, in itself, the apprenticeship that taught you the depth. Surface and substance were welded together by the cost of the work.

Large language models have broken that arrangement; a model can produce a thousand-word piece in the style of any well-known writer, with the correct surface features, in about four seconds. The barrier to imitation is crumbling.

What then?

When anyone can summon the surface of any voice in seconds, the surface becomes a commodity; what remains scarce is the underlying judgement - what to say in that voice, what to leave out, why a particular reference earns its place, when to drop the voice entirely.

The visible parts are now cheap.

The invisible parts are the whole ballgame.

What the apprenticeship actually involves

There is no shortcut. Not to this, not to anything.

If you want to be inspired without copying, you have to spend time inside the work that moves you. Skimming it doesn't count, and neither does gesturing at it on a podcast. You have to sit with it long enough to map its decisions, identify its constraints, and understand what got rejected as well as much as what got kept. You have to be able to articulate the work in your own terms before you can transmute it into your own forms.

The writer who reads only writers, the designer who looks only at design, the founder who studies only founders, is starving the engine. The collisions that produce something new tend to come from oblique angles. The richest period of European painting (the Dutch Golden Age) overlapped with a flood of trade in spices, optics, cartography, and lens-making. Vermeer, after all, learned about light from instrument-makers; originality is downstream of variety. It must be.

You have to be patient with the gap. Years of input precede any output worth keeping. Bach copied Vivaldi for years before the Brandenburgs. Picasso painted in classical mode for two decades before cubism. Joni Mitchell played other people's standards in coffee houses for years before Blue. Hunter Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby and then spent fifteen years writing journalism that no one could ever mistake for Fitzgerald.

These are long, long stretches of work that looked, from outside, like nothing was happening. Inside, the inputs were being broken down into their components, sorted, and rebuilt as something the practitioner could call their own. The temptation, especially now, is to skip this phase by trusting a model to deliver the surface without the years. That temptation should be refused for the same reason a virtuoso refuses to lip-sync: the work that bypasses the apprenticeship produces no apprentice, only an output. And an output is not enough.

The work you're trying to do hasn't been done yet, because you haven't done it. Nobody else will do it for you. The route is through, not around.

In a few hundred years, someone might transcribe your work by hand to understand how it holds together. That's not a bad goal, in itself.

Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. 

In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired Doyle Dane Bernbach and asked them to do something useful with the worst hand in the industry.

The campaign DDB produced ran a single line: 

"Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder."

Within a year, Avis had moved from $3.2 million in losses to $1.2 million in profit. The cars hadn't changed. The locations hadn't changed. The pricing hadn't changed; but the story they told about themselves had, and they let that story do the work.

What positioning is

Positioning is the answer to a question every customer asks before they decide whether to care about your product: "What is this, and why should it matter to me right now?"

Before you have a product, and well before you have an investor, you need to have an answer to that question - and you need it in a single // simple sentence. Nobody is going to do the cognitive work for you; they'll categorise your product based on whatever signal they catch in the first three seconds, and the category, once set, is near-impossible to dislodge.

The category - the box they put you in - determines who you compete with, what price they expect to pay, what features they expect you to have, and what story you're allowed to tell. Get the category right and you set the terms; get it wrong and you spend the rest of your life arguing with the market about who and what you are.

Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981. The book makes a forty-year-old argument that the war is fought in the customer's head, where there's no spare room and no patience for new claims.

The most expensive mistake founders make

The vast majority of founding teams treat positioning as a marketing exercise: Something the marketing team does after the product is built; something you put on the homepage when you're ready to launch.

This is both wrong - and expensive.

Positioning is upstream of marketing. It's upstream of product, pricing, hiring, fundraising, and PR. It determines what you build, who you sell to, what you charge, and what investors think you are. A company with clear positioning ships faster and raises at higher multiples because every decision flows from the same understood centre.

A company without clear positioning ships features that contradict each other and hires people who can't agree on what the company does.

I've worked with companies that had product-market fit and were still failing because no two people inside the building could finish the sentence: "We are the _____ for _____." When the founders can't agree, the sales team improvises, and the marketing team writes copy that doesn't ladder up to anything coherent.

The messaging spine

Every positioning piece should open with a messaging spine. It's the series of claims and narrative touchpoints that hold up an entire company. Decks, websites, sales scripts, hiring materials etc all come later.

A spine has four parts.

1. The first is the category. What kind of thing are you? What bucket do you belong in? A category is a shortcut, telling the customer how to think about you in a half-second of attention. If your category is wrong or fuzzy, every downstream message leaks energy trying to fix it.

2. The second is the audience. Who is this for, in specifics? "Businesses," "developers," and "creators" are broad nouns that fall apart under any pressure. A real audience description names a role and a moment. "Heads of compliance at mid-market fintechs trying to pass their first SOC 2" is an audience. "Modern professionals" is a hallucination.

3. The third is the alternative. What are they doing today instead of using you? This is the question most founders skip, and it's the one that matters most. Customers don't compare you to nothing. They compare you to the spreadsheet they've used for eight years, to the agency they hired last quarter, to the open-source tool they already know, or to the colleague who handled it last month. Until you name the alternative, you can't claim the wedge.

4. The fourth is the wedge. What's the single sharp thing you do better than the alternative? One thing, expressed so cleanly that a customer can repeat it back to a colleague without stumbling.

When the spine is right, every other piece of copy in the company writes itself.

Narrative is positioning told over time

Positioning is the static claim, but narrative is the moving picture.

A company can hold a single positioning statement for years, and most should; but the narrative around that statement has to evolve, because the world evolves and your competition evolves with it.

Stripe's positioning has been close to constant since 2010: payment infrastructure for the internet. The narrative around it has cycled through a dozen variations; in the early years they talked to developers about seven lines of code. By 2015 they were talking to CFOs about reducing fraud and reconciliation overhead. By 2020 they were telling Fortune 500 boards that they were the operating system for global commerce. But the spine held steady across each story.

Most companies get this backwards; they keep the narrative fixed and let the positioning drift. The pitch deck still says what it said three years ago, while the product has wandered into a new category and the leadership team is pretending it hasn't.

The remedy is to write the spine down, share it with everyone who joins the company, and revisit it once a year with the discipline of a financial audit.

Position against something specific

Every position works through contrast. The claim says you're better than something, simpler than something, more honest than something, or designed for someone the alternative ignores.

When Salesforce launched in 2000, they positioned themselves against “software” itself. "No software." Every piece of collateral pointed at the same enemy: installed enterprise software that took twelve months to deploy and cost millions in services. Customers didn't have to understand SaaS as a category. They had to understand they were tired of waiting for IT to install Siebel.

Pick your enemy with care. It should be big enough to matter, recognisable enough that customers already have an opinion about it, beatable enough that your wedge works against it, and unable to follow you into the corner you're claiming.

The wrong enemy is another startup nobody's heard of. The wrong enemy is the abstract status quo of "manual processes," because nobody buys against an abstraction. The right enemy has either a name and a market cap, or a behavioural pattern your audience can picture without effort.

The category gambit

Sometimes the right move is to claim an existing category.

Sometimes the right move is to invent a new one.

Inventing a category is harder and more expensive than founders think. The standard venture advice is to "create a new category and dominate it," and most who try this fail because they don't have the budget, the airtime, the patience, or the distribution to teach the market a new word.

When category creation works, it's because someone with serious distribution put their full weight behind a single term until the market repeated it back. HubSpot did this with inbound marketing. Drift did it with conversational marketing. Gong did it with revenue intelligence. Datadog did it with observability. Each company spent years publishing books and running conferences under a single banner until journalists and analysts stopped questioning whether the category was real.

If you're a seed-stage company with $2 million in the bank, you can't afford to create a category; but you can afford to claim a corner of an existing one, and own it harder than anyone else does. This is the Avis play: you don't need to invent the rental car. You need to be the company that tries harder than Hertz.

The category gambit gets misread because the visible examples are the winners. The failed attempts at category creation don't get studied. For every Drift, there are twenty companies that tried to coin a term, ran out of money before the market adopted it, pivoted into someone else's category, and disappeared from view.

What investors actually buy

Founders raising venture money tend to treat the pitch deck as a product spec. The deck explains what the product does, how the technology works, why the team is qualified to build it, and how the market is large enough to matter.

This is also wrong.

Investors fund stories about products. The deck is a narrative artefact, and its job is to make a partner at a fund repeat your story in a Monday morning meeting without garbling it. If the story collapses when an underprepared partner retells it on three hours of sleep, the deck has failed at the only thing decks exist for.

The best decks I've worked on open with a claim about the world. The product comes in around slide six, after the world has been described in a way that makes the product feel inevitable. Something has changed, something is broken, and the audience half-believes it already but hasn't seen it written down with any precision.

Founders skip this because they think the world-claim is obvious. It rarely is, even to the founders who built the company. The investor sees fifteen decks a week and starts each one cold. The first three slides install the worldview that makes everything that follows feel like the logical conclusion of a premise they've already accepted.

Copy as evidence

Every word on the homepage either confirms the positioning or contradicts it. There's no such thing as neutral copy and there should be no such thing as filler. A hero headline that says "Empower your team" contradicts the positioning of every company that uses it, because the words do no work and the customer has read the same line on a hundred other websites that week.

Specific words confirm positioning; vague words dissolve it. "We process two billion dollars a year in same-day payouts for marketplaces" is a positioning sentence. "We make payments easy" is a marketing hallucination that any company in the category could have written.

A good test: take your homepage copy, swap your company name for a competitor's, and see if the sentences still make sense.

If they do, you've written wallpaper.

The same test applies to investor decks, sales scripts, hiring pages, and press releases. If a competitor could lift your copy verbatim and use it without changing anything, you've written nothing of your own.

The pricing tell

A consultancy charging $4,000 a month is in a different category from one charging $40,000 a month, regardless of what either website claims. A SaaS product priced at $19 a seat competes in a different market from one priced at $19,000 a year, even when the feature lists overlap. The price tells the customer which competitive set you're in, and the customer believes the price more than they believe the copy.

Founders who underprice are doing it because they don't trust their own positioning. They worry that customers will balk, so they hedge by setting a number nobody could object to. The result is that nobody treats them as serious peers, because cheap reads as low-stakes, and low-stakes products don't get bought by buyers with real budget authority.

The correction is to price for the position you want, and let the positioning catch up to the number. If the plan is to sell to enterprise, an SMB price contradicts the plan on contact.

The number itself is a positioning claim, and underpricing is a way of telling the market you don't believe what your own homepage says.

Hiring is downstream of narrative

People want to work for companies whose story they can repeat at a dinner party without sounding ridiculous. If your narrative is sharp, you can hire above your weight class. If it's muddy, every hire becomes a war.

I've watched companies with worse products win senior hires from companies with better products, because the narrative was clearer and the candidates could picture themselves inside it. The folks who are actually in demand evaluate the story before the feature set. They want to know whether the story they'll tell their next employer about this job will sound impressive or embarrassing. We’re all climbing the ladder. Your story has to place you one rung up.

The same logic applies to retention. The best people leave when they can no longer explain what the company is doing. They leave before the bad ones do, because the bad ones don't have other options, and the good ones run the calculation every six months.

A clear positioning is a retention tool. It tells your best engineers why their work matters at the scale of the company, and it lets them say something coherent at parties when someone asks where they work.

When to reposition

Repositioning is the most dangerous play in the manual. Done well, it can rescue a stalled company in a quarter; done badly, it can torch ten years of accumulated meaning in a week.

A company should reposition when one of four things happens.

1. The market has moved underneath the original claim, and the position now describes a world that no longer exists.

2. The product has expanded into territory the original claim can't cover, and customers are confused about what they're actually buying.

3. A competitor has captured the language you used to own, and the contrast has stopped doing the work it used to do. Or,

4. the founders have learned something material about who their best customers are, and the original audience description has stopped matching the people writing the cheques.

Repositioning that happens because the founders are bored with their own message will always fail; personal boredom is not a strategic signal. The customer hasn't heard the message yet. The customer is just starting to remember it. Throwing it out because the founders have repeated it a thousand times is throwing out the only thing the market has begun to recognise.

Most repositioning attempts try to rewrite everything, and most fail because the new version has no equity, no recognition, and no proof points. A surgical change at the wedge or the alternative is easier to absorb than a full rebrand of the category and audience.

Founders as narrators

Every founder is the chief narrator of the company, whether they want the role or not. Investors read founders; hires read founders; and customers read founders. The way the founders talk about the company in informal settings tells the market more than any campaign ever will.

The founders who win at this discipline share two habits.

1. They use the same vocabulary to describe the company across every audience, so the deck, the all-hands speech, the analyst briefing, and the dinner-table answer to a stranger all sound like they came from the same head.

2. They resist the temptation to update the story every time a journalist asks a clever question, because they understand that the question is a test of conviction, not an invitation to redesign the company in real time.

Founders who lose at this discipline tend to do the opposite. They tailor the story to whoever's in the room. The deck says one thing, the all-hands says another, the analyst briefing says a third, and the dinner-table answer says a fourth. Over time the company loses the ability to say anything at all, because nobody inside it can agree on what the company is.

The fix is the spine again. Write it down, read it out loud, and use the words themselves. The discipline is to bore yourself with your own message a decade before the market starts repeating it back, and to keep saying the same true thing while competitors burn their oxygen on rebrands every eighteen months.

What to do this week

Skip the rebrand for now. Sit five people in a room and finish the sentence: "We are the _____ for _____ who want to _____ instead of _____."

The blanks are the spine: category, audience, outcome, alternative.

If everyone in the room agrees on the completed sentence, the company has working positioning. If the sentence doesn't read cleanly to everyone, no amount of homepage redesign or paid advertising will fix the underlying problem, because the underlying problem is that the company doesn't know what it is.

Run the exercise this week. Don't leave the room until the sentence reads cleanly. Then check it against the homepage, the deck, the sales script, and the latest job posting. Anything that contradicts the sentence is a leak in the spine. Patch the leaks one by one, and don't open a new marketing channel until they're closed.

The longer game

Positioning is a posture you hold for years, not a campaign you run for a quarter. Companies that hold a clear posture for a decade compound advantages that companies running a fresh campaign every quarter never accumulate.

Berkshire Hathaway's annual letter has said the same things, with the same vocabulary, since the 1970s. Buy good businesses at fair prices, hold them forever, trust the underlying math, and ignore the short-term noise. The letter doesn't change because the position doesn't change. The position doesn't change because Warren Buffett worked out what he believed early and refused to negotiate with the market about it.

You don’t have fifty years. At most, at the absolute stretch, you have 2-3 before the company either compounds into something or doesn't.

Pick the claim, hold the claim, write everything else from the claim, and let competitors burn their oxygen on rebrands every eighteen months while you keep saying the same, damned, true ~thing.

The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The language is typically martial - as if fear were a hostile enemy, camped at the gates of your better self.

But this is sloppy thinking that comes at a cost.

When the body floods with adrenaline // the mind locks onto a single threat, the system is doing what it evolved to do: reporting on the state of whatever it is you care about. The signal bypasses the conscious mind almost entirely; which is why you can spend years lying to yourself about what you want and still flinch at the wrong moment when the thing you value comes under threat.

My basic claim is this. When someone (anyone, everyone) is afraid, they're telling you what they actually value. Their fear is a noisy, but no less precise indicator of both the surface threat and their underlying stake. A founder who keeps delaying their launch has a private worry that has almost nothing to do with the launch itself; they're deathly afraid of the dissonance between who they've been telling people (and themselves) they are and who the market will reveal them to be. The surface object of the fear is misdirection; the actual content is a value statement signed in the writer's own hand.

You can argue with the rationalisations that get layered on top of the stake, but you can't argue with the signal itself.

People will lie to you about what they want, and they'll lie to themselves with even greater conviction. But their fear won't lie, because it can't. It's older than language and it runs on a circuit that doesn't consult the part of the mind responsible for maintaining a neat // tidy story.

If you want to know what someone actually values, pay attention to what they protect.

A client who keeps fixating on the timeline is afraid of something other than the difference between three weeks and four. Their fear is tied to a board meeting, or a budget cycle, or personal pressure. A prospect who keeps circling back to price is using the price as a placeholder for a deeper fear about whether they'll be able to defend their decision if it all goes sideways.

If you read the fear correctly, you can stop arguing with the placeholder and start addressing the actual stake.

Your own fear works in much the same way; it's drawn from a part of you that doesn't bother with self-deception. When you flinch at sending an email, you're exporting data about that relationship. When a project keeps slipping in your calendar - whether or not you've admitted to deprioritising it - your behaviour is an indicator. The thought of having that one conversation you've been putting off makes your stomach turn because you're responding to a real assessment of the stakes that the "refined" part of your brain has refused to acknowledge.

I've caught myself avoiding decisions for weeks at a time, generating elaborate justifications for the delay, when the actual reason was a single, one-line fear I would've been utterly embarrassed to say out loud.

But the fear is almost always right.

Even if it's usually wrong about what to do with the information…

Fear is excellent intelligence, but it's not much of a strategy. It tells you what's at risk with high fidelity, and what to do about that risk with all the sophistication of a small mammal in a patch of tall grass; the amygdala, after all, rarely understands either long games or leverage. If you let the part of you that knows what's at stake dictate your response to that stake, you'll spend your life flinching away from the things that matter to you and into the things that look superficially safer.

This is why so much of the advice we give // receive about fear is suspicious of the concept without quite understanding why. People do get controlled by their fear, and that control does produce bad outcomes; but it's a mistake to conclude that fear is therefore a corrupting influence and that it has to be smothered. The fear is fine - useful, even. The problem is letting an instrument designed for tactical reflexes write the plan.

Acknowledge the fear and read it carefully; and refuse to be moved by it until you've understood what it's telling you.

Then decide whether the information changes the plan.

But stop treating fear as either a master or an enemy. It's an instrument, and like any instrument, you have to read it and you have to choose what to do with the data it offers.

The list of things you're afraid to lose is the most accurate map you have of whatever you've built your life around. If you want to know what actually matters to you, watch what your nervous system does when something’s threatened. The list might not match the vision document you'd recite on a podcast, but it's much closer to a source of truth.

I find that clarifying rather than depressing.

The world is not as opaque as the official explanations make it look. People are constantly broadcasting what they value, in a frequency older than speech, on a channel they can't turn off. You only have to learn to listen to it, and be willing to listen to yourself.

The discipline is the same in both directions; read the signal carefully, and then decide what to do with the information, free of any pressure to obey it.

The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of “high-risk” systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators were neither stupid, nor incompetent; they were doing what regulators are supposed to do. They consulted, they ran impact assessments, they debated wording, they translated everything into twenty-four languages, they voted in committee, and voted again, and harmonised national positions, and produced something defensible.

The process took the time it took.

This is the whole problem, and - to my mind - one of the central tensions of the decade. The institutions best able to move at the speed of the real world are the institutions we trust the least; while the institutions we trust the most are too slow, and too cumbersome to matter.

I’m not here to mount a defence of the idiotic spate of DOGE inspired initiatives; I want to argue instead for a degree of dispassionate realism about where we are, and where we’re either doomed or blessed to go next.

Legitimacy is a slow technology, built of procedure, of precedent, of deliberation, and the gradual accumulation of trust across cycles of failure and correction, across generations, across years. You can’t accelerate it without breaking it, because the whole point of due process is that it slows you down - it must slow you down. The whole point of peer review is that someone qualified gets to object and point out the things that should not be broken. The whole point of constitutional limits is that the people in charge can’t just do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they feel like it.

When you strip those constraints out, you get speed - I’ll grant.

It’s the inevitable outcome of authority concentrating, accountability loosening, feedback loops collapsing.

The story of the twentieth century was, in part, the story of the slowest institutions racing to catch up to the fast. Markets ran ahead, regulators followed; inventors invented, courts adjudicated; technology disrupted, and culture absorbed - one way or another. The catching-up was painful and often violent, but it happened on a timescale that human institutions could survive.

I doubt this is still true // possible.

We’re too far apart and drifting.

Facebook reached a billion users before any major democracy had a coherent policy position on what it was. By the time the policy machinery wound itself up, Facebook had already restructured politics in dozens of countries, undermined several elections, and pivoted into something else entirely. Whatever the regulators eventually produced was a response to a previous version of the company, but the current version had moved on.

The FDA’s approval process is designed to be slow because the cost of a fast-tracked failure is, not to be ghoulish, literal bodies in a literal morgue. But the gene-editing tools available to a competent graduate student in 2026 would have required a fortified national laboratory in 1996. The technologically possible has outstripped the institutionally permissible - to the point that whole industries are migrating to jurisdictions with looser rules. The regulatory tortoise is still doing its job, but it’s not the only animal in the race - not anymore.

We build legitimate institutions around legitimate problems - but the world changes. The institution remains optimised for the old problem, and gradually becomes ceremonial. Like the British monarchy. Or the United Nations. Or the academic peer review system.

The fast institutions I’m describing are rarely more competent. They’re frequently, catastrophically worse. Theranos was fast. FTX was fast. WeWork outran its own ability to function. The history of speed without legitimacy is a history of fraud and human wreckage and a great many self-justifying memoirs published with the gift and grift of hindsight. Every time someone tells you that move-fast-and-break-things is a good strategy, you should ask what got broken and whose problem it’s going to be to fix it.

But the answer to “fast institutions sometimes blow up” can’t be that the slow ones are therefore vindicated; slow institutions blow up too. They just blow up in slow motion. The 2008 financial crisis was a slow blow-up. The opioid epidemic was a slow blow-up. The housing crisis in every major Anglophone city is a slow blow-up that’s been unfolding for two decades while the relevant planning bodies follow procedure with admirable rigour. A failing institution can fail for a generation before anyone is willing to admit that the failure is structural rather than a rough patch. I’ve known marriages in that vein. I’ve known states in that vein. I’ve known companies, etc.

The new compact will involve some level of negotiated settlement between the two species. And I don’t have a clear picture for what that settlement looks like - yet. My optimism leads me to believe (or at least, hope) that fast institutions adopt enough procedural integrity to earn the trust they lack, and slow institutions adopt enough adaptive capacity to remain relevant.

The pessimist in me (of whom I remain rather less fond) is convinced that the divergence only accelerates from here, and there’s a betting chance we end up with a two-tier civilisation. The fast tier governs through algorithms, contracts, and platform policy; the slow tier governs through statute, precedent + parliamentary procedure. The two tiers nominally coexist but operate in different timeframes and address different populations. The fast tier handles anyone who is rich, technical, mobile, or willing to live within the rules of private platforms. The slow tier handles everyone else, in the residual physical world of borders, courts, parliaments, and the postal system. This is, broadly, what is already happening.

I’m wary of declensionist takes that romanticise the slow tier as “the last fortress of human dignity.” There is, after all, nothing inherently dignified about waiting twelve years for a permission slip, or in the way the British NHS treats its waiting lists, or the American immigration “system” its most vulnerable applicants.

Procedure can and frequently does ossify into the basest of inhumane cruelty. Slow institutions aren’t virtuous because they’re slow; they’re virtuous if and when their slowness produces the legitimacy it was designed to produce.

When slowness becomes a substitute for legitimacy, you have a Soviet-era clusterfuck.

But can legitimacy can be rebuilt at speed?

Can you construct an institution that is both accountable and reasonably fast?

Actual legitimacy seems to require a patience of movements and monuments that competitive markets and accelerating tech does not // will not allow. You can’t do the equivalent of British common law in five years. You can’t do peer review at the speed of preprint. You can’t do constitutional design at the speed of a Slack thread.

What you can dov - possibly - is accept the trade-off honestly. Build fast institutions for things where speed is the binding constraint and slow institutions for things where trust is the binding constraint, and stop pretending that the same body can do both. The current confusion comes from expecting our slow institutions to keep up with the news cycle, and from expecting our fast institutions to behave with the gravitas of a constitutional court.

Neither of those expectations is ever going to be satisfied.

In the late medieval period, the Catholic Church was still the central legitimacy-conferring institution - but it had already stopped being operationally dominant. New money, new printing, new science, new political forms grew up alongside the old hierarchy and (eventually) displaced it. The displacement took two centuries and several wars, and it was far from orderly, but it happened all the same. The thing that came out the other side, the modern nation-state with a codified law and a standing armies and a civil service and a bureaucracy , eventually achieved some synthesis of speed + legitimacy that none of the contesting parties had managed alone.

We are probably at the starting point of an analogous process.

There are 2 things about that period worth flagging:

1. The first is that the new institutions didn’t announce themselves as such. The Medici were a bank before they were a political force; and the Dutch East India Company was a trading concern before it was effectively a state. The legitimacy came afterwards, retrofitted to whatever the speed had already built.

2. The second is that the Church didn’t vanish. It kept performing its older functions for a population that wanted older things from it, while the operational running of European civilisation passed to bodies that didn’t yet have the moral authority but were already doing the governing.

How much of the actual coordination of modern life is now happening inside corporate platforms and private networks that have no constitutional standing whatsoever?

The practical advice is to know which game you’re in. If you’re running a startup, you’re in the speed game, and pretending you’re running a regulatory agency is a category error. If you’re running a regulatory agency, you’re in the legitimacy game, and it’s something of a vapid conceit to pretend to be running a startup. Most of the dysfunction in contemporary institutions comes from this same category confusion. The legislators who tweet like influencers vs the CEOs who issue manifestos like political leaders. The universities who try to brand themselves like consumer products vs the journalists who behave like activists and then complain that no one trusts them anymore. Each of these is an institution trying to play a game for which it was neither designed nor built, and losing the legitimacy of its native game without acquiring the speed of its aspiration.

Pick a side and commit. Find a functional substitute for the legitimacy you lack, and find it before the next scandal makes your shortcomings impossible to ignore; or find a way to remain relevant despite your pace, and stop confusing the pomp of authority with its substance.

The hybrids will struggle. The pretenders - the institutions that perform speed without being fast or perform legitimacy without being legitimate - will be eaten first.

I’m not certain anyone “wins” this in any way the word “win” is usually applied. But in a war between institutions, the folks on the losing side are usually the last to figure out they’re at war in the first place.

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There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. When bad news arrived at the dinner table, we finished the meal anyway. In hindsight, you could call it discipline: the capacity to feel a thing in full and still choose what to do next.

That capacity is going the way of the Buffalo.

You can see it - in real time - on any platform that rewards reaction; the faster the feedback loop, the worse the regulation. People are unleashing their feelings, unbounded and uninhibited, before they’ve finished having them, which means they aren’t really having them at all. They’re skipping the inner step, where a person sits with a sensation and decides whether or not it deserves to leave the body.

The new orthodoxy says suppressing emotion is harmful; and this might be true, but outside of a therapist’s office, it’s trivial. Suppression and regulation are different animals. Suppression is shoving the feeling into a closet and pretending it isn’t there until it crawls out twenty years later as an autoimmune disease; regulation is letting yourself feel the feeling, in full, while keeping your hands on the wheel of the car.

We’ve collapsed the distinction.

Look at how grown people describe the minor frictions of their lives. A disagreement at work is “harm.” Someone fails to text back within an acceptable window and they say their boundary has been violated. The vocabulary of clinical psychology has been borrowed wholesale and applied to ordinary life, and it's started to function as a permission slip. If every discomfort is trauma, then every reaction is justified, and the work of metabolizing your experience becomes either optional or the domain of the "privileged."

This is downstream of a cultural shift, confusing authenticity with reactivity. The assumption is that whatever you feel first, raw and unmediated, is the real you, and anything else is a performance.

In my experience, the opposite is closer to the truth.

The real self is the part of you who survives the first reaction; the part that can be angry and still be kind, scared and still steady.

The reactive self is a child throwing food; and calling the food-throwing “brave” is a mistake.

Actual children, watching this, are absorbing the model with terrifying efficiency, growing up in homes where the adults live stream their anger and stage public meltdowns in airport terminals. The lesson they’ll enact is that feelings are emergencies, and emergencies require an audience. Walk into any third-grade classroom now and you’ll find children who can name fourteen emotions and have the tools and know-how to regulate approximately none of them.

Some of this is technological. Phones reward a specific kind of nervous system, twitching first and thinking later. The dopamine architecture that hooks you on slot machines hooks you on outrage, and the platforms have figured out that a regulated person is a bad customer. The regulated close the app, but the dysregulated person scroll until four in the morning, bleeding cortisol and efficiently monetized.

But blaming the phone lets too many people off the hook. Phones inherited the tantrum and scaled it; the rot is deeper and philosophical. Several decades of therapeutic culture, well-meaning and badly executed, have taught generations that the goal of inner life is to express and never to contain. Containment has been rebranded as toxic, and composure as being cold.

For all my critiques of the philosophy’s Reddit-bound adherents, the Stoics weren’t automatons; Marcus Aurelius wept for his son, and Epictetus had been a slave whose owner crippled him for sport. They knew exactly how much the world hurt, and they wrote about it unapologetically. Their “innovation” was the claim that our hurt is not the last word. Between stimulus and response there exists a space, and in that space a person with agency can choose, and be responsible for that choice. A human being, however battered, retains a small and sovereign workshop where they make and remake and rebuild and mend themselves. That workshop is the only piece of territory that can’t be confiscated by circumstance - lose access to it and you lose yourself.

A good many people now are locked out of their own workshops. They feel a thing and the thing feels them right back, and there’s no daylight between the two.

The art of emotional regulation is dying because the conditions that taught it have been removed. We’ve lost slow time and private time; we’ve lost the time when no one asked what you thought before you’d finished thinking it. A whole generation of children has watched the adults around them treat every passing affect as a press release, and they’re learning to do the same. But you can’t regulate what you’ve already broadcast - and you can’t reclaim a workshop you’ve turned into a stage.

William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers.

Three years later, when his correspondent Frederic Remington cabled from Cuba that there was no war to cover, Hearst replied with the line that became his epitaph: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

That was the original sin, and the original business model. Find a target, deliver the outrage daily, harvest the engagement and sell the audience to advertisers.

The economics haven’t changed since 1895.

Walter Lippmann, writing in Public Opinion in 1922, described how a small class of editors and publicists had taken on the job of “manufacturing consent” by deciding which stories would be put in front of the public and to which framings they would be attached. He thought this was, on balance, fine. Most readers, he said, would never have the time or competence to form views from primary sources. Someone had to do the framing.

Someone.

A century on, the framing is automated // the framers are algorithms tuned to a single metric: how long can we keep you scrolling?

Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, studying viral content for the Journal of Marketing Research in 2012, found that the emotion most reliably correlated with sharing was high-arousal anger. Neither sadness, contentment or even joy came close; anger was the engine. Every platform, and ever performer that lives on advertising eventually discovers this and bends its product around the discovery.

There is nothing neutral about the feed.

It’s a slot machine built to dispense outrage on whatever schedule keeps you returning. The story in front of you was picked because an algorithm, somewhere, ran the numbers and concluded it would make you feel something corrosive enough to produce a reaction.

Whose ledger does that reaction land on? Theirs. Your time on the platform is sold to advertisers in increments, your annotated rage in the comments trains the recommendation model, your re-share recruits one more person into the same loop, and your dwell time on each story sharpens the algorithm’s prediction of what will hold you next. The feeling moves through you and leaves a residue on the corporate balance sheet. You absorb the cost, and they book the revenue.

Chris Voss, the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, wrote Never Split the Difference in 2016, on the principle that whoever feels more in a negotiation loses. Across the table from a hostage taker, Voss wouldn't match the emotional temperature of the room; he'd lower it, keeping possession of his own pulse while everyone else lost theirs.

This is a useful posture to steal: you refuse to feel what you’re being told to feel by people whose business model depends on the feeling, and the refusal is procedural. The feeling might turn out to be correct, or it might not; that’s a separate question, evaluated later. Before the feeling arrives in full, you ask: who’s pushing this into my field of view, what do they collect if I take the bait, what’s the response they want from me, and does that response actually serve me?

Call it sequencing.

• Feel first and think second, the slot machine wins.

• Think first and feel second (or not at all, depending), and the game stops paying out.

Rage is metabolically expensive; borrowed rage even more so. You spend cognitive bandwidth on a quarrel imported from a stranger’s algorithm, then arrive at your own work depleted, with less attention left for the people and projects you’d actually choose. The outrage cycle runs on fuel siphoned from your real life. Mary Oliver asked what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life; for a lot of us the answer, when we’re being honest, is: argue with people we’ve never met about events we can’t influence on a platform whose advertisers are paying for our distress.

But you can, of course, decline.

Tristan Harris, founding the Center for Humane Technology in 2018, framed it as recognising the asymmetry: a thousand engineers on one side of the screen, optimising for your attention; one tired person on the other side, trying to hold their ground.

Stop offering the response the system was built to extract, and watch what shows up in the space the rage used to occupy: the work you’ve been avoiding, the conversation you owe someone you actually care about, the book on your nightstand, the neighbour you’ve been meaning to call back.

The un-cinematic projects that don’t trend and don’t reward you with a hit of validation when you rage-post about them.

AKA: your actual life, previously crowded and smothered by the outrage.

Abraham Lincoln rode home from Washington in December 1849, with what looked like the end of his career packed into his luggage. He'd served one term in the House, alienated his constituents by opposing the Mexican War, and lost his shot at a federal Land Office appointment.

He went back to Springfield to practice law, a near-broken man. And, for nearly 5 years, he barely participated in national politics.

He rode the Illinois circuit, argued patent disputes, and taught himself geometry from Euclid by candlelight in coach inns. He read newspapers obsessively; he read Shakespeare and the King James Bible until he could quote either from pretty much any starting point.

The folks who saw him in those years said he looked...tired.

When he returned to the spotlight, in October 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had cracked the country open. Lincoln walked onto the stage at Peoria and spoke for 3 hours straight. The man who'd been a country lawyer that morning was a national figure by midnight.

Six years later, he was president.

Lincoln's lost years are the part of the biography American children skip past in school; they get the rail-splitter, the beard, the debates, the war, the emancipation, the address, the assassination.

But the 5 years we skip over are the whole ballgame.

They rebuilt the instrument.

The English writer Katherine May coined the modern usage in her 2020 book Wintering, but the idea is older than the word. Russian peasants called the long quiet stretches between harvests zima and treated them as a season for weaving, sleeping, repairing tools, and telling stories. Japanese Buddhist monasteries built whole liturgies around rohatsu sesshin, the seven-day winter retreat that closes the year. Foragers like the !Kung and the Hadza, spent something like 4 hours a day on subsistence and the rest on…rest.

Productivity is a recent invention; wintering is not.

Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985 to a shrugging response. The New York Times reviewed it in a single column. He'd been writing in El Paso for years, broke and largely forgotten. Friends thought he'd peaked. Then in 1992 All the Pretty Horses came out, won the National Book Award, sold half a million copies, and the back catalog got reissued. McCarthy hadn't been recovering. He'd been finishing something the culture wasn't ready for in 1985 and was ready for by 1992.

He'd been wintering.

Daniel Day-Lewis stopped acting in 1997 and apprenticed as a cobbler in Florence. He came back, played Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, and won an Oscar. He stopped again. Came back. Won another Oscar. Stopped again, and by all reports has actually stopped this time, though I wouldn't bet on it. The cobbler years were how he reset the instrument.

In the long winter, organisms route metabolism inward.

Trees pull resources out of leaves, drop the leaves, and push the sugars down into root systems. Bears don't sleep, exactly. Their core temperature drops a few degrees, their metabolism halves, and they cycle slowly through fat reserves while their kidneys learn to recycle urea into protein. They come out in spring with their bones still mineralized and their muscles roughly intact, which is something no human has yet figured out how to do. What the bear performs is one of the most metabolically sophisticated tricks in the animal kingdom.

The Romans understood that a field left fallow for a season produced more in the next cycle than one worked continuously. Norfolk farmers in the 18th century made it a four-course rotation: wheat, turnips, barley, clover, with the clover restoring nitrogen the wheat had pulled out. The land that looks unused is doing the most useful work.

People who winter well are doing something analogous. They route attention inward and downward, into the parts of the system that don't show up on the surface. They read, they revise, they take long walks they can't account for, and they think the same thought 400 times until it cracks.

Most of what gets published, shipped, posted, and announced is washed off the rocks within a quarter. The people doing it are running on a treadmill that resets their position to zero every Monday. They have to keep producing to stay visible, and visibility is how they earn the right to keep producing.

It's a closed loop, and it generates very little compound interest.

The winterer is off the loop. They aren't maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain.

In the short term, you pay dearly for it.

People forget you exist. Calls dry up. Old collaborators stop replying. Younger versions of you lap you in the standings.

The benefit is that you can do work that takes longer than a quarter, and longer than a year, and longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.

Charles Darwin came back from the Beagle voyage in 1836 with the rough outline of natural selection in his head. He published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The intervening 23 years included long stretches when he wrote almost nothing in his theory notebooks, partly because he was sick, partly because he was writing 8 volumes about barnacles, and partly because he understood the case had to be airtight. When he finally published, the argument was so heavily fortified that the church spent the next 50 years trying to find a hairline crack and failing.

If Darwin had published in 1840, he might be a footnote. His 23 years of comparative silence were the moat.

Robert Caro started his Lyndon Johnson biography in 1976. He's published 4 volumes of an intended 5. He's now 90. He moved to the Texas Hill Country to live among the people Johnson grew up with, because he thought he couldn't write about a man without inhabiting his weather. Each volume took roughly a decade. The publishing world treats him as a slow eccentric. Anyone who's read the books knows he's running a different clock, on a different scale, and that no one currently working at speed is going to produce anything close.

Plenty of people stop and produce nothing. The graveyard of failed comebacks is large, and wintering is dangerous as a strategy because most attempts at it collapse into actual stagnation.

The difference between the two is invisible from the outside, until the end.

The reason the wintering few register as dangerous, when they re-emerge, is that they have something the still-busy don't have: a center of gravity. They've spent enough time alone with a single problem to develop actual opinions about it, opinions that don't move when other people push on them. In a culture optimized for constant repositioning, conviction is a structural advantage. The market doesn't know how to price it.

The winterer has been watching while you weren't looking. They've watched the consensus shift, watched the mistakes pile up. When they come back, they come back with reads you can't get from inside the swirl, because the swirl makes you stupid.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing in The Life of the Mind in the 1970s, described thinking itself as a form of withdrawal. You can't think and act at the same time, she said, because thinking pulls you out of the stream of ongoing events. She was suspicious of people who claimed to do both at once.

The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in Solitude (1988), made the case that the most original work of major figures often came out of long isolated stretches. Newton in plague-year Cambridge. Wittgenstein in Norway. Kafka in Zürau. Beckett in his Paris apartment with the curtains drawn. Storr wasn't romanticizing it; the isolated stretches were often miserable, sometimes pathological. But the work that came out of them had a density that wasn't available to people doing it part-time.

Any culture that systematically punishes withdrawal is going to lose its most concentrated thinkers to either burnout or invisibility. The modern knowledge economy, with its ambient pressure to post, ship, and stay in the conversation, is a machine for producing exactly that loss. The people we'll wish we had in 15 years are, right now, being shamed into producing slop they don't believe in, because the alternative is to drop out, and dropping out reads as failure.

The winterers who survive this will be those who can tolerate looking like they failed. This is a real and rare psychological skill, and most people don't have it. It requires you to be okay with the wrong kind of silence around your name for years. It requires you to pass on small wins that would re-establish your position. It requires you to bet that what you're working on is worth more than what you're giving up, when the only person who can evaluate the bet is you, and you might be wrong, and you'll only know in 7 years.

Lincoln didn't know in 1851 that he was wintering.

He thought he was finished.

He told his law partner William Herndon that his political career was over, and he believed it. And then his country produced an emergency that demanded exactly the kind of mind he'd been nurturing, and he was the man of the hour whose hour had finally come.

The people who appear to have stopped, in any given year, are mostly people who have actually stopped. But small fraction of them are doing the other thing.

Our world produces emergencies on a reliable schedule; when the next one comes, watch who walks out of the woods.

In February 1637, a single tulip bulb in Haarlem sold for 5,200 guilders - the price of a canal house on the Keizersgracht // ten times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. The bulb was a Semper Augustus, streaked white and flame-red, and the buyer never saw it. He bought a piece of paper representing a future flower, and within 3 weeks, the market collapsed. Men who had mortgaged their workshops to buy futures on something they would never hold went home to explain it to their families. Within a century, the Dutch and English were back, inside the South Sea Company, whose directors had printed prospectuses for an undertaking they refused to describe. Within two centuries, French investors were holding the worthless scrip of John Law’s Mississippi Scheme, which had promised them a share of Louisiana gold that didn’t exist. By the 1840s it was railway shares, with one in ten English investors buying into lines that were never built. By the 1920s it was radio stocks. By the late 1990s it was dot-com. By 2008 it was tranched American mortgages, rated AAA by people paid by the banks that issued them. By 2021 it was JPEGs of monkeys. By 2026, it was AI stocks.

Every one of these episodes was preceded by someone writing a book about how the last one could never happen again, and every single one ended with the same sentence murmured like a prayer on the way up:

This time is different.

…But it never is.

Is it?

The claim I want to make…

Humans do near-identical things, over and over again, across history. And we do it because our cognitive equipment hasn’t changed - the brain running a 21st-century civilization is a Paleolithic brain, shaped by 200,000 years on the savannah and another 10,000 years in small agricultural settlements, and it fears the same things our ancestors feared, and it wants the same things they wanted, and it fails in the same ways.

The loop itself is, in fact, our operating system.

Everything else, the political systems, the technologies, the languages, the ideologies, is the application layer. Applications change, but the operating system doesn’t. When an application throws the same error message in Rome, in Berlin in 1933, in Phnom Penh in 1975, and on a Saturday afternoon in a suburban American town in 2024, the error sits in the kernel - and the kernel is not getting patched.

The bubble

The financial bubble (and by that I mean every financial bubble) is the cleanest version of the loop there is. Prices rise, greed overrides caution, debt piles on debt, and the floor gives way. Within ten years the same people, or their children, do it again.

And again.

And again.

Every bubble is catalogued and studied before the next one begins. Charles Mackay wrote Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. The book became a bestseller among the same London financiers who would soon be pouring money into Latin American mining schemes that required them to invest in countries they couldn’t find on a map. In 1929, Irving Fisher, one of the most published economists in America, declared that stocks had reached a permanently high plateau - and the crash began nine days later. In 2005, Alan Greenspan testified to Congress that American housing prices reflected local conditions and there was no nationwide bubble. In 2008, there was. The brain has a failure mode around probabilistic risk: it discounts low-probability catastrophic outcomes in favor of high-probability mild gains, it reads social consensus as information, and its dopamine circuit rewards the anticipation of gain more reliably than the gain itself.

The hunt feels better than the meal.

Humans pretty reliably miscalculate risk at every step of the process, but somehow the profession of finance is built on the assumption that markets aggregate these miscalculations into wisdom. They don’t. They aggregate them into stampedes, and herd cognition does the rest. When everyone around you is buying, the cost of not buying is financial + social. You miss the gain, and your neighbor gets rich, and your brother-in-law mentions it at dinner. The brain treats this as a threat to status, and status, in primate terms, is survival. Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments in 1951 showed that ordinary people will deny the evidence of their own eyes rather than disagree with a confident group, and bubbles are Asch experiments with money on the line.

Every bubble ends with the same discovery, which is that the asset was never worth what it traded for; every bubble starts, though, from the matching belief that this time, it is.

The strongman

The strongman arrives on schedule, and the preconditions are consistent. A frightened middle class + institutions that have stopped delivering + an establishment that has lost the trust of the people it governs. Put those pieces in a room together and within a decade someone walks in who promises to cut through all of it. Caesar in 49 BCE. Napoleon in 1799. Mussolini in 1922. Hitler in 1933. Perón in 1946. A catalogue since then that hardly needs naming. The strongman is a phenotype; he’s what the interaction between primate dominance hierarchies and political instability produces. Chimpanzee troops have alpha males, and human societies have them too. Under stable conditions, the alpha position is distributed across institutions, softened by law, and rotated by elections. Under unstable conditions, the position re-concentrates around a single body. Frans de Waal watched the same sequence play out among captive chimpanzees at Arnhem; Hannah Arendt watched it play out among human beings in the twentieth century. The mechanics were the same. The stakes differed only in body count.

Apparently, the human brain under stress doesn’t want deliberation; it wants authority. Uncertainty burns more energy than bad news, and so the prefrontal cortex tries to resolve ambiguity, and when it fails, it hands control to older circuits that prefer a simple answer to the right answer - any right answer. MRI studies of people presented with ambiguous political images show amygdala activation patterns close to indistinguishable from fear responses; the feeling of not knowing whether your world is safe is, in brain-chemistry terms, very close to the feeling of being in danger.

And, sooner or later, there will always someone willing to supply the simple answer. The man who says he alone can fix it believes it, because the crowd that believes it first has already told him so; what his opponents call a lie, he experiences as a revelation. The feedback loop between a frightened population and a would-be strongman runs on the same neurology in both directions: he needs them as much as they need him, and they produce each other.

The cycle tends to run thirty years from collapse to collapse. Long enough for the generation that lived through the last strongman to die, and short enough that their grandchildren are available // ready // willing to repeat the experiment.

The scapegoat

When a society is in pain, it finds someone to blame. Rarely the structure. Rarely the people who benefit most from the structure. Always someone weaker, someone already marginal, someone who can be sacrificed without the majority feeling the cost. Jews in medieval Europe during the Black Death, when entire communities were burned alive on the accusation that they had poisoned wells, and Jews again in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Catholics in Elizabethan England, hunted by priest-catchers who were paid by the head, and Chinese merchants in Indonesia in 1965, and again in 1998. Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 dead in a hundred days, killed with machetes by neighbors who had lived next door for generations. Muslims in post-9/11 America. Immigrants, always, everywhere.

The mechanism was described by René Girard, a French literary critic who argued that violence against the innocent is the engine of social cohesion. His book Violence and the Sacred in 1972 laid out the structure: a community in conflict with itself discovers that it can reconcile by turning collectively on a single victim, and all that the victim has to be is unanimous. Guilt is beside the point, which is the part of this I find hardest to sit with; once the blow lands and the crowd goes quiet, the community feels cleansed. Girard’s work sits uncomfortably among the more respectable social sciences because it says something his colleagues didn’t want to hear: the crowd’s sense of unity is purchased with the body of someone who didn’t deserve to die, and the mechanism doesn’t give a shit about ideology. It works for medieval Catholics, for Jacobin revolutionaries, for Nazi party members, for Twitter mobs. The crowd needs its victim, and the victim needs to be innocent enough that the guilt of destroying him is too heavy to carry, which is why the sacrifice must be followed by denial.

The scapegoat loop is neurology under pressure. The brain performs in-group and out-group sorting in under 200 milliseconds, before conscious perception arrives - a feature of human vision that kept small bands of primates alive on the savannah. A stranger at 40 meters could be trade or death. You didn’t have time to think it through. Demagogues know this, or they feel it, which amounts to the same thing. They weaponize a perceptual shortcut human beings can’t turn off, and they provide a face for a pain that has no face. The crowd does the rest.

The invention that eats its children

The printing press was going to democratize knowledge. And it did! But first, it launched two centuries of religious war. Johannes Gutenberg pressed his first Bible in 1455. By 1517, Luther’s theses were being reproduced across Europe in weeks, and by 1618, the Thirty Years’ War had begun. By its end in 1648, a third of the German-speaking population was dead. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in 1979 documented how the technology that was supposed to bring light to the masses also industrialized the production of astrology, witch-hunting manuals, and anti-Semitic pamphlets. The press amplified everything, including the things its advocates hoped it would abolish.

Radio was going to educate the masses. It gave Hitler a direct line to every kitchen in Germany, and Father Coughlin a direct line to thirty million American listeners in the 1930s, and Radio Rwanda the tool it needed to coordinate a genocide in 1994. Television was going to create an informed electorate - but it simultaneously created a visual electorate, which turned out to be a different thing. Marshall McLuhan saw all of this in Understanding Media in 1964 and was called a charlatan for saying so.

Social media was going to connect the world.

Well, it has, and the connection is the problem.

Every new tool that reshapes a society follows the same arc: it gets pitched as utopia, adopted before anyone understands it, panicked about ten years too late, and regulated (badly) ten years after that. By the time the culture has a theory of what the tool does, the social fabric has already been re-stitched around it, in a structural mismatch between the speed of technological change and the speed of social adaptation. The brain adopting a new tool has never been the brain that understands its second-order effects, because the lag is biological. The telegraph took 50 years to saturate the industrialized world, but the internet took 20, and the smartphone took 10.

And generative AI has taken half of that to be near-ubiquitous…

The adaptation lag stays constant, meaning each new technology is more disruptive than the last. We’re adopting tools - right now - that will shape the next century without having metabolized the last century’s tools; the printing press hasn’t been fully understood, radio hasn’t been understood, television hasn’t been understood, and the side effects of social media are being “lived” through in real time by people who haven’t yet admitted what it’s doing to us.

The war that ends all wars

Humans don’t go to war despite knowing what war does, they go to war because the knowledge of what it does fades, even though it technically exists. Nobody forgot the pain of WW1. It just became less vivid…

The generation that fought swears never again, and their children believe them, but their grandchildren might not. By the fourth generation, war is an abstraction, something that happened to other people, in old photographs, with outdated weapons. William Tecumseh Sherman spent his last years giving speeches against war to audiences who listened attentively, and then sent their sons to Cuba in 1898.

The French generation that survived 1918 built the Maginot Line because it couldn’t imagine living through another Somme, but their sons were overrun by a tactic that didn’t exist when the walls were poured, by an enemy they had forgotten to fear. Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, produced a documentary in 2003 called The Fog of War in which he admitted that the policies he had designed had been wrong for reasons he actually understood at the time.

The film was released during the invasion of Iraq; the lessons were on screen, broadcast to millions, but the tanks kept rolling.

You can teach someone that fire burns, but you can’t make them feel the heat. A lesson that can’t be felt won’t prevent the behavior it describes. Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est in 1917 about the sweet lie that dying for your country was noble. The poem is taught in every British secondary school; it has stopped zero wars. The interval between great-power wars in Europe from 1648 to 1945 averaged around forty years. That’s how long it takes for the generational memory of the last war to fade from the bodies of the people who vote in the next one. The post-1945 peace in Europe is the longest stretch in recorded history, which means we have a decade or two before the generation that could say “I remember” no longer exists in political life.

What happens then, is what always happens.

The moral panic

Witches in Salem, 1692, where twenty people were executed on evidence so thin the colony issued an apology within a generation. Catholics in Elizabethan London. Comic books in the 1950s, after Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent triggered a US Senate investigation and forced the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Rock and roll. Dungeons & Dragons, where a generation of American parents were convinced their children were being recruited into a satanic cult by a dice game. Video nasties in 1980s Britain. The Parents Music Resource Center, chaired by Tipper Gore in 1985, running hearings against heavy metal. Rap music. Violent video games after Columbine. Social media. TikTok. Transgender rights. I feel like I’m reciting a depressing cover of We Didn’t Start the Fire…

The moral panic follows the same sequence every time. A new thing emerges that the older generation doesn’t understand, and someone somewhere claims it’s destroying children. The media amplifies the fear, and legislation follows. The panic burns out.

Then, twenty years later everyone agrees it was overblown.

Then, the next one begins.

The moral panic is a reaction to a loss of control; it’s the terror that arises when a parent, or a culture, realizes the next generation is building a world they can’t enter. The target changes every twenty years, but the terror doesn’t change at all. The sociologist Stanley Cohen named the phenomenon in 1972 in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, writing about British seaside brawls between mods and rockers. The book could have been written about anything. A manufactured villain, a media cycle, a legislative response disproportionate to the threat etc, maps cleanly onto every subsequent panic, including the ones he couldn’t have predicted. QAnon is a moral panic. So is the 1980s satanic-ritual-abuse craze that it grew out of, during which adults were sent to prison for crimes that forensic evidence later showed had never occurred. A panic doesn’t have to be wrong to be a panic. It just has to be out of proportion, and they almost always are.

The empire

We all think our specific empire is the exception.

Rome believed it was eternal. The Chinese dynastic system believed in the Mandate of Heaven as a stable arrangement between rulers and cosmos, which is why each new dynasty claimed to have received the mandate from the last. The British believed their empire was a civilizing force that would last centuries. The Americans believe they’re not an empire at all. Every imperial project follows the same arc: expansion driven by economic need, sold to the public as ideology. Overextension, and the cost of maintenance exceeding the benefit of possession. Internal rot funded by external extraction, and the slow or sudden loss of the periphery while the center insists everything is A-OK.

Edward Gibbon began publishing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the same year the American colonies declared independence from the British. Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies in 1988 argued that civilizations fail when the marginal return on complexity flips negative, which is a technical way of saying that empires break when each new administrative layer costs more than it adds. The Romans kept adding layers until the layers collapsed under their own weight, and eery subsequent empire has done the same.

Empire is an emergent property of human social organization at scale. Dominance hierarchies scale, as they always have, and they always produce the same endpoint: a system too large to govern, too expensive to maintain, too proud to contract voluntarily. The final stage is denial. The senators in Honorius’s Rome debated traditional agricultural policy in 410 CE while the Visigoths were sacking the city; the Ottoman Porte in 1911 was still issuing decrees about the administration of the Balkans after it had lost them; the bureaucrats of the Third Reich set a record for how many memos they were writing and sending in 30 days or so befoe Hitler’s suicide; the British government after Suez spent a decade insisting that the empire was managing an orderly transition, a phrase that meant nothing because nobody was managing anything; the Soviet Politburo in 1988 was discussing the modernization of Cuban sugar exports while their own economy imploded.

When the center begins to legislate the future of a periphery it no longer controls, the collapse is already underway.

The God cycle

Religions rise when the existing structures of meaning collapse. They institutionalize, they accumulate power and wealth, they become the thing they were founded to resist and they calcify. A new crisis of meaning arrives, and a new religion, or reformation, or spiritual movement rises up to replace them. The cycle runs from the Axial Age (Karl Jaspers’s name for the period between 800 and 200 BCE when Confucius, the Buddha, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets, and the pre-Socratics emerged, each proposing a new relationship between the human and the cosmos) through the European Reformation, the First and Second Great Awakenings in America, the political religions of the 20th century, and the current explosion of secular faith substitutes - from Wellness to Bitcoin.

The true believers in CrossFit and the true believers in early 4th-century Arianism have more in common than either would like to admit. So do the adherents of long-form supplement protocols and the followers of Girolamo Savonarola, who burned the vanities in Florence in 1497 and was himself burned at the stake a year later. The impulse to purify the self through ritual deprivation is older than any of the current practitioners know - Bryan Johnson is reinventing the early Christian ascetic and selling it as biometrics. The brain requires narrative. When one narrative fails, it doesn’t default to a net-zero narrative, it just grabs the nearest replacement, however ragged. This = a neurological need for meaning and coherence that no rational framework has ever been able to satisfy. The experiments of Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients in the 1960s showed that the left hemisphere of the human brain will manufacture an explanation for any observed behavior, including behaviors it didn’t cause, rather than admit it doesn’t know.

The brain won’t tolerate a gap in the story, and if you don’t give it a religion, it will invent one. The content of belief changes but the need for it doesn’t, which is why the most confident atheists end up sounding the most religious. It’s the same apparatus, different idol.

The exhaustion

Deforestation in Mesopotamia by 2000 BCE left the fields salt-crusted and the population migrating; soil depletion in Roman North Africa turned the granary of the empire into desert within three centuries; the residents of Easter Island cut down every tree on the island, lost the ability to build canoes, and were reduced to eating the dead by the time Europeans arrived in 1722; the 19th-century guano trade reshaped Pacific geopolitics around bird excrement until the deposits ran out. Whale oil, coal, petroleum, silicon, compute, housing etc. And on it goes.

Every civilization finds a resource, builds itself around that resource, burns through it, and either collapses or scrambles for the next; it’s temporal discounting, the brain’s systematic undervaluation of future consequences relative to present rewards, running at civilizational scale. The Atlantic cod fishery off Newfoundland was fished every year for 500 years, and then, in the decade after 1992, it collapsed and has never returned.

The Canadian government knew the catch was unsustainable in the 1980s, but the boats went out anyway. They had mortgages to pay. Every generation knows it’s borrowing from the future, but no generation stops. The cognitive machinery that would allow them to care enough doesn’t exist.

The revolution that becomes the thing it replaced

The French revolutionaries executed a king and installed an emperor.

The Bolsheviks overthrew a tsar and built a new one, with secret police larger and more thorough than the Okhrana had ever been. The Iranian revolution deposed the Shah in 1979 and produced a theocracy whose morality police have arrested more women than SAVAK ever did. The anticolonial movements across Africa and Asia expelled foreign rulers and produced domestic dictators within a generation. The tech companies “disrupted” monopolies and became monopolies. Every revolution promises a break from the past and delivers a reproduction of it.

This is close to structural; the act of seizing power requires the construction of hierarchies, the concentration of authority, and the suppression of dissent, the exact things the revolution was against. The tools of liberation turn out to be the tools of control…they have to be, because they’re the only tools that work.

Robespierre in 1793 believed he was defending liberty by executing 17,000 people in ten months. By the time the guillotine took him too, in July 1794, the mechanics of the Terror had built a state apparatus more centralized than anything Louis XVI had commanded. Milovan Djilas, once a senior official in Tito’s Yugoslavia, wrote The New Class in 1957 from his prison cell, describing how the communist revolution had produced a bureaucratic elite with privileges indistinguishable from the aristocracy it replaced. He was right, which is why he was in prison.

The revolution is in the method; you can’t win by being peaceful against a state that isn’t, and you can’t build by refusing to govern. But the moment the revolutionaries become the government, they become the state, and the state has structural interests. Those interests don’t care who’s running it. George Orwell, who had seen the Spanish Civil War up close in 1937, understood this well enough to write Animal Farm about it in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four about it in 1949. Both books are taught in schools, and both are cheerfully ignored in practice. The revolutionaries who most need to read them are always the ones who believe the books can’t possibly be about them…

The Cassandra

Every loop has someone who sees it coming, and they’re never believed.

The evidence is strong, but the warning is unwelcome, and unwelcome beats true...

Jeremiah in Jerusalem before the Babylonian conquest was ridiculed in the temple courts, and thrown into a cistern, only to be vindicated after the fact by the destruction of everything he had warned about. Cato the Elder ended every speech with Carthago delenda est until his colleagues stopped listening. Churchill in the 1930s, was frozen out of government, still warning about German rearmament to a House of Commons that preferred to discuss cricket. Eugene Stoner testified before Congress in the 1960s about the inadequacy of the M16 rifle he had designed, and the Pentagon ignored him until American soldiers in Vietnam started being found dead with their rifles in pieces in their hands. The climate scientists of the 1980s, whose testimony was televised and archived and treated, for four decades, as the background noise of cable news. The economists who called the 2008 crash, including Raghuram Rajan at Jackson Hole in 2005, and were told by Larry Summers that their analysis was “slightly Luddite.” The epidemiologists who warned about pandemic preparedness in 2015, whose reports were filed, then forgotten, then pulled off the shelf in March 2020 when there was no longer time to act on them.

Accurate prediction doesn’t lead to prevention.

The reason is part political: acting on a warning is expensive, and ignoring it is free, up until it isn’t. But it’s equal parts cognitive: the brain treats unfamiliar threats as less real than familiar ones, regardless of probability. Shark attacks over car crashes; plane crashes over heart disease; terrorist attacks over obesity. The risks that kill us are not the risks that frighten us, because the brain evolved in an environment where the frightening things were almost always the things that killed us, and we haven’t updated the pattern.

Cassandra herself, in the Iliad and the Aeneid, was cursed by Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. Virgil gave her the line: insani Vatis verba, “the words of a madwoman.” Even without divine curse, the outcome is the same: truth has rarely been sufficient.

The loop

The loops are caused by the species. Bad luck, bad leaders, and bad cultures show up in every story but they don’t generate the pattern. The pattern is downstream of the brain that produces the stories. That’s the argument.

But can the loops be broken?

So far, the answer is discouraging; but they have occasionally been lengthened. The interval between crises has been extended, the damage mitigated, and the recovery accelerated. The post-1945 international order bought 80 years of relative peace in Europe by building institutions designed to resist the strongman loop - a massive, landmark accomplishment, but an accomplishment with an expiration date, because the institutions are only as good as the generation running them, and that generation is dying off in real time.

The bubble loop has been shortened in some respects by regulation and lengthened in others by cheaper borrowing; the scapegoat loop has been softened in many places by norms of tolerance, which the current decade is stress-testing; the empire loop has been delayed for the United States by a combination of military spending and currency dominance, neither of which is permanent; the invention loop has been accelerated by every successful attempt to regulate it, because the regulation creates markets for jurisdictional arbitrage that didn’t exist before.

We’re very good at making the loops run faster.

We’re not so good at stopping them.

The loops persist because the brain persists, and you can build a fence around a feature of human cognition. You just can’t. The loops are a tendency of the species, and you can push back against a tendency within limits that go only so far.

Seeing the loop while you’re inside it is a good deal harder than it sounds. Every bubble feels like a new era, and everyone saying otherwise sounds like a total bore. Every strongman feels like a savior, at least until the night he stops taking questions, and every scapegoat feels like a real enemy, because your cousin lost his job last month and somebody has to have taken it. Every war feels necessary. Every panic feels justified. Every empire feels eternal and every new God feels true. Every resource looks infinite right up until it isn’t. Every revolution feels pure for about eighteen months. Every Cassandra looks hysterical.

Every mistake of the past was made by people who were certain they weren’t making it.

The move, if there is one, is the move the Trojans couldn’t make, the one the Weimar voters couldn’t make in 1932, the one the subprime borrowers couldn’t make in 2007, the one the American cod fleet couldn’t make in 1991. Treat the thing that feels obviously true with the utmost suspicion. Look for the loop in the direction you most want to walk. Ask whether the people you most agree with are the same people who would have agreed with the crowd at every previous iteration of this same mistake. It won’t save you - but it might slow you down. The loop is older than any of us, and the loop has been true for 10,000 years. I think it will be true tomorrow. The only thing we get to decide is what we do with the knowledge in the interval between now and whichever loop is already closing around us.

Here’s the answer:

Context.

The thing every productivity guru strips out before handing you the advice.

In this video I argue that productivity writing has a structural problem. The circumstances that make these routines work almost never travel. A single mother raising three kids in the 80s knew more about real productivity than any 4am optimizer on YouTube, because her system had to survive contact with the world. The billionaire’s system doesn’t. His scaffolding is invisible and it’s doing most of the work.

I trace the fallacy back through Seneca, Alexander the Great, Ben Franklin, and the long parade of self-help genres that keep promising the same thing. That if you copy your heroes, you’ll become like them. You won’t. You’ll just get tired.

If you’ve ever tried to bolt someone else’s routine onto your life and watched it break, this one’s for you.

In July 2003, Admiral John Poindexter proposed a futures market inside DARPA (the research and dev agency responsible for the internet itself) called the Policy Analysis Market. Poindexter was Reagan’s former National Security Advisor, convicted for his role in Iran-Contra and later acquitted on a technicality. Traders would bet on Middle East political events, including assassinations, coups, terror attacks, and regime changes. Senators Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan went public with the details on July 28.

The program was killed within 24 hours, and Poindexter resigned two weeks later.

The public reaction, way back in 2003, was utter revulsion. The idea of betting on whether a head of state would be murdered etc struck almost everyone as obviously gruesome and beyond redemption; editorial writers called it grotesque; and Pentagon officials spent days apologising.

Twenty-two years later, we seem to have drifted a long way from that moral high watermark.

Polymarket ran live contracts in 2024 on whether Vladimir Putin would remain in office, whether Joe Biden would drop out, whether a ceasefire would hold in Gaza by a given date, whether Donald Trump would be assassinated before the November election. Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated American competitor, took hundreds of millions of dollars in volume on the 2024 presidential race. In 2026, folks have been betting on the deaths of Iranian officials and Israeli civilians and nuclear war.

Nobody has resigned, and no senator has been forced to hold a press conference. The markets are covered in the financial press as an actual innovation in retail trading.

We’ve gone from “this is too ghoulish to exist” in 2003 to “this is the new wisdom-of-crowds infrastructure” in 2026. And it’s a symptom of how we, all of us, are coming apart.

Prediction markets are, I think, the clearest single sign that our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage.

The dream and the pitch

The pitch for prediction markets has been the same since Robin Hanson started writing about “idea futures” in 1988 and 1990, and since the Iowa Electronic Markets launched their political futures market that same decade. Markets aggregate dispersed information better than polls, pundits, or committees; if you put money on the line, people stop posturing and start estimating, and prices become a running readout of collective belief.

Hanson’s version of this ran deep. He proposed “futarchy,” a system where citizens vote on values and markets decide on policy. You’d ask the market whether a given policy would raise GDP, reduce childhood poverty, or cut CO2, and whichever policy the market priced highest would get implemented.

Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment in 2005 and Superforecasting in 2015 supplied the scientific underpinning. Tetlock found that generalist forecasters who updated on evidence, tracked calibration, and competed in open tournaments routinely beat credentialed experts. The Good Judgment Project, funded by IARPA starting in 2011, showed this was repeatable.

Markets do aggregate information. Forecasting tournaments do beat pundits. The humiliation of the 2003 Iraq WMD consensus, and of nearly every major think tank’s prediction record in the decade after, gave the prediction-market crowd a genuine argument.

So if the pitch is good, why is the product a sign of rot?

Because the pitch was about epistemics.

The product is about something worse.

What the markets price

Open Polymarket in April 2026. Scroll the trending contracts. You’ll find markets on celebrity divorces, CEO firings, troop movements, drone strikes, papal health, celebrity deaths recast as “will X still be alive on December 31,” and whether a given pop star will release an album in Q3. The biggest volumes cluster around elections and the personal misfortunes of public figures.

These are bets on whether bad things will happen to specific people, and groups of people, whether institutions will hold, whether the world will feel more or less stable in 90 days.

The prediction-market community will tell you the content of the contracts doesn’t matter, because the market’s function is to produce accurate probabilities and nothing more - and I don’t buy this for a single second. What a society chooses to price reveals what it actually gives a shit about, in the same way that what a society chooses to memorialise reveals what it honours. Tell me which contracts move size and I’ll tell you what your civilisation has decided is interesting.

In Renaissance Florence, the biggest public wagers were on papal elections, the outcomes of condottieri campaigns, and whether the Arno would flood before June; you can reconstruct the city’s anxieties from the betting books. Our betting books show a civilisation fixated on the humiliation and removal of a small number of public figures, and on the probability that large systems will crack on a short timescale.

This is an unflattering portrait.

Assassination contracts

Polymarket listed a contract in summer 2024 on whether Donald Trump would be assassinated before the election. The contract was scrubbed after the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting in July, for obvious reasons, but crucially it had traded. There was liquidity. There were people on both sides of the bet.

In 2005, Nick Szabo wrote about the dangers of what a crypto-anarchist named Jim Bell had called “assassination politics” back in 1995. Szabo came close to inventing Bitcoin before Satoshi did, and he knew what he was looking at. Bell’s original proposal was a market where anonymous donors could pool money that would pay out to whoever correctly “predicted” the date of a public official’s death; and the prediction would, of course, be a contract for the hit.

Every prediction-market platform that goes live has to run a gauntlet around Bell’s ghost. Polymarket’s terms of service prohibit contracts that could function as murder contracts, and Kalshi does the same - the lawyers know the argument.

But the argument doesn’t depend on intent. Hanson himself has written that you can’t cleanly separate a prediction market on whether X will be killed from an incentive to kill X, because the market is information to a would-be assassin about how much financial upside exists in acting on their impulse; it’s a relatively clean way for a hostile state actor to hedge a covert operation. A sovereign that wants a rival head of state dead can, in principle, acquire a large position on a thinly traded market, wait for someone to commit the act, and pay for the operation with the winnings.

In 2003, this argument was enough to kill a DARPA program and end a career.

In 2026, the same argument is background noise. We’ve collectively decided that the information value of these markets outweighs the moral cost of treating human lives as tradable securities, and this (to me, at least, and I accept that I may be alone in this) that decision is a bleeding mistake.

The dead pool and the decline

Tudor Londoners wagered on the life expectancy of public figures so routinely that life insurance, as we understand it, grew out of the same market. Geoffrey Clark’s Betting on Lives, published in 1999, traces the 18th century English insurance market as a functioning prediction market on the deaths of dukes and royal mistresses. Parliament shut it down in 1774 with the Life Assurance Act, which required insurable interest, because the legislators of the era understood something we’ve apparently, conveniently and somewhat profitably forgotten. Permitting strangers to bet on whether a named person would live or die produced, in aggregate, darker incentives than the information-gathering benefit could justify. This should be obvious. In fact, to anyone paying attention, this is obvious.

The 18th century London markets at scale were disastrous. Ambassadors were assassinated. Heirs were poisoned. The statute was, by the standards of the 1770s, a moral intervention.

But we repealed that moral intervention, and we repealed it with software. Each new prediction market opens with a standard disclaimer that the platform doesn’t allow murder contracts, and then lists contracts on the lives of named public figures, reinventing 18th century betting practices and rebranding them too, as innovations and disruptions.

The Roman Empire late in its decline had booming gambling markets on gladiatorial outcomes. The Byzantines had a full betting economy around chariot racing that produced the Nika riots of 532 CE, which killed tens of thousands. Late Qing China had opium-fueled fan-tan parlors that functioned as quasi-markets on political outcomes. Weimar Germany had the Tauentzienstraße betting shops that took wagers on the next Chancellor and, after 1930, on which faction would be next to be shot in a street brawl.

None of this is to claim that gambling causes decline; that would be a cheap causal argument, and I’m not yet in that business...

My claim is a little narrower, at least.

In each case, a civilisation under strain stopped prosecuting its disputes through argument and institution, and started pricing them; the bettors were reading the decline the way a barometer reads a storm, even if the storm came from somewhere else.

Sandel’s objection, twenty years late

Michael Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, published What Money Can’t Buy in 2012. The core argument of the book is that some goods are corrupted they moment they’re priced. A Nobel Peace Prize that can be bought at auction isn’t a Nobel Peace Prize, something that Donald Trump may or may not have grokked; a friendship that’s bought and sold cannot possibly qualify as a friendship; a citizenship that has a purchase point, in the Maltese Golden Visa sense, isn’t actually any kind of citizenship that actually matters, in any kind of philosophical sense.

Sandel’s objection to prediction markets is that certain questions change their nature when you put them in a market frame. Markets don’t need to produce bad information for this to go wrong; they do the damage by producing any number at all. Ask “is the Secretary of Defense going to resign by June 1” in a newsroom and you get a political question - you talk about his relationship with the President, the policy disputes inside the cabinet, the institutional pressures from Congress etc. The question is embedded in a set of relationships and public obligations.

Ask the same question on a prediction market and you get a probability between 0 and 1. The market has no view on whether he should resign, whether the policy fight is worth winning, whether the institutional damage is worth the political cost and so on - It only has a price, because it only needs a price.

Prediction markets route around normative argument without destroying it; they provide a parallel answer, priced and continuous, that makes the unpriced conversation feel slow and unserious by comparison. Why listen to a journalist reason about whether the ceasefire will hold when you can see that it’s trading at 34 cents?

The laziness dividend

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote Nudge in 2008 with a section on prediction markets that reads, now, as a period piece. They praised the markets as a way to get past groupthink and expert capture and perhaps they were right about the epistemic problem, but I think it’s easy to see that they were wrong about where the pressure would move. The pressure has moved toward laziness - once a price exists, a journalist stops reporting and an analyst stops analysing and a decision-maker stops deciding. Everyone’s waiting for Polymarket to update.

During the 2024 US election, major news outlets, including the Financial Times and the Washington Post, quoted Polymarket’s implied probabilities in running coverage. The number was treated as a live readout of election reality, and when the numbers moved, articles were written about the movement. The question of what was driving the movement, which is the actual journalism, came second. In 2024, Nate Silver shifted to publishing both his own forecast and the Polymarket number, and spent much of October explaining why they diverged. His model at 538 had dominated election coverage for 12 years before that. The work of explanation became a reaction to the price.

Silver is one of the more honest figures here. He’s said in print that prediction markets are his competitors, that they force him to sharpen his reasoning, and that he thinks the aggregated number contains signal his model misses. And fair enough - I can accept that as a good faith position. But the broader effect, across the field, has been that journalism about uncertain future events has collapsed into price commentary, and the markets have become the story, and the story about the markets has replaced the story about the world.

Replacing argument with price

Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue, published in 1981, that modern moral discourse is a ruin. We use the vocabulary of older ethical traditions, Aristotelian virtue, Christian duty, Kantian rights, without the shared community of practice that gave those words their meaning, and so we shout past each other, trading fragments that no longer cohere. His example was the debate over abortion - but you could use almost any political question from 1981 forward.

The prediction market is the ultimate post-MacIntyre moral technology, asking only what will happen. Questions about what we owe each other, what justice requires, what a good outcome would be, what a morally defensible position would represent - the market has no machinery for. Values drop out of the picture, because the price is the only fact.

he defenders rarely argue that the markets produce better outcomes in any thick sense of “better.” They argue that the markets produce more accurate probabilities, as though accuracy is the only remaining virtue; but it’s the virtue you keep when you’ve stopped believing in any of the others.

When a civilisation loses its ability to answer “what should we do” it retreats to answering “what will happen?” The late Romans did it, and late medieval astrologers did it, and late 19th century social Darwinists did it too. Each of these movements felt, to its practitioners, like a rigorous clarification, and each, in retrospect, is closer to a surrender.

Prediction markets are the 21st century version of that surrender: a technology for converting questions of value into questions of fact, and then trading the facts.

The Scott Alexander problem

Scott Alexander Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten, is the most thoughtful public defender of prediction markets working today. His argument, refined across a dozen essays from 2012 to 2025, is about this: prediction markets are useful tools for aggregating information and forcing experts to put money where their mouths are. They have costs, yes, but the costs are manageable, and so we should want more of them, not fewer.

But the question that matters isn’t “do prediction markets produce accurate probabilities.” They do, sometimes, on questions where they have enough liquidity and no manipulation incentive. I think the question is whether a civilisation that routes more and more of its public life through these markets is one in good health or coming apart at the seams.

The rationalist position = that better epistemics is always a good; knowing what’s true is the first step to making things better, and you can’t improve what you can’t measure. But some things, some parts of our existence are degraded by measurement. Marriage quality, and artistic achievement, and the sanctity of a deliberative process. When you take a thing that was embedded in relational or political context and reduce it to a number, you may have made the thing more easy to understand; but you’ve also changed what the thing is.

This was James Scott’s argument in Seeing Like a State, published in 1998, about forestry and city planning. The state, in order to manage a forest, has to render it as timber volume; once rendered, the forest is managed as timber; and so the ecological complexity, the cultural meaning, the local knowledge of which stands of trees matter for which villagers, all of it disappears into the measurement...it’s all timber, all the way down. Which of course, is not so different from defining an entire population as so many corpses.

Prediction markets render deliberation as probability, and once rendered, public questions are managed as probability, and the deliberation that produced the question vanishes - the argument for why the question matters vanishes too.

What’s left?

The price.

Who benefits

The money on Polymarket and Kalshi comes from some identifiable sources. Crypto-native traders looking for a new volatility surface after the 2022 collapse of the lending markets, and Quant firms running information-arbitrage strategies, and political operatives testing narratives, and Journalists and hobbyists putting down small stakes for entertainment.

In the 2024 US election, Polymarket data showed a single French trader, named in a Wall Street Journal piece by Alexander Osipovich and Shane Shifflett in October 2024, putting down about $30 million across several accounts to bet on Trump. The bet moved the implied probability for weeks. And he won about $85 million when the results came in.

Set aside whether he had inside information. The point is that the “market consensus” on the most important political question of the year was shaped by the convictions of one rich person willing to take a large position. The market aggregated information, yes, but the information it aggregated was dominated by the bankroll of one participant.

This is the manipulation problem in miniature. In any market with thin liquidity and high civic importance, the price is going to reflect the beliefs of whoever’s willing to put the most money in. The people who gain from this arrangement are the same people who gain from any financialisation of public life. Traders, platform operators, and a small cohort of well-capitalised political actors who can now move the apparent consensus on a question by buying it. The people who lose are everyone else. The citizen who reads the Polymarket number as a fact is consuming a number produced in part by someone’s willingness to spend. The journalist who quotes the number is laundering that person’s money into public knowledge. The policy-maker who uses the number to justify a decision is delegating to the bankroll. This was always the critique of modern financial markets at scale, from Hyman Minsky in the 1980s through to Adair Turner and Mariana Mazzucato in the 2010s. Prediction markets inherit it, and the civic stakes make it worse.

Why this feels like decay

Joseph Tainter argued in The Collapse of Complex Societies, published in 1988, that collapses share a signature. The society develops expensive institutions to manage complexity, and the returns on those institutions decline. The society can’t afford them, and so the institutions fail or are abandoned. Reading Tainter alongside the current prediction-market boom is a strange experience. The pattern fits, but it fits sideways. The expensive institutions are things like the professional press, the civil service, the academy, the peer-reviewed journal, the national statistical agency - these were built through the 19th and 20th centuries to produce reliable public knowledge. They’re all, right now, in various states of crisis // collapse…

Prediction markets are cheap. They don’t need credentialed staff, or editorial judgment, or institutional memory. They produce a continuous stream of apparently reliable numbers, on any question you can phrase, for the cost of a small trading fee. From a pure cost-benefit standpoint, they look like a massive improvement on the old institutions. From a civic standpoint, they’re a replacement, like a drive-through replacing a dinner table. The drive-through feeds you faster and cheaper; but the thing the dinner table was for, a slow shared practice of attention, isn’t among the things the drive-through provides. Tainter’s argument is that societies rarely notice they’re replacing the dinner table with the drive-through until the dinner tables are gone. The cost savings look real and the institutional loss is invisible until a crisis demands the capabilities that only the old institutions had.

We’ve seen previews of this. During the 2020 pandemic, prediction markets priced the course of the disease with about the same accuracy as public health agencies, sometimes better. Many technologists used this as evidence that the CDC and WHO should be replaced in part by forecasting infrastructure. But the CDC was built to coordinate the response, distribute vaccines, run surveillance, and train the next generation of epidemiologists so the country would have them when the next crisis came - and forecasting was a small piece of a much larger public-health organism.

When you propose to replace the organism with a market, you’re trading a capability for a number. The number is cheaper. When the next crisis comes, the number won’t help. This is what civilisational decay looks like in detail. Expensive institutions are eaten by cheap substitutes, who are capable of doing only one thing the institutions did; the other things, the work of being a polity that can act, drop out. And by the time the polity needs to act, the infrastructure is long, long gone.

Late moves, short histories

Late-period civilisations discover elegant, efficient-looking technologies right before they’re unable to use them...

The late Roman Empire had glass blowing, sophisticated concrete, hydraulic engineering, and long-distance banking on a level the West wouldn’t rebuild for 800 years. The late Song dynasty had printing, gunpowder, movable type, and a paper currency system a millennium before European equivalents. Each civilisation’s late period looks, to the historian, like a technological peak right before a collapse. This is partly survival bias, I’ll admit: we notice the technologies because they survived the collapse in the written record. But civilisations under pressure do accelerate innovation as a substitute for institutional repair - because the efficient new tool is cheaper than the expensive old practice, and the new tool gets adopted fast. The old practice atrophies, and when the new tool runs up against a problem it can’t solve, the civilisation has no fallback.

Prediction markets fit this. They’re elegant, they’re efficient, they’re sold to all of us as a modern replacement for expensive institutional practice, and they do solve one real problem, which is that credentialed experts are overconfident in their forecasts. But that problem is a tiny piece of the problem that the old institutions were built to handle. If you read Polybius on late Rome, or Ibn Khaldun on the Maghreb dynasties of the 14th century, or Gibbon on the Antonine age, you’ll highlight the same shit: clever technical solutions proliferate, and civic competence declines. People blame the institutions for their inefficiency, without noticing that the efficiency of the replacements is achieved by discarding the functions that the institutions existed to provide. Khaldun called this stage haḍara, the settled, luxurious phase of a civilisation where the original virtues have been hollowed out by comfort and specialisation.

What’s missing from the price

Take a contract on “will Israel and Hamas reach a ceasefire by December 31, 2026.” The price, on any given day, is some number between 0 and 1.0 Say it’s 0.22.

What the price doesn’t contain: an account of why a ceasefire would be a moral good, an account of who bears responsibility for the failure of previous ceasefires, a theory of what international pressure could shift the outcome, a map of which hostages are still alive, a record of what the killed journalists were writing before they died, or any sense of what it would mean, for the children now growing up in the Middle East, for the war to end in November instead of January.

None of this can be priced - the market cannot hold it.

The market can only hold the collapsed summary.

The market’s defenders will say that all of this exists elsewhere, in the journalism, the NGO reports, the academic analysis, the long-form commentary. But “elsewhere” is losing its funding, losing its audience and losing its status, while the market is gaining all three. The price is becoming the authoritative output, while the elsewhere is becoming the decorative commentary around the price. And when you invert the relationship between the deliberation and the summary, you change what the summary means. In a healthy system, the probability number is a shorthand for a rich debate; in a decaying system, and we are in a decaying system, the debate is a shorthand for the probability number.

From orbit…

If I were diagnosing a civilisation from orbit, I’d look at what it bets on and what it refuses to bet on. A healthy civilisation bets on games, on contests, on horses, on private entertainments; it draws a line around the sacred or the civic, and refuses to price what’s inside that line, and the line might move around, but at least it exists. A civilisation in decay erases the line: everything becomes a contract, from the death of a public figure, to the course of a war, to the outcome of an election, the next pandemic, the marriage of a celebrity, the survival of a pope. Nothing is held out of the market, because nothing and no one is sacred.

The first prediction markets, the Iowa markets in the late 1980s, confined themselves to electoral outcomes. Intrade, which launched in 2001 and collapsed in 2013, pushed the envelope into celebrity deaths and ran into legal and reputational trouble; Polymarket, since 2020, has been willing to list almost anything that generates volume. Each platform that pushed the boundary might not have gotten away with it, the boundary still moved all the same. The social response got weaker, and so did the legal response. I don’t think the boundary actually exists anymore, not in any meaningful sense. You can bet, right now, on the death of almost any named public figure, on the outcome of active military operations, on whether specific children of specific celebrities will be arrested. I don’t think this happened because we decided as a society that it was fine. I think it happened because we stopped having a mechanism for deciding anything as a collective bunch of normal bloody people.

There’s no golden age of public deliberation to return to. The 18th century betting books I described earlier coexisted with slavery, wife-selling, and press-ganging, and the 20th century public sphere excluded roughly half the population. My claim isn’t that we’ve fallen from some prior height of mora superiority. I’m no fool. But civilisations - ours, specifically - can build institutions that hold certain questions out of the market, treat them as scred, and handle them through deliberation instead. When those institutions are healthy, the society can argue and act together; when they rot, the market floods in and prices what the institutions held out.

A version of us that wasn’t decaying would have, in 2003, rejected the Policy Analysis Market, built better public forecasting inside the civil service, and kept the private prediction markets confined to commerce and entertainment. A version of us that wasn’t decaying would treat Polymarket contracts on assassinations the way we treat snuff films, as something the market can technically produce and that the society refuses to consume. But we don’t treat them that way, do we?

We cite them in the Financial fucking Times.

A small hopeful note

A few people are still holding the line. The UK’s Government Office for Science has experimented with internal prediction markets limited to scientific and technical questions, while keeping political questions out. Singapore’s civil service uses forecasting tournaments of the Tetlock kind, carefully scoped. The Metaculus platform, non-monetary and governed by a research norm, has tried to build forecasting infrastructure with stronger civic guardrails than the commercial markets.

These are small efforts, fighting against a much larger tide, but they suggest that the choice between “no forecasting at all” and “price everything” isn’t the only choice available. You can have institutions that use prediction-market techniques on some questions, under constraints, while defending a line that keeps other questions civic.

I think Polymarket and Kalshi are early rather than final. The infrastructure is cheap, the regulatory fights are mostly won, and the cultural objection has collapsed. Over the next 10 years, you’ll see prediction markets embedded in news apps (they’re already live in Substack), used as the primary data feed for political coverage, integrated into corporate decision-making, and deployed inside political campaigns as both polling infrastructure and voter-suppression tools.

You’ll see a second wave of markets on things that now seem unthinkable: markets on the outcomes of specific criminal trials, markets on marriages and divorces of named ordinary people who become briefly famous, markets on child custody outcomes, markets on refugee-camp mortality. There’s no principled line that stops the expansion once the line against “civic questions” is gone, and that line fell in the early 2020s.

The prediction markets are the clearest sign of decay because they’re the case where the pitch is most defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, and the long-term effect is corrosive anyway. You can’t argue against them on their own terms; the terms are already the problem.

What you can do is keep asking the questions that the market can’t price. What do we owe each other? What should we refuse to sell, even if someone wants to buy it? What are the things we used to know and have started forgetting? Those questions produce arguments and if we’re lucky, sometimes the arguments produce institutions, and if we’re luckier still, the institutions are the load-bearing walls of a civilisation that’s still alive.

Our civilisation can still produce them. It mostly doesn’t.

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