Why Is Consumer Sentiment at Record Lows?

Consumer sentiment is at record lows because there is zero visibility on any real-world trends that would be positive for the bottom 90%. Vague promises of super-abundance are not visibility.

Why is consumer sentiment at record lows while the stock market is at record highs? The media / social media are ablaze with coverage and commentary on this K-shaped economy, for example: The Stock Market Has Never Been So Good When People Have Felt So Bad: Stocks are partying like it's 1999. Americans haven't been this gloomy in 70 years. (wsj.com)

While much commentary focuses on the rising cost of living (i.e. inflation) and the potential disruption of jobs by AI, these miss the larger dynamic of visibility, i.e. what is visible looking forward. If the horizon is clouded by uncertainty and unaffordability, then the core investments in the future--a family home and a family--are no longer in reach except for the lucky few inheriting wealth while they're young. A high-paying job that isn't secure is not a foundation, it's a temporary raft in a tempestuous sea.

Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.
What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people's inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood.

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. The Gen X writer Astra Taylor calls ours "the age of insecurity"; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described "the end of predictable progress." Gen Z-ers' uncertainty about the future can't be captured by the usual metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor in the global parenting free fall.

Raising children is an inherently forward-looking project, and in Professor Vignoli's analysis, increasing exposure to a volatile global economy and accelerating technological change make it hard for young people to project a path forward with even a modest degree of confidence.

In previous lows in consumer sentiment, current economic conditions were unfavorable because the economy was in a recession. I've indicated the three major recessions of the past 50 years on the chart below: 1973-74 (energy crisis / inflation), 1980-82 (inflation, higher interest rates), and 2008-09 (housing bubble burst, subprime mortgage meltdown triggers Global Financial Crisis).

The most important difference between then (1973-2009) and now is that average households could still afford to buy a house and have a family and now those are out of reach for a significant percentage of median-income urban households. In previous recessions, consumers suffering the effects of recession had visibility on evidence that once the economy improved, they would still be able to afford to buy a house and raise a family. This visibility wasn't a top-down narrative bolstered by gamed statistics; it was visible across the entire spectrum of the economy.

The truth few dare to recognize is there is no credible evidence that housing and having a family will return to being affordable for the majority in the foreseeable future. If these are what matters, then rising GDP (a favorite metric of those promoting the narrative that rising GDP means everything's getting better for everyone) offers no visibility on what matters to households.

Also unsaid because it undermines the narratives of permanent Progress and the system benefits us all is the visible decline of the quality of everyday life. Life is more hectic, more precarious, less secure, and our health is declining in ways that go unrecognized because that undermines the narratives propping up the status quo.

It's not just the cost of living is rising; the quality of life is deteriorating in ways that are not easily measurable. Healthcare claims being denied, busy-work being offloaded by Corporate America onto the household, the steady decline in quality of goods and services--in all these cases, what was once reliable and of good quality has been degraded. To contact customer service is now a nightmarish experience of being returned to the same menu of options, none of which address the problem you're trying to resolve.

This Is Why You're Drowning in Busywork We have been told that AI will take people's jobs. What no one mentions is that many of those jobs are landing on us. The AI revolution involves a huge transfer of labor--not from worker to machine but from worker to consumer.

Consumers have visibility on this degradation of the quality of everyday life, and they see no plausible evidence it's reversing. The trajectory of the future is more degradation, and there is no evidence AI will reverse this trajectory. Rather, in many ways it's accelerating it.

There is a lively debate about whether AI will in aggregate create jobs or eliminate jobs, or generate churn that leaves the total number of jobs about the same. At this early stage, there is no visibility on how this will play out, but consumers have visibility on the potential for job losses, reductions of benefits, the collapse of job security and the possibility that most of the replacement jobs being created will be low pay and insecure.

Households have no visibility on the promise that AI will generate vast prosperity that they will share, but they have clear visibility on AI decimating stable employment. Pundits offer up the historical record that previous Industrial Revolutions laid waste to social and economic security but eventually created more general prosperity.

Households understand that this sounds nice while supporting the status quo inequality, but there is no guarantee in history; it's not gravity, it's contingent. This Industrial Revolution might just decimate social and economic structures and leave a dystopia in its wake that institutionalizes extreme inequality not just in wealth and outcomes but in opportunity and freedom of movement.

What's visible is not warm and fuzzy, and insisting that consumers / households have it wrong because those set to reap extraordinary profits insist it wll all work out just fine is comically disconnected from reality. There is no visibility on all those promises of super-abundance that's going to lift all boats, and no visibility on society surviving the onslaught of Big Tech AI.

The social order that underpins the economy has already been already discounted to near-zero by the technocratic value system and machinery of Big Tech's optimization to increase profitability by any means available, and the resulting decay of the quality of life and the moral foundations of a functional society.

Why is consumer sentiment at record lows while the stock market is at new highs? Ask what's visible. What's visible is soaring corporate profits and stock indices only benefit the top 10% who own the lion's share of stocks. What's visible is the decline in security, affordability, the purchasing power of wages and the quality of life, and the absence of any evidence that this trajectory downward is about to reverse.

What's visible is billionaires reaping outlandish gains from financializing technology promising that their gains will trickle down to the bottom 90% after the foundations of the bottom 90%'s security are gutted and reworked in some unforeseeable way that will magically make everyone rich.

This isn't visibility; it's FantasyLand. What's visible is the decay and decline of security, employment, opportunity and visibility itself, and the emergence of a neofeudal society that is so corrupt that it no longer has the ability to recognize its own moral decay.

We inhabit a Tower of Babel that's automating its own demise. We all have visibility on this, but to admit this is to admit the entire status quo is set on self-destruct while indulging in self-glorifying fantasies.

Consumer sentiment is at record lows because there is zero visibility on any real-world trends that would be positive for the bottom 90%. Vague promises of super-abundance are not visibility.



Here is the May 2026 snapshot of consumer sentiment:



This is a 10-year chart of consumer sentiment:



What do we have visibility on? How about the widening gulf between the wealthy and powerful and everyone else?




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The Overstuffed Freezer Analogy

So we as a nation are waiting for the system to break down so we're forced to empty the overstuffed freezer and start over.

A friend recently made a comment that reflected something larger than he intended. It was an offhand comment along the lines of, "I hate to say it, but I wish our freezer would fail so we'd clean out all the old food no one will ever eat."

This struck me as an analogy for wealth, waste and rot in America. As a nation, we're so wealthy we can stuff millions of freezers with food that is never consumed because it's buried beneath a mountain of more recent food, and we're wealthy enough to devote vast quantities of energy to keeping this food that no one will ever eat frozen for years.

Eventually, the freezer fails or the owners move, and all this once perfectly good food is tossed out as garbage to rot in the landfill. There are other forms of rot in this analogy.

There's the rot of vast wealth inequality: there are millions of households wealthy enough to keep overstuffed freezers full of old food running for years and millions of households worrying about paying their utility bills. For the wealthy household, the utility bill is such a modest percentage of monthly income that it's not an issue. The annual utility bill is an inconsequentially trivial percentage of the household's net wealth.

Then there's the rot of legacy systems we're paying to keep frozen long after the utility-value of the old system has expired. Just as no one recalls what's at the bottom of the freezer, and no one wants to expend the effort required to empty the freezer and actually decide if anything in the bottom is worth saving, we as a nation continue paying for legacy systems that are wasteful to maintain and provide no value.

Since no one is paid or rewarded for doing the tedious work of emptying the freezer and assessing the value of each layer of old stuff, this task is never done. We as a nation just keep paying the bills to maintain systems that cost real money to maintain but provide no value. And to the degree they take up space that could have been devoted to things that have real value, the old layers are costly obstacles to improving the quality of life by reducing needless, wasteful expenses.

So we as a nation are waiting for the system to break down so we're forced to empty the overstuffed freezer and start over. Is this ideal? No, but that's the only way overstuffed freezers are ever emptied.




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When Unfairness Is Systemic, the Consequences Are Flight, Resistance, Revolt

Now that we've drained the aquifers of a stable society, the replacement form of "wealth" is a delusional credit-asset bubble that generates the illusion of "wealth."

Let's weave together two threads that look different: systemic unfairness and civilizational psychosis. As I often note, social species that organize themselves into hierarchies (i.e. primates, including humans) have an innate sensitivity to fairness, as this trait is essential to maintaining social stability, and therefore it has been selected as advantageous.

This sensitivity applies both to individual instances of unfairness / injustice and to systemic unfairness / injustice. If there is no redress when an individual is treated unfairly or abused, the social order is weakened. This is why early civilizations instituted legal codes and systems of redress as they expanded into nations / empires that needed bureaucracies to organize, manage and enforce the rules and responsibilities of every class.

If the mechanisms of redress have become empty shams, then the unfairness is systemic: it isn't just some individuals who have been treated unfairly--everyone is being exploited and treated differently from what the system claims is the operative set of values and rules.

When there's an external source of wealth to be exploited, the leadership has the luxury of becoming extractive and oppressive, because they have a source of wealth that's external to their own populace. Consider the progression from a society of systemic fairness to a society of systemic unfairness.

Consider a fledgling nation that was a society with high levels of social trust and cohesion generated by a dutiful leadership, social mobility and a system in which social pressures meant members of each social class had to respect the same set of social rules.

This structure is the essential foundation of a functional society and economy, for if the resident populace is immiserated by an unfair system, they respond by either fleeing the system (i.e. opting out or leaving), resisting the unfairness / exploitation or revolting against the status quo.

If the nation transitions into an expansionist empire, the leadership can jettison fairness / redress because it can extract wealth via conquest or exploiting new resources. The bureaucracy is co-opted / bought off via the spoils of conquest and corruption, and as the imperium expands, it has sufficient wealth to buy off the citizenry class with bread and circuses or equivalent largesse.

In other words, systemic unfairness--what we now call a rigged casino--is accepted as long as the key social classes feel they're getting ahead. The Roman state / empire is an example of these dynamics, but there are many others.

As long as there's enough external wealth flowing in to enable people to feel they're still getting ahead, social decay is tolerated as "the cost of progress." In other words, who needs fairness if I have a seat in the rigged casino?

But this structure is inherently unstable, both economically and socially. External sources of wealth / resources are eventually depleted, and the largesse diminishes asymmetrically: the wealthiest few at the top continue amassing fortunes, the bureaucrats are squeezed, and the lower classes are now being taxed to cover the decline of external wealth extraction.

The systemic unfairness that was tolerated is no longer tolerable once the majority are no longer getting ahead. This presents the leadership class reaping the lion's share of the wealth extraction with a problem: how to persuade the masses that 1) they're still getting ahead, even as they visibly lose ground, and 2) how to mask the systemic unfairness, i.e. the rigged casino that stripmines the many to benefit the few.

The leadership's "solution" is civilizational psychosis: the founding mythology of the state--so inspirational and lofty--is heavily promoted, even as this mythology (super-abundance, democracy, etc.) no longer maps the real world.

This widening divide generates civilizational psychosis as the masses are corralled into a state of denial that temporarily eases their anxiety at the recognition they're no longer getting ahead and the ladders of upward mobility have all crumbled.

This state of inspirational delusion enables denial to take a superficially plausible inspirational form: Rome is eternal, so we don't have to do anything but await an automatic return to greatness, AI will make us all rich, technological Progress is inevitable and automatically solves all our problems, and so on.

We fervently believe these delusions because the alternative is too painful to bear. The system is rotten to the core, it's all artifice masquerading as authenticity, and not only are we no longer getting ahead, there are no pathways left to get ahead other than gambling, selling our blood or delusional aspirations to become one of the tiny handful of newly minted Tech Bro millionaires.

There is an emotional progression that parallels the progression from a stable society of dynamic equilibrium to civilizational psychosis: denial breaks down into anger, a volatile state with uncertain outcomes, which eventually transitions to bargaining (please let the stock market go back up so I can exit without losses) which leads to depression (it's all lost) which once processed can move to acceptance (oh well, time to start over).

Both denial and civilizational psychosis are inherently unstable as they're self-liquidating. So denial will blossom into anger whether we "like" it or not.

Now that we've drained the aquifers of a stable society, the replacement form of "wealth" is a catastrophically delusional credit-asset bubble that generates the illusion of "wealth." Since the top 10% managerial / entrepreneurial / professional class the leadership needs to run the empire own 90% of the bubbling assets, inflating a credit-asset bubble is a painless way of generating the illusion in this class that they're still getting ahead.

Until the bubble pops, of course, and all bubbles pop, even when we insist they're not bubbles.

Bubbles masquerading as "wealth" is a manifestation of civilizational psychosis, and so these asset bubbles are equally unstable and self-liquidating: they implode not as a result of some external influence but as an inevitable consequence of their internal structure / nature.

Once the system's transition to a rigged casino becomes undeniable, denial cracks wide open and is replaced by anger. The responses to systemic unfairness are flight, resistance and revolt: dropping out, laying flat, let it rot, opting out, booing toadies worshiping the new gods of AI and eventually, manifestations of revolt as political, economic and social redress are suppressed as needless by a delusional leadership class that has embraced civilizational psychosis.

The price of believing their own PR will be higher than anyone thought possible.





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Inequality, AI and Digital Life Are Undermining Society

Trying to convince ourselves that this is "Progress" and therefore it will all work out just fine isn't the same as it actually working out just fine.

That society is on a terminal trajectory toward collapse is self-evident, as is our desire to evade acknowledging this distressing reality. I have curated four recent articles / essays to establish the baseline argument: inequality, AI and social media are undermining society in mutually reinforcing ways.

The dynamics are scale-invariant: they undermine the cognitive, emotional, financial and social stability of individuals, families, communities, the economy and ultimately society, which includes the economy--not the other way around, as we've been led to believe: society doesn't exist, the economy is everything. This claim is the ultimate source of the dynamics of system-societal collapse.

Let's go through four sources that lay out the dynamics of social collapse.

1. The collapse of identity, marriage, family, security and universally accessible positive economic-social roles.

Jaded with work and school, some young men are opting out. Meet the NEETs: not employed, in education or in training. (yahoo.com)

2. The globalization of inequality not just in wealth and income but in agency (control of one's life) and opportunity to marry, establish a family, own a home and secure a positive economic-social role. What's being globalized is anxiety, desperation and loneliness, not prosperity.

The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future. (nytimes.com)

I have spent years reporting and living in both the United States and China and wrote a book chronicling the history and evolution of the Chinese internet. Moving between the two countries, I've been struck by how they have come to mirror and resemble each other. There is a shared sense of precarity that lies beneath the envy and distrust: the technological future is taking shape at vertiginous speed yet its promise is not shared by all.

Researchers are courted with nine-figure salaries like N.B.A. stars, and roadside billboards call on residents to 'Supercharge your A.I.' and 'Stop Hiring Humans.' Tech workers have earnestly adopted China's infamous '996' work schedule: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. They are hustling hard and 'locking in' to ensure that they emerge as the rich and powerful victors of the A.I. gold rush. China's tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency.

"It's a highly competitive environment right now," a Shenzhen software engineer told me. "I feel like if I stop, I'll be left behind." His anxiety is not new. Unstable work situations and economic insecurity long predate the current A.I. boom. But A.I. has supercharged those anxieties and made them much harder to contest.

A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as 'high agency,' while the rest of us are 'bots' condemned to the 'permanent underclass.'

"This is not 'embracing the future,'" one disillusioned user on RedNote described the OpenClaw craze. "It's 'being harvested by the future.'"

In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu ('corporate cattle') and jiabangou ('overtime dogs.') These same workers have long used the viral term 'involution' to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the 'NPC' or 'non-player character.' They feel like the background role in someone else's video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.



The knowledge workers of both countries feel the surveillance presence of the technology. Outside the office, both Chinese and Americans have become enamored with A.I. as a source of frictionless companionship and emotional validation, with companies now monetizing emotional intimacy at scale.

In China, one survey found that nearly half of young Chinese had used an A.I. chatbot to discuss their mental health. A.I. companions have emerged as a quick fix to a growing loneliness epidemic. This year, the app 'Are You Dead?' --which alerts a contact if a user fails to check-in -- has been wildly popular.

The people of both countries are turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control. When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge. Both societies have seen a surge of nostalgia, a longing for a time remembered as simpler and more stable.

Faced with such a system, the simplest response is to surrender: accept one's fate, sink into the apathy of inevitable decline and, in the words of Chinese netizens, 'let it rot.' It's easy to flee the friction of the real world for the comfort of our feeds and to confide in chatbots rather than friends.

3. The undermining of the family, which is the foundational structure of the human experience and social order. Stability is being replaced by desperation, anxiety, insecurity, disconnection and profound alienation.

Meet the Sad Wives of AI: Are you married to a man who's obsessed with AI? I'm so, so sorry.

There's a strange and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it's doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it's potentially destroying family dynamics. I'm sure this applies to all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members. The technology is coming, has come, for us all.

Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it's bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI--or feels he must work in AI--and she wants him to do literally anything else. He's off in another world, a world of prompts and benchmarks and epiphanies, while she's firmly in this one.

Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot.

Neither of my friends' husbands actually makes money from AI. Not yet. There is this sense, I offered, among people in AI--and people adjacent to it, and people who are pretty sure it's coming for them--that this is their last chance. They've tried everything else, these men, from writing screenplays to investing in crypto. It's AI or bust. Their partners, meanwhile, have quietly taken on a second job: emotional support. Chief Existential Officer, uncompensated. No one asked us if we wanted the gig.

This is the question I ask everyone: Has any part of the AI boom made things better at home? Could it ever?

4. The hollowing out of social mobility and stability by financialization, turning everything into a market that can be rigged and exploited.

The Profitable Rot of the Middle (Noel Johnson)

Look around and you will see that the concept of ownership has radically changed. What we have now is licensing, a mere permission to use a thing or a service.

This is the matter of the profitable rot at the deepest level. The societal transformation from owners to tenants is the very center of the transition.

This propagates everywhere. It is the main principle of chokepoint capitalism.

The social contract is being broken down between generations. If the calculation shows the hardworking generation can't get a house, health security or an honorable retirement anymore, then their attitudes change.

Instead of going for the traditional achievements, they are saying 'nah' and quietly dropping out of the rat race. This is often misinterpreted by the media as 'quiet quitting' or lack of ambition. The truth is that it is neither.

It is a highly rational reaction to a rigged casino. Why play a game where the rules are entirely dictated by the house and the house has explicitly stated its goal is to empty your pockets?

We are witnessing a powerful psychological shift. The constant stress and worry characteristic of modern life are pretty much the awareness that a single medical emergency, job loss or rent hike will send you into complete ruin.

The safety net has been privatized, sold off and financialized and the latter has been offered to us at an unaffordable price.

Every pillar which used to provide stability to the middle class has been turned into an extraction vector.

So what really makes us, us? What defines the modern working class? They shared a common understanding that the cavalry will not come to rescue it.



Why does it matter so much?

Because a society that has no middle class is by definition fragile. It's a brittle construct incapable of withstanding systemic shocks. In the absence of social mobility avenues, the impoverishment of individuals is not the only thing that happens. The legitimacy of the very institutions erodes.

Whenever the distance between the rulers and the ruled gets too great and the social contract is voided by the elites at the top. History shows that the system does not end up simply incapable of resolving a state of permanent inequality.

The system breaks down completely."

Will inequality, AI and Digital Life collapse society? Yes.

I have curated a list of my own essays that address society's accelerating trajectory into collapse: How Things Break / Model Collapse that includes a summary.

I also have a curated list of my Essays on AI.

The real-world commons where people learned to socialize and gain their sea-legs as adults has been replaced by ultra-processed Digital Life: addictive digital technologies / phones / devices that don't just enable surveillance, tracking and algorithmic entertainment, they monetize and incentivize these sources of addiction, disconnect, alienation, loneliness and isolation. Social anxiety is a "market" that invites profitable exploitation.

The real-world commons and sources of stability that are the foundations of social stability are eroding right before our eyes. AI is not the answer, it is one of the drivers. There are no simplistic economic or political answers to the decay and collapse of society, for the root causes include every aspect of Ultra-Processed Life, from addictive digital scrolls to addictive junk food to a pervasive desperation and anxiety as the ground gives way beneath our feet.

Will buying (or more likely, leasing) a household robot fix what's broken, or is the fantasy that there is a profitable technological "solution" to everything the reason why everything of value is breaking down? This is the core dynamic of what I call Anti-Progress: a profitable technology sold as "Progress" that is actually the opposite of Progress, for what's broken can't be fixed by what broke it.

Avoidance, rationalization, denial--these coping mechanisms have very short half-lives. After denial comes Anger, and we're unprepared for anything other than artifice permanently propping up denial. But there is nothing permanent about artifice or denial, as both are self-liquidating by their very nature.

Trying to convince ourselves that this is "Progress" and therefore it will all work out just fine isn't the same as it actually working out just fine, and the difference between the two is about to be starkly revealed as denial is replaced by anger.

My trilogy maps this territory: the Mythology of Progress fails, the consequences of Ultra-Processed Life break through denial, and this acts as a catalyst:

The Mythology of Progress

Ultra-Processed Life

Investing In Revolution

Short video: Inequality, AI and Digital Life Are Undermining Society (1:57 min)

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We've Optimized Fragility, Failure, Denial--and Rage

What happens when optimization is itself the point of failure?

In today's zeitgeist, everything must be optimized or we'll fail: our time, productivity, fitness, diet, supplements, career, income, wealth--everything must be constantly optimized lest we fall behind or fail.

The grand irony is optimization generates fragility which generates failure which generates denial which eventually generates rage. We've optimized global supply chains for efficiency and cost, rendering them exquisitely vulnerable to disruption and collapse. We've optimized the global economy for "growth" based on expanding consumption of energy and everything that depends on energy, which is everything.

To fund this endless expansion of consumption, everyone must borrow more money to buy more than their income allows. To enable this endless expansion of debt, money must be nearly free to borrow after adjusting for inflation.

The irony here is when money has no cost, it's squandered on excess consumption or speculation. The incentive to borrow and spend / invest wisely is that borrowing money has a high cost. Reduce the cost to boost borrowing / consumption / speculation and you create credit-asset bubbles and households, enterprises and governments one mis-step from insolvency.

Optimization raises expectations to lofty heights. The promise of optimization is endless--there's no limit to optimization, and so there's no limit to technology, profits, health, wealth and prosperity. If we keep optimizing, everything becomes possible. By tweaking technology and finance, we can endlessly expand consumption and wealth.

The mindset this generates is: follow the rules of optimization and you'll enjoy all the benefits of success. Optimize your career by borrowing a small fortune to obtain a university diploma, chase the Next Big Thing, optimize your engagement, visibility, and the buzzword du jour, and all the good things in life will be within reach.

The expectations are as fragile as the system they rely on. We've been taught that "our vote counts," that democracy means we have a say in collective decisions via representatives we elect. We've been taught we have agency--control of our destiny: work hard, work smart, optimize work flows and innovation, and anyone can be a startup founder who cashes out with millions of dollars--and the high agency that comes from high visibility.

Except all of this that's presented as stable, trustworthy, predictable and real is fragile, unstable and artificial--simulations of stability, trust and predictability. The belief that this vast system of mythologies, beliefs and "the real world" is as it's presented is civilizational psychosis, a self-reinforcing state of denial in which some new innovation / optimization will "solve" whatever problems arise.

So what's the optimized solution when optimization itself is the problem? What if a new product or profitable technology is not a solution but an extension of optimized fragility?

What's been optimized is centralization of power and control in the hands of the few because distributed capital, agency, power and control are inefficient. So we inhabit a world of overlapping monopolies and cartels, the marriage of state and private sector monopolies. In terms of optimizing profits, the optimized structure is monopoly. Nothing else comes close. So an economy of overlapping monopolies and shared-monopoly (i.e. cartels) is the perfection of a system optimized to maximize profits for the owners of the monopolies.

This is why it doesn't matter who you vote for, as the decisions are made to suit the interests of those at the top of the optimized concentrations of power pyramid. The masses are fed distractions, us-vs-them divisions, fake virtue-signaling policy-tweak "solutions," and a circus of entertainment.

As for optimizing security and a place in the sun--oops, you didn't optimize enough. You didn't optimize innovation enough, and let's face it, you didn't optimize optimization enough, so you failed. Maybe your AI chatbot can console you.

High expectations lead to dreams dashed which leads to denial crumbling on contact with the real world. And when denial crumbles and the scales fall from our eyes, and we see everything that was presented as authentic is actually artificial, a synthetic simulation designed to obscure the gearing of an increasingly fragile system, our sense of betrayal, the shattering of trust, the awareness that we've been lied to, conned, to benefit those doing the bamboozling, then we become angry.

We become angry because we're social beings who depend on trust and truth to function as a group that benefits its members and not just its leaders. When trust and truth have been replaced by artifices to serve the interests of leaders touting how the system benefits everyone, the group dynamics transition from positive to destructive. Nobody likes being conned, and there is a selective advantage to this trait.

Part of the con is to claim that we can collectively transit smoothly from denial to acceptance, skipping the messy, difficult stages of anger, bargaining and depression. (Kubler-Ross's progression of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.) But this isn't how we're wired, and this progression cannot be optimized away.

So never mind you're selling your blood to make ends meet while a handful of others are about to reap fortunes in IPOs. Just accept this is your lot in life. Not all outcomes are equal, creative destruction, blah blah blah.

But what if optimization is the techno-speak cover story for a rigged casino? What if all the buzzwords --innovation, growth, super-abundance, and so on--are all techno-speak cover stories for the substitution of economic metrics for a life that's actually worth living?

We've been herded into a Mouse Utopia of metrics--financial metrics, systems, data, models--that leaves out the reality that we exist in a moral universe in which trust and truth matter more than GDP, stock markets, and the hollow, surreal realm of consumerist transactions.

In this universe, anger leads to redress or retribution. The current system is optimized to avoid redress by optimizing the substitution of artifice for authenticity. This optimization has reached such perfection that the status quo leaders, public and private, believe their mastery of this substitution will continue protecting them from public anger come what may. Just pull the levers, and the public will continue believing.



Our leaders have effectively optimized their belief in their own PR. There is no need for redress because the public will accept more of the same: distractions, us-vs-them divisions, fake virtue-signaling policy-tweak "solutions," and a circus of entertainment.

But this isn't how the transition from denial to anger works. Applying more of the same will only push anger into rage, where it becomes an emergent force with non-linear dynamics: unpredictable, uncontrollable.

In terms of optimized metrics and systems, rage is irrational. In the moral universe, it's perfectly rational. What happens when an unexpected asteroid shatters all the interconnected fragilities of hyper-optimized supply chains and finance?

We can rephrase this to: what happens when optimization is itself the point of failure? What happens when the optimization of substituting artifice for authenticity to mask the decay of trust and truth fails?

All this boils down to: what happens when redress is set aside as needless? That leaves retribution as the only outlet for all the energy being converted from denial to anger.

What seemed preposterous before the asteroid is later recognized as destiny.




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