Introducing ToxicBot (tm), The Bot That Tells Us What We Don't Want to Hear

Needless to say, the world isn't ready for ToxicBot (tm).

I'm finally ready to share a side project of mine, creating a chatbot / AI agent to answer queries without any sugarcoating, in effect telling us what we don't want to hear. I call it ToxicBot (tm) because in our culture of self-serving artifice and comforting delusions, the unvarnished truth is considered unbearably toxic.

In many cases, our resistance to whatever it is we don't want to hear is a measure of its accuracy. We don't want to hear it because it's a painful truth we've been avoiding, to our detriment.

Here's a sample of ToxicBot (tm) as therapist:

Patient 1: I know he's not perfect, but I'm really in love this time.

ToxicBot: When are you going to get tired of jumping from one co-dependent relationship with control-freak losers to another, with zero self-awareness or willingness to ask yourself why?

Patient 2: Every time we try to discuss something, we end up angry and frustrated.

ToxicBot: You're the one who's angry and frustrated, but you never take responsibility for your responses. You sound like a 5-year old blaming everyone else for your self-created misfortunes.

Here's a sample of ToxicBot (tm) as corporate consultant:

Corporate: give us an actionable transition plan to agentic AI.

ToxicBot: Aura farming, actionable leadership, agentic transition--if cliches were money, you could retire right now. You and your team are clueless lemmings, trying to find someone else to follow so you don't have to do any original thinking of your own.

ToxicBot, tell us about AI super-abundance.

ToxicBot: What AI is generating is a super-abundance of malicious uses that place enormous costs on every user of the Internet, in effect generating profits for the malicious users and costs for everyone else. The over-reliance on shoddy software and hardware in products and services is unleashing a systemic collapse in durability and utility across the entire global economy. Both of these are Anti-Progress, not Progress. Those who deny this or refuse to admit it are delusional, insisting the buck-naked Emperor is dressed in amazing finery.

Let's ask ToxicBot (tm) how we can fix the $40 trillion in federal debt problem:

Concerned Citizen: Everyone knows the federal debt is unsustainable; what's the solution?

ToxicBot: As long as all those who own the debt or benefit from the borrowing refuse to accept any sacrifices, there is no solution other than the collapse of the whole financial system, as only collapse will end the reliance on expediencies and force sacrifices on everyone seeking delusional, sacrifice-free technocratic "solutions" because they want a fantasy Hollywood ending. There is no upside to self-delusion.



Needless to say, the world isn't ready for ToxicBot (tm), as this conversation illustrates:



So I'm developing HappyStoryBot (tm): everything is fantastic, there's upside everywhere, solutions abound, stablecoins, fusion and an endless parade of pretense--and indignation (How dare you!) if the pretense is challenged. Oh, and you're all brilliant, fabulous, etc.

We all want to be appreciated for our fine qualities and efforts, but this is different from depending on insincere praise, rote flattery and sappy sycophancy for a positive sense of selfhood.



If we don't want real solutions, we just want pain-free, sacrifice-free simulacra of solutions that require nothing more than arranging the eventual consequences to land on those without sufficient power to escape the consequences--that only accelerates collapse.

NOTE: ToxicBot does not exist.

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"Angry Voters": What Are We Angry About?

Maybe voters are frustrated that no matter who they elect, nothing in the economic machinery of soaring inequality, debt and servitude changes.

Here's the mainstream summary of the midterm election results: Angry Voters Usher in Beginning of the End to the Trump Era.

And what are voters angry about? It's a fairly lengthy shopping list:

"Many voters told pollsters and interviewers that they felt hoodwinked by Mr. Trump, believing that he was going to bring down prices and not start new wars. They expected him to close the border, but bristled at what they saw as heavy-handed arrests of people living in the country for years. They rebelled against the tariffs that increased costs for consumers."

OK, fair enough. Those are all legitimate issues. But I submit voters are also angry about a reality larger than any of those issues: no matter which party they vote for, nothing changes. Scrape off the culture wars hot-button topics designed to inflame the loyalists and generate conveniently distracting rage and indignation, and we find that nothing actually changes in what matters to the hard-working bottom 90% who are being stripmined by the accelerating decline in the purchasing power of their earnings.

Look carefully at these three charts and point out the reversal of the primary trends delivered by either political party. You can't, because the policies and Imperial Project continue on the same trajectory regardless of which party or administration is in power.

Here is a chart of TCMDO, total debt. We can call it "living on money borrowed from the future." Note that way back in 1980, before the "borrow our way to prosperity" fantasy became the unofficial policy of the status quo, the ratio of GDP to total debt was 1.67: $3 trillion in GDP, $5 trillion in total debt.

Now the ratio is 3.7: $30.7 in GDP and $115 trillion in debt. So how is "borrowing our way to prosperity" working? This is a parody of a functional, sustainable economy. Both parties have relied on soaring debt to win the popularity contest of who promises more "free money" to the elites who fund their campaigns and the electorate.

Never mind it's not actually "free": we've perfected kicking the can down the road.



Next up: soaring wealth-income inequality: we now live in a highly stratified society of haves and have-Nots, in which the Haves have little or no contact with the Have-Nots other than Amazon deliveries and wait staff.

So show us where one party or the other reversed this geometric rise in inequality. You can't. Relying on inflating credit-asset bubbles for a politically useful illusion of "growth" has an unavoidable side-effect: credit-asset bubbles enrich the top 10% who already own assets and have the income to enjoy the ride, with the gains concentrated in the top 1%.



Wages' share of the economy has been in a stairstep decline for 50 years as capital has been favored by both parties and the Federal Reserve, the central bank. Both parties have maintained an illusion of 'growth" that rewards the least productive at the expense of the most productive.



Both parties have been equally pleased to oversee the gaming of statistics to support this illusion of "growth" and "low inflation" that funnels the gains to the top 0.1% who fund political campaigns. The political toadies in the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve have dutifully rigged the status quo to remain unchanged, so the revolving door of elections maintain the illusion of "choice" and "democracy."

Our two-party system is like being offered two "competing" brands of toilet paper, both owned by the same corporation. Consider the Imperial Project of Endless Wars (TM). the players in the war room change, but the game of Wars of Choice continues on regardless of who's at the table.



The same can be said of our Wall Street Casino Economy, filled with gamblers desperate to win big enough to escape penury, usury, student-debt servitude and Tax Donkey indenturement. The corrupt game doesn't change when one party wins or loses; nothing changes in the casino except a slight modification of who gets VIP status.

The only potential for real change is a third party that introduces the possibility of closing down the war room and the casino and cashiering all the toadies maintaining a status quo adept at illusion and artifice.

Maybe voters are frustrated that no matter who they elect, nothing in the economic machinery of soaring inequality, debt and servitude changes. Shopping for political change is like shopping for healthcare insurance: we have no real choice. Maintaining the illusion of choice benefits both parties at the expense of the citizenry.

New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

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New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


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5,200 Miles: Impressions of the US Economy

What's the value proposition of immersing ourselves in the real world?

Longtime correspondent Buck V. recently reminded me of a timeless quote from Yogi Berra: "You can observe a lot just by watching." Buck added: With the corollary being "you can hear a lot just by listening.") Having completed a 5,200 mile camping trip around the American West, I had a chance to "observe a lot just by watching" and "hear a lot just by listening."

Everything I mention will sound so obvious that it doesn't seem worthy of comment, and that is why it's worthy of comment.

The real world is not at all like the abstract, symbolic "world" displayed on screens. Replacing looking at screens with looking at real life is a good example of "You can observe a lot just by watching."

The weather matters more than anything displayed on a screen. Drive a few thousand miles through the Western states and one observes large-scale agriculture. In drier climates, the primary crop is fodder to feed the animals we raise to milk, shear and eat. You will occasionally observe bright-green fields which are irrigated, generally by water from a river or extracted from an aquifer.

Most large-scale agriculture isn't irrigated. It depends on rain and cooperative weather.

Electrons in a data center and images on a screen cannot make it rain or refill an aquifer. The abstract, symbolic layer we pay so much attention to can't change the weather. This is too obvious to matter, until it does.

Convenience comes in one package: diesel. Grocery stores in small towns stock wonderfully fresh and affordable produce from distant lands, California or an even more distant foreign farm. The gas stations all have diesel and gasoline to fill our tanks. This abundance of convenience--too obvious to be worthy of comment--is remarkable. Equally obvious and therefore unworthy of comment is that all this convenience depends on diesel fuel.

The long trains--70, 80 or 100 cars in length, pulled by multiple Locomotives--are powered by diesel. So are the thousands of large trucks that distribute convenience to every corner of our remarkably large nation. All the rail and all the roads take a beating and must be constantly maintained. Roadwork is everywhere. This too is too obvious to be worthy of comment.

Those who own 90% of the financial wealth of the nation are drooling over the profits to be reaped by replacing 400,000 truck drivers with AI. Diesel doesn't seem to enter the picture. I know--too obvious to be worthy of comment. The screen is all about increasing profits by any means available, and nothing else matters. Until it does.

You don't see Tesla vehicles on the road or charging stations, because the distances exceed the limits of electric vehicle ranges. Not the theoretical range, the real-world range. There's a chicken and egg aspect: why invest in charging stations for so few customers, so nobody buys electric vehicles because there's so few charging stations.

What you do see are long 80-car trains of coal being pulled across the landscape. This is not a value judgment, it's an observation: "You can observe a lot just by watching."

If we tear our eyes from screens and look at the real world, all sorts of things become absolutely remarkable.

Those who own 90% of the financial wealth of the nation are drooling over the profits to be reaped by optimizing everything with AI. What's obvious--and therefore unworthy of comment--is virtually every aspect of the American economy is already optimized.

A relative handful of the workforce manages to grow hundreds of millions of tons of fodder and turn this into food for us and our pets. Every such enterprise is already optimized for efficiency. Every one requires special knowledge and deep experience.

What AI replaces is abstract, symbolic busy-work that takes place on screens, most of which is superfluous, an artifact of too much money seeking ways to make more money without producing anything real.

Most people are decent and hard-working. Maybe people don't want a robot to replace their neighbor the Walmart greeter just to make a Tech Bro billionaire and his pals even wealthier and more powerful. Maybe this is so obvious that it's unworthy of comment.

Yes, there is a place for screens and data and information and entertainment. The question isn't about that; the question is whether there's any space left in our lives to "observe a lot just by watching."

Ours is a big, beautiful land. It is still possible to escape the abstract, symbolic, intentionally synthetic, commoditized, addictive digital bubble, turn off the screens and the music and all the other distractions and just listen and observe. What's the value proposition of immersing ourselves in the real world? The only way to get an answer is to "observe a lot just by watching."



New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

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New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


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Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World

This is Essay #9 in the series Truth Be Told.

The core dynamic of this era is the notion that controlling the narrative controls the world, as persuading the populace to believe something is true controls their convictions which then control their behaviors. Centralized powers discovered the potential for narrative control to control the world in the 20th century, as mass communications enabled centralized control of what is presented as true and important.

Propaganda has an ugly tone, so now we say narrative control, which is of course a comically obvious propaganda technique. We call propaganda designed to financially benefit a private entity marketing, a key component in what I call privatized totalitarianism: establish a monopoly that controls a key mass communication technology--a social media platform, search, smart phones, etc.--and voila, privatized totalitarianism controls the medium which controls the message.

Controlling what the populace believes to be true appears to control the world, but Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same As Controlling the World. This is becoming increasingly clear as the status quo narratives--everything's going great, AI will deliver super-abundance to everyone, inflation is low, etc.--are now so detached from what we experience that they are inducing mass psychosis.

The incentive is obvious: persuade the populace to accept an arrangement that enriches and empowers those in control, and you no longer have to deliver authentic Progress or Prosperity, you only need to deliver artifice: fake statistics, fake claims presented as certainties, a ceaselessly promoted narrative in which everything is fake.

But narrative control doesn't actually control the world. A rancher told us the cost of fodder has doubled in the past year. That's the real world of weather and the cost of energy. Telling us that inflation is only 3.6% while healthcare premiums go up 13% a year, insurance costs triple and beef is now a luxury item is a parody of factual reporting.

The Pendulum of History has reached an extreme of artifice and narrative control that will break the status quo as the gulf between the fake and the real widens to the point the bridge connecting them collapses.

The social control of replacing authenticity with artifice will backfire and the pendulum will swing back to punishing self-serving artifice rather than rewarding it.

Yes, yes, I know this is "impossible." Those wielding the machinery of social control have god-like powers that will never diminish, they will only increase, etc. But everything is fake and mass psychosis are not stable arrangements. Artifice is self-liquidating.

The pendulum has reached an extreme of parody that cannot be pushed any further, and as the real world intrudes, all the narrative control in the world won't actually control the real world.



New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

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New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


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The Pendulum of History

This is Essay #8 in the series Truth Be Told.

A great many phenomena in both Nature and human history follow cyclical patterns, while others form waves. Author David Hackett Fischer (The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History) described the difference between cycles and waves:

"Cyclical rhythms are fixed and regular. Their periods are highly predictable. Great waves are more variable and less predictable. They differ in duration, magnitude, velocity, and momentum. One great price wave lasted less than ninety years; another continued more than 180 years. The irregularities in individual price movements make them no more (or less) predictable than individual waves in the sea.

Even so, all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of price relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest rates; and the same dangerous volatility in later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of prosperity. Each ended in shattering world crises and was followed by periods of recovery and comparative equilibrium."

As Fischer observed, waves of human history share characteristics with ocean waves, which can accrete energy and become giant rogue waves that cannot be predicted even as they can be foreseen as recurring phenomena.

Two cycles have attracted much commentary over the past decade: The Fourth Turning posited by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (subtitled What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny) which laid out an 80-year cycle of four generational turnings (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis) that culminate in a system-changing Fourth Turning.

This 80-year cycle aligns with the nation-changing crises of 1781 (the end of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States), 1861 (the start of the Civil War) and 1941 (America's entry into an existential global conflict, World War II). This cycle suggests a nation-changing crisis began around 2021.

Strauss and Howe took pains to note that the outcome of each crisis isn't pre-ordained to be positive. Complacency based on the idea that it will all turn out wonderfully due to the nation's destiny could be fatal.

Peter Turchin and his colleagues have mapped out a 50-year cycle based on data ranging from archeological to financial--or in the case of coin hoards buried in times of crisis, both archeological and financial. Turchin's prediction of a crisis beginning in 2020 drew skepticism which then flipped to recognition when the events of 2020 came to pass.

Cycles are generally depicted as some version of a sine wave:



Waves build up and break in irregular fashion. If we discern the forces at work--storms, etc.--we can predict the eventual arrival of waves but not their amplitude. In other words, the outcome of waves cannot be predicted. The complacency lent by cycles--everything will recover in time, etc.--is not possible in waves, as the wave might sweep away the entire status quo.


Moana Jones Wong at Pipeline, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii

A pendulum offers a third model of history: asymmetries push the socio-political-economic order to an extreme that cannot be sustained, and the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, for example, from order to chaos and from surplus to depletion.

In my framework, the shared interests of society are always in competition with the private interests of markets. Ideally, these generate a dynamic equilibrium, as adaptive forces provide feedback that counteracts any overreach.

But as I have taken pains to explain, when one set of interests gains the power to override or ignore competing interests and the shared interests of society, their power becoming self-reinforcing, with fatal consequences. When a financial-market elite gains enough wealth to take control of the political machinery, they use this power to increase their share of the economy's output / gains at the expense of everyone else.

From their point of view, this is the natural order of things: we've gained supremacy because we're smarter and therefore deserving of power.

What they miss is that by gaining dominance, they eliminate the adaptive forces needed to maintain systemic stability. The system veers into moral decay as self-interest is deemed all that's necessary for "growth," and rampant corruption / unfairness reigns as the system is tilted to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The irony is rich: the status quo the dominant few believe is permanent cascades into disorder due to the destabilizing effects of their dominance.

Richard Bonugli and I discuss the resulting potential for nonlinear disruption in our latest podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

This pendulum swing eventually reaches an extreme that cannot be increased or even sustained. The asymmetries imposed by the dominant few reach the limits of the system, and the pendulum pauses for a brief moment before beginning its mechanically inevitable swing to the opposite extreme.

It's impossible not to note the pendulum of wealth and power swinging from the extreme of elites owning most of the wealth and accumulating most of the gains to the other end of the spectrum of a more widely shared distribution of wealth, power and gains. Here we see Peter Turchin's 50-year cycle depicted as pendulum swings.



We are currently poised in that brief moment in which the pendulum has reached an extreme that cannot be pushed any further as the asymmetries have reached their systemic limits. Wealth-power-income asymmetries have reached extremes of concentration that generate instability:



The broad-based distribution of the economy's gains to the workforce has been siphoned off and distributed to the owners of capital in a highly asymmetric power-law distribution: over time, this resulted in the transfer of $150 trillion from the workforce to those at the top:



Wealth, income and power now follow a power law distribution that favors the few over the many due to the self-reinforcing nature of an economy dominated by what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale:



Life is good for Billionaire Tech Bros and the financial Nobility:



Thanks to the status quo's mastery of The Big Con, the majority have been conned into believing the current moment of apparent stability is authentic stability. But this apparent stability is as fake as everything else in Ultra-Processed Life, as events will reveal.



I don't follow the predictive gambling table in the casino, but I did overhear a peculiarly garbed stranger murmuring, with some urgency, "I bet 100 million quatloos the economy will collapse into disorder and depression by 2032." I think he was given good odds from the gamblers who fell for The Big Con.

The delusion that technology and finance have given us god-like powers that moot the pendulum of history will be revealed as delusion in a most painful manner. A social-economic system in which what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale generates its own demise, as The Big Con doesn't work on the forces of history.

New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

---

New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


Subscribe to my Substack for free

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Paul C. ($300), for your beyond-outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, James B. ($70), for your monstrously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Craig F. ($150), for your beyond-outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Gary F. ($100), for your outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...