Month: November 2022

Scaling Is a Problem. Downscaling Is a Wicked Problem.

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Scaling is easy. Just throw more hardware at it, more bodies, more capital, more hype. Pump it up, stack it high, run the numbers until they glow. A startup becomes a unicorn, a unicorn becomes a monopoly, and suddenly the market’s a game of Monopoly where one guy owns all the hotels and everyone else is just paying rent.

But downscaling? Downscaling is a wicked problem. Because once the beast is big, it doesn’t shrink—it calcifies. It lurches, it sprawls, it fights for its own survival. The bureaucracy metastasizes. The codebase bloats into Lovecraftian horror. The supply chains become Gordian knots. The boardroom starts talking about “unlocking efficiencies,” which is code for mass layoffs and desperate cost-cutting.

And here’s the kicker: things that scale well don’t downscale well. Tech empires don’t gracefully retreat; they collapse. They rot in place, cranking out worse versions of the same product while sucking more from the ecosystem. Facebook pivoting to the Metaverse was a downscaling problem. Twitter turning into X is a downscaling problem. Google search slowly drowning in ads is a downscaling problem.

The only real way out? Radical subtraction. Not efficiency theater, not just-in-time logistics, but actually unmaking the monoliths, rewiring the incentives, dismantling the enclosure. Easier said than done. Because the people in charge don’t just fear failure—they fear irrelevance. And they’ll take the whole system down with them before they let it shrink.

The SV Ouroboros: Eating Its Own Future

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Ah, the glittering contradictions of Silicon Valley, where the titans of “innovation” hold the steering wheel with one hand and strangle competition with the other. The ecosystem of disruption is now an ant farm encased in venture-backed resin. We’re engineering a conflict to kickstart a future that will take us forward 75 years into the past. 😅

Here’s the playbook: First, you burn down the old to make way for the new. Then, you enclose the commons, erect a few digital toll booths, and call it progress. You get an app for the thing that was free, a subscription for the thing that was a right, and a walled garden where ideas go to die. It’s not about better tech—it’s about owning the platform.

And when we get there? Oh, buddy. It’s 900 moons at warp power back to the future. The sleek, neon-lit tomorrow loops back to a corporate mainframe from 1965, where the difference between General Motors and OpenAI is just the number of paperclips left on the desk. Innovation becomes iteration. The personal computing revolution gets metabolized into the great enclosure of human thought. We build, we consolidate, we rent-seek, and then we wonder why the next Great Leap Forward is just an incremental software update with a bigger price tag.

What’s next? Probably an AI-generated apology for the inefficiency of it all, delivered by a chatbot you can only access via a premium subscription. But don’t worry—it’ll still tell you to “Think Different.”

ZIRP Personality

What If Your Whole Personality Depended on Low Interest Rates?

Worse—what if your entire social circle, your ideological shtick, your sense of meaning, was just a byproduct of a SoftBank write-down?

That’s the uncomfortable reality a lot of people are facing right now. We’ve spent the last decade living inside a simulation powered by cheap money, where everything went up and to the right because there was nowhere else for capital to go. Now the tide is going out, and a lot of people are realizing that their entire worldview was just a derivative of low interest rates.

The Boom/Bust Theology

Every cycle has its preachers. In times of easy money, Evangelists dominate. They preach the Abundance Gospel—the future is limitless, capital is infinite, and even if they’re wrong, they get to shill another day.

Then the crash comes, and the Apologetics take over. Their role? Surrender agency. “We didn’t fail—you weren’t sufficiently loyal.” These people don’t make for fun company during boom times, but they flourish in busts, usually burying themselves with their own apologias.

It’s a predictable cycle:

• Boom = Malinvestment.

• Bust = Capital reallocation, narrative shifts.

• Evangelists become Apologetics in downturns, but the reverse makes people suspicious. Nobody trusts a bear-turned-bull.

The smart money flips between these roles strategically. The dumb money just rides the wave and hopes for the best.

Tech, TradFi, and Saying the Quiet Part Loud

Tech and traditional finance (TradFi) have always mirrored each other, but with a key difference—TradFi understood subtlety. Where Wall Street used to whisper, Silicon Valley now shouts.

Tech used to promise a clean break from the old world, but now it just feels like an accelerated version of TradFi’s worst instincts, with the same old insider games but fewer safeguards. The venture-backed model of eternal growth never accounted for what happens when the money printer stops.

And the ruling class? They see this. That’s why we’re witnessing wildly successful/unsuccessful institutional hijack attempts—libertarian shamans and techno-utopians trying to steer the ship before it sinks. But the reality is that when the music stops, capital doesn’t seek utopia—it seeks shelter.

The Dark Road Ahead

Tech firms don’t do well in reverse. They can scale, but they can’t shrink gracefully. That’s why every downturn in tech feels like an identity crisis. The companies built for perpetual expansion suddenly face an existential question: what are we when we’re no longer growing?

And right now, crypto looks less like a revolution and more like a fee-sucking machine preying on retail. The “future of finance” pitch doesn’t sound as compelling when the biggest innovations are just new ways to front-run retail investors.

What Collapses First?

Boom times let everything work. Bust times remind people why the state exists—to enforce contracts, adjudicate fraud, and dictate terms.

So the real question is:

What fails first—crypto or the Westphalian nation-state model?

People love the idea of decentralization until they get rugged. Then they want a judge. They want enforcement. They want the boring but functional mechanics of a state that can make fraud actually carry consequences.

And that’s the tension at the heart of all of this: people want freedom in boom times and protection in busts. When capital is abundant, the state is a nuisance. When capital dries up, the state is a backstop.

The Play

Anti-fragility means getting stronger in downturns. Which sector can truly claim that in 2023? The ones that don’t depend on the perpetual motion machine of low rates.

Everything else? Best to wait for the fire sale.

Elon’s Reverse Von Braun

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Elon Musk is a living prototype of the reverse Von Braun, a man who started with rockets and electric cars and ended up in the ideological trenches, slowly backpedaling into the past like a man moonwalking into a burning building.

Von Braun had the good sense to launder himself through history’s acceptable filters. He started as an enthusiastic Nazi, built Hitler’s death machines, and then—when things got dicey—rebranded as the benign wizard of the space age, the kindly explainer of Tomorrowland. He didn’t change, per se. The world just adjusted around him, erasing his unsavory bits like a bad edit in a propaganda reel.

Musk, though, is running this in reverse. He begins as the beloved rocket man, a real-life Tony Stark, the guy who sells utopia by the tweet, a man so flush with government subsidies he can reinvent free enterprise in his own image. And yet, somehow, inexorably, he’s working his way backward, shedding goodwill like a heat shield on reentry. He’s got the chaotic hubris of a mid-century fascist technocrat, but without the tight uniforms or the sense of doomed grandeur. Instead, he’s out there arguing with anime avatars about race science at 3 AM, mistaking engagement metrics for destiny.

Does he complete the loop? Does he go full Von Braun in reverse—first the PR fiascos, then the political extremism, and finally, the outright state-sponsored villainy? Maybe. But history has a cruel sense of humor. Because in the end, Von Braun got to be the grandfather of the Moon landing. Musk, if he keeps up his trajectory, is far more likely to be the grandfather of an NFT-based Panzer division, or worse—a grimly ironic footnote in a Wikipedia article about the collapse of Tesla’s last functional gigafactory.

Wordcel vs Shape Rotators

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The problem with the wordcel-shape rotator class is that it’s an ecosystem without an outside. A self-licking ice cream cone of credentialed cognition. They write white papers for each other, render graphs no one else reads, optimize logistics for the next iteration of optimizing logistics.

But here’s the catch—markets require consumers. They require a churning mass of people who don’t know the terms, who don’t spend their time rotating polyhedra in their heads or debating semiotic collapse on Discord. Markets need people who buy, who need, who act irrationally and impulsively and sometimes just want a thing because it’s shiny.

That used to be the role of the great unwashed, the working stiffs, the beer-swilling sports fans, the department store clerks. But automation, financialization, and all the other -izations squeezed them out. Now, the only people left with purchasing power are the same people who design the products. Which means the demand curve has collapsed in on itself. It’s a Klein bottle economy—curved back through four-dimensional space so that the output feeds directly into the input.

And that’s not a market. That’s a recursion error.

So what happens when a civilization optimizes itself into irrelevance? When the last meaningful transactions are just AI-generated slideshows about AI-generated products, pitched to AI-generated venture capital firms?

Simple. The simulation crashes. And in the end, someone—probably an underpaid contractor in a country the wordcels have never heard of—has to unplug the damn thing and start over.