War, money and political insecurity reproduce the threats they ostensibly intend to resolve, sustaining destructive relationships whose continuity subsequently appears necessary.
Tag: political economy
Extreme wealth preserves its own stability by shifting costs onto everyone else. Captain Fractal explores why even billionaires cannot escape the physics of their own existence.
Civilisation has made its own destruction so profitable that its survival now constitutes a threat to the economy.
Our political and commercial systems profit from the crises they perpetuate, rendering meaningful dissent unintelligible and civilisational failure commercially indispensable.
As the world approaches catastrophic conflict, wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements driving instability. Asking for peace has become almost absurd, while preparing for destruction is considered perfectly sensible.
We have spent billions of years becoming what we are, yet our political and economic systems increasingly reward the destruction of the complex relationships that sustain us. What we stand to lose is beyond calculation, and the tragedy is how unnecessary so much of it is.
The flying car illustrates the peculiar absurdity of developing increasingly sophisticated means of getting somewhere while losing collective control over where we are going.
From Starlink and Ukraine to everyday technology, technocratic overextension exposes a dangerous paradox: civilisation increasingly depends on systems that (mostly) function as intended, but whose continued availability is controlled elsewhere, by political and ideological interests we may not share.
The problem is not capitalism or competition, but the concentration of wealth and power that progressively undermines the conditions through which meaningful competition, economic freedom and social resilience remain possible.
When controversy becomes politically and commercially valuable, incompetence ceases to be merely a failure. Trump’s administration reveals how conflict reproduces authority, even at the expense of human dignity.
Conflict builds technology, technology reorganises conflict, and somewhere inside the loop every new problem becomes someone’s next investment opportunity.
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AI: When the Bubble Bursts
AI is building the dependencies that make its own expansion increasingly necessary.
