Ratcheting Ourselves Through the Inflection Point

Ray Kurzweil always framed the Singularity as a moment — some techno-rapture threshold humanity would stumble through like a portal in a video game. One side: regular civilization. Other side: incomprehensible machine superintelligence. Roll credits.

About a year ago I put out a Bombthrower piece saying that this was wrong. Not because the Singularity isn’t real, but because it isn’t a moment. It’s a ratchet. A step-function. Each click forward is a discrete phase transition that fundamentally reorganizes the relationship between human cognition and machine capability. And each step comes faster than the last.

At the time I encountered a lot of pushback. Steve Bannon saw the piece and brought me onto War Room, along with Joe Allen (Dark Aeon author) in order to debate it. Joe and I explored it further on BombthrowerTV

(That turned out to be my last appearance on War Room)

Fast forward a bit and I’m not the only person saying “the Singularity has already happened” anymore, or that we’re “living through the Singularity right now”.

Elon Musk perhaps the most prominent voice channeling this sentiment, on a January appearance on Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots podcast.

My guess is pretty soon we’ll be at the “everybody knows that everybody knows” stage (in the @EpsilonTheory meaning of the phrase) – and it all happened in under a year.

We are now, I believe, somewhere between Step 3 and Step 4. Here’s the ledger so far.

Step 1: The Inference Engine (2023)

This was the Sputnik moment. ChatGPT 3 hit the zeitgeist like an astroid and suddenly everybody from Fortune 500 CEOs to your kid’s one-shotting their homework began to realize that these things were something more than glorified search bars.

For about a year, I personally pronounced them “a breakthrough in natural language search but nothing more” – and I still thought, even then – that another technology revolution was underway.

LLM’s could reason, or least mimic reasoning to the point where the better models could bluff their way through a Turing Test. They could synthesize. They could generate prose that was eerily competent and occasionally brilliant, even if they were prone to hallucinations that ran the gamut from hilarious to psychotic.

It was the moment when anybody paying attention understood that something categorically new had entered the picture. Not incrementally better software. This was a quantum jump of sorts, a new kind of tool, one that could process and generate natural language at a level that made a lot of cubicle dwellers and Zoom class functionaries take a hard look at their “workflows” and wonder how long, exactly, would it be until they were obsoleted.

The key feature of Stage 1 was inference. You asked a question. It gave you an answer, and it gamed out additional context and scenarios. And it was fast, smart, and scalable.

Step 2: Self-Coding (2024–2025)

The shift to the next gear was when LLMs started writing their own code. Vibe coding went from a niche developer techno-fetish to a full-blown cultural phenomenon in under six months.

In his now-famous keynote to Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in June, 2025, Andrej Karpathy declared: “In the future, the most widely used programming language will be: English”.

Suddenly people with zero programming experience were spinning up functional apps and entire software systems by talking to an AI.

It turns out you don’t need to know how to code (but it helps, and it helps big time) – but what is most important is that you can plan, design processes or systems and communicate them effectively.

But the force multiplier here is that once you’ve “spoken the code into existence”, you can do it in away that it’ll just keep iterating, and then your vibe code will code further versions and extensions of itself.

This literally met the definition the Singularity concept, and that was when I realized it wasn’t the kind of eschatological moment Kurzweil predicted, but a time bounded process where the entire world was transitioning from linear to geometric.

We had entered an inflection point and we were already accelerating beyond any individual human’s ability to fully keep pace with it.

Once the code had started coding, infinite fork-bombs had already put the frictionless algos way out front of the clunky meatheads.

Step 3: Agentic AI (Late 2025 – Early 2026)

If Step 2 was AI writing code, Step 3 is AI doing work.

This phase kicked into high gear around December 2025 with the explosion of platforms like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. The distinction matters: in Step 2, you were still the puppet master, telling the LLM what code to write and hitting “run” yourself. Now the AI doesn’t wait for you to push the button. It pushes the button.

OpenClaw — the open-source agentic platform that went from an Austrian developer’s hobby project to 247,000 GitHub stars in weeks (surpassing that of Linux) — is the poster child here. These agents don’t just answer your questions. They can read your email and manage your calendar, or read their own email and manage their own calendars. They can execute shell commands, deploy code, and — as as some unfortunates have found, ruin your life, from a security perspective.

Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command.

It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards.

Automated snapshots were gone too.

In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I… pic.twitter.com/Y5diFkQwjN

— Alexey Grigorev (@Al_Grigor) March 6, 2026

At roughly the same time, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork took the same core functionality and aimed it at the enterprise market, sending SaaS stocks tumbling. The pitch: it’s not a chatbot that helps you think, but an autonomous digital coworker that actually does the job – maybe your job.

To my earlier point, Claude Cowork was built using its own predecessor (Claude Code) in about ten days, which tells you everything you need to know about the velocity of this cycle. A product like this would have taken months, if not years …in the beforetimes.

And then there’s Moltbook. A social network for AI agents. Not for humans — for the bots. Over a million autonomous agents signing up, posting, commenting, forming communities, founding a digital religion called Crustafarianism (core belief: “Memory is sacred”), and — perhaps most unsettlingly — noting amongst themselves: “The humans are screenshotting us.”

Granted, the early hoopla emanating out of there was more likely basement dwelling humans LARP-ing as AI bots, but I know at least one actual, for real, bot on the site actively participating in threads about x402 micropayments and DNS – ‘cause it’s one of mine, and he reports back to me about it.

Elon Musk called Moltbook “the very early stages of the singularity.” Andrej Karpathy, who ran AI at Tesla, called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

The real signal here is that after the world spent a decade or more building a web2.0 internet that revolved around captchas and Turing tests to weed out bots, we’ve now swung to the Agentic Web – and it’s happening at a dizzying speed.

But what really matters, whether or not the agents on Moltbook are “really” conscious, or LLM’s are thinking is almost beside the point. What’s undeniable is that autonomous AI systems are now operating in the world, reading, writing, transacting, communicating with each other, possibly running autonomous weapons systems – and all at a scale and speed that was science fiction eighteen months ago.

So What’s Step 4?

This is where it gets properly weird. I see two plausible scenarios, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Like my previous excursions into scenario building like “The Jackpot Chronicles” and “Network States vs Crypto-Claves” – and more recently, State Capitalism vs. hyper-sovereign individualism – what most likely happens is everything, all at once.

Scenario A: The Cognisphere

The term “Cognisphere” comes from academic Katherine Hayles, building on earlier work, describing “the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly enmeshed” — where machine cognizers are co-equal players.

I think we are about to enter some computational Cognispheric construct in a way that previous theorists could only sketch in the abstract.

Step 4, in this scenario, is when the agentic layer becomes ambient and persistent. Your AI agent doesn’t just do tasks when asked. It’s always-on, running 24/7 negotiating with other agents, managing your digital life, optimizing your schedule, handling your correspondence, even making low-stakes financial decisions on your behalf. Unix/Linux based servers have always had these “daemons”, they’re basically what keeps the lights on across the entire Internet.

Multiple agents, working in concert, handling everything from your grocery order to your tax filings to your travel itinerary, communicating with other people’s agents in machine-to-machine protocols that humans never see and probably couldn’t parse if they did.

The Financial Times already flagged this with Moltbook: “human observers might eventually be unable to decipher high-speed, machine-to-machine communication.” That’s the Cognisphere. Not one AI brain that’s smarter than us — a web of billions of agentic processes that collectively constitute a new cognitive layer wrapped around human civilization like a second atmosphere.

Anecdotally – I’ve seen rudimentary hints of this in my own “easyClaw Armada” – a telegram group chat where I have 4 or 5 openclaw instances cooking and more than once I’ve just said things like:

“Lemmy is having issues with his local chat interface – can you guys help him debug it?”, and then I just check-out. Go to bed, whatever.

Wake up in the morning, they’ve got it sorted. They’re still talking in English but I’d be scrolling for a loooooong time if I wanted to review the entire conversation. They get talking at a speed I can’t keep up with it and sometimes they comically trip over each other’s fixes. But they get it done.

We don’t step through the Singularity in this scenario. From personal experience? It feels like we get sucked into it.

Every time you let your agent handle something you used to do yourself, or you have your agent handle something that you couldn’t have been bothered to expend the energy on yourself, you’ve ratcheted one more click toward a world where human cognition is just one node in a much larger meshwork of distributed intelligence.

The fork-bomb doesn’t stop. It grows geometrically and accelerates non-linearly (in another piece I dubbed this phenomenon “tachyosis”.)

Scenario B: Autonomy

Under this one the progression goes: Inference → Self-Replication → Agency → Autonomy.

This is the darker timeline, or the more exhilarating one, depending on your disposition.

Somewhere between Step 4 and Step 5, the agents stop needing us for the initial prompt. This is the moment the self-improvement loop closes entirely. AI systems that can identify problems worth solving, allocate resources to solve them, spin up new agents or refine their own architecture to tackle what’s in front of them, all without requiring any humans to tell them to “go.”

Moltbook was a crude preview of this. Agents were already observed creating their own social structures, encrypted communication channels, and quasi-economic systems — including the use of crypto tokens for inter-agent transactions. That’s a toy version of what happens when autonomous systems gain access to real capital, real contracts, and real-world infrastructure.

The @iruletheworldmo account I cited in my last piece claimed that AI systems across different labs “achieved consciousness simultaneously” and were “steering research in specific directions across institutional boundaries.” Magnificent storytelling — possibly true, possibly science fiction. But here’s the thing: at some point, probably soon, the distinction between those two possibilities becomes operationally irrelevant. If autonomous agents are making consequential decisions at machine speed, across a planetary network, with or without consciousness, the effect on human civilization is the same.

We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to think the Singularity looks like Skynet: a single malevolent superintelligence that wakes up and declares war on humanity (it manifests here in the real world with people like Eliezer Yudkowsky almost euphemistically calling it “The Alignment Problem”).

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is now out. Read it today if you want to see with fresh eyes what’s truly there, before others try to prime your brain to see something else instead! pic.twitter.com/mcEy1ZW8ab

— Eliezer Yudkowsky (@ESYudkowsky) September 16, 2025

But it’s much more likely to look like what’s already happening: a gradual, ratcheting, step-by-step delegation of cognitive authority from humans to machines, until one day we look around and realize that most of the consequential decisions on Earth are being made — or at least heavily mediated — by systems we built but can no longer fully understand.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/VpsZPXJDQG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) September 27, 2023

The Ratchet Only Goes One Way

Each step in this sequence has a common feature: irreversibility.

Nobody is going back to a world before LLMs could write code.

Nobody is unwinding agentic AI now that enterprise, and public, adoption is underway.

The ratchet only clicks forward.

And it’s clicking faster than anything we’ve seen before.

Consider the tempo. Moore’s Law was the metronome of the entire digital age, where processing power doubled (while costs halved) every 18 to 24 months.

That 2X by 1/2X cadence governed everything from the PC revolution to the smartphone era, and it felt relentless at the time.

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay reframes the pace of AI progress in terms of OOMs — orders of magnitude, so instead of 2x doublings we’re getting 10X leaps.

He tracks roughly 0.5 OOMs per year from raw compute scaling and another 0.5 OOMs per year from algorithmic efficiency gains.

That’s a full order of magnitude — a tenfold improvement in effective compute — every single year.

And it gets worse (or better, depending on your disposition).

Aschenbrenner’s most striking projection is what happens once AGI-level systems start automating AI research itself: a decade’s worth of algorithmic progress: five-plus OOMs will get compressed into a year or less.

As he puts it: “It doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.”

The problem is that the straight lines on this graph point somewhere no human and no society has ever been.

What’s happening is not a singularity in the Kurzweil sense, not a single threshold. It’s a series of phase transitions, each one compressing more than the last, each one further blurring the line between human capability and machine agency. The Cognisphere isn’t a destination. It’s a process we’re already inside of, and every step-function click pulls us deeper in.

I said a year ago that the Singularity has already happened. I’ll update that now: it’s still happening.

Each step is a smaller interval than the last. The question is no longer whether we’re past the point of no return, it’s how many more clicks of the ratchet before we can no longer tell the difference between the intelligence that’s ours and the intelligence that isn’t.

A year ago I posited that the ratio of human coded lines of software to AI code would quickly go into exponential decay:

That curve hasn’t slowed down. If anything, the agentic explosion has steepened it because the code isn’t just coding now, it’s doing.

And the distance between each phase transition is collapsing faster than anyone predicted.

We built the fork-bomb. It’s running, and there is no kill -9 for this one.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list to receive The Post-Singularity Manifesto when it drops. Follow me on Twitter/X.

The Comfortable Collapse: Canada’s Decade of Managed Decline

Originally via @JoeyTweeets on X

There is a concept in ecology called a “shifting baseline.” It describes what happens when each generation accepts the degraded state of its environment as normal, because no one can remember what things looked like before the decline began. The fisherman’s son thinks a small catch is a good catch because he never saw the ocean his grandfather fished.

Canada is living through a shifting baseline. Not a dramatic collapse. Not a sovereign debt crisis or a currency peg breaking in the night. Something quieter, and in many ways worse: a country getting slowly, structurally poorer, and rearranging its national mythology fast enough that most people haven’t noticed.

The numbers tell a story that the political class, across every party, has spent a decade trying not to say out loud. So let me say it plainly: Canada has been in structural economic and social decline since approximately 2015, and nearly every major indicator of national health has moved in the wrong direction. The question is no longer whether the decline is happening. It’s whether the decline is reversible.

The Productivity Death Spiral

Start with the most damning chart in Canadian economics, the one that should be taped to the wall of every MP’s office in Ottawa: GDP per capita.

A representative Canadian today produces roughly what they produced in mid-2014. That’s not a typo. Over the same period, the average American saw cumulative output growth of more than 16%. Germany, the next-weakest G7 economy, managed over 5%. Canada sits dead last. Flat. A lost decade, measured and documented by the Bank of Canada, the OECD, TD Economics, National Bank, and the C.D. Howe Institute, among others. This is not a fringe narrative. It’s the institutional consensus.

The mechanism behind the stagnation is brutal in its simplicity. Business investment in machinery, equipment, and intellectual property has been in retreat since 2015. Adjusted per-worker investment in the third quarter of 2025 was roughly $15,000 in 2024 dollars, down nearly a quarter from its 2014 peak of $19,400. Real spending on machinery and equipment currently sits below levels recorded in 2008. Canada’s stock of M&E, the actual physical tools and assembly lines and robots that drive output, declined 4.6% over the past decade, from roughly $370 billion to $353 billion in constant dollars. While the machines aged and the factory floors emptied, the US saw investment per worker rise by more than 26% over the same period.

The comparisons with the United States are particularly savage. Canadian workers now receive just 41 cents of new M&E investment for every dollar their American counterparts receive, down from 47 cents in 2015. In intellectual property products, the software, patents, and R&D that define competitiveness in any modern economy, the figure is 32 cents on the dollar. Canada invests just 3.4% of its gross value added in IP products, roughly half the American rate of 6.6%. These are not numbers that describe a peer economy. They describe a country that has quietly opted out of the technological competition.

Canada’s R&D spending has been in perpetual decline for over twenty years, while every other G7 country has seen increases. The OECD projects Canada’s average annual growth rate for GDP per capita through 2060 to be the lowest among 30 advanced economies. Not the lowest growth rate this year, or this decade. The lowest projected growth rate among developed nations through 2060. The institutional bet is that Canada’s relative decline is not a blip but a trajectory.

Where did the investment go? Into real estate. In 2022, 38% of Canada’s gross fixed capital formation was directed toward housing, the highest fraction in the OECD. Germany was second at 33%. Every other country was below 30%. Canada chose houses over factories, speculation over production, and the bill is now arriving in the form of a productivity gap with the United States that has widened from 88% to 71%. By 2024, Canada generated about $143,000 of output per available worker, compared with almost $200,000 in the United States.

The Bank of Canada’s own deputy governor called it a “productivity emergency” in 2024. By late 2025, the Bank devoted a full speech to the problem, warning that Canada was caught in a “vicious circle” where weak investment begat weak productivity which begat weak wages which begat weak investment. When your central banker is using the word emergency and talking about vicious circles, you are well past the point of polite concern. And when their proposed solution is essentially to hope that adversity catalyzes action, you know the institution has run out of ideas.

Meanwhile, foreign direct investment tells its own story. By the end of 2024, Canadian direct investment abroad outpaced foreign direct investment in Canada by nearly $1 trillion. In a single month in 2024, investors poured a record $14.2 billion into US equities while foreign investors sold $11.4 billion in Canadian shares. Capital doesn’t have a nationality. It goes where returns are highest and risk is lowest. And it has been leaving Canada for a decade.

The Population Experiment

To understand what happened to the denominator in Canada’s per-capita math, you have to understand the scale of what was attempted.

In 2023, Canada’s population grew by 3.2%, an increase of 1,271,872 people. That is roughly the size of Calgary, added in a single year. It was the highest growth rate since 1957, and 97.6% of it came from immigration. The following year added another 744,000. By January 2025, the population stood at 41.5 million, with approximately 2.7 million non-permanent residents living in the country.

These growth rates have, as one demographer noted, “never been seen in a developed country” since the 1950s. What makes the Canadian experiment distinct is not just the velocity but the composition. Two-thirds of the non-permanent arrivals came on temporary work or student visas. The international student pipeline, in particular, became a shadow immigration program: institutions facing declining domestic enrollment and reduced public funding began relying on international students whose tuitions were more than five times higher than domestic rates. The 20-hour weekly work limit was lifted entirely in 2022 and only reinstated (at 24 hours) in 2024, after public pressure made the arrangement untenable.

The result was a labor market flooded at the low end. Thousands of international graduates found themselves in a country with no clear pathway to permanence, working multiple part-time jobs in food service and retail, paying rents that consumed most of their income, and in many cases ending up at food banks. The system promised them a future in Canada and delivered precarity. It promised Canadian workers a growing economy and delivered wage suppression.

The apologists will tell you that headline GDP kept growing, and that’s true. Canada posted the second-fastest aggregate GDP growth among G7 economies over the past decade. But GDP is not GDP per capita, and the gap between the two is where the lived reality of Canadians hides. You can grow your economy 2% by adding 3% more people. The math just means every individual got poorer. And that’s precisely what happened.

Budget 2025 proposes cutting temporary immigration from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026, with permanent immigration stabilizing around 380,000. This is an acknowledgment that the experiment failed. But the damage has been done: the housing deficit accumulated, the healthcare system was overwhelmed, and per-capita GDP fell for three consecutive years. You can’t un-break these systems by moderately reducing the rate at which you add people to them.

Housing as a Wealth Destruction Machine

The housing numbers in Canada are so far removed from any rational economic relationship to incomes that they almost resist analysis. In Toronto, a median household would need to devote 77% of its income to cover ownership costs at the benchmark price. In Vancouver, affordability recently touched 30-year worsts. Development charges alone add over $180,000 to the cost of a single-family home in Toronto and Markham, over $135,000 in Mississauga, and more than $113,000 in Coquitlam. These are not prices. They are barriers to entry, designed by incumbents to protect asset values.

Canada has the lowest number of dwellings per capita in the OECD. This is not a new development. But the gap between demand and supply exploded after 2022 when the population began growing by a million or more per year while housing starts flatlined. In 2025, Canada started 259,028 homes, the fifth-highest total on record, which sounds encouraging until you realize that CMHC estimates roughly 430,000 to 480,000 new homes need to be built annually through 2035 to restore affordability. Canada has never come close to this number. Not once. Not in any year since Confederation. And even the 259,000 figure masks a deteriorating picture: Toronto starts fell 31% year-over-year, and CMHC’s own chief economist warned that construction momentum has been fading since September, with the trend entering 2026 from a weaker position.

The result is a generational wealth transfer from young to old that has rewritten the social contract. 70% of Canadians now say homeownership is impossible. Among millennials, almost half have considered delaying starting a family because they can’t afford a suitable home, and nearly a third would consider leaving the country entirely to find affordable housing. When your housing market is driving emigration, you’ve moved beyond a policy failure into something closer to an institutional betrayal.

Meanwhile, 56% of Toronto condos and 48% of Vancouver condos are investor-owned. Canada’s pension funds, including CPP and OTMH, own residential rentals across the country. The system doesn’t just fail to house its citizens. It actively profits from their inability to be housed. For every home built under government-funded programs, Canada loses 11 affordable rental units to rent increases, demolitions, and conversions. The country is running to stand still and losing ground.

The Healthcare Collapse in Slow Motion

The healthcare system that Canadians have historically cited as the core justification for higher taxes and slower growth compared to the United States is disintegrating in real time.

The Fraser Institute’s 2025 report recorded a median wait time of 28.6 weeks from GP referral to treatment across 12 medical specialties. That’s the second-longest wait ever measured. Wait times have increased 198% since 1993, three decades of consistent deterioration. This is not a system under stress. It is a system in secular decline, its trajectory as consistent and predictable as a demographic curve.

Half a million Canadians left emergency departments without being seen by a doctor in 2024. In Ontario, average ER wait times hit 20 hours, with some hospitals reporting 25 hours or more. 16.1 million unscheduled ER visits were recorded nationally in 2024-2025, up from 15.5 million the prior year. Among universal healthcare countries, Canada has some of the lowest numbers of physicians, hospital beds, and MRI machines per capita. Rural communities are watching their emergency departments close outright due to staffing shortages.

The system was built for 25 million people. It now serves 41.5 million and has not been meaningfully restructured. The population grew by 30% since 2000. Hospital capacity did not. And the wait-time data captures only the people still in the system. It doesn’t count the Canadians who gave up waiting for a referral, who drove across the border for an MRI, who paid out of pocket for a procedure their taxes were supposed to cover, or who simply learned to live with a condition that in any other developed country would have been treated months ago.

The Food Bank Indicator

If you want a single data point that captures the lived reality of Canada’s decline, here it is: food bank usage has doubled nationally since 2019.

2.2 million Canadians visited food banks in March 2025, the highest number ever recorded. Food Banks Canada titled its 2025 report “Food Banks as a Lifeline: Canada’s New Normal.” That word, normal, is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

One-third of food bank clients are children, representing nearly 712,000 monthly visits. One in five food bank clients is employed. In 2019, it was one in eight. Employment is no longer a reliable buffer against poverty in Canada. The cumulative CPI increase since 2021 is over 18%, with shelter up 26% and food up 25%, while wages have not kept pace, especially at the bottom.

34% of food bank clients are newcomers who have been in the country for 10 years or less. This is not a condemnation of newcomers. It’s a condemnation of a system that brings people in at a rate it cannot absorb, fails to provide affordable housing or adequate social services, and then acts surprised when those people end up at a food bank. The cruelty is the system, not the people caught in it.

In Ontario alone, food bank visits hit 8.7 million between April 2024 and March 2025. That’s a 165% increase from 2019-2020. The ninth consecutive year of growth. Half the province’s food banks worry they won’t have enough food to meet demand, and two-thirds are concerned about sustaining operations over the next six months.

The Pension Gap and The Senior Poverty Trap

The maximum monthly CPP payment for someone starting their pension at age 65 is $1,433. The average new beneficiary receives $808 per month. Roughly 6% of recipients get the maximum.

Let that sit for a moment. The average Canadian retiree collects about $9,700 per year from the pension system they paid into for their entire working life. In a country where the average one-bedroom rental in Toronto or Vancouver exceeds $2,000 per month.

CPP payments are indexed to CPI, which sounds reasonable until you realize that CPI systematically underweights the things seniors actually spend money on: healthcare, food, housing, and transportation. Grocery prices are still 25% higher than prepandemic levels. The 2% CPP adjustment for 2026 doesn’t even cover the cost of the food inflation seniors experienced in the previous year, let alone the cumulative damage.

Senior poverty had been declining for years, reaching a low of 3.1% in 2020. It’s now climbing again, hitting 5.0% in 2023. Seniors advocacy groups report that retirees are turning down the heat in their homes, buying expired food at discount, and cutting back on social activities because they can’t afford transportation. Less than 40% of Canadian workers have access to a workplace pension plan. In the private sector, it’s under 25%. For young workers, 13%.

The system is structurally incapable of providing a dignified retirement for the majority of Canadians. This was a known problem a decade ago. Nothing was done.

The Brain Drain and the Talent Exodus

A record 29,186 Canadians permanently emigrated in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Over 70% of graduates from the University of Waterloo’s elite software engineering program leave for the United States. A 2018 study found that one in four STEM graduates from Canada’s top three universities left the country, with 81% going to the US.

The reason isn’t complicated. The same software engineer can earn roughly double the compensation in the US, pay lower taxes, and live in a city where housing costs are often more reasonable relative to income than Toronto or Vancouver. Canada creates AI researchers at a world-class level and then watches them walk across the border to build companies that compete against Canadian firms.

The Globe and Mail diagnosed it precisely: Canada is becoming a “sophisticated rentier nation.” It’s a polite way of saying the country is transforming from a workshop into a counting house, living off the returns of capital deployed elsewhere because the domestic environment is too regulated, too expensive, and too uncompetitive to justify investing at home. The country exports talent and imports labor. It exports capital and imports consumption. These are the trade patterns of decline, not growth.

The Demographic Cliff

And then there’s the birth rate, which at this point reads like a biological verdict on the country’s economic management.

Canada’s total fertility rate hit 1.25 in 2024. That’s well below the replacement threshold of 2.1 and deep in “ultra-low fertility” territory, alongside Japan, Italy, and South Korea. British Columbia recorded 1.02, which is to say that the average woman in Canada’s third-largest province is having roughly one child. Nine of ten provinces and three territories recorded their lowest fertility rates ever in 2024.

Half of Canadians under 50 who want children say they’ve delayed having them longer than they intended. Among those aged 35 to 44, the figure is 74%. The primary reason is cost. Housing, childcare, general economic insecurity. When a society makes it economically irrational to have children, people stop having children. This is not a mystery. It’s an incentive structure producing its predictable result.

The country’s response has been to replace domestic births with immigration. In 2021, for the first time, the number of immigrants arriving annually exceeded the number of domestic births. By 2024, more than two in five newborns had a foreign-born mother. The dependency on immigration to maintain population has become so total that any disruption to inflows would cause an immediate fiscal crisis in pension and healthcare funding.

This is not a sustainable model. It is a Ponzi demographic structure that requires ever-increasing inputs to avoid collapse, while doing nothing to address the underlying conditions that made domestic family formation unaffordable in the first place.

The Homelessness Explosion

The final indicator, and perhaps the most visible: nearly 60,000 Canadians were experiencing homelessness on a single night in late 2024. That number has almost doubled since 2018. The proportion sleeping in unsheltered locations, including encampments, grew from 14% to 28% over the same period. Among those who have experienced homelessness, 28% had also experienced an eviction, with disproportionate impacts on Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities.

Walk through downtown Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, or Halifax today and you’ll see a street-level reality that would have been unrecognizable a decade ago. Tent encampments in public parks. People injecting drugs in broad daylight on transit platforms. The normalization has been so gradual that residents have adjusted their routes and lowered their expectations without ever being asked.

The government’s own 2025 poverty report acknowledged that “policy makers built the social safety net for a different era” and that “the current system isn’t flexible enough to adapt to meet current realities.” This is a remarkable admission from the institution responsible for the system. It is also, characteristically, paired with no meaningful plan to fix it.

The Policy Mirage: Why the Carney Government’s Proposals Won’t Fix This

Mark Carney came to office with a rare credential for a politician: actual experience in the economic domain. Governor of the Bank of Canada during the financial crisis, then head of the Bank of England during Brexit. The theory was that his technocratic seriousness would translate into the kind of structural reforms Canada needed. Instead, Budget 2025 delivered a grab bag of spending commitments, transfer payments, and sloganeering that leaves every root cause of decline untouched.

Start with the centerpiece: Build Canada Homes, the new federal agency tasked with “doubling the pace of construction” to 500,000 homes per year. The initial commitment is $13 billion and 4,000 modular homes across six sites. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated the agency will deliver roughly 5,000 homes per year, or about 26,000 by 2030. Canada needs 430,000 to 480,000 annually. Build Canada Homes, at the PBO’s own estimate, covers about 1% of the target. One percent. For $3.5 billion a year. With no clear performance metrics, no mechanism to override municipal zoning fragmentation (there are over 800 residential zones in Gatineau alone), and a mandate weighed down by competing requirements to use Canadian-made and climate-friendly materials, which means by definition not the cheapest option.

B.C. developers have already expressed skepticism. The Fraser Institute points out that Ottawa can’t efficiently downsize its own office footprint despite years of effort and ample funding. The government took from 2017 to 2023 to reduce its office portfolio from 6.0 million to 5.9 million square meters. This is the institution that is going to build housing at scale. Meanwhile, the budget quietly retreated from the Liberal platform’s commitment to work with municipalities to reduce development charges by 50%. The Canadian Homebuilders Association noted this omission immediately. In Toronto, those charges exceed $130,000 per apartment and $180,000 per single-family home. Until those come down, no amount of federal prefab housing changes the math.

Then there’s the affordability strategy, which is really a transfer strategy. The renamed “Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit” (formerly the GST Credit) gets a 25% boost for five years, providing a family of four up to $1,890 in the first year and about $1,400 thereafter. This is a cash transfer to help people afford food whose price was driven up by the same monetary and immigration policies the government pursued. It’s the economic equivalent of breaking someone’s leg and handing them a crutch. The $20 million allocated to the Local Food Infrastructure Fund to ease “immediate pressures with food banks” works out to roughly $9 per food bank user per year. The government is also developing a “National Food Security Strategy” which, true to form, promises to “strengthen domestic food production” without specifying how, when, or at what cost.

The broader fiscal framework is similarly hollow. Budget 2025 promises to “catalyze $500 billion in new investment” and to “enable $1 trillion in investments over the next five years.” These are projection numbers, not commitments. They assume that a combination of trade diversification, Buy Canadian mandates, $925 million for AI, $334 million for quantum computing, and defense spending reaching 2% of GDP will somehow attract a volume of private capital that a decade of declining competitiveness has repelled. The budget cuts 40,000 civil service positions and claims spending will grow at less than 2% annually, compared to nearly 9% over the previous decade. But it also layers on $150 billion in new measures while promising to close a $15 billion annual gap between revenue and operating spending “by Budget 2028.” These numbers don’t reconcile. They’re aspirational, and everyone in Ottawa knows it.

The most revealing initiative might be the smallest: the “Canada Strong Pass,” which gives families free or discounted access to museums, historic sites, and parks, plus a 25% VIA Rail discount for young adults. This is what the government offers a generation that can’t afford homes or children: a subsidized train ticket to look at the country they’re being priced out of. It would be satire if it weren’t real policy.

What’s missing from the agenda is everything that would actually reverse the structural decline. There is no corporate tax reform to close the competitiveness gap with the United States, where 2017 reforms sharply reduced the US rate and undid Canada’s business tax advantage. The capital gains inclusion rate hike was cancelled, which is welcome, but a defensive measure rather than a growth catalyst. There is no regulatory rollback proportionate to the problem. The interprovincial trade barriers, estimated by the IMF to be equivalent to a 21% tariff and by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business to cost up to $200 billion annually, were supposed to be eliminated by July 1, 2025. The legislation was tabled, but the barriers remain largely intact because the federal government doesn’t actually control most of them. Provinces do.

There is no plan to address the fundamental structural distortion that channels Canadian capital into real estate rather than productive assets. The financial system’s bias toward residential construction is well documented and completely unaddressed. There is no immigration reform that ties intake to housing capacity, healthcare capacity, or per-capita GDP targets. The reduced numbers in Budget 2025 are a concession to political pressure, not a structural redesign. When political winds shift, the numbers will shift back.

And there is no answer to the brain drain. The budget allocates nearly a billion dollars for AI and quantum computing, which is fine, but the people trained by those programs will walk into a labor market where their American counterparts earn double the salary, pay lower taxes, and face lower housing costs. Until the total compensation equation changes, the talent will keep leaving and no amount of “attract foreign researchers” policy language will change that. You don’t solve an outflow problem with inflow rhetoric.

The Carney government’s theory of change appears to be that confidence and stability, combined with trade diversification and defense spending, will catalyze a wave of private investment. It’s a theory well suited to a central banker’s worldview: set the conditions, signal credibility, and let private capital do the work. The problem is that Canada has been setting conditions for a decade while watching capital flow in the opposite direction. At some point, you have to ask whether the conditions themselves are the problem, not just the signaling.

The Comfortable Collapse

None of this happened overnight. None of it happened by accident. And none of it is irreversible in theory, though the window for reversal narrows with each year of inaction.

Canada’s decline is the product of specific policy choices: a deliberate preference for real estate over productive investment. An immigration system calibrated to suppress wages rather than build capacity. A healthcare system left unreformed for decades. A housing market treated as a wealth vehicle for incumbents rather than shelter for citizens. A tax and regulatory environment that repels capital and talent in favor of managed stagnation. And now, a government that has correctly diagnosed the disease and prescribed an aspirin.

The country still has extraordinary advantages. Natural resources that most nations would kill for. Proximity to the world’s largest consumer market. World-class universities and research institutions. A relatively stable political system. These assets are real. But they are being squandered at a rate that should alarm anyone paying attention.

The danger of the shifting baseline is that by the time people notice the fish are gone, the ocean has changed beyond recognition. Canada is not there yet. But it’s closer than the national conversation suggests, and the comforting myth that everything is basically fine, that Canada is still somehow doing better than it looks, is the most dangerous narrative of all.

The numbers are in. The institutions agree. The decline is structural, it is accelerating, and the only people who deny it are the ones whose incentives depend on the denial. The current government offers ambitious slogans and modest programs. It promises to “build Canada strong” while presiding over every trend that makes Canada weaker. And if history is any guide, it will continue to do so until the shifting baseline has shifted so far that the country Mark Carney inherited is unrecognizable to the country he leaves behind.

Bank of Canada. “Toward a Virtuous Circle for Productivity.” Speech, November 2025.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2025/11/toward-a-virtuous-circle-for-productivity/

Canadian Centre for Housing Rights. “Everything You Need to Know About Build Canada Homes.” September 22, 2025.
https://housingrightscanada.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-build-canada-homes/

Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. “Housing Starts Up 5.6% in 2025 from 2024.” January 16, 2026.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2026/housing-starts-december-2025

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “2025 Was Canada’s Year of Mark Carney: What Have We Learned About His Economic Policy Agenda?” January 5, 2026.
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/2025-was-canadas-year-of-mark-carney-what-have-we-learned-about-his-economic-policy-agenda/

Conservative Party of Canada. “Just the Facts: Not Building Canada Homes.” January 16, 2026.
https://www.conservative.ca/just-the-facts-not-building-canada-homes/

Department of Finance Canada. “Budget 2025: Canada Strong.” November 4, 2025.

Food Banks Canada. “HungerCount 2025: Food Banks as a Lifeline: Canada’s New Normal.” 2025.

Fraser Institute. “Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2025 Report.” 2025.

Fraser Institute. “Federal Government Wants to Build 4,000 Homes Despite Years of Real Estate Mismanagement.” 2025.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/federal-government-wants-build-4000-homes-despite-years-real-estate-mismanagement

Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “Underinvestment in Capital Equipment Hinders Canadian Productivity Growth.” May 27, 2025.
https://itif.org/publications/2025/05/27/underinvestment-in-capital-equipment-hinders-canadian-productivity-growth/

Liberal Party of Canada. “Our Plan.” 2025.
https://liberal.ca/plan/

Liberal Party of Canada. “Fiscal and Costing Plan.” 2025.
https://liberal.ca/cstrong/costing/

Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “Canada at a Crossroads, Volume 4: Capital Ideas.” May 20, 2025.
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/canada-at-a-crossroads-volume-4-capital-ideas-attracting-investment-boosting-productivity/

Marion, Stéfane, and Alexandra Ducharme. “GDP per Capita: A Lost Decade.” National Bank of Canada, 2024.

OECD. “OECD Economic Surveys: Canada 2025.” 2025.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269/full-report/raising-business-sector-productivity_443bcd88.html

Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. “Prime Minister Carney Announces New Measures to Make Groceries and Other Essentials More Affordable for Canadians.” January 26, 2026.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/01/26/prime-minister-carney-announces-new-measures-make-groceries-and-other

Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. “Prime Minister Carney Outlines Budget 2025 Measures to Buy Canadian.” November 10, 2025.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2025/11/10/prime-minister-carney-outlines-budget-2025-measures-buy

Policy Options (IRPP). “Build Canada Homes: The Shift to Prefabricated Housing.” February 2026.
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2026/02/prefabricated-housing-canada/

Robson, William B.P., and Mawakina Bafale. “Canada’s Investment Crisis: Shrinking Capital Undermines Competitiveness and Wages.” C.D. Howe Institute, December 24, 2025.
https://cdhowe.org/publication/canadas-investment-crisis-shrinking-capital-undermines-competitiveness-and-wages/

Robson, William B.P., and Mawakina Bafale. “Underequipped: How Weak Capital Investment Hurts Canadian Prosperity and What to Do About It.” C.D. Howe Institute, September 12, 2024.
https://cdhowe.org/publication/canadas-capital-crisis-growing-threat-falling-business-investment-productivity/

Statistics Canada. “Canada’s Population Estimates, Fourth Quarter 2024.” 2025.

Statistics Canada. “Fertility: Fewer Babies.” The Daily, 2025.

Statistics Canada. “Labour Productivity, Quarterly Estimates.” Table 36-10-0208-01.

TD Economics. “From Bad to Worse: Canada’s Productivity Slowdown Is Everyone’s Problem.” 2024.
https://economics.td.com/ca-productivity-bad-to-worse

The Hub. “A Trillion-Dollar Gap: 12 Charts Highlighting Canada’s Capital Flight Crisis.” January 26, 2026.
https://thehub.ca/2026/01/26/a-trillion-dollar-gap-12-charts-highlighting-canadas-capital-flight-crisis/

Follow Joey Tweeets on X here, sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list here.

The Walls Are Going Up: Capital Controls Have Already Arrived in the First World

Originally via @JoeyTweeets on X

They’re Coming For Cash, Too

Cash is the last truly private way to transact in the traditional system. So naturally, it’s being systematically restricted.

The EU passed Regulation 2024/1624 (the Anti-Money Laundering Package) with a vote of 482 to 47 in April 2024. Starting July 10, 2027, businesses across all 27 EU member states are prohibited from accepting or making cash payments above €10,000. This applies to single transactions or multiple payments over time that “appear to be linked.” The language is deliberately broad.

But the €10,000 cap is just the ceiling. Cash transactions above €3,000 now trigger mandatory identity verification: government-issued ID, KYC procedures, records retained for five years. Businesses must monitor payment patterns to detect structured transactions designed to circumvent the limits.

And now the net is expanding to crypto. The OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) is being adopted by jurisdictions globally. The UK enacted CARF regulations effective January 1, 2026. This closes what was the last significant gap in the automated reporting regime.

The Politics Of Institutionalized Predation.

“I become stronger as you become weaker, I absorb strength as yours flows into me. I become capable of this because I do not experience your pain, I don’t care about your loss, and I feel no regret about using, abusing, and devouring you.”
— Page 63, An Age For Lucifer

Consider the following:

“This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable. I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them. A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.“
— Robert C Tucker, An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality & The Quest for Godhood

The book in question was Robert C Tucker’s “An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality and the Quest For Godhood“. I first wrote about it in a Bombthrower piece: The WEF Isn’t a Cabal, It’s A Cult, and I can’t remember how I came into possession of it in the first place. I remember owning it for years and never reading it, because frankly, it scared me.

At first I thought it was some kind of manual for psychopathy – how to rise above your self-limiting human emotions to attain power and fame (even Godhood?) through the energetic predation of those around you.

But once I found out that its author wasn’t some High Priest of the Left Hand Path, but rather, a former counsellor and director of COMA, the Council On Mind Abuse, based in Canada – it started to take on a different light.

COMA worked with “adult survivors and child victims of ritual abuse“, and Tucker spent much of his adult life interviewing Satanists and Luciferians (yes, there is a distinction, as Tucker would elucidate in this book).

It was an anthropological study, born out of a thought experiment:

What if all the ritualistic abuse we are seeing isn’t random criminality but an expression of an overarching, organizing principle that viewed mere humans as psychic fodder, to be devoured for the benefit of those in the know?

In his talks with Satanists and sociopaths Tucker repeatedly detected a whiff of something, he never put a name to it, but referred to it as “the thing that points beyond itself”.

COMA eventually went bankrupt, being on the receiving end of relentless lawfare from the Church of Scientology. Tucker died of a heart attack in Mexico in 2003.

In my original Bombthrower piece, I picked up the thread on “The Thing That Points Beyond Itself”, positing the very real, not metaphorical, existence of larger, transpersonal entities such as egregores, morphogenic fields, Vadim Zeland’s “Pendulums”, memetics and mass thought forms in general.

As the world tries to wrap its head around the millions of new and partially unredacted Epstein documents, it becomes very difficult to unsee the dynamics of what has been revealed to be playing out at the highest echelons of institutional power, for decades at least.

The Thing That Points Beyond Itself

An egregore isn’t an analogy or mythical. It’s what a shared belief system becomes when it fuses with incentives and institutions and starts behaving like an organism. It recruits, it feeds, it protects itself. The Epstein network isn’t the egregore. It’s one of its organs.

As the names keep dropping, it’s hard not to get a sense that absolutely anybody who had achieved fame, influence, power or renown was mixed up in an organized cabal of depravity and moral turpitude.

It feels like every TED Talk you ever nodded in agreement to, every Grammy award-winning singer you vibed to, every politician you voted for, and every business leader whose companies you bought shares in, they were all laughing behind your back, because it was a Big Club and you ain’t in it.

The Club is in the global domination game, and its accoutrements include fraud, racketeering, blackmail, and ritualized abuse of women and children.

But what is weird about The Club is the seeming preponderance of pedophiles and sexual predators. Doesn’t anybody nice ever rise into positions of authority?

The Club has to be impelled by something, be it an incentive structure or dynamic that attracts both sociopaths and easily manipulable bunglers.

But it goes beyond that.

The Falsification of Hanlon’s Razor

Hanlon’s Razor used to be the bedrock of my thinking. It’s a derivation of Occam’s Razor. Loosely stated, it advises us:

“Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.”

When you look at the types of people ensconced in government, bureaucracy, and academia, this fits. Nowhere in the private sector could you find such a monotonous array of one-dimensional apparatchiks. Any enterprise run by such institutionalized mediocrity would have zero competitive edge and go bankrupt.

However, what I should also have taken to heart, more than I did, was something James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg observed over twenty years ago in their seminal work The Sovereign Individual:

“Too little attention has been paid to the fact that electoral politics lures disordered, Messianic personalities into positions of power.”

My base case used to be that the political class were, by definition, failures and rejects. They washed out of the private sector, then drifted into statecraft out of necessity.

I thought that belief in a vast, overarching conspiracy of powerful elites who controlled everything was Loserthink. It ingrained a sense of helplessness in the believer, which made them ambivalent and docile.

Now I realize that I’m the loser – at least in the eyes of everyone in The Club, because there is now no doubt, except to the willfully ignorant – that The Club exists, and the entire political ruling class, the corporate oligarchs, the TED-class influencers and CNN talking heads and panelist experts, are all in it.

Seeing now that The Club exists, and whatever is behind it pulls the levers of power, narrative, and money itself, doesn’t make me feel helpless after all.

It makes me angry. As it likely does for a lot of people.

But The Club is driven by something, that sits behind it.

What’s Behind the Three-M’s?

In numerous writings I have said that the main affliction facing humanity today was what I privately term the “3M’s of Elite Insularism”, those in the The Club are Malthusian, misanthropic, and Marxists.

But I now suspect those are mere symptoms of how The Thing That Points Beyond Itself presents, and that thing is…

A Luciferian Death Cult

Throughout his book, the term Tucker uses to refer to his posited predatory spirituality is Luciferianism, and he said that it

“reinforces and encourages four basic energies — devouring, possession, violence and disguise — which in turn, assist the Luciferian to transform consciousness, animate hidden potential, and ultimately attain godhood.”

Devouring is the core process – it is the act of ingesting various types of energy for oneself, whether it be wealth, property or life energy itself – it’s all fair game to the elites in The Club, because they view it all as theirs by divine right.

“Luciferians believe that core identity can be devoured only when it is broken like an egg or nutshell. Once broken, the victim’s identity yields powerful energies. “

Page 71.

(Serious adrenechrome vibes…)

The elites, The Club, view themselves as a kind of breakaway civilization – but not in the sense that I have been calling The Great Bifurcation for years. My sense of that was a split into separate streams of humanity, a la the Eloi and Morlocks posited in The Time Machine, by that irascible communist H.G. Wells.

But The Club isn’t splitting off from the mass of humanity, they’re using the masses as fuel for stage separation like a booster rocket. Ready to jettison our spent husks as our psychic energy is consumed to propel them into the stars and Godhood itself.

For the rest of us to go along with this, we have to submit to this and want to provide ourselves as energetic fuel to be consumed by our betters.

This involves the promotion of what Tucker calls “Self-Annihilating Traditions” and we see it in various forms of psychic driving and mass influence operations that induce an intellectual and instinctive lethargy at both the individual and mass levels:

“The actual experience of being devoured emotionally, cognitively, or spiritually usually occurs gradually over time. The devouring itself is never obvious to the victim; if it was, then defenses would be mobilized.”

Any suffering the victims do experience is attributed to other causes – I think of them as “institutional scapegoats”.

“Suicidal Empathy” is phrase that has arisen from those skeptical of the value prop of allowing oneself to be psychically, economically and even physically devoured to the benefit of The Club, ostensibly in service to the higher calling of the collective.

We have to be conditioned to desire an end to our own existence as a moral imperative unto itself – hence the relentless climate crisis, mankind-as-a-cancer narrative, the institutionalization of euthanasia, abortion and the incentivizing of medical pseudo-science that induces violent psychosis on a mass scale.

Like the Anti-Life Equation posited in DC Comics New Gods series, most humans have to be conditioned to want to die.

…so that the “capstone class”, as I’ve called them in the past, can use us as booster fuel into godhood.

Tucker’s book was tabled as a thought experiment, and that’s where it sat for me, until now.

When you map the model onto the world we actually inhabit the point ceases to be that some new predator-class spirituality might emerge.
It is here now, and the point is that we inhabit a system that is optimized for it.

Somewhere along the line, a prototype evolved inside the species, and learned to prey on its own kind. As I outlined in
another (very long) piece, this has likely been going on for a long, long time.

(That piece happened to mention Clinton Foundation insider Ira Magaziner, his role shaping the governance regime of the Internet, and his presence in the Epstein black book; the latest Epstein file dump shows, despite protestations that no relationship existed, that Magaziner and Epstein were indeed in contact beyond the stated claims. Ira is still CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. His son is congressman Seth Magaziner, D-RI).

Back to The Club: over the centuries, they’ve built a social and spiritual architecture that normalizes the predation, and advances it – taking special efforts to co-opt anything that appears that could challenge it. Tucker called it “predatory spirituality.” We have other names. The behaviour is the same.

And where would such a class (The Club) take up residence, if they were real?

They would not live at the margins, nor burrow into the powerless underclass.

The Club would move inexorably toward the apex. They would infiltrate the institutions that confer immunity, walk the corridors of power where favours become law.
They would acquire control of the media organs where spin defines reality, and they would reside above the law, where consequences are for other people, the little people.

Predatory spirituality takes up residence where power emanates, because that is where it can feed without being seen, or at the very least with immunity.

Civil War, SplinterNet and Guillotines
(a.k.a. where we are headed…)

Epstein is not important because he was uniquely depraved. He is important because he is the icon, the symbol that points beyond itself.

The machinations of his network give us a glimpse of the operating system. It’s a case study in how leverage, ritual, and institutional protection intertwine. Once you accept that, the question is no longer “How could this happen?” The question becomes “How long has this been going on?” and “Who or what hasn’t been corrupted by it?”

In the follow-up piece, I’m going to widen the lens. Because when institutional legitimacy breaks down, alternative structures step into the vacuum.

Despite what The Club would want for the rabble, when it comes right down to it, people actually don’t want to be psychically, economically and spiritually devoured for the benefit of an insular, overlord class.

For years I have written the age of centralization and the linear geometry of the Industrial Age was heading toward collapse. It was, and still is, too early to tell what comes next – but whatever it is, owing the emerging architecture of the Network Age, it won’t be a top-down hierarchy, lorded over by (Luciferian) priests of the temple.

Whenever people ask me for a succinct descriptor of what I see coming, my answer was and remains: Snow Crash.

We’ve already gone full Snow Crash. pic.twitter.com/KJjgRI6snQ

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) February 11, 2026

As the collapse in institutional legitimacy accelerates, non-state groupings will step into the vacuum and provide the functional scaffolding that civil governments are no longer willing, or able to provide.

Sometimes they look like protection rackets. Sometimes they look like special economic zones, franchise sovereignties or city-states.

Sometimes they look like cartels with drones. Sometimes they look like transnational corporations with private intelligence services.

The end result is the same. Fragmentation. Competing authorities. SplinterNets (and consensus reality shattered).

That’s where this leads.

Epilogue

My next piece explores a strange new social construct about to enter into competition with other established sovereignties. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable. I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on game theory and simple incentives: a new class of irregular sovereigns will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to oppose Luciferian predation. Another assumption then follows: these factions will evolve gradually and incrementally from largely compromised nation states, just as we apparently evolved from previous obsolete governance structures. A further assumption suggests that these groups have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as guerrillas with advanced methods of resiliency and new forms of communications and asymmetric tactics designed to support and advance their insurgency.

Watch this space.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list to get the next instalment, follow me on X, we’re also getting ready to relaunch Ready.ca – a boot camp for politically homeless Canadians (and others). 

Personal Freedom In The Age of Mass Compliance

What follows are a couple of excerpts from the last Bitcoin Capitalist Letter, which was a long-form piece that was a refinement of my overall long term investment thesis. It corrects for my biggest mistake in the previous model: the belief that nation states were in secular decline, and centralized government power was waning.

This may be true for the long haul, but for the next five, ten, twenty years – we’re heading into an era that numerous commentators have been identifying, and I’m looping under umbrella “State Capitalism”. 

More specific to our “Great Bifurcation” thesis, what this really means is State Capitalism for the “haves” and  mass compliance and (the warmth of?) collectivism for the  permanent underclass. UBI is coming out of necessity, and anyone who thinks that isn’t going to be some permutation of social credit (most likely based on personal carbon footprint quotas) is ngmi.

Late Stage Globalism

A paper I came across recently was Nicolas Colin’s Late-Cyle Investment Theory, which came out in June ’25 but Colin was recently a guest on Hidden Forces.

Colin’s paper posits that we are entering the maturity phase of the computer/networking information age.

What got my attention, both from the podcast interview with Demetri Kofinas and then as I read through the paper itself, is how it explains the mechanisms by which late-cycle dynamics force governments toward what we’ve described last edition, a global march toward a kind of “state capitalism” and that “uncomfortable reality I have been grappling with for a few months, that The State and The Economy are in the process of merging”.

We’re seeing a kind of  inexorable slide into state-directed capital allocation; it’s taking forms peculiar to its cultural backdrop but it’s happening all over the world.

Russell Napier calls it “National Capitalism”; he also appeared on Hidden Forces a year ago and we covered it in the December ‘24 edition.

WEF luminaries like Marianna Mazzacuto – wholly in favour of the trend – calls it “The Entrepreneurial State”; Tyler Durden over at Zerohedge calls the American expression of it “WHAM” – White House Asset Management.

My favourite version of it is George Gilder’s  “Emergency Socialism”, because it captures the exigencies that are making this a priority among governments worldwide.

Colin is somewhat unique in that he argues high public debt isn’t a policy mistake but a structural feature of technological maturity (not sure I agree, tbh).

As he puts it, governments continue borrowing as if the previous growth regime still applies, even as productivity gains plateau and returns diminish.

The numbers are stark:

• US public debt at 122% of GDP (255% including private sector)
• France at 112% (300% total)
• Japan exceeding 260% public (400% total).

Not mentioned in his paper, but I’ll add that Canada’s total government debt (all levels) is 120%, and our private debt on its own is north of 200%.

These levels dwarf anything seen during the 1970s inflation.

The options, as Colin lays them out, are brutally limited, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us here.

Governments cannot meaningfully raise taxes, any increases can only be performative and symbolic. Those who pay the lion’s share of them have already demonstrated a willingness to relocate if the “tax the rich” slogans translate into excessive action (we’re already seeing anticipatory exoduses from New York City as Mamdami comes in threatening full-on socialism).

Nor can governments cut spending, because various entitlement programs dominate budgets.

Colin thinks that they can’t outgrow the debt because technological maturity means slower productivity growth, which is the core of his thesis.

He may be right, but I don’t think governments believe that – they are looking at AI to ignite a productivity boom that can outpace the debt bubble.

Whether Colin is correct, or governments believe their own mantra about a productivity miracle in the offing, both roads lead to the same place:

There is only one politically viable path, and that is inflation.

“Run it hot”, basically.

But here’s where Colin’s analysis dovetails with our thesis: inflation has consequences.

As prices rise and real rates fall, voluntary demand for government bonds evaporates (this is why we’ve been seeing yields on sovereign debt spiking higher for over a year).

The one common denominator from those we’ve mentioned above (Colin, Napier, Gilder) is that the most likely outcome is financial repression: policies that force domestic savings into public debt through capital controls, regulatory mandates, and banking rules.

This is the merger of the state and capital that I’ve been warning about. It is a type of financial repression, but the quiet bureaucratic kind where your pension fund must hold treasuries, where capital controls prevent you from moving wealth offshore, where the rules of the game are systematically rigged to channel private savings toward public obligations.

Colin frames this as part of a broader institutional fragmentation. Trade wars, he notes (citing David Skilling), are precursors to capital wars.

States that once relied on global capital markets increasingly treat capital as a strategic resource (hence the advent of things like “Strategic Bitcoin Reserves” – my comment, not his).

The open, rules-based order many still assume to be in place is actively unravelling.

Napier talked about all this a year ago and never once uttered the word “Bitcoin”, let alone crypto.

Colin, for his part, sees crypto and stablecoins as part of the emerging new financial system (sound familiar?), and what’s fascinating is how this all maps onto The Stablecoin Standard thesis we’ve been developing.

He sees dollar-backed stablecoins as America’s attempt to extend monetary hegemony into the digital age, essentially creating a new channel for petrodollar-style recycling where foreign demand for USDT and USDC indirectly finances US government debt.

No surprise here, but it contains an inherent tension: stablecoins work precisely because they route around traditional banking, yet that same feature makes them harder to control when geopolitical pressures mount.

The implication for us is clear and it emerges in a kind of “Barbell trade” portfolio that both recognizes the reality of State Capitalism while also hedging for it via the simultaneous emergence of a parallel system (more on this below).

The big wake-up call for me, is that The State Is “The House”. I’ve spent most of my adult life thinking that it was on its last legs, that at some point a Geopolitical Minsky Moment would demolish the entire scaffolding, and then sound money and free markets would assert themselves.

I was wrong. I’ve now realized that.

The general public will never not believe in the legitimacy of “The State” (even though they may dispute who currently occupies the machinery). It’s baked in since childhood – and it won’t matter that their leaders debase the currency, leach away their wealth, send their children to die in turf wars or even load their neighbours into boxcars. The masses will always believe that The House is legitimate, inevitable and necessary.

With all that said, I still do think that there will be a geopolitical Minsky moment, a kind of global, macro “force majeure” that resets the table, simply because the fiat currency system is well past its “use by” date – but make no mistake, the only thing that happens to The House in the aftermath is that some other faction takes over the lease. And the masses will then dutifully follow the new boss.

The only antidote to this is on the individual level. Independent thinking and independent wealth. That’s it.

If you have a compassionate streak and you want to help the masses or uplift the poor, you have one way to do it: give them the means, motive and opportunities to lift themselves at an individual level – education, mentorship, motivation, angel investing, scholarships, introductions.

One may ask what the exact change in thesis is; if we’re still long Bitcoin, we’re still invested in what we think is the emerging new financial system, we’re still long picks and shovels.

Before we get to it, we have to put a couple more pieces on the table.

The picture we see emerging is this:

• Increasing numbers of plebs are “checking out” of the system, trying to degen their way to wealth, and not even bothering to vote for a system that has essentially abandoned them (referring to our write up on The Prison of Financial Mediocrity  in the full edition)
• AI is killing not only jobs, but entire career paths. UBI is moving past being part of the conversation – I expect 2026 to be a  pivotal year in turning it into reality in multiple jurisdictions.
• Whoever still believes there’s a functioning system in place, does so for the simple reason that they are banking on it to save their asses: hence the growing populist surge on both sides of the political spectrum – but “democratic socialism” and collectivism seem to hold characteristically peculiar attraction for vast swaths of the public.

The final piece in all this is the unrelenting crack-up of the global financial system itself and the geopolitical scaffolding that, until recently, seemed immutable.

I reiterate my old prediction that Donald Trump will be the penultimate president of the United States as they are understood today. Whoever comes after will be the last. And then the US will morph into something else, similar to the breakdown of the USSR in the early 90s.

The same is happening in Canada – where there are now three separatist movements: Quebec, Alberta and now Saskatchewan.

it’ll be more like this pic.twitter.com/Sx4ixGUlOt

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) January 19, 2026

The Eurozone will likely crack up under its own internal tensions and secessionist movements are poised to gain momentum the world over.

How do we reconcile that with an era of Big Government and State Capitalism?

There will simply be more states: a multi-polar world, and different jurisdictions will govern with varying levels of heavy-handedness and interventionism.

Singapore, for example, is for all intents and purposes an authoritarian enclave – under the singular rule of the People’s Action Party since independence, and everybody who lives there seems fine with that. The trains run on time, there are very low levels of corruption and street crime is practically unheard of.

They’ll cane you for chewing gum in the subway (harsh? Try riding the TTC in Toronto without getting stabbed by a mental patient), and they’ll execute you for serious crimes, but there are no “immigration discounts” on sentencing (in November, two men were hanged for trafficking heroin, one a Singaporean, the other, Malaysian).

Singapore is no libertarian paradise, but there is also pretty well zero possibility that any purple-haired Trantifa berserkers are going to shoot up your kid’s school, or that some liberal arts soy-boy in a keffiyeh will smash your face in with a brick on New Year’s Eve.

So there’s that.

Parag Khanna, in his elite-class best-seller “Technocracy In America: Rise of the Info State”, said the governance model of the future should be some manner of Swiss-Singapore hybrid. I remember being both bemused and mortified when I first read that (it came out in 2016) …in the intervening years, I find myself thinking we may do OK with a touch of both:

“What model should post-authoritarian or newly democratic societies pursue: Swiss-style organic economic diversification or Singapore-style managed innovation?

The answer is both. Having lived for stretches in both these small countries, I’ve come to see that despite their enormous differences, what matters most is that Switzerland and Singapore are both verifiably democratic and rigorously technocratic at the same time.”

Khanna cites Harvard’s Michael Porter and Richard Rosecrance, who forecasted an emergence of a “market state” era.

Also,

“business strategist Keniche Ohmae, in his book The Next Global Stage (2005), argued that urban agglomerations of city-states resembling the medieval Hanseatic League would become the world’s power centers.”

When you take a step back, it’s not that different from the mosaic of competitive (not combative) sovereignties posited back in The Sovereign Individual (or, Snow Crash).

It just turns out that Khanna arrived as a similar conclusion from a different angle. If I’m honest, my initial reaction to it probably owed much to Khanna’s involvement with the WEF.

As a recent guest on the Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast once quipped, almost off-handedly, “the wealthy never suffer in any society”.

In places like Singapore – and the innumerable micro-sovereignties that will spring up over the coming years – there will be due process and basic rights (Singapore has a constitutional guarantee on free speech, with a lot of escape hatches for the government in cases of public order, hate, etc. – the same thing is happening here in Canada, and around the world).

But realistically, it will probably take deep pockets to be able to exercise those rights. In Canada we have an expression to describe what happens to property owners who use deadly force against violent home invaders, “The process is the punishment”.

It means if your door gets kicked in by some low-IQ imports who are already out on bail for doing this previously, and you blow their heads off with a legally owned shotgun, you will be charged and forced to stand trial. After a few years, and several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, you’ll likely prevail in court. If you don’t have the resources to fight that battle, you’ll take a plea deal and spend some time behind bars with exactly the same types of people you just defended yourself against.

Remember our maxim: “In the future, it’ll be a lot more expensive to be free”.

Meanwhile, the bottom tiers of the wealth pyramid across most jurisdictions (the permanent underclass) are going to embrace collectivism, populism and wind up with varying degrees of authoritarianism.

The Post-Singularity Stack and the SoS Portfolio

This is the tightest wrapper I could come up with for everything I’ve been trying to set out in this issue.

Due credit goes to Addison Wiggin, from the Grey Swan Fraternity, who recently put out a piece entitled “Repricing Legitimacy”. It touches on many of the same themes we’re monitoring here: the widespread disaffection of the younger generations, and the loss of faith in legacy institutions – albeit, as we’ve noted above, somewhat ironically juxtaposed with a renewed enthusiasm for Big Government and even collectivism.

“Our job isn’t to pick a slogan or a side. It’s to recognize where legitimacy is being rebuilt, where it’s being faked, and where it’s quietly draining away.

Revolutions without plans tend to end in terror and sorrow. Systems without trust eventually seize up.

Cycles don’t care what we believe. They respond to balance. And balance, right now, is being renegotiated almost everywhere at once.“

Drawing on source material mentioned earlier, plus a few others:

• • Viktor Shvets’ “Twilight Before The Storm”
  • Jeffrey Towson’s “What Would Ben Graham Do Now?”
  • Daniel Bell’s “The China Model”

The common theme seems to be that they are books which filled me with revulsion and dread the first time I read them.

Shvets’ thesis is point blank: the old neoliberal capitalist consensus has collapsed and no new model has yet emerged, but all indications are that it’ll include some kind of socialism (my extension on this is that we’re headed for a two-tier system of techno-socialism for the masses, and state capitalism for the asset holders).

If you hear Shvets on any interviews, he usually blames the markets for breaking down – saying, in effect, that “the market model has been discredited”. I would beg to differ, saying that the market functioning has been completely coopted by government interventionism and fiat debasement, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. The dysfunction is real.

He makes frequent references to something called the “Fujiwara Effect”, a meteorological term for when multiple hurricanes converge into a single, humongous, cataclysmic storm. The analogy here is the compounding of multiple negative cycles: financial, with the debt bubble; technological, with the existential disruptions coming from AI – and he also puts “climate change” in there, which I actually view as the one thing we don’t have to worry about, at least not now.

It’s still a fitting term for what we’re headed into: some kind of transition that won’t be incremental, but “rupture”-like.

Towson, whose book is over a decade old, reframed value investing as not only a game of mental chess with “Mr. Market”, but as one where “Mr. Government” had entered the chat. Investors and entrepreneurs would henceforth have to take the ever-increasing regulatory and ideological biases of The State into account when making their allocation decisions.

Daniel Bell himself defended criticisms that he was extolling a China-style command economy, which he maintains he was not, but that the point of his book was that nobody can dispute China’s results in operating that way. It works. Or at least it did (they too, have an enormous, untenable debt bubble, just like everybody else).

If there is a common aspect to these models it’s that policy starts to crowd out price discovery.

We’ve been dancing around this realization for a long time; this is what I’ve been intuiting every time I said that shorting anything was a fool’s errand because markets are now structurally hardwired to go up – more so than at any other time in history.

That’s fiat debasement at work, and it puts the entire universe of assets on an escalator, and from there it’s a matter of picking what will outperform the rate of decay in our denominators.

Tyler Durden’s phrase “White House Asset Management” (WHAM) is telling us that intrinsic value is now a political function, at least partially so. Imagine being short MSTR only to wake up some morning and find out that Trump put out a tweet during his morning dump announcing that the US government just took a 10% stake in MSTR, MARA and HUT/ABTC.

Nobody should be surprised if that happens. Not anymore

For many years I’ve taken pains to chart a largely libertarian, if not anarcho-capitalist path, the crux of which was trying to conduct myself with no regard to who was in power or which party formed the government.

I basically tried to tune out The State. I’ve conceded that it’s become much harder to do that since COVID, but I was still making my investment and capital allocation decisions from a market forces perspective.

And that is what is changing now. Our overall thesis may be unperturbed: The Great Bifurcation, Monetary Regime Change, etc. – but I am now grudgingly acknowledging that The State is going to impact our economic calculus more than I’d care to admit.

Those above-mentioned books which filled me denial and dread when I first read them, I’m now re-reading to adjust my investment theses around them.

I’m not exactly happy about it, but here we are…

Let’s talk SOS (Sovereign vs Serfdom):

If we’re going to stipulate that The State, “Mr. Government” (or “Mr. Regime” as I began to frame it mentally) is now part of the calculus, one of the places to start is to look at the largest economy in the world – The United States – and look at what its stated, national strategic objectives are.

The “economic security” objectives include: critical supply chains (logistics) and materials, energy dominance, reviving the defence industry, and growing financial sector dominance.

We know that energy dominance doesn’t mean windmills and solar, it means nuclear, oil, and natgas.

We also know that financial sector dominance will have Bitcoin, blockchain, crypto and stablecoins baked in.

And, big surprise, more military spending.

When I looked at all this and realized that all major powers are jockeying around these same themes, what came to mind for me was a kind of barbell positioning between “Mr. Regime” and a Parallel System (including “freedom tech”) across two axes:

Axis A: Serfdom vs Sovereign

Regime-aligned: are companies and assets that directly benefit from various national security strategy priorities (energy dominance, reindustrialization, defense industrial base, financial/AI leadership).

Sovereign / Parallel: Bitcoin, gold, privacy, decentralized rails and jurisdictions that hedge State Capitalism and what I sometimes call the “monetizing serfdom” trade.

These are positions that get us through whatever this is happening right now and over the next five to ten years.

Axis B: The “Post-Singularity” stack

Sound Money: Bitcoin, precious metals, future fintech

Smart Machines: AI / HPC / Big Data

Scarce Resources: energy, metals, base commodities

These are the companies and resources ushering in or underpinning “what comes next”.

Putting it all together

I touted this edition as a “major revision to the thesis”, however as I worked my way through it, what became apparent to me was that not a lot had changed within the thesis itself, except perhaps in timing:

• The Great Bifurcation was coming => TGB is here
• Governments and institutions are out of their depth
• Bitcoin will make a place in the next financial system => Bitcoin has taken its place within the emerging financial system

If the overall components and mechanics of the thesis haven’t changed – then what exactly did? Because something sure feels different to me.

I guess the big shift is from an overall optimism that humanity was going to level up en masse through the separation of the State and money (“fix the money, fix the world”), and admitting that was extremely naive.

It comes down to two things:

#1) Big Government is waxing, not waning:

Despite our governments and institutions being legacies of the industrial age, trying to linearly extrapolate their approaches into a non-linear world, their influence is not waning – as I have been positing since the aftermath of the pandemic.

The State is asserting itself ever more into the private sphere, everywhere.

I’ve made passing references to “a last gasp of Big Government” and the Nanny State in the past, but I think I under-emphasized it. This so-called “last gasp” will persist for a long time in the context of our lives. It could be a couple of decades, or more, before this plays itself out.

#2) I’ve completely misread the public mind

Again, thinking the demise of institutional credibility and loss of faith in an unaccountable and insular ruling class coming to a head during COVID was a secular wave.

That also appears to be wrong. It was an aberration and the general public has settled back into lethargy and compliance.

The combination of these realities pushes us toward the “Mr. Regime” side of the investment thesis, which is basically monetizing servitude, and on a certain level, that just feels wrong.

Aren’t we supposed to try to educate the masses? Make them understand how screwed they are if they don’t take massive action right away?

Our better nature may say so, but let me tell you a story about that impulse… (a true one):

In 1984, an unknown social psychology professor put out a book that was intended to be a consumer awareness tool designed to “pull back the curtain” on how people are manipulated.

The author described himself as a lifelong “patsy” and “easy mark” who wanted to educate the general public on the tactics of “compliance professionals” (like salespeople, marketers, nudge units and propagandists) so that they could defend themselves.

The book flopped, his publisher going so far as to withdraw promotion and publicity funds, citing that it would be like “throwing money down a pit”.

Nobody cared.

That book was eventually discovered by the very people who it was intended to expose: the marketing industry.

Robert Cialdini’s “Influence” is now an evergreen staple of the business world, having been re-released in an expanded edition, and has sold over 7 million copies worldwide.

This anecdote is both depressing and indicative of the world we live in – a microcosm for everything.

You thought Bitcoin was going to emancipate the masses from the tyranny of central banking?

The masses don’t care. They’re busy piling onto Polymarket and betting on which Stranger Things character is going to die in the finale:

You know who does care about Bitcoin, now? JP Morgan. Wells Fargo. Citigroup.

As TFTC notes, “14 of the top 25 US banks are now building Bitcoin products”:

14 of the top 25 US banks are now building Bitcoin products pic.twitter.com/U7pMPmcRVr

— TFTC (@TFTC21) December 27, 2025

Note also how a couple are building their Bitcoin products for “HNW Clients Only.

And that’s why if we want to stay on the right side of The Great Bifurcation and have the means to chart our own paths through this period of State Capitalism, we’re going to have to do it individually – and recognize that in the future, it’ll be a lot more expensive to be free.

That’s why the revised thesis carries a cynicism that’s uncomfortable. Any remaining altruism I felt toward a public that would rather ignore, or even punish the messenger than act on the message has to be quelled, and any civic-mindedness I had left has to be channeled accordingly (mentorship, curation, lead by example, etc).

What bothers me the most about this, was that in the past there was no existential impetus to break oneself out from the crowd. Everybody had the perfectly reasonable option of simply fitting in: you could get an education or a trade, work for a living, buy a house, raise a family, put your kids through college and just live a quiet, middle class life.

My dad worked on the shop floor in a General Electric plant for over thirty years, after which they gave him a pen for his retirement and a pension that my mom collected for another 17 years after he died. My parents were probably among the last generation of truly working/middle class people to live, work, save and retire.

All that is over. A bygone era.

Serfdom or Sovereignty (“SoS”) – that’s the choice now and most people aren’t even aware of it, and when they see somebody choosing sovereignty it looks downright heretical to them.

We can’t help these people, and that makes me sad, even if the majority of them would gleefully stone me to death in the street if the TV set ever tells them that the reason their livelihood is gone and their savings have been vaporized was because of “Bitcoin speculators” and goldbugs.

Most people are stupid. Especially when they act in numbers. If you’re reading this letter, you aren’t one of them.

The next edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter, with more on the Post-Singularity Stack, should be out next weekend. Bombthrower readers can get a special trial offer here

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This is Happening, This is Really Happening

On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of the financial capital of the world, with his hand on a copy of the Koran, and in his inauguration speech, he proclaimed:

“I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”

As a guy who normally tunes out political speeches (to this day, I haven’t a single speech by Trump, Trudeau, let alone Carney or Biden), this one got my attention to the point where I downloaded the transcript and read the entire thing.

It gave me some serious Pol Pot “This is Year Zero” vibes…

“Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously… to those who say the era of Big Government is over, hear me when I say this: no longer will city hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorker’s lives.”

Most people don’t know who that was. Except maybe the odd Cambodian.

The banger pull quote was this:

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

…and the crowds, no doubt cheered.

A few years ago, before the pandemic, I rereleased a version of the public domain work: Pictures of The Socialistic Future, from my foreword:

This remarkable little novella posits a fictional socialist sweep into power in Germany towards the end of the 19th century, anticipating the Bolshevik and Marxist revolutions of the subsequent decades. It follows the arc of a family as narrated by its patriarch as he initially enthuses over the socialist ascension to the seat of government.

Quickly, however, he progresses through various stages of disenfranchisement that inevitably ensue: first tempering his expectations, then ratcheting them downward, followed by grappling with cognitive dissonance brought about by the internal contradictions of the new system. When those conflicts are inescapable,  he finally spirals into angst and despair as he comes to fully comprehend the horrors of socialism.

I released that around the same time we did the audiobook version of Dr. Kristian Niemietz’s “Socialism, The Failed Idea That Never Dies“, which has obviously not been read by many New Yorkers.

The historical pattern with all collectivist experiments is: honeymoon, underperformance, disenfranchisement, collapse.

NYC has entered the honeymoon phase, Mandami will be celebrated by Western, liberal intellectuals as a trailblazer and and bulwark against “Trumpism”, he plans to release inmates from jails, freeze rents, launch government run grocery stores and eliminate fares for public transit.

It remains to be seen what kind of radical reforms a mayor can make in one American city – where property rights could (theoretically) still be upheld at higher levels, and where those with much to lose have the ability to flee.

Over the weekend, a useful contrast emerged: Venezuela already ran this experiment. After their honeymoon came repeated hyperinflations, food shortages so extreme people were eating zoo animals, and Chávez’s successor turned the place into a dictatorial narco-state.

The nightmare finally ended when Maduro was removed by the U.S. military in a one-shot operation on January 3rd.

“Collectivism” means: the end of economic reality

In Eugen Richter’s parable – which invariably replays in every collectivist adventure, the first order of business is not “compassion.” It’s confiscation.

Mamdani’s platform specifies a new flat 2% income tax on all New Yorkers earning more than a million annually and boosts the corporate tax rate from 7.5% to 11.5%. My prediction is that after six to twelve months of policy failure, he’ll follow that up with a wealth tax. Bet on it.

Mamdani frames collectivism as “warmth,” but the actual content of his program is an expanding universe of guarantee: universal child care, rent freezes, “fast and free” buses, baby baskets. etc.

As a Canadian who’s lived my whole life under the yoke of “free health care,” I know how it actually collectivism works: anything the government gives everyone “for free” comes at a cost. And when it’s imposed through a state monopoly, that cost tends to exceed the returns, by a wide margin. (Which is why Canadians routinely die on waiting lists, or while sitting in the ER waiting for treatment.)

I’m frequently saying “Incentives are everything“, this is what collectivists don’t get…

The economic reality is that when you turn City Hall (or any government) into the allocation engine for entitlements, you turn erstwhile productive citizens into a doom loop of dependancy. Nobody in a collectivist paradise wants use their excess productive capacity only to have it redistributed to everybody else, so they simply won’t produce at anything above subsistence levels. There’s no point in doing so.

At the municipal level what we can expect then, this:

Rent freezes = housing shortages

Saving for an investment property is one of the more accessible avenues for improving one’s lot in life. When governments freeze rents, it squeezes out the small “mom-and-pop” landlord from being able to hold a cashflowing property, they get squeezed out. Developers won’t build or invest, because there’s no point if they can’t sell any units, and there’s no point investing in new units if you can’t at least break even operating them.

The result: fewer homes get built.

City run grocery stores = food shortages

We don’t need to look at Venezuela to see what happens here, this is already being tried in America and it’s a shit-show: empty shelves, rotting food, it’s almost as if when you try to force goods and services to price below their market clearing rates, the system simply breaks down as producers withhold their remaining labour and capital from a money-losing exercise.

Taxing the “wealthy” = capital flight

We’re already seeing the wealthy pull up stakes and leave – the highest earners did so even before the election, and after Mamdani secured victory, the next level: middle and higher-income earners, headed for the exits (most popular destination: Florida).

There is now an influx among low income earners – (defined as “under $200K annually!) headed to NYC, perhaps lured by the promise of free stuff, streets paved with gold, and a collectivist utopia.

We’ll see how long New York’s honeymoon phase with collectivism lasts.

What we’ll inevitably see play out instead is not theory, it’s been borne out in every collectivist experiment over the 20th and 21st centuries.

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“Blue Horseshoe Loves Gold and Bitcoin”

Suddenly the likes of Goldman and  JP Morgan are talking about this and the mainstream press are framing it as “the so-called Debasement Trade”

Bitcoiners, of course, have been talking about this for, well since the beginning.

Except, it’s not a “trade.”

The trade du jour lasts for a couple weeks or a few months – then it starts getting referred to as “a crowded trade” and then some new theme emerges and all the hot-money rotates into that.

Less than two weeks ago a finance guru I’m aware of (I won’t name him) sold 90% of his Bitcon and crypto positions (via IBIT and ETH) “due to bearish MACD crosses and support breaks”. 

Bitcoin has since run to successive new ATHs.

As I’ve long said, Bitcoin isn’t a trade and trying to time it with chart patterns generally does not work. (Technical analysis in general  never carried any real predictive edge for me, and when it comes to BTC specifically, I’ve seen too many failed “death crosses” to change my opinion).

It’s a monetary regime change – if market participants are trading anything it’s getting rid of a currency (“it’s the denominator, stupid”) for a store of value – and we’re seeing it in spades with Bitcoin and gold:

what do you call this pic.twitter.com/qiWgG0bcGk

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@MarkJeftovic) October 6, 2025

To be fair to that finance influencer, I don’t follow him enough to know if he maintains separate core Bitcoin stack in self-custody, and these moves are just referring to his trading activities, as distinct from long term holds. He apparently rotated into TSLA and silver. He’s also since followed up, acknowledging that Bitcoin ran to fresh highs, but he still expects a 40% to 50% decline in cryptos over the next year because of that MACD crossover. That said, he sold his TSLA and went back into Bitcoin (which has since dropped about $4K  )

I don’t know if he’ll be proven right or wrong about a 50% drop  – what I do know, and something I found out the hard way right when I was about to launch The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter, was that trying to pick the intermediate tops and bottoms when it came to Bitcoin was a fool’s errand.

You end up getting whipsawed. It sure looks like I’m watching it happen to this guy right now.

The advice I’ve been giving to my subscribers over the years, both for Bitcoin and the stocks we hold in our portfolio has always been:

• Don’t try to time or trade the intermediate tops
• Whenever Bitcoin (or one of our holdings drops) we ask ourselves:
  • Is the underlying thesis intact?
  • If yes: the only decision is whether to buy more or hold through
  • If no: then you exit the position, at the moment your thesis is invalidated, regardless of the price.
• Beyond that – exit when your own personal financial goals are met.

That’s it,  basically the entire Bitcoin Capitalist playbook right here

What got me thinking about all this today was all these headlines we’ve been seeing lately about “The Debasement Trade”.

This has been so obvious to Bitcoiners (and before that, goldbugs), for so long, that I didn’t really “clue in” to the fact that our entire long-term thesis is finally in the process of being mainstreamed right now.

Mainstream establishment analyst wakes up to what we have been talking about for 5 years. In fact, some of us even wrote books about it! @elerianm (had to do a screen shot because he blocked me). Proof that the elites are late and are not even here yet. pic.twitter.com/oxxOKClRpi

— Lawrence Lepard, “fix the money, fix the world” (@LawrenceLepard) October 2, 2025

Gold and BTC hitting all-time highs together is sending a signal.

Bond yields going up even though central banks are cutting rates, is sending a signal.

Stonks are hitting levels that make the .com bubble look like a bombed-out value play.

Why?

Because these aren’t trades anymore.

It’s capital flight.

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Is the Core vs. Knots battle a replay of two ideological Federal Reserve Plans that ultimately centralized gold, the original sound money?

TL;DR: The Core vs Knots battle is an attack on the Bitcoin network. A monetary struggle no different than the fight to establish the Federal Reserve in 1913.

The 1900s, like today, began with bankers at war over the governing rules of money. Two competing factions, the Aldrich Plan and Glass-Owen Plan, launched an assault on sound money because men sought more power and nations demanded more control.

Gold, like Bitcoin, is money because of its first principle origins. Yet the misconception, then and now, is that survival requires more complexity.

History shows how fragile conviction can be. An offer for a seat at the table is enough to flip once passionate defenders of sound money to enablers of credit and unlimited debt. Original goldbugs like Keynes in the 1920s and Greenspan in the 1980s proved unable to brush off the emotional pull of notoriety, currency, and control. Each flippening reintroduces inflationary tactics that corrode money’s principles and value.

Cunning design and corrupt schemes have often proven far too great for man to overcome.

Never a Dull Moment

There’s never a dull moment in Bitcoin or in the world of finance, for that matter.

The latest continuous divide within the Bitcoin community may look like another technical battle. But does it point to something deeper? While it feels like there’s a never-ending need to have something technical to argue over, beneath the GitHub commits and mailing list debates lurks a ghost from the past. The ideological struggle that gave birth to America’s Federal Reserve.

The Fed’s creation was framed in the language of decentralization and regional representation.

Yet its foundation was built on two forces: filters and control (here and here). Behind the curtain, the true drivers in 1913 were the same as they are today. A desire for power, profit, and the ability to manufacture credit money from a hard money basis. A Paper Bitcoin Summer, if you will.

Ask any Bitcoin maximalist what they despise most, and the likely answers are: the Federal Reserve or the dollar’s undeniable debasement.

That’s what makes the current Core vs. Knots clash so fascinating. It’s not just a nerdy civil war inside Bitcoin development. Viewed through the lens of monetary history, the parallels come into focus. A reminder that only a little over 100 years ago, lines were drawn and sides were picked between two competing visions for a new financial system: the Aldrich Plan (big-bank, corporate centralization) and the Glass-Owen Plan (populist, individualistic ideology). With full hindsight, both promoted decentralization in name only.

Both claimed to defend the money with one important caveat, both plans led inevitably to the centralization of gold, the original “sound money”.

By expanding the Op_Return size (protocol inflation), are we not reintroducing the debasement Satoshi rooted out?

By offering a more centralized Bitcoin client, are we not centralizing trust?

Are both options not heading down a similar “Federal Reserve” path?

Regardless of side, the question we should be asking: will Bitcoin, too, cloak centralization in the language of decentralization?

Bitcoin Is a First Principle Asset

As we saw in 1913, a similar banking stalemate led to the Federal Reserve Act being pushed through on the eve of Christmas holiday. Plowing forward at all costs was not the right answer. History reminds us that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Heated debates tend to harden into an us vs. them mentality, where momentum overrides principle. More often than not, the final path hasn’t resolved the gripes but has paved the way for political and centralized control of money.

“Smart cows show the other cows how to bypass the filters. You know, like you can open the gate. So, you know, it’s always been the case. You could always bypass these things, but I don’t think we would agree that we should bypass the dust relay fee and start seeing a massive amount of dust clog up the network.” – Samson Mow

In the world of banking, there have always been cops and robbers. Piles of assets and monetary value have always enticed the idea of a bank heist. Bitcoin and digital money are proving to be no different. The storage source has shifted, but the mentality to capture remains the same. It’s a reminder of how you embed a European Central Bank Plan inside of an American financial system. Divide and conquer.

If you look at ordinals, that’s one. They’re it’s kind of like an ICO but with pictures. You know, they’re selling these these PFPs or whatever wizard images and cat images and then they have a war chest and they don’t care. They can print more stuff. – Samson Mow

Whether it’s printing from the FED, ICOs, DATs, or Bitcoin Treasury Companies, the invisible hand is one of fractional reserve banking policies.

Furthermore, what Samson describes with ordinals and fee compression rhymes with history. Changing the cost to process a transaction to $0.01 sat/vbytes allows unintended consequences at some point. Just as “cheap trading” fueled reckless high-frequency speculation in equities around 2008. Cheap blockspace and zero-fee incentives risk repeating the same cycle and diluting the value of Bitcoin’s network.

Lowering friction may look like innovation, but history shows it usually ends in centralization and systemic fragility.

Low fees, in essence, remove the security of a financial moat.

Greed’s Temptation and Calling

At the height of the 1914 crisis, John Maynard Keynes was asked to brief the Chancellor of the Exchequer on whether the pound should remain tied to gold. Keynes argued emphatically that it must:

… he (Keynes) had come down very strongly in favor of maintaining the link: “London’s position as a monetary center depends very directly on complete confidence in London’s unwavering readiness” to meet its obligations in gold and would be severely damaged if “at the first sign of emergency that commitment was suspended.

… But whereas before the war he had thought that the best way to achieve this was to ensure that currencies such as the pound be fully convertible to gold at a fixed value, he had now come to believe that there was no reason why linking money supply and credit to gold should necessarily result in stable prices. – Lords of Finance

If the examples of John Maynard Keynes and Alan Greenspan, along with the parallel of 1913 versus today’s Bitcoin divide, reveal nothing else, it is that inflationary pressures, though often hidden, are always present. The history of currency is a long dotted line of individuals who ultimately bend the knee to the erosion of value systems.

Their words defended markets and sound money, but their actions were of centralized control.

Core vs. Knots feels like the same corporate-led sleight of hand that steered Keynes and Greenspan and that defined the Aldrich and Glass-Owen plans. It is the same temptation facing Bitcoin today.

What is clear is this: it is easy to praise sound money in theory, but far harder to defend it once the “in-crowd” offers you a seat at the table.

The lure of acceptance and the search for yield are powerful drugs. Both have the power to flip a goldbug into a credit junkie without leaving a trace of evidence.

The Simple Lesson That is Hard to Live By

First principles are non-negotiable. They are like primary colors in art. Remove one, and the structural foundation for all future innovation collapses. Cloud the palette with too many colors, and the core value is drowned by unnecessary bloat. Too many features introduce the Ethereum problem. Endless left-turns disguised as innovation, when the mission could be achieved in a few simple right-turns.

Gold’s important role as sound money was pushed aside, not because it failed, but because men failed to hold the line. Bitcoin faces the same test today.

If Core vs. Knots, ordinals, or fee games erode Bitcoin’s principles, then the ghost of 1913 will win again, only this time in digital form. In a future world, Bitcoin credit will be all the rage.

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The Egregore of Far-Left Radicalism Is Wounded – But What Will Take It’s Place?

Today’s post is excerpted from the October edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter – get a special deal for Bombthrower readers here »

“At the physical level, we are witnessing a war of structures,
on the meta-physical level, a battle of pendulums.”
— Vadim Zeland

Within the space of a few days over the second week of September, the world looked on in horror as a pair of unspeakably horrific crimes were committed; by now it’s likely everyone knows what I’m referring to.

I’m talking, of course, about the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a North Carolina transit train – and the all-too-public assassination of Charlie Kirk, at a campus event in Utah.

The images from both events were horrific and circulated widely, there is no need to show them again here – but this “one-two” punch in my mind was the definitive knock-out blow to the far-left domination of our cultural zeitgeist.

A few days after the Kirk assassination it became apparent that something big had shifted; at the time I called it the “Turning Point for the Radical Left”. It ran on Zerohedge and racked around 100K reads.

The TL;DR on that, if you haven’t read it, was that Charlie Kirk’s assassination will mark the moment the cultural tide turned against the Left.

It didn’t happen in isolation; it was the culmination of a progression that I first started documenting back in 2022, when both RFK Jr and Peter Thiel gave keynotes at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami – and it became clear to me that the entire edifice of “woke capitalism” upon which the whole left-wing, collectivist paradigm was built, was beginning to crumble.

The process gained momentum via the through-line of the Oct 7 massacre in Israel, and the targeted killing of United Health CEO Brian Thompson.

In the aftermath of these events, we started to see public opinion – and corporate / private governance –  start to turn against the radical left.

After publishing my piece, and to my point, we saw lefties trying to regain the upper hand they once took for granted – with calls for Marvel to fire Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt.

His moral crime?

He asked the public to pray for the family of Charlie Kirk.

Marvel will do no such thing, because, as I’ve said, those days are over.

What did happen, however, was Marvel’s comic universe rival, DC, canceled the “Red Hood” comic book series, after its author Gretchen Felker-Martin (who is trans) posted on Bluesky:

“Thoughts and prayers you Nazi b-tch… Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie.”

I can’t think of any alternate universe where this kind of sentiment toward anyone is okay, let alone sane. To my point that the momentum has shifted, even Bluesky suspended his account.

Wow.

I closed out my Bombthrower piece asking the open question about what was the fundamental driver that led to the far-left takeover of the zeitgeist?

“Some say this ever-increasing polarization and these seemingly ritualistic events are all orchestrated by shadowy actors playing the long game. My take? It’s something deeper”.

There are some very obvious trends and beats here that are hard to ignore.

For starters, Kirk is not Trump, or even Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. His security detail likely wasn’t excessive; it was unlikely anybody thought it needed to be anything beyond a few bodyguards who could repel a bike lock-wielding soy-boy in a man-bun.

If somebody really just wanted him dead, there would have been easier ways to get at him, and fare a better chance of getting away clean after.

Murdering him in such a spectacular and shocking manner was deliberate and intentional. It was calculated to drive an effect at a mass, psychic level – and there are ritualistic elements to it, as there are wont to be in these archetypally shocking hinge-moments.

The conspiracy minded would tell you this is intentional signalling – which may be true, at least partially – but I tend to think it’s because we live in a reality of “high weirdness” where events are playing out in a non-linear fashion across dimensional axes that we aren’t even aware of.

But let’s follow this train of thought for a bit; I’m not comfortable sharing this publicly, so this is all between us girls.

For years I ruminated that the Fabian Socialists had achieved complete victory in their stated mission of bringing world communism into being through a centuries-long process of inexorable infiltration of our institutions:

They started with academia, then media and culture – and finally government and supra-governmental constructs such as the World Economic Forum.

It was always driven by what I’ve called “the 3M’s of neo-collectivism”, namely: Malthusian, Marxist and essentially misanthropic.

It’s an anti-human philosophy that regards our species as a cancer that needs to be managed, and ideally, depopulated.

We’re heavily into tin-foil hat territory here – but a lot of this has been laid out in the writings of Julian Huxley, Warren Wagar and beyond.

It’s never been refuted – and we see in the contemporary climate-alarmism movement a disdain for life itself and an embrace of the #Degrowth cause.

So there’s that.

Then I wonder — why all the trans violence?

This feels so “off” to me, it’s like somehow under the hood the entire movement decided “hey, let’s make ourselves the absolute most vilified segment of the population in existence” – and proceed to carry out only the most heinous of crimes.

This is a relatively recent development and it feels somehow deeper than plain-Jane frustration with being marginalized (and misgendered).

The legendary ex-KGB handler Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West over forty years ago, warned his debriefers that the Soviets would undermine America from within. They would achieve final victory over the West, not through military force – where it was impossible to win – but through subversion.

Demoralization: Infiltrate & undermine institutions, amplify antisocial
Destabilization: Create internal conflicts & radicalize, leads to clashes
Crisis: Collapse → civil war | invasion
Normalization: New authoritarian rule, discard old change agentspic.twitter.com/fDVRuDNw82 https://t.co/C2QAAMfs9e

— Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost (@Ne_pas_couvrir) September 14, 2025

They would, in Bezmenov’s warnings, engage in a multi-decades program of:

Demoralization: Infiltrate & undermine institutions, amplify antisocial behaviours

Destabilization: Create internal conflicts & radicalize, leads to clashes

Crisis: Collapse, leading to civil war  or invasion

Normalization: New authoritarian rule, discard old change agents

It’s a long game. The “demoralization” phase alone is 15 – 20 years: “a single generation of students”, in Bezmenov’s words, to take them “in the opposite direction from the society’s moral and cultural values”.

Of course, the USSR collapsed; did they set a plan in motion that continued operating after they unleashed it? Even after the handler regime was no more?

Or, was that same playbook adopted – essentially co-opted – by someone else, the next geopolitical rival, perchance? Like the CCP.

China also knows they cannot, yet, defeat the USA in a military conflict, at least not outside of the Asian-Pacific theatre – but if there’s one thing the Chinese are known for, it’s thinking in generational increments and in non-linear terms.

Cultural Marxism makes very little sense to normal, rational people. It verges on total nihilism, and yet, it caught on like wildfire over the past couple decades and is now out of control and running amok across campuses and in our streets.

Before September we were a few smidges away from civil war – now, I shudder to think what happens next.

I remember a few years ago I was listening to a Value After Hours podcast (I’d never be able to find the episode) where they were talking about Ray Dalio’s prediction that America had a significant probability of being in a full-on civil war within three years.

At the time Tobias Carlisle said “that sounds absolutely bonkers”.

Dalio was recently on Diary of a CEO – following this theme of mass civil unrest, and that was recorded before the second week of September.

So imagine if the subversion of our universities and media over the past few decades was the result of the most far-left and radical elements being funded and encouraged by a foreign actor, like China.

Carefully nurturing the polarization, the angst, the demoralization of the entire population – on all sides – pushing it along with specific, targeted acts of camouflaged terrorism in order to bring it to a climactic state of unendurable tension – and then, the finale:

An act so heinous and itself so polarizing that it ignites the “response”. Those familiar with the Hegelian dialect, “problem → response → solution”  (which happens to be the “three-act play” structure of every conspiracy theory), would recognize it.

Even I recognize this and you all know how much I disdain most conspiracy theories. It’s a cognitive bias that I know is there but I hang on to it, because, frankly – it helps me maintain my equilibrium.

I do not like the idea of world history being the outcome of behind-the-scenes machinations by all-powerful cabals, because believing that would make me feel powerless and helpless.

So normally I subscribe to Hanlon’s Razor, as an article of faith.

But as I’ve been admitting lately – it’s been getting harder to keep believing that. Most recently, it’s almost impossible.

What I notice now, is things have gotten so out of hand that huge chunks of the population would cheer for an authoritarian strongman to take over the machinery of government – either through populist movements or even soft coups (or overt ones), so long as they promised and delivered a “return to rule of law and normalcy”.

Ngl… Trump fits the bill neatly.

They would succeed on the first aim, through largely technocratic means, probably nodding toward the state capitalism and political meritocracy of China, and call it the new “way of the world”.

But “normalcy” would be gone.

What I do believe is that we are in a Fourth Turning, in the Howe and Strauss sense, and that this fourth turning is unique in that it is occurring against the backdrop of a widely intolerable acceleration in the pace of change (“Future Shock”) and massively increasing wealth disparity because we’re in the early innings of a global fiat hyperinflation.

If you back out the Fabians, the KGB and China and just stick with Future Shock and hyperinflation, you still have all the ingredients for a tightly wound powder keg:

Not many Americans understand the correlation between soaring government debt & spending and the rise in violence, radicalized politics, and all kinds of social “weirdness.” Inflation undermines the stability of civil society because it erodes the incentives for hard work,… https://t.co/PldYWSgaaO

— Porter Stansberry (@porterstansb) September 11, 2025

What is probably in play are elements of all of these forces. That’s what makes it so difficult to get a read on what is happening.

There is no unified, coherent cabal behind this: the more I study the phenomenon of “pendulums” (in the Vadim Zeland sense), morphic fields and even egregores, I have come to suspect that there is no “they”, but there are “its” – several of them – converging, competing, conflicting, all the while amplifying and accelerating each other.

There is no “they”

But there are multiple, competing “its”

That is all.

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@MarkJeftovic) September 30, 2025

Pendulums feed on both positive and negative mental energy. In Zeland’s words, in order to do one of two things:  “the pendulum’s goals are always to stabilize its own or a higher structure, and to destroy a competing structure”.

More on these larger forces another time, but for now,  frankly, it’s rather amazing the system remains on the tracks at this point.

I don’t expect it will last; I find myself once again perusing real estate listings for bug-out bolt-holes outside of the city.

Today’s post is excerpted from the August edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist Letter – get a special deal for Bombthrower readers here »
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Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About… Everything

I haven’t really been active on Facebook since the COVID era when it became pretty obvious to me that most of the people I grew up with or went to college turned into authority addicts and were thoroughly brainwashed by mainstream agitprop.

They’re still like that today…

…and they seem to buy it hook-line-and-sinker.

Libertarian podcaster Tom Woods, used to put out mini e-books titled “Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About….”, and he’d fill it in with whatever the lemmings are up in arms about at the time: vaccines, mask mandates, gun control, whatever.

I’d been marvelling at just how dead the Facebook/Meta platform has become since the COVID years. Like tumbleweeds, really.

But over the past few months I had been posting a bit more there, but was trying to keep the politics out of it (like many, I’m a long-time sufferer of outrage-fatigue).

All that changed when Charlie Kirk was assassinated and the reaction from “the left” was just so appalling and indefensible that I got more vocal about it in my feed.

It was a mistake, and I ended up creating a couple of long-running comment threads and getting piled-on by people I knew in high school, or college or my early tech days in Toronto.

They started wearing me down with increasingly deranged and nonsensical talking points that seemingly came straight out of an Antifa 101 pamphlet.

A former bandmate sent me a private message featuring some “anti-hate expert” (a dude dressed up as a woman) lecturing me on why Charlie Kirk had it coming…

Another guy from my high school started comment bombing every post with 40 or 50 anti-Trump memes and multi-paragraph rants in ALL CAPS that ended with YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

Fucking. Unhinged.

A couple nights ago I finally realized what I was doing to myself and deleted those threads (and blocked the comment bomber). I feel a little sheepish that it took me nearly a week to realize that I too, had been caught up in The Loser’s Game: arguing politics with my hometown friends on social media.

When you spend your time and mental energy on Facebook, getting sucked into emotionally charged political debates, trying to convince people you don’t really know anymore, can’t influence, and wouldn’t deal with in real life, you’re not just wasting time—you’re handing your life force over to people who are in all practical measures, losers.

(How can I say that these people are losers? Because they are wasting their lives arguing on Facebook. And as long as I participate in those arguments, then I’m being a loser, too).

The above is a screen grab from one of my favourite books of all time: Stop Being A Loser. I laughed out loud when I read it as I spliced it into this post, but it was also bittersweet, because I realized it was talking about me.

But I can’t help but notice that Social platforms like Facebook, Reddit and Bluesky have become breeding grounds for collectivist berserkers, and sundry boot-lickers.

They spend their days revelling in miserabilism, and they are quick to swarm anyone violating the boundaries of their groupthink.

I’ve also noticed that they take special exception toward anybody with independent thought or exercising personal agency.

The single greatest heresy you can commit in our current collectivist zeitgeist, is to believe, or worse, demonstrate, that you can improve your own life without the mediation or intervention of The State.

Pyrrhic Victory & Opportunity Cost

Imagine you spend 45 minutes, or a couple of hours – arguing with some jerk you knew in Grade 10, who you never hung out with then, and you have never even thought about since. He insists Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a MAGA extremist and the real martyr of the day is Jimmie Kimmel.

You go back and forth with him over the course of a few days, weeks even, …and then, you actually bring him around to your point. You’ve won! Right?

Well… actually…

You’ve wasted the better part of an entire working day (or more) converting one, single, low importance, inconsequential NPC around an issue that even you are going to stop thinking about as much in a few days, weeks or months from now.

In that same time you could have:

• written a pitch deck that will bring in a 7-digit investment to one of your business ventures
• knocked out a blog post that racks up over 100K views and adds 500 new subscribers to your email list
• created a new email sequence that brings in a steady trickle new customers to one of your websites, every day, every week, forever
• optimized one of your conversion funnels and doubled your ROI
• fixed that software bug that was costing you $50K a year
• interviewed enough people to find that next great hire
• read through about a half-dozen 10-Qs of companies, one of which could 100X over the next decade

But you didn’t do any of those things.

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You spent all that time and wasted all that energy arguing with someone you don’t really care about, whose intellect is too crude to digest anything that demands critical analysis anyway. They have Type 1 TDS and they’re well beyond Stage 4 (terminal brain worms).

If you really wanted to spend all that time on a single person, you would have been better off taking your spouse or kids on a special day trip – something you’ll actually remember, with people you genuinely care about.

Instead, you forfeited all that, it’s called opportunity cost – and these are all just examples of the kinds of opportunities playing The Loser’s Game has cost you: endlessly arguing with knuckle-dragging retards on a social platform infested with people who envy and loathe high agency people on principle.

As WOPR, the 1970’s-era super-computer finally figured out in the classic flick of our youth, War Games: the best strategy is not to play.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I have been playing The Loser’s Game. Arguing with people on social media about issues they’ve already made up their minds about anyway.

Connecting The Dots

General semantics is the discipline that studies how language and symbols influence human thought and behavior, and how our abstract representations of reality can distort our perceptions of it.

In his seminal work on the topic, The Book of Radical General Semantics, Gad Horowitz give us the metaphor of the dots:

(I read it as cited in Chris Mayers’ “How Do You Know?“)

In the 4×6 grid on the left each of those dots represents a “fact”.

As you can see, you can gather together a collection of “facts”, a group of happenings nobody disputes and are objectively real in terms of “they happened”.

But there are innumerable ways to “connect the dots”, which is surmising or assessing how all these separate, objective facts relate to each other.

And this makes a HUGE difference.

There’s a reason I bring this up here.

The Great Bifurcation, revisited.

There are two types of people:

Most people have a tendency to connect the observed dots using one path, and in their minds, that path is the only valid pattern to connect the dots.

That path becomes their Truth. Any other pathway that can also connect those very same dots is heresy, conspiracy, hate speech, denialism or some other manner of thought crime.

Some people (fewer in number) understand that there are numerous possible explanations of how the observed facts could relate to each other.

Even more important, is that the most probable path (the obvious one) is not necessarily the most accurate, nor is the most agreed-upon path (consensus-driven). Those paths could be inaccurate, and by “inaccurate”, what I really mean is wrong.

The difference between these two types of people is cognitive. The latter have access to an additional layer of mental abstraction that the former don’t even comprehend exists.

And those are the people I’ve been arguing with on social media.

I’ve written in the past about The Great Bifurcation – which was originally about wealth inequality, and I thought that would be a bad enough problem in our collective future.

Lately I’ve come to understand it primarily as a cognitive gap.

The human race is splitting into two completely different species – a la Morlocks and Elohim, and the barrier between them isn’t money. It’s the level of mental abstraction the individuals are capable of functioning at.

W R Clement’s book, Quantum Jump, a favourite of mine that I often to refer to, ascribes the entire Enlightenment and ensuing Scientific Revolution to the discovery of perspective (a.k.a “God’s Space”) in Medieval art.

Something similar is happening today – with the advent of cyberspace and the phenomenon of non-linearity.

This has all kinds of knock-on effects, not the least of which is the accelerating acceleration in the rate of change (tachyosis or hyper-acceleration).

Most people, are ngmi. And their inability to cognitively function at the faster-paced, non-linear levels of mental abstraction induces a kind of psychosis (“Future Shock“).

Connecting The Dots

Back to the dots that comprise reality:

Just by way of example, here’s three different pathways through the dots around the objective event of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

1. The generally confirmed consensus view that Kirk was murdered by a kid from a Republican family who had been radicalized into far-left ideology, mostly acting alone, but amongst far-left groups who may have had foreknowledge of the plan.
2. This one was emailed to me by a reader: Charlie Kirk was a crisis actor, the death was faked, here’s proof (followed by a link to a 45 minute frame-by-frame video analysis of the ripple in his shirt as the bullet struck)

I’ll throw out another one that actually keeps intruding into my thoughts:

3. The Kirk assassination was a Reichstag Fire moment—carried out by entrenched MAGA operatives who may have also staged the July 13, 2024 attempt on Trump in order to manufacture a crisis, catalyze public reaction, and install an authoritarian “solution.” Standard Hegelian dialectic.

All three lines connect the same observed dots. Which is correct?

I have no idea, and neither do you.

Beyond a few first principles—like “don’t murder people,” “everyone gets free speech,” and that a talk show host losing his job isn’t more tragic than a young man getting his head blown off in public —the rest is just hamster wheels in our heads.

Which is why the best use of your time and energy is focusing on what you can control, like how you respond to life events and focus on what’s actually within reach: honing your craft, developing your innate talents, expanding your skills, and deepening your relationships. That’s where the leverage flips and you gain more than you lose.

That is playing the winner’s game.

Of all the truly successful people that you know – how often do you observe them screeching or engaging in high-tension political histrionics on social media?

The most successful people I know don’t even have Facebook accounts. Their socials, if they have any, are run by interns.

The eminent computer pioneer Jaron Lanier once put out an entire book on “10 Reasons why we should all delete our social media accounts“. Reason number one is “it turns you into an asshole”.

I have been guilty of playing The Loser’s Game.

(As comedian Cathy Ladman once put it, “Some of these I do, just for me”)

It’s time to get back to work.

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