How We Just Lost Our Last Two Decades To Turn Things Around

HyperObjects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

As Vladimir Lenin once quipped, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

For sure, 1917 was one of those devilishly accelerating times.

“I stuck around St. Petersburg /

When I saw it was a time for a change /

Killed the czar and his ministers /

Anastasia screamed in vain”

But so was 2020.

And it looks like 2025 is shaping up to be too.

For now, lets leave Lenin to the history books, and focus on our own more recent lived experiences.

And their implications for what’s coming next.

If we think back to those first uncertain months of Covid, it was shocking how many things that had been forecast to arrive by 2030 were suddenly everywhere and all at once.

Remote work and zoom calls. (plus “quiet quitting”)

QR codes and contactless restaurants (first debuted at SXSW in 2014, but didn’t really catch on until digital menus and ordering became the enforced norm)

Global Tech-Airbnb Nomadism (and the utter ruin of third tier spots like Lisbon, Cartagena, Phuket and Austin)

Telemedicine (which paved the way for testosterone and ketamine pill mills)

Rampant Global Conspiracies (perennial, but got a serious boost with house bound “researchers” losing their minds to the algo).

Meme coins and NFTs and other bizarrely hyped financial instruments.

And it wasn’t just random stuff that you might’ve seen promised from a TED stage.

It was political stuff too.

Enviros gleefully circulated the “dolphins return to Venice Canals” meme (turns out, they were actually in Sardinia and the Venice canals got clearer due to less boat traffic, but not necessarily any cleaner)

Global supply chains could be brought to their knees by one badly docked boat in a much bigger canal.

#suckitamazon

Degrowthers celebrated our reduced carbon footprint and the fact that Heathrow and Newark could in fact, stop launching planes, and we’d still all be here.

Yay!

(the reality was that private jet travel, and semi-private jet use all skyrocketed during this period and haven’t backed off since)

Boo?

But alt-Righties got a taste of what was possible too.

Flat out immigration bans.

Refusal of entry. Forced deportations.

National guard and militaries deployed domestically.

ID cards. Smartphone surveillance.

Overthrow of tyrannical regimes.

#daskapital

And Telegram channels for the really dark shit.

In sum, what had been off in the vague middle distance of “coming in the next decade or so” was suddenly right up in our windshields, impossible to ignore.

(but tantalizing to replicate)

***

So much in the same way that Covid acted as crisis/opportunity/accelerant, the policies of our current (US) administration are speeding us towards things that might otherwise have taken a little longer to get here on their own.

That’s quite possibly the greatest impact that Trump 2.0 is having.

What might not have arrived until 2030 to 2050 is likely coming soon, to a dumpster fire near you.

And for any of our global grab bag of existential issues—like water, food, migration, debt , democracy and war, we really really coulda done with the extended time on our final exam!

DJT is proving himself not only to be a masterful arsonist and firefighter

America’s going to hell! / I alone can fix it!

He’s also playing fortune teller and bookie.

Taking bets on how to short the future, while still make a killing.

(Amidst all the killing).

***

Let’s back up a bit and frame this first point properly–the relative dominance of the US on the world stage and what our current policies might be doing to affect the leaderboard.

By the end of the 19th century, the US was ascendant. The only question was for how long its luck might hold.

Higher rates of industrialization. Ridiculous untapped natural resource wealth. A mobile and growing population. A whole continent “sea to shining sea” unified under one government and tax base.

To be sure, by the 1890’s Britain still held more cards on the global power/naval might/colonial reach scorecard. But the sun was destined to set on that empire. It was just going to take a couple of brutal continental wars to finish the job.

If the 19th century was a bit of a toss-up as to who came out on top, the 20th sure wasn’t.

After WWII, the Pax Americana left the US uncontested in Western dominance. And by the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR, it had become a unipolar world power.

No one else was even close.

So as we entered the 21st century, the open question was: could the US of A go for a threepeat? Three centuries of ascendant power and prosperity?

Or was it destined to pass the torch to Russia, China, or some crafty petro state lurking in the wings?

***

Spoiler: it definitely ain’t gonna be us no more.

For reasons that range from utter naivety to venal greed to apocalyptic religiosity (to a penchant for swinging-dick strongmen best unpacked on a therapist’s couch), we’re handing the 21st century, lock, stock and two smoking barrels to our Sino-Russian friends.

(And a smattering of regional strongmen yearning to rule over their ‘hoods unmolested by global oversight or conscience).

We’ve dismantled virtually all aspects of our “soft power” ranging from Radio Free broadcasts of world news and information, to USAID vaccines and anti-famine relief.

And while we have just bailed out alt-Right Argentina to the tune of $20B, twice as much as all those DOGE cuts saved us, (as calc’ed by the right leaning American Enterprise Institute) the rest of our global investments have largely dried up.

And with them, much of our influence.

(that diamond encrusted chainsaw their president gave to Elon must’ve really added up!)

End result? Chinese and Russian diplomats have confessed to their US counterparts that they can’t quite believe what’s happening. The US has gone rogue on itself, tripping its own players, shoving them into the penalty box, and scoring more Own Goals than our opponents could ever have dreamed.

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder” –Arnold Toynbee

For them, advantages they’d planned to fight and claw for over the next several decades has all just been dropped into their lap at once!

Russia is spinning up its own replacement for USAID, and happily hacking our digital newsfeeds (AM/FM radio is so last century).

China’s has had its own Belt and Road initiative for a decade and is stroking checks for everything from bridges in the Maldives to solar panels in Pakistan.

#firstrocksfree

Trump’s gutting of NATO, the UN and virtually all other international treaties and alliances, along with the batshit bonkers tariff “strategies” have just signaled in no uncertain terms, that the US has contracted a possible terminal case of mad-bull disease.

And is best given a wide berth and worked around.

What until recently was a rickety alliance of a rules-based global order has been hammer-smashed into oblivion.

(to be sure: tons of the NGOs and GOs were badly flawed and in deep need of reboots and reforms! But as Larry Summers recently said, our current interventions are the equivalent of trying to mend a wristwatch with a hammer. Sure the watch wasn’t telling good time. But maybe we should try rewinding it first?)

One historian noted recently that this complete 180 deg turn of US policy is the most signifiant change on the world stage since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Think about that. It’s a tectonic shift that even those who are paying attention can miss in the relentless weekly onslaught of the Next Craziest Thing.

Our (former) allies are horrified.

Our (forever) enemies are delighted.

And the thing is, there’s no going back to normal.

The US could come to its senses. Start behaving reasonably, diplomatically, strategically, but the damage is already done.

No one’s going to believe we wont have another relapse. In four years. Or eight. Or maybe next week.

Everyone is cutting new deals, forging new treaties, and banking on the simple fact that the US is no longer bankable.

Within a few decades, we likely wont even hold the incredible advantage of being the world’s reserve currency.

If we think our financial troubles are bad now, just wait until everyone wants to get paid in renminbi.

So that’s the accelerated end of the Pax Americana. Didn’t have to happen so soon.

Or even (if we’d played our cards right) at all.

But we forgot to account for the Joker in the deck.

And that’s always gonna be wild.

#fortressamerica

#cabinfever

***

Another zone that is suffering greatly from time-compression is the ecological crisis and transition to our next energy platform.

For a hot minute, it seemed like the tide was turning, the world was electrifying, and all the COP summits, SDG goals, IRA funding and sporty Tesla Model Ys were gonna turn the tide in time to save those little ice-bound polar bears!

Now the IRA has been terminated with extreme prejudice. Even dollars allotted are being clawed back. SDG goals are being abandoned by the very same CEOs who took a knee and posted black squares on Instagram. COP summits have been reworked as deal-weeks for the petro-states hosting them.

“Climate change religion” is on the back foot, and we’re drilling baby drilling to the point where even the oil execs think it’s too much (needless overproduction drives prices lower than their cost of extraction).

The end result?

Twofold.

Thing One: we’re gonna keep conducting the biggest experiment in thermodynamics ever conceived.

Namely, what happens when you take hundreds of millions of years of buried starlight and set it all on fire in the span of a century?

In a closed loop system (Earth and its atmosphere).

And how does that affect ocean and air currents? Forests and glaciers?

Farms and food?

(one leading Nepali sherpa just last week confessed that he and his colleagues aren’t even bothering to train their sons and grandsons to become mountaineers because “by the time they are men, there won’t be any more climbing here in the Himalayas!”).

Another study released this week observed that one glacier in Antarctica retreated five miles in two months!

(for those trying to figure where to pitch your tent, that’s nearly five hundred feet per day).

To be sure, as the accelerationists insist–burning coal now equals prosperity next. There’s a near 1:1 correlation between carbon burn and GDP we haven’t yet figured out how to reliably decouple.

It just doesn’t account for the hangovers that come after.

Or the DTs of going cold turkey that might kill us after that.

Sure, as Bill Gates slyly pivoted to this week, maybe climate change isn’t existential after all!

But without a doubt, (he admits from his Seattle bunker,) it’s gonna hit the poorest hardest.

So maybe we keep that fossil fueled prosperity engine humming and pay our climate interest in easy monthly installments (never mind the principal)?

Or the principle.

What’s the worst that could happen?

So that’s our apparent US policy. Tied to the share price (and available energy reserves) of all those tech titans gunning for AI supremacy.

While all of those homeowners watch their electric bills double anyways.

Which bring us to Thing Two: the rest of the world’s continuing to transition off fossil fuels regardless.

Australia has just launched a “three free hours of electricity for everyone, everyday program!”

In what its calling its “Solar Sharer” program.

The program would require electricity retailers to provide free electricity to everyone for at least three hours a day, in recognition of the incredibly low wholesale cost of electricity during daytime due to extensive solar power penetration.

The only difference between now and a few years ago is that China has taken the lead in research, production and sales, and the US (who pioneered this space) will never catch back up.

And this isn’t about culture war Lefty/Righty stuff as it’s framed in the US.

It’s economics.

And strategy.

As the Pentagon realized a few decades ago (but has forgotten due to the brain damage inflicted by “warfighter” National Guardsman Pete Hegseth), oil-based supply chains are long, slow, costly and vulnerable.

And any military that could take its energy with it, and harvest it along the way, was infinitely more agile, stealthy and effective than one who couldn’t.

Same goes for a high-tech nation state. Energy independence = geopolitical and economic advantage.

Period.

#RIPNordstream

#savethewhales

To be sure, there’s a flood of investment into fusion and Small Nuclear Reactors in the US right now too. It’s just already spoken for by the AI cartel.

One friend’s company just closed a $270M round with $50M coming from Lauren Powell Jobs. Others in the SpaceX/Founders Fund orbit are spinning up their own versions.

As Bloomberg just reported

Rather than huge power stations built by engineering companies for giant utilities, a new breed of nuclear startup wants to commercialize reactors, some so small they could be carried on semitrucks, so mighty they could power the hungriest of artificial intelligence data centers.

Not one of these so-called advanced reactors has yet to be built in the US, but their promise has touched off a dealmaking frenzy, with backing from tech giants including Amazon.com, Google, Meta Platforms and Microsoft.

The play now is utterly deregulated fast-track access to whatever can fuel the bottomless appetite for AI server farms. It’s not a strategy so much as a religion.

Fuel it, and IT will come.

And IT will solve all of our other problems, from climate to Universal Basic Income! (as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt first promised, then backtracked on when GPT5 flopped)

But make no mistake, China is coming.

For all of it.

Regardless of our internal divisions over climate change, carbon and artificial intelligence.

And as the Economist noted this spring, the CCP got a PR boost it could only have dreamed of even a couple of years ago.

As of this spring, all but Brazil, India and a few Commonwealth countries now prefer the Reds to the Red White and Blues!

That’s crazy.

And costly.

It’s always been easier and cheaper to bribe people than bomb people.

That’s what “soft power” is really all about, Charlie Brown!

(that’s also what “energy independence” is about too) You create more wealth by building bridges than blowing them up.

Same goes for solar farms and fusion reactors.

#allroadsleadtobeijing

***

Final point of three to illustrate where our timelines have compressed, and what might’ve been vaguely on the horizon is now happening all around us.

The immigration and labor crisis.

For sure, 2022/23 saw a lot of unchecked cross border shenanigans. But the truth was far less clear cut than what you might’ve heard on Truth.

By 2025 for the first time since the 1930s we’ve now got more folks exiting than entering the country. Net population loss at a time when we’re facing a legit graying of our own workforce, with nowhere near the industrial automation that China is already deploying to patch their demographic holes.

But the MAGA Great Replacement theory is simple: brown people are breeding more than the whites, and left to their own fecundity they will outproduce us by sneaking in and anchoring their babies to US citizenship (and voting godless lesbian Marxists into office?).

Then white Christian civ will be inundated and diluted, and lost to the chocolate milky currents of history.

Not so sexy when they come for your kids!

So kick ‘em all out, and we’ll restore a proud, robust industrial society where (white) men are Men and (white) women are sexy little Trad Wives popping out blonde haired babies.

It all makes perfect sense.

If you only got as far as Intro to Econ and the first few chapters of Camp of the Saints (French anti-immigration novel based on Book of Revelations that’s kinda big in MAGA land)

But in reality, booting out all the illegals (and more than a few perfectly legal), doesn’t mean what you think it means.

#notasyouwish

The first point is, despite the rhetoric about illegal aliens’ burdens on public services (they do after all pay taxes and buy stuff)

“the Department of Homeland Security found that for every 100 immigrants deported, you actually ended up with 9 fewer jobs for natives. Not just temp work. 9 jobs permanently gone in this community”

So that’s an economic slump when 10% of your workers (and consumers) stop earning and spending in your neighborhood.

Well good! You might say from MAGAland.

That’s just a necessary sacrifice and ultimately more jobs for Us.

We’ll rise up and take back our dignified high paid labor in the fields and factories, slaughterhouses, motels and Quick E Marts of this Once Great Land.

(Just as soon as our kids give up their precious dreams of becoming influencers, Call of Duty gamers or podcast bros).

If you’re hell bent on this Taylor Sheridan/Yellowstone vision of Blue Collar Rugged America, there’s a few things to note.

As Nellie Bowles (Bari Weiss’s funnier half) observed a few months ago:

I love that these guys imagine all factory workers as these oil-covered men standing astride a car, rather than hunched over sewing the same stitch in a thousand Spanx for some HR lady to wear while she turns you into a woman with her estrogen.

You know what it is? It’s how gays in New York imagine factory work (heavy lifting, sweaty, proud)

Never show these boys a Bangladeshi factory line and ruin the sinewy, masculine fantasy. As Dan Savage says, don’t yuck someone else’s yum.

As NYU biz school professor Scott Galloway quipped “Americans want to be able to buy Nikes, they don’t want to have to make them!”

The reality is that Rust Belt union-wage middle class American manufacturing isn’t coming back.

Ever.

The world, and manufacturing have moved on.

It’s not like those factories from before NAFTA and the ‘08 crash are still sitting there, greased up and mothballed, just waiting for the padlocks to be removed and the lights switched back on.

They’re obsolete. Or already bulldozed.

For Trump to effect what he appears to be attempting (the onshoring of American industry and the total reshaping of US trade agreements) would be a $20 trillion/20 year effort that would make Biden’s IRA initiative look like spare change.

And he’s been trying to get it done, with no warning to any of the CEOs and markets that will take the hits, no subsidies and tax incentives to shift investments, and no roadmap or coordination with anyone (White House aids, for example, were scrambling during the first round of the March Tariff Madness to come up with mutually contradictory explanations of what their boss was even up to)

So what are we gonna see?

The Great Replacement MAGA story is simple—kick ‘em all out and we’ll have better price pressures and labor leverage to negotiate fair living wages for all those underemployed 20-40 something Xbox incels we call our own.

But that’s not what happens in real life when markets shift so abruptly.

When industries lose whole swaths of low-paid, relatively high-skilled workers, they don’t just turn around and invest in higher-paid, lower skilled workers (like disaffected white men would likely be, since they exited these kind of labor pools over a generation ago).

What do those industrious industrialists do instead?

They invest in automation. And software.

And what’s been happening all around us?

The move to AI.

And robotics.

Amazon just claimed this week they aim to replace 600,000 jobs with robots.

And that’s after last week letting go of 40,000 mid level employees due to AI!

And that’s after DOGE just gutted the Federal workforce to the tune of a quarter of a million employees with who knows how many more to come in the aftermath of this current shutdown.

So an utterly seismic reordering the the American workforce that might have taken a couple of decades to effect, and would’ve certainly become a central and raucous debate in the public sphere and litigated everywhere from media to elections to courts…

Has all just happened.

In less than nine months.

And it’s not going to remotely end up how the rank and file America First nativists have been told it’s gonna.

We’ve waged a totalizing war on the bottom tier of our workforce (immigrant labor)

We’ve waged a totalizing war on the middle tier of our workforce (dismantling of the Federal Government and the management class from Amazon to Salesforce with much more to come)

And we’ve given unfettered, deregulated carte blanche to the upper sliver of our workforce (.001% tech titans) to do it all.

In the name of profits. And progress. And innovation.

And Universal Basic Income?

You know, for all the Basics, without any more income?

***

So that’s the thought experiment in three parts: In the same way Covid served as a techno-social accelerant by breaking norms and allowing for what’s next to become what’s now, Trump 2.0 is doing the same.

Across a bunch of different sectors of life.

Including geopolitics and the place of the United States on the world stage.

Including energy/environmental transitions and our influence upon them both.

Including our workforce revolutionized by labor shortages, AI displacement and robot replacements.

As you read this, you might be checking the boxes, tracking the moves and cheering it all on!

“The man’s got a plan, and this is what I voted for.”

If so, then you’re going to get the benefit of seeing what you imagined coming to fruition faster than our enemies dreamed, and faster even than its architects imagined (just ask the authors of Project 2025, who were positively giddy earlier this year at the rate of implementation).

But if you weren’t sold on relegating US power and influence to the bush leagues and giving China, Russia, and the Gulf States an open run on the world stage…

Or if you hoped for a bit more global coordination and innovation to address our environmental overshoot and energy transitions…

Or if you thought it might be good to sit down and map out how best to restore the American middle class in the face of globalization and AI automation…

Well, times up.

And the weirdest part of all?

This administration is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We didn’t have to pull up the drawbridges, renege on all our agreements, and go to the mattresses this soon.

Or maybe ever.

But now that we have, we’ve triggered a bunch of reinforcing feedback loops well ahead of schedule.

Is anyone tracking these movements in quite this way?

Not if you scan our newsfeeds or listen to our so called leaders.

But more than any of the sensational particulars of our current moment, it’s perhaps this compression of our time remaining that will prove to be most critical.

As the Good Book (and Pete Seeger) remind us, there’s:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace..

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

But if we run out of all that time?

There’s only gonna be Hell to pay.