Edward Jiang

2011-14 feels a but like 93-97 (which was exactly my undergrad period), a sort of limbo time that got totally forgotten in the light of what happened next. Back then, the internet was still a sort of force in the shadows, not the center of the universe.

1993-97 and 2010-14 were both branch prediction errors. You could see a minor branch developing but reasonable people bet that it would stay minor, and focused their attention on the historical branch that currently had the most momentum. Which turned out to be a dead end.

If you were to write a sweeping history of say 1980-2020, you'd dismiss these 2 periods in short footnotes, besides noting smugly that almost nobody took the possibility of a sharp historical pivot seriously, though most people noted the possibility.

Remember Krugman in 1998 declaring the internet's impact would be no greater than that of the fax machine? I think that's when he lost the bulk of his credibility. It would have still been an acceptable sentiment in say 1996. By 1998 you had to be clueless to think that.

Though I only participated in dotcom boom in a very minor way 1998-2001, it was part of my hedged futures portfolio at the time. I pivoted my personal life story at almost exactly the moment world history itself pivoted. The internet became item #1 in both stories simultaneously

Big history whiplash is a thing. Staying inside the OODA loop of history tires you out. I think most people can navigate at most 3-4 of these big historical pivots before giving up and saying fuckit, I'm not changing anymore and let this kill me if I can't navigate it.

I'm at 3 now: internet, great weirding, covid. I have 1 more left in the tank, tops. After that I'm going krugman. I don't count 1989-91 because I was still in high school and I didn't really have to navigate it. That was for adults to do.

I have a fairly solid record of my own thinking through 2010-2014, since that coincides with my most steadily prolific output period on ribbonfarm. But there are no throughlines there that I can detect. There's like 4-5 branches of stuff.