I’m guessing 10 more weeks before we see the first signs of economy reboot. This is going to get really brutal. I’m not seeing any historical comparable for what we’re headed for. Not WW2, not the Great Depression, not the Spanish Flu. This is a totally sui generis cataclysm.
-
Show this thread
-
The perfect storm is the combination of an extremely complex and integrated energy-intensive global society and a pandemic materially blacking out random large swathes of it. Wall Street people are still thinking of this in “market crash” terms. It’s something much worse.
4 replies 16 retweets 131 likesShow this thread -
In between writing stuff and shitposting on Twitter, one of the things I’m trying to do is sort of imagine a plausible economic recovery pathway. It’s like trying to predict recovery from a tsunami about to hit a town by crawling under sinks and checking state of plumbing.
2 replies 13 retweets 82 likesShow this thread -
Edit: I *can* think of comparable but they all come from Tainter’s book Collapse, not from the continuous history we’re all by definition a part of it
I don’t think this is a collapse event but it’s definitely a crash event. Recovery isn’t restarting, it’s rebuilding anew.7 replies 6 retweets 82 likesShow this thread -
The short term and long term are easy to predict. Short term is just emergency response and triage, economy edition. Long term is just the Next Big Thing pulling us out of the hole we’re now digging ourselves into. It’s the medium term that’s the bitch to prep for. 6-18 mo period
1 reply 12 retweets 86 likesShow this thread -
My theory: there is no plan, and there will be none, for 6-18mo phase 2. It will be a distributed, improvised survival scrum by any means necessary. Top-down aid will just run out of fuel by then. Money printer will stop going brrr. But wealth printer will not have restarted yet.
7 replies 14 retweets 100 likesShow this thread -
One thing we can expect: prepare for a lot of social closing, as people move into larger households in suburbs/smaller cities to make ends meet. Financially distressed people simply moving out of expensive cities once evictions moratoriums end and credit cards start maxing out.
1 reply 9 retweets 76 likesShow this thread -
I was initially trying a sort of war game approach to analyzing the recovery pathway but the war metaphor is mistaken, this is *more* complex than a war recovery. There aren’t even obvious things to rebuild like bombed-out buildings. Mostly just shattered lives.
2 replies 9 retweets 69 likesShow this thread -
New thought is to maybe track this with sort of a recovery ooda loop focused mainly on rapidly identifying and imitating successful local recovery patterns. An integral (as in calculus) OODA loop that accumulates rebuild patterns. A pattern inventory. Bottom-up DIY Marshall plan.
9 replies 7 retweets 73 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @vgr
Something our little band of refactoring misfits could work on, perhaps?
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
Trying to think of a way to coordinate that
-
-
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
Narrative rebuilding?
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @dhivehiscript @vgr
Definitely starts with narrative, for radically reimagined futures
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes - 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.