I can no longer remember what the topline narrative of the NYT was like back in 2014, before the current creeping mix of trump-kremlinology and woke clickbait took over. What was the narrative back when people like Friedman and Brooks were still in charge of it? Anyone remember?
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West-coast tech was still on the whig progressive narrative and battling the techlash as it is today (though that seems like an irrelevant sideshow now) but I can't remember what throughline the NYT was carrying. Or the Economist. Or FT. I have a sort of narrative amnesia.
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What did they tend to derp on about? Davos? Inequality? World is flat? Can't boot up that headspace at all now.
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I think they talked a lot about hipsters and millennials and the recovery from GFC. The general branch people thought we were on was recovery --> get those pesky Europeans back in shape after fumbling Greece and stuff.
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Islamic terrorism (remember OBL was killed in 2011 and ISIS was just taking over from Al Qaeda) was still big on the radar I think. It's pretty much fallen off the radar entirely since then.
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The 3 big narratives I was paying attention to in 2011-2014 were probably: tech-SV-TED, NYT-globalism-Davos-QE, and South Park. In peripheral vision, there were the the then baby grand narratives of crypto, NRx, Occupy, China. Climate change was slowly looming larger.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Heh, I should compile an ebook out of those years' archives titled "The Dead End Scrolls"
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A very good test of narrative vigor for anything that's older than 10 years is whether it has a thread of narrative continuity through 2011-14 that does in fact continue uninterrupted through 2015-20 rather than being an abandoned dead end.
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Two narratives that satisfy this criterion are Amazon and Elon Musk. And shocker, both also boast stocks flying high right now. Very few things can claim to have uninterrupted compounding value through the dead-end years, hedged across all futures.
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I honestly can't think of anything else that was *already* big ~2010 that has retained narrative momentum through that period and into the great weirding. There were tiny baby things in 2010 that got big and vigorous, and big and vigorous things that kinda just died.
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Like Obama hope train. That was HUGE through first term. But it represented a vein of moderate progressive hope that kinda just stopped dead and died. Sadly, the first black president will also be remembered as a dead-end president on an abandoned branch of history.
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Modern BLM-ish black politics took shape in the last years of his administration and is basically the most un-Obama thing ever. Sadly, his most direct impact on history will have been triggering the white reaction and helping directly create Trump with his standup set.
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Most of his legislative record has been rolled back and won't be restored even if Biden wins. The world has changed too much. Can't step in the same river twice etc. But ACA remains as... something of a landmark compromise. I'm still on it.
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Clinton too will be remembered as a dead-end president on an abandoned historical branch. His second term was mostly bogged down with the Lewinsky scandal, and his own legacy is fumbling the post-Cold War and creating Putin via the permissioning effects of intervening in Bosnia.
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The best thing that can be said for Clinton is that he didn't mess up the growth of the internet that was happening on his watch, and did a mediocre job wherever he did have some agency. He was mostly harmless, and a pleasant presence on the world stage.
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Interestingly, both 1993-97 and 2010-14 were periods of high indeterminate optimism for people on the right side of history. That part of the energy of those periods was NOT a dead-end. But because it was illegible nobody could take credit for it or narrativize it.
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The Thiel 2x2 is an example of alt-top. Makes sense he’d land there. Interestingly in my use of the Thiel 2x2 I’ve cast indeterminate optimism as the best quadrant. Still do, even though it’s hard to inhabit. In both these 2x2s, I think top-left is actually evil.
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The definition of “right side of history” didn’t change, though some people who were on that side either went pessimistic or determinate. In both cases becoming, as far as I’m concerned part of the problem.
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I’m pretty proud of how I threaded the futures needle in my software eating the world essays of 2015. I managed to hedge it just right and call out the upcoming fork in history correctly, though I didn’t make branch predictions. So the essays managed to not get cache-invalidated.
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I didn’t predict either the right or wrong future. I just pointed to both as possibilities and warned against one.
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The biggest thing I missed was which elites would lead a reactionary revolt. I was focused on fox elites (aka Bernie/inequality crowd), but the ones who led were the lion elites. But I didn't learn about the Pareto fox vs. lion circulation of elites theory till later.
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Kind make sense, since the 2013-14 milieu which I was thinking about was all techlash, inequality, occupy wall street etc., with Piketty being headline news. I expected a leftist-fox-reaction and got a rightist-lion-reaction.
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