What is the strongest ascending successor of neoliberalism right now in the sense of a world-historical-process shaping force? (granting that neoliberalism is far from a spent force and might come back)
like (being super loose), the whole "it's time to build" meme, focus on manufacturing & natural resources, "state capacity", funding "atoms not bits" projects, great men not collective processes, 19th-c-style oligopolistic conflict between nations
even vaguer and vibe-y-er: "chunky" world.
feels like there's "alpha" in doing even a bad job at modeling concrete things. "fact"-y things like pandemics and wars and natural resources.
things aren't getting less complex/unpredictable/chaotic than in the 2010s, they're getting more so; but my sense of opportunity is around "treating the world as chunky and fact-y and "normal", with like the affect of a 1950's Statesman or Captain Of Industry"
https://crockford.com/wrrrld/warning.html… I think of this poem, and the world before you untie the string, the world of maps and illustrations.
Chunky World.
Like in the days when children had to memorize imports and exports.
Chunky World isn't exactly reality, and we're more aware of that than ever, but I feel like we're entering a phase where creating a new Chunky World is the thing to do.
There's, like, a British Empire Chunky World, and a post-1945 reboot Chunky World, and a Reagan-Thatcher reboot Chunky World (which I think is neoliberalism?) and postmodernism is "dissolving the illusion that Chunky World is the world"?
I see/feel this trend too, and even see myself responding that way, but wonder how much of it is merely reactive overcompensation for feeling seduced and betrayed by rarefied ideas as opposed to sensing actual opportunities in atoms.
There’s an angry “all maps are fake news made by craven fraud elites” tenor that shows up in a lot of the supposed building being closer to “Nordic yes Chad” build-larping than meaningful building driven by an interesting idea.
Cultural equivalent of Keynesian aggregate demand fueling by building “infrastructure” of roads and bridges nobody needs. Because the point is seeking meaning through building not the building itself.