There's a reason the original Mad Max movie is so unnerving: The systems exist still, held together by the people who refused to accept the reality of its shell: law exists but who upholds it, who defines it and what does it even serve. In the end, you have Max fully realizing his individual sovereignty, for better or worse.
Wow! That argument offered deep analysis with surprising roots (1648)! I’m going to digest the implications of this thesis for a while. Your writing paints a coherent picture of the political distortions that are creeping in from all directions. Masterful articulation! Thank you!
One can scarcely refute your scholarship or emerging conclusions, but my response to this piece is to almost--almost lose the signal for the noise. Maybe it just seems to me that an international financial and corporate 'takeover' of previous seats of power is enough to digest. This morning I watched what seemed like endless footage of Trump and a Saudi prince holding court in what looked like a combination of High Noon and a kiss-the-ring and hope for the best ceremony of yore. To me that said (almost) it all. What, it seems to me, your analysis left unsaid is what advanced AI and robotics will add to the mix, and upon what skew lines it will advance. Not to mention the likelihood of intense and widespread climate changes affecting air, water, temperature and food production shuffling the cards. Suffice it to say we are facing massive systemic change, much of which will unroll in a totally or largely unpredictable manner. Meaning we will need to be more agile than we have ever been during those times when we relied on overlords, be they elected or not, to govern for us. Here's hoping that some sort of distributed information and power systems will emerge to see us through.
"Not to mention the likelihood of intense and widespread climate changes affecting air, water, temperature and food production shuffling the cards. Suffice it to say we are facing massive systemic change, much of which will unroll in a totally or largely unpredictable manner."
Yes... I'm turning to that next at Borderless Living... I've started to think about how climate is going to affect thinking about where to live. A reader brought this to my attention, particular with respect to food sensitivity/scarcity and water issues. Some countries are going to do better than others. The tariff debacle is going to highlight where the fracture lines are around the world.
I don't know if it's entirely "unpredictable" as again... stochastic... probabilistic and underspecified ex ante, but not ex post.
By the way... AI might actually help in this regard. AI is nothing more than a massive regression engine, and a pretty damn good one at that (if you know how to manipulate it properly, which most people do not.) With the right data and the right modeling, you might be able to crunch down what's going on to make prediction a lot more viable and reduce the "noise" so you can get more clarity.
I've been trying to use it that way... and it has worked... kinda... but it's hard. It's somewhat like trying to sculpt "David" with a spoon and a hammer. I'm still a pretty damn good sculpter so I can make it work, but the tool being what it is, still makes it pretty hard.
Ha ha, plenty sense. Except that I had to scratch my head a bit over 'stochasitc,' which I was only familiar with from math, as in 'repeating patterns'? Urgh. Ask me about poetry or gardening, instead. But I can easily imagine sculpting with a spoon. Especially if you do bronze casting from wax or clay. Here's the thing about AI, me, and I suspect most people: I am just waking up to the implications of something probably as impactful as the first factories of the industrial revolution. When seen as a so-called 'force multiplier,' I get it. When seen as the progenitor of huge computer arrays that gobble googolzillions of watts of electricity to keep pumping out god-alone-knows-what-kind of-useful-and-idiotic-and/or-actively-harmful stuff like social media, who knows? Not to mention its status as the icon of the likes of Curtis Yarvin and Elon Musk, brrrr. But I just bought a book called something like AI for Idiots off Amazon. Ha. Bezos is into it, too, right? Anyhow, anything you can add to our relevant understanding of what's on the horizon, especially as contextualized to our quality of life, would be deeply, deeply appreciated.
Oh, crap, PS: Here in Pittsburgh, to which city I moved partially based on it's heretofore predictable and relatively livable climate (so advertised by local promotors) we had a storm last week that spawned 100mph winds, which knocked out power to @ 450,000 people for several days. Including me. Good thing I cook with gas, have a battery powered radio and LED storm lanterns. But say buh-bye to the perishables in the fridge. And what if it happens again in, say, July? In the middle of a refugee crisis originating in Sudan?
I agree that the layered addition of climate and AI are two critical missing pieces here. The entire framework makes sense (and aligns with what I’ve been seeing in climate, public health, and logistics policy and markets). But understanding the ways in which climate change and AI are going to fundamentally disrupt economic systems, alongside the ways that highly concentrated capital and highly optimized misinformation infrastructure and psychology will work, is central to survival. We have to more agile, with fewer resources, higher protectionist/nationalist/fear-driven responses to the chaos, and more stochastic anarchy as fully described above. And I haven’t figured that out, but I know enough to be asking the questions, and I’m grateful to find others tacking these same messy, vital conversations.
Welcome to Station 11? Watching the right elements and understanding them will help with most things other than a continental sized climate shift that happens relatively quickly, a wide-scale nuclear or biological weapons-fueled conflict, or a massive pandemic of the sort that can't be treated via vaccination or similar easy-to-distribute 'cure.' And maybe the tech broliarchs, who are partially far-sighted and partially (IMO) out of their effing minds and whomever they recruit to their vision are who we must watch most closely, along with whichever conventional capitalist individuals and institutions with enough power to influence or stymie them. Sigh. And a big YES to 'messy, vital conversations,' here and elsewhere.
😃 I actually meant this as snark, but when I thought about it, the concept of AI trying to bring order to the chaos of human disorder seems not only plausible, but modeled in a scenario, likely. In these movies, humanity is obliterated, leaving only a small group of “resistance” fighters to manipulate time in an effort to subvert the war of the machines.
Hmm, Michael. There are a lot of movies (some recent ones based on video games) where machines, zombies, or maddened victims of brain-eating viruses take over, save for a fortunate (egads?) few human resistance fighters around. I wonder what this says about our deeper sense of how things might go from here on out. The thing about all the enemy critters is that their sole interest is apparently wiping out these remaining folk. Apparently they don't enjoy going to the beach, watching the sunset, drinking Cuba Libres, making love, making music, playing softball, writing poetry, growing tomatoes or having a dog. Double hmm.
A most elegantly written long memo—I now understand why life feels so disconnected. Whoo! I’m free-floating through this political unreality. It seems the old touchstones are gone. Thanks for helping me understand why I’ve been feeling so completely clueless.
I have young children, and in a different way, I was recently realizing how this world is so very different from when I was a child in the 80s. So different in function that I don't think I can teach them anything of value (that I value) besides "do the right/good thing." The idea of working hard, studying, getting degrees and ways to approach life and work might still have intrinsic value, but it's a drastically different, lesser, value in today's economy. And reading your piece here reinforces and expands the thought.
You don't go into how the internet has influenced the course of human events, but this thread is woven in silently into the argument you state. I guess what I'd like to know is how the internet shapes the stochastic, anarchic future. It feels like it will play an outsized role, and that if you are a deep student of the digitally networked world, a young person today may have a chance at living a halfway decent life.
Thank you for this. You’re naming something a lot of people are feeling, but haven’t quite articulated: that the old virtues—work hard, study, follow the rules—haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been decoupled from reward. They exist now as moral guidance, not as strategy.
And you’re absolutely right—the internet is the unspoken infrastructure in this whole transformation.
If stochastic anarchy is the condition, then the internet is both the accelerant and the escape hatch.
It accelerated the collapse by disintermediating authority, spreading disinformation faster than institutions could adapt, and turning everything—truth, value, identity—into gamified attention metrics.
But it also enabled sovereignty in ways that weren’t possible before:
A kid in Lagos can launch a global business from their phone.
A dissident in Minsk can broadcast truth to the world.
A family can build financial resilience using tools never taught in school.
So yes, if a young person today becomes a deep student of digital systems—not just coding, but how networks work, how platforms extract, how algorithms shape agency—they have a shot. Not at fairness, necessarily. But at leverage. At optionality.
The new virtues are not obedience and merit—they’re network fluency, narrative control, and adaptive strategy.
Which means that what’s teachable has changed.
We may not be able to pass down the old path. But we can still pass down a different kind of compass:
Learn how the system actually works.
Don’t confuse the map for the territory.
And don’t play a game where the rules are fake.
That’s not defeatist. That’s adaptation.
And in a world this unstable, adaptation is the inheritance worth passing down.
That's as far as my thinking goes at this moment...
Thank you. I appreciate all the thinking and your writing. It's an interesting, validating thing when these subtle shifts one feels are put into words and solidified into some kind of reality.
There is (sharp) pain in seeing the old ways that you lived and breathed die. But as you point out, there is also liberation in understanding old rules don't apply anymore. Now, to find some solid ground and do the work of learning anew.
Thank you for this piece and the work that went into it. Three questions for now: 1) What groups and/or networks (G/N) set up the first domino, "1980s–90s: Market Uber Alles" or was this a convergence of many disparate forces? 2) If there were G/Ns that set up this domino, then why change the existing order? and 3) Why have the change engineered or allowed to be so chaotic/anarchic? Note: I lived and worked in the Republic of Armenia for 14 years from 2001-2015 where there was a semblance of systems and elections familiar enough to be somewhat oriented, but constantly disoriented by how things actually worked or didn't work. Your concept of "stochastic anarchy" resonated with my time there, and I witnessed and learned how people become resilient and built individual and in some cases collective sovereignty within such a system.
Thank you for this thoughtful response—and for sharing your time in Armenia. That kind of firsthand experience with system-legibility collapse is rare and immensely valuable, especially for readers trying to feel what stochastic anarchy looks like in lived terms.
To your three questions:
1. Who set the first domino? Was “Market Über Alles” driven by specific groups/networks—or was it a convergence?
It was both. There were identifiable networks—Chicago School economists, Mont Pelerin Society intellectuals, neoliberal technocrats in institutions like the IMF and World Bank, and corporate-political alliances like ALEC and the Business Roundtable. But it wasn’t a conspiracy—it was a convergence of ideological commitments, structural incentives, and Cold War triumphalism.
The end of the Cold War created a vacuum—and neoliberalism filled it, not just because of belief, but because the West now had no serious alternative model to balance against. The triumph of markets as moral arbiters ("the invisible hand knows best") became not just policy but dogma. And global capital was more than happy to fund the infrastructure that would protect its primacy.
2. If there were networks driving it, why change the existing order at all?
Because the old order—industrial capitalism constrained by national borders, union power, and the Bretton Woods system—was too slow, too expensive, and too democratic. From the perspective of transnational capital, those constraints had to go.
Deregulation wasn’t just about “efficiency.” It was about removing frictions—meaning labor power, environmental safeguards, and sovereign constraints. Changing the order unlocked exponential returns, especially once financialization replaced production as the primary source of wealth.
In short: they changed the system because they could extract more from a new one. Period. The machinery got away from everyone, and now, the power plant is in full meltdown.
3. Why allow the transition to be so chaotic and anarchic?
This is where it gets more interesting.
The chaos wasn’t always deliberate. It was often an externality of speed, scale, and feedback loops no one could fully control. But over time, the ruling networks learned something vital:
A chaotic system can be incredibly stable for those at the top, because the average person no longer knows how to fight back, where to apply pressure, or what the rules even are. What looks like “breakdown” to us is often insurance to them.
So yes—parts of the chaos were engineered (think: deliberate deregulation, media fragmentation, surveillance capitalism). But much of it was then embraced as a feature, not a bug. You don’t need to run a dictatorship if no one can find the switchboard.
You saw this in Armenia, no doubt: the shell of democracy, the rituals of participation—but behind it, a system running on favors, factionalism, and inertia. The aesthetics of order masking the reality of anarchy. That’s what we’re now importing.
And that’s why sovereignty—in the individual, the collective, and the resilient—is the only counter-theory that holds any water in a post-legible world.
Well that was an incredibly cheery lunch time read from a sun drenched Ireland. But you're not wrong. I've witnessed your analysis first hand from Dublin to the far reaches of the Danube.
I lived this in Puerto Rico. The goverment exist but it never changes our daily lives. The power grid exist but it's not reliable. Self reliance is a good practice but comminity reliance is what has helped our species survive. Great article!
I'll start by saying that I'm in my late 60s. In my lifetime, I've seen things go from relative stability to stochastic anarchy (your words). I've found TLM valuable in explaining much of what's been going on at least since the 80s. Thank you for that. It helps a little to orient myself a little, but it also leaves me feeling very insecure and uncertain for myself and our children/grandchildren.
I fear the government these days. I've been vocal enough online over the decades that I could be on someone(s) list for all I know. Everything that used to feel stable is now shifting like the ground in an earthquake. Depression is becoming my default.
How does one live reasonably safely, especially as a senior, in times like these? Government, financial institutions, society itself, are changing like putty in multiple hands. How does one make basic decisions when no outcome is assured? Disappear off of the internet? Going off grid isn't possible for us. Trust to luck?
Don't worry, they know everything about us, and you are probably on a list somewhere. You are in good company. Don't worry about disappear of the internet and going off grid. Life is good in the moment if we don't let these people get in our heads. I did the VPN thing, tried to disappear...all of it. They still know. But since this was a few years ago that I experienced and felt all this, trust me, this is nothing that is happening tomorrow. I agree with the authors longer timeline outlook.
This was definitely the best piece you've written yet. And every bit of it makes perfect sense. I look forward to you expanding on the role of climate change, water shortages and the role of corporations buying up and controlling water rights, and what role unstable nuclear powers can have on your scenario.
This is, as usual, a great piece, and so much to consider. My first thoughts relate to the wealth gap, economic compliance, and those pesky egg prices. When people voted for the price of eggs, they actually were voting for the system that they think they are still living in. And it is hard to blame them. Even while I see all you shared here happening, it feels as if I have no agency to change my circumstances. As a Gen X divorced mom, who's boomer parents fucked up and never settled down, there has never been financial security. Living paycheck to paycheck means, if I don't participate, I don't eat and live on the streets. I have no illusions that there is any kind of safety net for me. I am hardly alone in my financial insecurity. The reason there hasn't been a complete collapse of the system is because we have become economically complacent, voting for our immediate needs, unable to put forth effort into change. And I do believe the global elite are making it worse to keep it that way. They are the beneficiaries of this systemic facade after all. I agree the climate changes will be a catalyst, but the system may be economically stressed enough to snap before the climate crisis truly gets underway, or even worse, at the same time.
A great essay, and many great comments as well. I agree with those who feel this is the best take you have had. I have found it a hard sell to most folks I know, they cling to the comforting idea that electoral politics in the US will save us and the world.
As an old person, I believe the rot set in sooner, during the 70s. Reagan set the stage, then Obama in the Great Financial Crisis aftermath sealed the deal.
I just don't see how one can ignore the precarity of our physical survival, though. There are just so many mouths to feed in this world. Part of the stochastic nature of our world is the possibility of catastrophic kinetic war which would render so much of the political and societal issues moot.
I am almost 77, and elections have never really mattered in my lifetime.
Trump is an outlier, cities almost always totally control elections. But National Elections matter little.
Apparently JFK was assassinated largely because he was going to withdraw troops from Vietnam. The people REALLY in control will go to that extreme, but it usually isn't necessary as they can dig up enough dirt on candidates to control them. Or they can buy them up. Or both.
All the prattling on about Nazism vs Democracy is just so much distraction. Europe is always ahead of America on the down-slope and the future shown there is that if "democracy" doesn't elect the "right" candidates, elections will be suspended or invalidated, political parties outlawed, critical media shut down, etc. In other words, European democracy is just socialist dictatorship with a stolen name. That is what will be coming next to the USA.
Donald Trump is just a small town used car salesman, concerned with "closing the deal". I've worked for many like him. Buyers complain continually about lack of honesty, yet the small towns support their car salesman because he helps support local sports, school events, and mostly because he doesn't look down his nose at them and snub them. He is one of them.
Democrats USED to be one with Unions and the Working Man. No more. Anyone who gets their hands dirty is a peon and to be avoided. Now they are one with the wealthy elitists who run America for their own profit. Republicans are also, but they always were. There is no longer a choice. If there is no real choice, there is no democracy.
Mahalo ... Ironically, I was re-reading some HST the other day that back in the 70s sort of alluded to some of the concepts that you went into much greater depth on. So many are looking for a voice to explain and make sense of where we are. I have been regularly coming back to your writings to do just that.
We tend to think of the chaos and breakdown as a uniquely USA situation (because, in the end, we ARE very self-centered), and it is clearly far from that. The distrust that seems to seep into just about everything these days seems to be a common denominator - whether it is governments, news, memes, A.I. or your neighbor. As mentioned in a comment, the internets should be factored in, and I am sure many of us would love to go back and convince Al Gore to think twice about inventing it.
There's a reason the original Mad Max movie is so unnerving: The systems exist still, held together by the people who refused to accept the reality of its shell: law exists but who upholds it, who defines it and what does it even serve. In the end, you have Max fully realizing his individual sovereignty, for better or worse.
I never thought about that when I wrote this, but yes, you’re right.
I’m not saying that’s our future… that’s a post nuclear world. But some version of that future does seem to be where we are heading.
This is probably your best work yet, and I still think you're going to outperform this article soon enough. Can't wait for the next drop.
decidedly so
Wow! That argument offered deep analysis with surprising roots (1648)! I’m going to digest the implications of this thesis for a while. Your writing paints a coherent picture of the political distortions that are creeping in from all directions. Masterful articulation! Thank you!
One can scarcely refute your scholarship or emerging conclusions, but my response to this piece is to almost--almost lose the signal for the noise. Maybe it just seems to me that an international financial and corporate 'takeover' of previous seats of power is enough to digest. This morning I watched what seemed like endless footage of Trump and a Saudi prince holding court in what looked like a combination of High Noon and a kiss-the-ring and hope for the best ceremony of yore. To me that said (almost) it all. What, it seems to me, your analysis left unsaid is what advanced AI and robotics will add to the mix, and upon what skew lines it will advance. Not to mention the likelihood of intense and widespread climate changes affecting air, water, temperature and food production shuffling the cards. Suffice it to say we are facing massive systemic change, much of which will unroll in a totally or largely unpredictable manner. Meaning we will need to be more agile than we have ever been during those times when we relied on overlords, be they elected or not, to govern for us. Here's hoping that some sort of distributed information and power systems will emerge to see us through.
"Not to mention the likelihood of intense and widespread climate changes affecting air, water, temperature and food production shuffling the cards. Suffice it to say we are facing massive systemic change, much of which will unroll in a totally or largely unpredictable manner."
Yes... I'm turning to that next at Borderless Living... I've started to think about how climate is going to affect thinking about where to live. A reader brought this to my attention, particular with respect to food sensitivity/scarcity and water issues. Some countries are going to do better than others. The tariff debacle is going to highlight where the fracture lines are around the world.
I don't know if it's entirely "unpredictable" as again... stochastic... probabilistic and underspecified ex ante, but not ex post.
By the way... AI might actually help in this regard. AI is nothing more than a massive regression engine, and a pretty damn good one at that (if you know how to manipulate it properly, which most people do not.) With the right data and the right modeling, you might be able to crunch down what's going on to make prediction a lot more viable and reduce the "noise" so you can get more clarity.
I've been trying to use it that way... and it has worked... kinda... but it's hard. It's somewhat like trying to sculpt "David" with a spoon and a hammer. I'm still a pretty damn good sculpter so I can make it work, but the tool being what it is, still makes it pretty hard.
If any of that makes sense.
Ha ha, plenty sense. Except that I had to scratch my head a bit over 'stochasitc,' which I was only familiar with from math, as in 'repeating patterns'? Urgh. Ask me about poetry or gardening, instead. But I can easily imagine sculpting with a spoon. Especially if you do bronze casting from wax or clay. Here's the thing about AI, me, and I suspect most people: I am just waking up to the implications of something probably as impactful as the first factories of the industrial revolution. When seen as a so-called 'force multiplier,' I get it. When seen as the progenitor of huge computer arrays that gobble googolzillions of watts of electricity to keep pumping out god-alone-knows-what-kind of-useful-and-idiotic-and/or-actively-harmful stuff like social media, who knows? Not to mention its status as the icon of the likes of Curtis Yarvin and Elon Musk, brrrr. But I just bought a book called something like AI for Idiots off Amazon. Ha. Bezos is into it, too, right? Anyhow, anything you can add to our relevant understanding of what's on the horizon, especially as contextualized to our quality of life, would be deeply, deeply appreciated.
Oh, crap, PS: Here in Pittsburgh, to which city I moved partially based on it's heretofore predictable and relatively livable climate (so advertised by local promotors) we had a storm last week that spawned 100mph winds, which knocked out power to @ 450,000 people for several days. Including me. Good thing I cook with gas, have a battery powered radio and LED storm lanterns. But say buh-bye to the perishables in the fridge. And what if it happens again in, say, July? In the middle of a refugee crisis originating in Sudan?
I agree that the layered addition of climate and AI are two critical missing pieces here. The entire framework makes sense (and aligns with what I’ve been seeing in climate, public health, and logistics policy and markets). But understanding the ways in which climate change and AI are going to fundamentally disrupt economic systems, alongside the ways that highly concentrated capital and highly optimized misinformation infrastructure and psychology will work, is central to survival. We have to more agile, with fewer resources, higher protectionist/nationalist/fear-driven responses to the chaos, and more stochastic anarchy as fully described above. And I haven’t figured that out, but I know enough to be asking the questions, and I’m grateful to find others tacking these same messy, vital conversations.
Welcome to Station 11? Watching the right elements and understanding them will help with most things other than a continental sized climate shift that happens relatively quickly, a wide-scale nuclear or biological weapons-fueled conflict, or a massive pandemic of the sort that can't be treated via vaccination or similar easy-to-distribute 'cure.' And maybe the tech broliarchs, who are partially far-sighted and partially (IMO) out of their effing minds and whomever they recruit to their vision are who we must watch most closely, along with whichever conventional capitalist individuals and institutions with enough power to influence or stymie them. Sigh. And a big YES to 'messy, vital conversations,' here and elsewhere.
Do you remember the revenge of AI in the Terminator movies….
Nope. Not a big action movie fan. Help me out?
😃 I actually meant this as snark, but when I thought about it, the concept of AI trying to bring order to the chaos of human disorder seems not only plausible, but modeled in a scenario, likely. In these movies, humanity is obliterated, leaving only a small group of “resistance” fighters to manipulate time in an effort to subvert the war of the machines.
Hmm, Michael. There are a lot of movies (some recent ones based on video games) where machines, zombies, or maddened victims of brain-eating viruses take over, save for a fortunate (egads?) few human resistance fighters around. I wonder what this says about our deeper sense of how things might go from here on out. The thing about all the enemy critters is that their sole interest is apparently wiping out these remaining folk. Apparently they don't enjoy going to the beach, watching the sunset, drinking Cuba Libres, making love, making music, playing softball, writing poetry, growing tomatoes or having a dog. Double hmm.
The movie I am referring to is called Terminator.
Yeah. Sort of a robot from the future with red eyes and massive biceps. Much like the Arnold himself. I was trying to generalize.
A most elegantly written long memo—I now understand why life feels so disconnected. Whoo! I’m free-floating through this political unreality. It seems the old touchstones are gone. Thanks for helping me understand why I’ve been feeling so completely clueless.
I have young children, and in a different way, I was recently realizing how this world is so very different from when I was a child in the 80s. So different in function that I don't think I can teach them anything of value (that I value) besides "do the right/good thing." The idea of working hard, studying, getting degrees and ways to approach life and work might still have intrinsic value, but it's a drastically different, lesser, value in today's economy. And reading your piece here reinforces and expands the thought.
You don't go into how the internet has influenced the course of human events, but this thread is woven in silently into the argument you state. I guess what I'd like to know is how the internet shapes the stochastic, anarchic future. It feels like it will play an outsized role, and that if you are a deep student of the digitally networked world, a young person today may have a chance at living a halfway decent life.
Thank you for this. You’re naming something a lot of people are feeling, but haven’t quite articulated: that the old virtues—work hard, study, follow the rules—haven’t disappeared, but they’ve been decoupled from reward. They exist now as moral guidance, not as strategy.
And you’re absolutely right—the internet is the unspoken infrastructure in this whole transformation.
If stochastic anarchy is the condition, then the internet is both the accelerant and the escape hatch.
It accelerated the collapse by disintermediating authority, spreading disinformation faster than institutions could adapt, and turning everything—truth, value, identity—into gamified attention metrics.
But it also enabled sovereignty in ways that weren’t possible before:
A kid in Lagos can launch a global business from their phone.
A dissident in Minsk can broadcast truth to the world.
A family can build financial resilience using tools never taught in school.
So yes, if a young person today becomes a deep student of digital systems—not just coding, but how networks work, how platforms extract, how algorithms shape agency—they have a shot. Not at fairness, necessarily. But at leverage. At optionality.
The new virtues are not obedience and merit—they’re network fluency, narrative control, and adaptive strategy.
Which means that what’s teachable has changed.
We may not be able to pass down the old path. But we can still pass down a different kind of compass:
Learn how the system actually works.
Don’t confuse the map for the territory.
And don’t play a game where the rules are fake.
That’s not defeatist. That’s adaptation.
And in a world this unstable, adaptation is the inheritance worth passing down.
That's as far as my thinking goes at this moment...
Thank you. I appreciate all the thinking and your writing. It's an interesting, validating thing when these subtle shifts one feels are put into words and solidified into some kind of reality.
There is (sharp) pain in seeing the old ways that you lived and breathed die. But as you point out, there is also liberation in understanding old rules don't apply anymore. Now, to find some solid ground and do the work of learning anew.
Thank you for this piece and the work that went into it. Three questions for now: 1) What groups and/or networks (G/N) set up the first domino, "1980s–90s: Market Uber Alles" or was this a convergence of many disparate forces? 2) If there were G/Ns that set up this domino, then why change the existing order? and 3) Why have the change engineered or allowed to be so chaotic/anarchic? Note: I lived and worked in the Republic of Armenia for 14 years from 2001-2015 where there was a semblance of systems and elections familiar enough to be somewhat oriented, but constantly disoriented by how things actually worked or didn't work. Your concept of "stochastic anarchy" resonated with my time there, and I witnessed and learned how people become resilient and built individual and in some cases collective sovereignty within such a system.
Thank you for this thoughtful response—and for sharing your time in Armenia. That kind of firsthand experience with system-legibility collapse is rare and immensely valuable, especially for readers trying to feel what stochastic anarchy looks like in lived terms.
To your three questions:
1. Who set the first domino? Was “Market Über Alles” driven by specific groups/networks—or was it a convergence?
It was both. There were identifiable networks—Chicago School economists, Mont Pelerin Society intellectuals, neoliberal technocrats in institutions like the IMF and World Bank, and corporate-political alliances like ALEC and the Business Roundtable. But it wasn’t a conspiracy—it was a convergence of ideological commitments, structural incentives, and Cold War triumphalism.
The end of the Cold War created a vacuum—and neoliberalism filled it, not just because of belief, but because the West now had no serious alternative model to balance against. The triumph of markets as moral arbiters ("the invisible hand knows best") became not just policy but dogma. And global capital was more than happy to fund the infrastructure that would protect its primacy.
2. If there were networks driving it, why change the existing order at all?
Because the old order—industrial capitalism constrained by national borders, union power, and the Bretton Woods system—was too slow, too expensive, and too democratic. From the perspective of transnational capital, those constraints had to go.
Deregulation wasn’t just about “efficiency.” It was about removing frictions—meaning labor power, environmental safeguards, and sovereign constraints. Changing the order unlocked exponential returns, especially once financialization replaced production as the primary source of wealth.
In short: they changed the system because they could extract more from a new one. Period. The machinery got away from everyone, and now, the power plant is in full meltdown.
3. Why allow the transition to be so chaotic and anarchic?
This is where it gets more interesting.
The chaos wasn’t always deliberate. It was often an externality of speed, scale, and feedback loops no one could fully control. But over time, the ruling networks learned something vital:
Chaos disorients challengers. Complexity protects incumbents.
A chaotic system can be incredibly stable for those at the top, because the average person no longer knows how to fight back, where to apply pressure, or what the rules even are. What looks like “breakdown” to us is often insurance to them.
So yes—parts of the chaos were engineered (think: deliberate deregulation, media fragmentation, surveillance capitalism). But much of it was then embraced as a feature, not a bug. You don’t need to run a dictatorship if no one can find the switchboard.
You saw this in Armenia, no doubt: the shell of democracy, the rituals of participation—but behind it, a system running on favors, factionalism, and inertia. The aesthetics of order masking the reality of anarchy. That’s what we’re now importing.
And that’s why sovereignty—in the individual, the collective, and the resilient—is the only counter-theory that holds any water in a post-legible world.
Well that was an incredibly cheery lunch time read from a sun drenched Ireland. But you're not wrong. I've witnessed your analysis first hand from Dublin to the far reaches of the Danube.
I know... I'm always Mr. Happy Fun Guy as of late.
I lived this in Puerto Rico. The goverment exist but it never changes our daily lives. The power grid exist but it's not reliable. Self reliance is a good practice but comminity reliance is what has helped our species survive. Great article!
I'll start by saying that I'm in my late 60s. In my lifetime, I've seen things go from relative stability to stochastic anarchy (your words). I've found TLM valuable in explaining much of what's been going on at least since the 80s. Thank you for that. It helps a little to orient myself a little, but it also leaves me feeling very insecure and uncertain for myself and our children/grandchildren.
I fear the government these days. I've been vocal enough online over the decades that I could be on someone(s) list for all I know. Everything that used to feel stable is now shifting like the ground in an earthquake. Depression is becoming my default.
How does one live reasonably safely, especially as a senior, in times like these? Government, financial institutions, society itself, are changing like putty in multiple hands. How does one make basic decisions when no outcome is assured? Disappear off of the internet? Going off grid isn't possible for us. Trust to luck?
Local mutual aid groups are going to become essential
Don't worry, they know everything about us, and you are probably on a list somewhere. You are in good company. Don't worry about disappear of the internet and going off grid. Life is good in the moment if we don't let these people get in our heads. I did the VPN thing, tried to disappear...all of it. They still know. But since this was a few years ago that I experienced and felt all this, trust me, this is nothing that is happening tomorrow. I agree with the authors longer timeline outlook.
I'm sure they do, Gretchen. Now I know how Germans felt in 1935.
This was definitely the best piece you've written yet. And every bit of it makes perfect sense. I look forward to you expanding on the role of climate change, water shortages and the role of corporations buying up and controlling water rights, and what role unstable nuclear powers can have on your scenario.
This is, as usual, a great piece, and so much to consider. My first thoughts relate to the wealth gap, economic compliance, and those pesky egg prices. When people voted for the price of eggs, they actually were voting for the system that they think they are still living in. And it is hard to blame them. Even while I see all you shared here happening, it feels as if I have no agency to change my circumstances. As a Gen X divorced mom, who's boomer parents fucked up and never settled down, there has never been financial security. Living paycheck to paycheck means, if I don't participate, I don't eat and live on the streets. I have no illusions that there is any kind of safety net for me. I am hardly alone in my financial insecurity. The reason there hasn't been a complete collapse of the system is because we have become economically complacent, voting for our immediate needs, unable to put forth effort into change. And I do believe the global elite are making it worse to keep it that way. They are the beneficiaries of this systemic facade after all. I agree the climate changes will be a catalyst, but the system may be economically stressed enough to snap before the climate crisis truly gets underway, or even worse, at the same time.
A great essay, and many great comments as well. I agree with those who feel this is the best take you have had. I have found it a hard sell to most folks I know, they cling to the comforting idea that electoral politics in the US will save us and the world.
As an old person, I believe the rot set in sooner, during the 70s. Reagan set the stage, then Obama in the Great Financial Crisis aftermath sealed the deal.
I just don't see how one can ignore the precarity of our physical survival, though. There are just so many mouths to feed in this world. Part of the stochastic nature of our world is the possibility of catastrophic kinetic war which would render so much of the political and societal issues moot.
yes your best
extremely valuable non-spective
I am almost 77, and elections have never really mattered in my lifetime.
Trump is an outlier, cities almost always totally control elections. But National Elections matter little.
Apparently JFK was assassinated largely because he was going to withdraw troops from Vietnam. The people REALLY in control will go to that extreme, but it usually isn't necessary as they can dig up enough dirt on candidates to control them. Or they can buy them up. Or both.
All the prattling on about Nazism vs Democracy is just so much distraction. Europe is always ahead of America on the down-slope and the future shown there is that if "democracy" doesn't elect the "right" candidates, elections will be suspended or invalidated, political parties outlawed, critical media shut down, etc. In other words, European democracy is just socialist dictatorship with a stolen name. That is what will be coming next to the USA.
Donald Trump is just a small town used car salesman, concerned with "closing the deal". I've worked for many like him. Buyers complain continually about lack of honesty, yet the small towns support their car salesman because he helps support local sports, school events, and mostly because he doesn't look down his nose at them and snub them. He is one of them.
Democrats USED to be one with Unions and the Working Man. No more. Anyone who gets their hands dirty is a peon and to be avoided. Now they are one with the wealthy elitists who run America for their own profit. Republicans are also, but they always were. There is no longer a choice. If there is no real choice, there is no democracy.
Mahalo ... Ironically, I was re-reading some HST the other day that back in the 70s sort of alluded to some of the concepts that you went into much greater depth on. So many are looking for a voice to explain and make sense of where we are. I have been regularly coming back to your writings to do just that.
We tend to think of the chaos and breakdown as a uniquely USA situation (because, in the end, we ARE very self-centered), and it is clearly far from that. The distrust that seems to seep into just about everything these days seems to be a common denominator - whether it is governments, news, memes, A.I. or your neighbor. As mentioned in a comment, the internets should be factored in, and I am sure many of us would love to go back and convince Al Gore to think twice about inventing it.
HST? Please explain.
Hunter S. Thompson.
Ah. Thank you. I have to wonder what he'd make of today.
This is what I've been waiting to read except there are no clear solutions so far