Toxic Masculinity is not Hard

I’ve watched the debate on “toxic masculinity” and people discussing that topic seem to fall on the far sides of a dividing line. On one side you have folks that see any “masculine” behaviors as toxic and on the other side people loath to call any specific behavior as toxic. The former are the well known crowd that is stunned when little boys are given dolls to play with and immediately bend them in half to work as imaginary guns. The latter are a new lot that is bent on alerting us to the collective failure of so many young men to mature. Neither one seems to have a definition of toxic masculinity which seems accurate or particularly descriptive. I think that is by design, although to what end I can not really say.

What they both agree on (and I think is not controversial beyond people who argue just to argue) is that some behaviors are more likely to be exercised by men and others by women. Men can be extremely nurturing and women can be vicious competitors. But, if you pulled a BoG standard man and woman out of a bag, you’d likely find that men are more likely to apply competition where it’s not wanted and women to nurture when it’s not warranted. These are differences of degree more than kind. You’ll find examples of both traits in each subject, but their application and inclination toward those traits will vary along sex lines. Much like a sheep herding dog will unwittingly and inappropriately start herding anything by nipping at the heels, including children, men and women are bred toward some behaviors more than others. It is no more remarkable than the mating dances bred into even the simplest animal.

What is toxic masculinity? It is the application of a gender stereotypical masculine behavior outside the bounds of healthy utility. For example, not asking of directions when you are clearly lost. Or competing with your spouse or children with the same vigor you compete against your great nemesis in business. It’s that simple. When a father comes home and plays basketball with his 11 year old son with the same physicality, aggression, and assertiveness he would use against other men his age, we find that completely inappropriate. If the excuse is to ‘teach a life lesson,’ we have to wonder what that lesson might be? As his son limps into the house, whimpering, abrased, and defeated, with his father crowing, few would see that as healthy. There is only great risk in the child learning to bully who they can.

That display of unhinged aggression and competition is different from winning against your child because you are taller, stronger, and faster, but doing so with moderation. Tuning back the unbridled aggression to teach both a sense of competition and how to play a good, clean game of basketball, is a nurturing, fatherly act. To understand you play the best game you can, even if you think you might lose, and to acquit yourself well, both in victory and defeat, is part of raising a good man. And to let your boy win when he plays well to enjoy the feeling, cultivating the behavior you expect when he does take the day. It also teaches him there are more important things than winning this round, like teaching and nurturing the good in people over a lifetime. It is possible to have both a competitive spirit and a nurturing soul.

It is also worth learning that more controversial tendencies have their place and time. Aggression, applied poorly, benefits no one. But sometimes aggression is needed. In the extreme example, the Ukrainians are aggressively and forcefully resisting decimation by Russia. Like competitiveness, aggression does not need to be taught to boys, their normal hormones will provide it. But it’s correct and proscribed uses need to be taught. Be aggressive when playing sports, but not boundlessly aggressive outside the rules of the game. Be aggressive when trying to win against a business competitor, but within the confines of the law.

One crowd will demonize any form of aggression as a negative trait a pathological “society” instills in males. (“Society” does no such thing and likely provides bounds for their aggression). The other side will see completely inappropriate aggression as something we should be afraid to censure, lest the lads continue smoking cannabis while playing Call of Duty in their basements. It is their choice to do so. At the end of the day, the best lesson we can teach is they are responsible for their choices. We need to find that middle ground where boys are raised to be good men. Because the other options, of either over-restraining or under-restraining their impulses will not be toxic – they will be radioactive. It will poison not only the current generation but deform the subsequent ones.

What if Data Center Space Were Free?

First, what is a data center? It’s a slightly archaic term, meaning where the firm aggregated its computer data. It’s from the age of centralized computing. While desktop computers were intended to run on household current, shared computers (mainframes, VAXes, Enterprise databases, etc) were to be installed in rooms with commercial power and air conditioning. These were often installed with special raised floors, allowing cables to run beneath your feet. The space where we put servers has changed, but not radically. Modern servers, although they use processors that are of the same instruction set as desktop and laptop processors, have constantly screaming fans and power requirements that can strain a typical 15 amp household circuit or typical office circuit. And rather than a raised floor, the cabling is now overhead.

The first big change was going from on-premise to hosted infrastructure. Prior to the 2000s, if you went to an internet company, you would likely be taken to their data center. It would be in the same building, or one building over, from their offices. Was there a server problem? Walk over to the data-center and take a look. (Tip: if the servers all looked the same, you could eject the CD ROM tray to help you find it). Starting in the late 1990s and through the 2010s, the data-center moved to a shared facility. Now, the data center might be hundreds of miles away. You might never visit it, or take the tour once before signing up. You ship your equipment to the site and they put it in racks for you, connecting cables as you specify. Or in some cases, lease the equipment from them. From the 2010s on, the move became to the cloud. In the cloud you are renting the equipment in very short time increments. The cloud provider gives you an API to manage the systems.

When you rent space in a data center you are paying for power, networking, and floor space. Power is a combination of the power your draw and some part of the infrastructure, like the backup generator. In a shared data center, you are generally responsible for your own uninterrupted power supplies. Networking is a function of how much of the bandwidth you intend to consume, or you can provide your own network pipe. Within the category of floor space you can add features like physical security, but it is essentially your portion of the footprint of the data center. All the other costs like staff to make sure the physical structure is operational, or someone to attach a cable, are either baked into those costs or billed separately. If you’re a small company looking to host a set of servers, you would likely pay for a rack (a single tower of servers) or a cage (essentially a fenced in area with a lock on it). That square footage combined with the power and network bill is your monthly fee for hosting your servers.

The cloud obscures all that and layers on management. You no longer have to set up your servers, storage, and networking. The cloud provider does that for you. You can still provision a VM or create a virtual (fake) network, but the physical hardware is hidden from you. Your interface to the computers is the API that cloud provider publishes. The costs can be per hour, minute, or gigabyte to seem ridiculously low. How can you justify managing your own servers when it not only involves all the costs mentioned above, but hiring and managing an IT staff, compared to those low costs. There are times when companies have been nearly bankrupted by their cloud spend, but for many it still feels like a deal. And it’s highly flexible, even if getting the costs down means buying into multi-year, inflexible arrangements more akin to leases.

But that’s not the real draw of cloud. Remember floor space, power, and networking? When a data center runs out of floor space, construction time is measured in years. It may not be practical to deliver more power. And even adding more networking always seems to take the networking providers months just to turn on a bit of fiber. God knows why. If you have your equipment in a data center and need to add more, the answer could be ‘no.’ It requires you to figure out where to put the equipment and how to communicate between the two data centers (although some providers had a solution for this). For all intents and purposes, the power, floor space, and networking in the cloud are infinite. And they handle other issues like fail-over, assuming you are willing to pay for it.

But we may be heading to an interesting situation, should the AI hype cycle crash. We will wind up with a lot of data center space heavily over-subscribed with power and networking, with no clients. We might be in a glut of modern data center space that is re-possessed by PE firms and regional banks lending to the projects. This would be like the glut of dark fiber that made YouTube and other social media initially affordable. You might have a group of lenders that’s suddenly trying to get rid of a largely completed data center at a fraction of what it cost to build. All you need to do is walk in and secure agreements for power and networking. The infrastructure will be there in varying degrees of completion. From powered on to cement slab.

What we lack is a view of operating systems that spans multiple computers. The cloud would still have an advantage for many companies that denuded themselves to system administrators to hire cloud administrators. It’s also hard to cost compete with a company that can smear those costs over a much larger number of systems. The idea of companies taking their data centers back in house isn’t what I think is likely. But it may open the door for newer and cheaper competitors. If not general cloud competitors, then maybe specialty providers that provide storage only or back up facilities in case there’s an outage? These new data centers would already have fat pipes to reach out to AWS or Azure.

Maybe another option is to finish the building and bring computer controlled manufacture. You would have plenty of power for laser cutters or mills. Even industrial processes like powder coating or electroplating require a significant amount of power. These data centers are being designed with more than enough power to spare. Like we divide existing data centers into ‘cages,’ these could also be divided up into cages for specific manufacturers. The data centers are also equipped with loading docks for semis. You want to make something like a bed frame that requires a CNC cutting board after board of MDF and grade ‘A’ plywood? No problem. You have a linear, football field sized building, where it gets cut, finished and packaged in one long assembly line. Maybe it would serve high-tech, multi-modal manufacture? You sit in a suburb of DC as you basically run a CNC cutter in Lousiana?

The down side is the AI chips themselves will have a very limited shelf life. Although using firms are extending the depreciation targets, the goal of the chip makers is to produce a chip so much better than the two generations ago, that it isn’t economically viable to operate the old chip. That’s a three year lifespan. Not because it can’t do the work, but because the electricity cost is too high. Maybe some of them could be used to support vision and robotics tasks related to manufacturing, but that may be only a small subset of what’s being purchased today.

The Untethered World

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The full quote by Nietzsche is amazingly dark. Having removed god from our lives, we find there is nothing to replace it with, other than our own super-inflated egos. Religion is a good that is in the eye of the beholder. The same person, who grew up in the Midwest, sees beauty in Islam, might find the Catholic church a bankrupt system of hypocritical power structures meant to keep women subservient, facilitate abuse, entrench power, and accumulate wealth. (And they do this with no sense of irony or of having spent any real time amongst Muslims or in Muslim countries, with only a couple of units in World History and Tik-Tok as their intellectual foundation). The world in which they were raised is intolerable rubbish heap, but about which they are largely ignorant seems a lush garden. To understand why this is, we must acknowledge the quote from Nietzsche realize we tore it all down before we built anything else.

But what did we really tear down? Let’s go back to that person in the Midwest, who is dealing with one of infinite variety of moral choices with which we are all presented. It could be as grave, involving great pain and suffering, even life or death, or it could be as simple as agonizing over a small lie to avoid going to a social event. Imagine having to reconstruct, for a kind of first principles, the ethical and moral thing to do in that circumstance. To get through the day, the effort would be staggering. Which is why we create short-cuts for ourselves. We might call this an internal code, even a terrible one, such as “I only help people when it feels right.” We have our feelings, such as feeling guilty about something or gleefully confident about the choice. But we also look to the examples set by others. These could be people in our own lives, like a relative, or a person we don’t know, but whose example we use to gauge our response.

In the 15th century, the person facing a moral question might look to the lives of the saints. Should I kick dogs? St. Francis would definitely not kick dogs. Should I go off with my significant other into the bushes, even though the desire is great? There are plenty of saints who stayed chaste, even though they were tempted. Should I do anything for the beggar at the end of the street? There are plenty of examples of helping the poor. Should I be honest about why I’m late to church? There are plenty of examples honesty or acceptable fibbing from other saints. Should I desert the army, given the fighting is not going well? Maybe no saints, but other examples from our shared history or mythology. And if you were to go back to the Ancient World, you would find people who might not believe in a literal Apollo, but might mine the stories around gods for kernels of wisdom. I’m going to use a catch-all label, which is imperfect, but a reasonable container for all these – they are heroes. And their stories are their legends.

A hero is someone who may have done something great, but is basically someone we admire and would emulate. They may be individuals, like a saint or a sports hero, or a collective of heroes, like the last holdouts in a righteous but desperate struggle. Their life is an example provided through the accounts and stories, sometimes apocryphal, that surround them. If we admire them them, and identify with them, we have a moral short-cut to questions such as “should I lie about getting to work late?” And if giving the honest answer results in censure or loss of the job, it might help provide the resilience we need to get a new job or to show we will do better going forward.

There is an old saying that burdens are more easily suffered when shared. I may not know anyone around me who is suffering the same burden, or I might not be able to discuss it, but in the hero I have someone who shared it. Even though they may have died hundreds of years before, or may not have existed, I know that they suffered the same pain and fear and suffered it with grace and dignity. The delightful J. Draper points out many who were publicly executed went to the gallows happy. Many saints and martyrs died remarkably calmly, because they could think of the other martyrs and saints that had gone before them. In addition to the belief that the pain they would experience would be temporary, and that their reward was to come, but that it was also a shared suffering.

When we tore down god, we tore down the bevy of heroes and examples that circulated in the culture. That left historical, cultural, or racial heroes as our source of inspiration. In some cases, this was not unwelcome. The American mythologies are not religious in nature, based largely on secular ideals. The old stories about the shared Thanksgiving, or the tenacity of the Minutemen, or the mythos of the explorer are the enlightenment version of the lives of the saints. This mythology is fit for a world that no longer believes in a fantasy of heaven or hell, focusing their struggles on real events and their outcomes. And while these mythologies could survive god being removed from the public sphere, they would also fall.

At some point we would learn that George Washington was a flawed human being. In the minds of some people, an evil human being. I would argue that George Washington was, if not the Zeus, the Apollo of the American pantheon. As he fell, and Thomas Jefferson, and then the mass of other founders, we are left with a few modern examples. And these modern examples are not bad. There more than enough to admire in the stoic heroism the marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge met their moment. Or the many examples of sexual or racial ‘breakthrough’ athletes, entertainers, or politicians who overcame so much to just have their basic rights. And, for now, they still stand. But in the endless scrutinizing, rethinking, and re-examining of history and these stories against current notions of moral norms, will we lose these, too? Will it come out that, as sometimes flawed people, they were no more gods or great than any of the other people evicted from that role?

For most people, they are less inclined to think of John Lewis as they are are to think of sports heroes or fictional heroes. Or maybe heroes in their personal life, like some family member or friend. And we recognize the danger in ‘creating martyrs,’ whereby people are elevated to heroic status due to mistreatment or persecution, perceived or actual. But the landscape is becoming more fragmented, more isolated, and maybe only individually meaningful. And even those heroes can be quickly torn down, as we learn they are deeply flawed (if not horrible) in other parts of their lives. Since we often judge these same people who tried to make moral choices against modern notions of morality, it’s not surprising we find them coming up short. Could we one day see John Lewis in a horrible light as yet another false idol to be torn down. Maybe in a future morality the choices that good man made may seem unjustifiable.

In the end we are left with nothing. We lack the easy guide posts to moderate our behavior. There is a great benefit to approaching each problem from first principles, but it does not scale to to the myriad of challenges we face each day. We are also left with no one to share our suffering. Without a hero or martyr to look to, to see our own suffering in their suffering, we have to bear it alone. Isolated and alone each pain becomes intolerable. Having torn all of that down, with nothing to replace it, like rudderless boats we lurch from idea to idea on the shifting wind of social media. Of course we become a self-centered people. Of course we suffer from the disease of nostalgia. Of course we try to fruitlessly tape together now broken idols. But no degree of xenophobia, reactionary policies, or renaming military bases will fill that hole if there is nothing left to fill it.

Government Handouts are the Exit

It’s almost undeniable that the only reason the US economy has started slipping into a recession, or would have slipped months ago, is that investment in AI has driven about 1 to 1.5% of GDP. That’s an insanely huge figure. Not AI profits – which are years away even in optimistic projections. Unlike investments in roads, for example, about 60% to 70% of the AI investment is in chips that become obsolete in three years, but maybe as little as two years. The growth is happening so fast that power companies can’t keep up, which has lead to basically using old jet engines to turn hydrocarbons into CO2 to power those chips. All to give you an answer that might or might not be right, or just to generate offensive AI videos like Mahatma Gandhi eating a burger. Just to recap: the only thing keeping us from a recession is money being plowed into quickly obsolete “assets” (it’s hard to call them that – they’re almost a consumable), powered by setting even more climate change. The cement buildings, the data centers, left behind have a multi-decade life, but no one needs that much data center capacity. And if they’re unoccupied, they will go to shit.

So far the financing for this has gone beyond traditional investment to weird circular financing where company A invests in company B, who buys products and services from company A. Company A can then point to future orders and sales. Company B points to more investment. Everyone’s happy. Number go up. Company B then makes absurd projections of incomprehensible investments that need to be made, causing investors to snap up associated companies, and everyone happier because more number go up. But that’s okay, Company C promises (not necessarily delivers) future investments in A, making more number go up, after A promises to buy 3 times that much in company C’s products and services. At no point is numbering going up because Company B is anywhere near making back a significant amount of what it spends on short lived assets and jet fuel to power its data centers.

But surely this is good because it will make us all richer, right? Not really. If you think that, you haven’t been following along. I’ll give you a minute to catch up on how wealth inequality is both bad and accelerating. The benefits will be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. Most of the benefit will be concentrated in the hands of people like Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg (who’s been searching for some new idea – any idea – since Facebook). The bonuses to execs and large share holders would be fantastic, if there any real chance of any of this earning back any money.

David Sachs and Sarah Friar made a statements which might indicate how these companies intend to square this circle of constant investment, no profit, and concentrated wealth. They will make the argument that if the government does not step in to support their narrow version of AI, the economy falters, and we go into recession. To keep that from happening, all we need to do is to make people like David Sachs wealthier, by bailing out their AI bets when the start to go bad by backstopping their loans or printing more money by driving down interest rates. (And therefore boosting inflation back up). I don’t think these are isolated musings. I think their air is probably thick with ideas in this vein, and these are just a couple of leaks. Maybe testing the waters? Or just they keep talking about it, so it’s a natural topic of discussion.

They have done everything in their power to make stochastic parrots seem like the next nuclear bomb. The country with the AI lead (whatever that means) will win the next wars. Tell that to Ukraine, who is using very much human piloted drones to attack 60 year old tanks and drones piloted by human Russian pilots. If businesses don’t adopt AI, or find that AI adoption is more limited than what they thought, and the profit potential seems to be a small fraction of what were overly optimistic projections, AWS or Microsoft’s investments in AI won’t seem like a good use of cash. Rather than lighting giant piles of money on fire, they should have bought back their stock. NVDA doesn’t look like a hot stock if the demand for their chips start to sputter. And Broadcom (AVGO) and ORCL start to falter at that point. (ORCL is already about 1/3 down. META – which has been floundering for its next idea – will also be seen to have wasted cash. The only dangers LLM based AI presents to the modern world is its ability to quickly mint disinformation and memes, and the financial crater it will leave when people no longer expect massive (or any) profits from the likes of Open AI. When that happens, and they stop lighting their money on fire, GDP shrinks and the US will probably slip into recession.

I was about to end there, but that isn’t quite the whole story. Because it isn’t just Wall Steet burning cash on stochastic parrots powered by jet engines. I feel like I would be remiss if I forget to mention all the private equity and funds that are investing in data center construction. To build the data center, largely unregulated private equity firms (which can borrow from regulated banks) have been making loans. If this all goes sideways, the 300,000,000 loan held by a PE firm for a data center could go to near zero, the small fraction recoverable only after years of bankruptcy litigation. Maybe there’s enough of these loans to make the systemically important, regulated banks sweat blood as their PE customers start to sputter. As long as number go up, the loan is getting serviced, but once number stop going up, we could have a massive, sudden influx of cockroaches. This includes some funds who buy notes or make loans as part of their income portfolios. You could wake up to read a horrible story that PIMCO is suddenly knee deep in bad loans in what should have been a safe, income generating, portfolio. And just to give you an idea of how poorly people view risk right now, you only need to look at the historically low spread between junk and investment grade bonds.

Your Mind, Their Thoughts

How does a company that’s hemorrhaging money get to profitability, when they offer a free service? You can create tiers or pay walls to funnel users to paying. This model is popular in the SaaS world, where the free version is a loss leader for future sales. But it isn’t a suitable model for every service. The other avenue to monetization is to show advertisements. It isn’t black and white, with some paid services, like Hulu, still show advertisements. The degree to which advertising is permitted is the degree to which the consumers (businesses or individuals) push back on the advertising.

Strictly speaking, Google and Meta are communication service providers on the SP 500 index. Practically all their money comes from advertising and sponsored content. Amazon and Microsoft are also making significant money from advertising and sponsored content. Your feeds on services like Linked In, X, Facebook, Tik-Tok, YouTube and so on are becoming a gruel of actual content and advertisements, either direct ads through the platform or “creators'” own advertising. New and improved with AI slop to foster more interaction and create more engagement. More of our economy is based on putting an ad in front of someone’s eyeballs than you would imagine. It’s easy to spot some advertising, such as a commercial about a laxative in the middle of a Football game. It’s harder to spot other ads, such as an influencer that doesn’t disclose a payment for a “product review.” The adage that if you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product, is ever more true. Have you thought, for five minutes, how the startups offering free access to LLMs are going to make money?

After thinking about it, I realized companies like OpenAI are better positioned to make money than we realize. First, the injection of cash has turbo-charged their data gathering. There is more investor money to harvest more and more data. I suspect this is also where the first moats for legacy chat-bots will happen, inking deals with content companies. New entrants won’t have the pockets or the bandwidth to negotiate a bunch of little deals to avoid getting sued. But that’s another issue. They are hoovering up everything. There is plenty of evidence they, or their agents, are ignoring any ‘ROBOTS.TXT’ entries that disallow scraping. When actual regulation arrives, it serves more as regulatory capture than creating equitable payments to the sources of content.

Second, we have come to accept that they can wrap your prompt in their secret prompt. These additions to your prompt are hidden, to arguably prevent circumvention. The stated reason to inject those prompts is to prevent leaking dangerous information, such as how to make explosives. They are also part of your terms of service. Attempting to circumvent or discover the prompts is a basis for canceling your account. The account that has your obsequious, pleasant friend on which you’ve come to rely. The point is we are now comfortable, or happily oblivious to, our prompt being wrapped in additional hidden prompts. The easiest way to hide advertising is to keep promotional material secret, like the safety prompts. And to make it a violation of the terms of service to avoid promotional prompting, like the safety prompting. You may even be aware that there is promotional prompting in general, but a specific prompt.

Another way is to selectively return supporting links. For example, if you ask about camping, cold weather clothing, or places to visit in Maine, you might get a link to LL Bean. This is relatively harmless, except that it is different from search, where you can move past the initial results. There is a push for search engines to move from search results to AI results. That may mean, in the future, that you only get the handful of links from the paid advertisers along with the chat response. There may be no button to show more results, or you may have to explicitly ask for more results. Combine that with the advertiser’s ability to modify the hidden prompts injected along with your prompt, and you might lose any awareness of other possibilities. And should the LLM lie about one retailer having the best price, or a particularly well-suited product, that’s chalked up to the hallucinations.

There is also the information you are divulging about yourself. Maybe you are spewing information you would never share on Facebook or even Google Search. For free users, the AI companies are likely to mine all prior conversations, building up a detailed profile. For paid users, mining may depend on the plan and the account, such as a corporate account versus an individual premium account. This is already happening through other social media, but the LLMs may have more detailed information about mental state or health. While it may be more a difference of degree than kind, the chats may have richer data. I suspect the need for vast amounts of storage is to handle the influx and processing of the data you are freely giving them about your internal emotional and psychological state.

What I fear, and may be more deeply concerning, invoving the ability of the LLM to prime you over time. In some sense, search is “one shot.” You type in a search, you get back results. Facebook and other social feeds have been shows to influence peoples’ opinion not on just products, but able to alter their mental health. Their advertising can be better concealed. You might have retweeted or re-posted what were ads in the past. To a degree people have unmasked some of the behavior. We might be more inured to it now, and therefore have a bit of a resistance, but the social media algorithmic rabbit hole is alive and well. We know to watch for “radicalizing” content. What we don’t know how to spot are radicalizing outputs from a chat bot.

LLMs and chat bots may catch us in a particularly vulnerable way. We have a bias to believe the computer’s response is a neutral, disinterested party. And the responses from the LLM are private and highly individual. Not like public feeds on various Apps. If a company that sees sufficient lifetime value in a customer, they may be willing to pay over multiple chats. Maybe a $100 for a couple of months of ‘pushing.’ Imagine if the opioid vendors had access to this technology. Paying a few dollars to push someone toward a prescription for their brand of opiate may be worth thousands of dollars per patient. And each future addict’s chats are essentially customized to that person. Remember, we have plenty of evidence that existing social media can shape opinion and even mental health. Show enough people “PSA” style ads about enough vague symptoms and people will, in fact, ask their doctor if that drug is right for them.

But the big hook is the outsourcing of your cognition. Human beings are inherently lazy. If an escalator is present, almost no-one takes the stairs. Go to the airport and watch people, without luggage, queue for the escalator. The stairs are almost empty and there is just one flight. But they will wait in a press of people. Having a tool that allows you to ‘just get the answer,’ is like your brain being given the option to take the escalator. Instead of thinking through even simple problems, you just pose the prompt to the chat bot. And just like muscle gets soft and atrophies with disuse, your ability to solve problems dwindles. It’s like the person who begins to take the escalator not because it’s a little easier, but because they are now winded when taking the stairs. Need a plan for a workout? This shouldn’t be that hard, but you can just ask the LLM. (Ignoring it may actually give you bad advice, or in a world of sponsored chats, push you toward products and services you don’t need). Need a date idea? Just ask the LLM. Is your back pain something to worry about? The LLM has a short answer.

At least reading search results might inadvertently expose you to a knowledgeable and objective opinion between ads. If I search on Google for US passport applications, the first link is actually a sponsored link to a company that will collect all my data and submit my passport application for me. Who is this company? I’ve never heard of them. It ends in a “.us” domain, making it seem US related, but who knows what they do with the data or how they store it. The second link is the state department, but the third link is not. The only reason the state department is there, is because they paid to sponsor a search result. But at least it’s there. And it’s also in the list of general results. Google, Facebook, Tik-Tok, and so on have a track record of taking advertiser money from almost anyone. Amazon’s sponsored content is sometimes for knock-off or counterfeit products. And some sites have absolutely no scruples on the ads they serve, ads which might originate from Google or Meta ad services.

The lack of scruples or selectivity demonstrated by other on-line services that take advertising, combined with the outsourcing of cognition, means you are exposing yourself to some of the shittiest people on the face of the earth. For every time you are pushed toward buying a Honda, you might also be pushed toward taking a supplement that is dangerous to your health. You will likely be unaware you are being marketed to, and in ways that are completely personal and uniquely effective on your psyche. In a state of mind where you’re being trained to expect an objective result, with additional prompts that are invisible to you for “safety,” and a technology whose operation is inscrutable, you have no idea why you are provided with a given answer. Is it your idea not to buy a car at all and just use ride share services every day? If the ride share services want the behavior to stick, they know it needs to feel like it was your idea. Is it your idea to really push your doctor for a Viagra prescription, even though you are an otherwise healthy, 24 year old male? You shouldn’t but those symptoms come to mind…

The possibilities for political advertising and opinion shaping are staggering. The LLM expected to give neutral answers is sponsored to return “right leaning” or “left leaning” answers for months before an election. Or it embeds language also used by framers of important electoral issues, to prime you for other messaging. Unlike the one-shot advertising in a search result, or the obvious ad on the page you ignore, the LLM is now doing your thinking for you. There will be people who will take the mental stairs because they know the LLM dulls their wits. But these will be fewer and fewer as LLMs get better and more common. With no evidence that on line advertisers find any customer objectionable, could Nick Fuentes be paying to inject your responses with pro-fascist content?

It will be impossible for you to determine what ideas are a product of your reason and research. You will still feel like you’re in control. You will still have your mind. But what goes through your mind will be even more carefully and accurately shaped. In a state were a few thousand votes can sway an election, how much would a campaign pay to advertise to specific voters, if they start seeing those voters adopt talking points and slogans from their LLM chats and social media posts? Would it be $500 per voter? Maybe you need to target 50,000 voters at a total cost of $25,000,000? That actually seems affordable, given the vast sums that are spent on some close elections. The free chat bot loses money. The “premium” plan at $20 per month loses money. Even the $200 a month plan loses money. But the advertising may be their pay-day. How much would you pay to get people to think the way you want them to think, each person believing this was the natural evolution of their own thinking. Casually using LLMs is essentially opening your mind to think other peoples’ thoughts.

The Fraud Is Coming

Michael Burry is shorting some tech companies. With the market as frothy as it is, that’s not exactly prescience. Unless you’re as good a market gambler as Burry, I wouldn’t recommend it. (And if you were as good as Michael Burry – you would already have a lot more zeros in your net worth). It is still true the market can stay irrational longer than you can be solvent. But what Burry isn’t just pointing out the emperor has no clothes. He is pointing to financial engineering. Why is that important? Why does presenting the information in a slightly better fashion matter?

The pressure is on to show something. All the public companies in the AI orbit, with elevated stock prices because they’re part of the “AI-play,” need to show earnings. The non-public AI startups do not need to show earnings. Oracle, Broadcom, Micron, etc. need to show revenue. Immediately they do not need to show revenue, as they sign contracts. That’s future revenue, and the stock price goes up as a multiple of earnings. With expected future earnings rising, the value of the company increases, even though current earnings may not have moved. A company that trades at 15 times their earnings begins trading at 30 times their earnings, based on the expectation of making more money in the future. But at some point, the imaginary future money needs to become real money in the present to justify that multiple.

Could companies like Palantir and Oracle be over-stating their income by altering the way they treat depreciation? Maybe as much as 20%? That’s what Burry sees. When companies structure their earnings to provide a better light than what would otherwise be the case, we refer to that as lower quality earnings. It may be legal and within the GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles), but it suggests the actual earnings are inflated. This is completely legal, as long as it is disclosed. Eventually, the lower quality earnings should result in a lower multiple. But in the short term, investors may ignore it or simply accept the statements of the companies that the new accounting practices make more sense. Longer term, investors tend to give companies that do a lot of financial engineering side-eye. Eventually reality will set it and the fundamental reasons they aren’t doing well will overtake the financial engineering.

But where there’s that much pressure to push earnings, it means there is building pressure to fake earnings. This can be done by either aggressively booking sales when the sale isn’t really complete and moving liabilities off the balance sheet. I would suspect the former is already unfolding. When everyone is desperate for more data center space, more power, more networking, and more processors, booking a sale early may not seem like a big deal. You feel the actual sale will almost certainly close in the very near term. Or you can call the next firm in line, waiting to snap up the same scarce resource. So why not report it in this quarter to juice your numbers a little? But it doesn’t take long before some firms start booking speculative sales, to keep the line on the sales chart going up and to the right. One of two things will happen, either the auditors will stumble over this and realize there’s fraud going on, or (more likely) a short seller will sniff it out. The former is bad enough when firms are forced to restate their prior earnings, as some executives go ‘spend more time with family,’ and shareholders bring suits. But the latter is devastating, usually resulting in obliteration, with the fraud investigations coming later.

The other approach is to engage in balance sheet engineering. A loan or an obligation to make payments in the future are recorded as liabilities. There are ways to move the liabilities off the balance sheet of the parent company, for example, by using special purpose vehicles to actually carry the obligation. Company X doesn’t owe the money. The money is actually is actually owed by Able Baker, a joint venture between X and Y. Company X doesn’t record the liability, even though the counter-party (the lender) can collect from Company X, should Able Baker default. The auditors may miss this if Company X misrepresents the true nature of the obligation (commits fraud). No one will notice a thing as long as the market that props up Able Baker is healthy. Once that changes, and Able Baker defaults, Company X may find itself illiquid.

On overstated earnings or engineered balance sheets you can quickly build other frauds. For example, understating the risk of loans to those companies. Lenders may be aware that something fishy is going on, but continue to lend to the companies, collecting fees on deals that should never have been closed. Even in the best possible light, it means suspicious insiders put aside suspicions to chase the deal. After all, the entire market can’t be wrong. And everything looks good for now. If the demand for the underlying market dries up, the loans held either by the direct lenders or the positions investors have in that lender, are worth pennies on the dollar. (Or nickles, now that we’ve stopped minting pennies). Suddenly, the lender (now likely to be a private equity firm rather than a bank) is exposed to losses large enough to wipe out its equity. Investors that invest or lend to the private equity firms suddenly find their positions wiped out as well, creating significant counter party risk. Which can ripple through other sectors of finance through reinsurance products. And liquidity dries up as everyone becomes unsure of any of their counter-parties actual financial health. What threatened to bring down the entire house of cards in 2007/2008 was the overnight lending market between banks was shutting down.

What makes this especially troubling in the current environment is a confluence of factors. First is the inability to actually jail corporate executives of very large companies. Even if there is fraud, we fine the corporation rather than hold its officers criminally liable. Let me do the math for you. Let’s say you put together a 300,000,000 dollar deal where your bonus is 5%. If you commit the fraud necessary to close the deal, you will be paid 15,000,000 dollars. Should you even get caught, you will have to give most of it back but won’t go to jail. And you keep all the other bonuses you also received. It’s likely the government will settle with your former employer. And if you’re not caught, and the company goes under, they still owe you the 15,000,000. You can sue for it in bankruptcy court, or from the company that acquires your old employer. If the company gets bailed out with public money, contractually, they will still need to pay you the 15,000,000. But what if it isn’t fraud and it’s just making a bet you wouldn’t otherwise make? There is are incentives to take outsized risks. After all, they’re losing other peoples’ money. So you will likely make 15,000,000, or maybe as little as 3,000,000 on the off-chance you’re caught. You won’t go to jail. And you won’t lose any of your houses just because you lost your job.

But coupled to that is a president who is willing to pardon anyone who is a supporter. He has commuted or pardoned people for political advantage. Like CZ to make good with the crypto crowd. Or the violent protester from January 6. It could be that even though there is criminal fraud, having donated to the campaign, the ballroom, the inauguration, and made statements pleasing to the ear of the administration, is sufficient to insulate your from Federal prosecution. And if you’re in a state such as Texas, it might also insulate your from state prosecution. We may find that explicit fraud was committed, people knew and traded on the fraud, but the fraudsters supportive of the administration are pardoned. In other words, they get to walk away with a lot of zeros in their bank account and no accountability.

If it were “free money,” I wouldn’t care. But what happens when a PE firm, lending money for data center construction, suddenly finds itself the proud owner of a bunch of half built data centers? Or even finished data centers filled with useless, expensive, and rapidly depreciating assets because AI demand isn’t what many expected? And what happens to the pension fund that put 250 million into that PE firm? And multiple other PE firms who also couldn’t resist deals around AI? Or the bank that provides liquidity for the PE firm? It’s not “free money,” it’s coming from somewhere. And that somewhere could be a wide-spread, systemic problem. How does the Federal government backstop PE firms, who are not insured or regulated like banks? Does the government step in and buy stock in the fraudulent company, injecting good money after bad? How do we put possibly trillions of dollars of bailout into firms but let the fraudsters walk away with all their money? Does the government step in and buy the data centers? Do the fraudsters stay in charge if they made enough dulcet noises of support for the administration?

Let’s put together a package that “doesn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.” It involves backstopping the loans, purchasing shares in troubled companies, and buying some data centers. All with money is effectively printed by the federal reserve or raised from “investors” with guaranteed loans. Essentially, this injects a pile of money into the economy, which will fuel inflation. It would also expand the debt, causing even more worry about the US debt burden. A burden the US has every incentive to ease by devaluing the dollar and inflating its way out of the crisis. And like the COVID relief bills, a lot of that money will go into creating even more income disparity. Not only will the wealthy (including fraudsters) walk away with the money they made on the way to the crash, eventually they will reap the reward of the stimulus injected to moderate the economic damage. And while the previous administrations tried to put some limits on how either the post 2008 or COVID stimulus could be used, I doubt this administration will suffer that burden.

I don’t know if or when the AI trade unwinds. I suspect it’s ‘when,’ and the longer it goes on, the more I suspect it will unwind badly. There is little I’m hearing that makes me sanguine about an orderly end to this. On the spectrum there will be true believers to outright fraudsters. Like flies to shit, fraudsters are drawn to environments where people making money would rather not look too closely as long as money is being made. If anyone did look closely, the party’s over no one is making money. After all, a little ‘wiggle room’ makes the market possible. To repurpose Mao, this is the water in which the fraudster swims. Whether its repacking bad home loans, creating accounting practices at suspiciously rock-star energy companies, or the sales figures at ‘world leading’ telecom companies, no one wants the gravy train to come to an end. But rest assured, the longer the massive (and frankly stupidly large) sums of money are changing hands (or not actually changing hands) over various AI deals, the more openings fraud will find.

AI Wins the Shutdown

It’s Monday, November 10, and I’m going through the news. The shutdown may be coming to an end. Welcome news to some, although I believe the Democrats caved. The Republicans indicated they were willing to scorch the earth over ACA subsidies. These are the payments that help people buy health insurance, when they can’t possibly afford 15,000 or 20,000 a year in premiums. It seemed as though Republicans were willing to let air travel fall apart in front of the holiday season rather promote access to healthcare. All while the government feels they have enough money to possibly send $2,000 rebate checks from the taxes collected through tariffs. And the Democrats blinked. The government, assuming the house approves and the administration doesn’t have a spaz and veto the bill, will likely re-open.

What stocks do you think would be doing well on that news in the pre-market? They airlines? Yes, they’re up. Defense contractors? They’re mixed. What about health care? Mixed to net negative. What’s ripping? AI hardware and semi-conductor companies. NVIDIA is up over 3%, while the strongest airline, UAL, is up just barely 2%. The DOW and the SP500 are up largely because of just the AI and related semiconductor stocks.

On the Russel 2000, there’s more broadly positive price movement. The second tier defense contractors are doing well. When the Russel 2000 does well, it is a proxy for investors being more willing to take risk. In the sense that ending the shutdown is positive for the economy, taking on more risk through AI and smaller companies follows. With the gross dysfunction abated, it is more likely companies will make money. But the undercurrents of self destruction over providing health care to people is still there. One party is willing to burn it all down, including intentionally withholding food assistance to their base. They are willing to ignore their roll in checking even illegal acts. I don’t know if my outlook on the future is as sanguine as the other investors stepping up to shoulder more risk.

I feel like we’ve lost our ability to discern what is good and bad. All we know to do is calculate which option gives us more money. What you build is not important. Who you defraud is not important. What you destroy is not important. The dystopia you are creating is not important. And with enough money you can buy a legacy. All that matters is making as much money as possible. The invisible hand free of moral and ethical constraints. Even democracy and the constitution fall by the wayside if there is money to be made. Greed is not just elevated to ‘good,’ along with other good values. Greed is the only thing that matters.

Totalitarianism Is an Unneeded Expense

I covered nationalism and authoritarianism and why I think the latter is the serious issue. While you can’t have blood and soil politics without nationalism, in it’s weak form it isn’t a problem. Then I covered authoritarianism and that there is no acceptable level of authoritarianism. And why you can have authoritarianism even when the people choose it. We come to the third, but not to last, leg of the dictatorship table. Unlike a three-legged stool, dictatorships have probably four legs, maybe five, or even six legs. It takes a lot of work to dislodge the autocrat and the peoples’ thirst for an autocrat. People have a craving for order and strange fetishes a democracy will never really satisfy. Totalitarianism is just another leg. One that may not be critical in the modern age.

Total control has largely fallen out of favor. The Nazis, but more so the Soviets, really brought it home. (I will use the term Soviets broadly, encompassing the USSR and allied regimes, like East Germany, Hungary, Romania, or Yugoslavia). A totalitarian state is one where the totality of civic, artistic, and professional life falls under sway of the autocrat. There is no other party. There is no protest. There are no ‘liberal’ cities in opposition. There are no books sold at the store that are not approved. There are no films shown, records played, or news broadcast that isn’t approved by the state. In the Soviet period, especially in the 1930’s to the 1950s, possessing contraband items, expressing contraband ideas, or just running afoul of an apparatchik who desired your apartment could earn you a stint in a slave labor colony.

Modern dictatorships have not picked up the extreme totalitarian mantle. China is a hold-over from the old Soviet model, but even they realize they can’t have a modern society and truly perfect control. They’ve left that to the starving North Koreans. Which is why they allow a limited form of protest and discussion. Within narrow bounds you can make specific points, but no other power centers are permitted. Other dictators, like Orban, Erodgan, or Putin, have differing degrees of social and political control. Russia maintains a tighter control over its people than Turkey or Hungary, but they all have limits on expression and do not tolerate any challenge to their authority.

Autocrats are pulled toward totalitarian control. Dictators can’t help themselves. In little and big ways, their need to control manifests itself. Why has Trump injected himself into the Kennedy Center? Why does he threaten entertainers with investigations or arrest? Why does he use the FCC to intimidate news outlets? And also a late night comic by going after his parent company? Part of it is ego. Part of it is legitimacy with his own base of popular support. No more garish displays of love and acceptance, just proper entertainment like eulogies to fallen internet trolls and odes to the their gold-plated tin god. Part of it is calculated to discourage dissent, intimidate his opposition, and stifle debate. But the need to totally control is just is their insatiable desire for power.

The modern dictator slowly tightens the totalitarian noose, but never pulls it hard enough to completely choke the opposition. This ‘kindness’ accomplishes does two ends. First, it allows the dictator the fig-leaf of not being a dictator. How can we say someone is a dictator if there are still media outlets to oppose them? They’re not a dictator, they’re just the popular choice. When they go after a news outlet or nascent party, it’s over some fraud or a dense legal issue around permits. Because one or two independent sources still exist, other closures were obviously not for political reasons. It provides a handsome veneer over the rotten state of affairs. It allows their apologists to claim it is not a dictatorship or autocracy because control is not total.

Second it reduces the cost of staying in power. Those networks of informants, jails, collecting data, and surveilling cost resources. There is a degree to which the population naturally policies itself, if the regime has a degree of legitimacy. A true believer will rat out the person they see as a traitor or a threat. We like being cozy, safe, right, and righteous. For them, throwing someone in the gulag is for a better society is its own sick reward. Then there are those that can be cheaply coaxed into cooperation. Rat on your neighbor and you’ll be promoted to a better job. At the end of the day it still requires a network of informants, dossiers, and piles of “evidence.” Even in the AI age, that is not cheap. An algorithm might select, but cannot arrest, jail, or torture someone. That requires a paid human being in a jail that must be maintained. By some estimates, the cost of the internal security in Russia exceeded the cost of the military before the war.

It is impossible to put a minder in every home. In the Soviet era “samizdat” circulated even in the darkest days. These are well-worn, dog eared, hand-made, hand-copied, and hand-circulated books, essays, stories, works of art, and news that the Soviet boot heel could not smother. Despite the blaring of propaganda from radio, film, television, and even the PA system in the subway, it was impossible to snuff out the minds of millions of people. People developed the skill of being outwardly compliant but inwardly rebellious. An unseen mass that just needed a spark to set them off. And to the regime, these dangerous people were everywhere. The regime knew this and spent untold efforts to eradicate traces of “foreign” influence. They did so in a brutal and frightening campaign of terrorizing its own population. In the Stalinist peak, people were simply plucked off the street or out of their homes. Accused of some crime or another, it didn’t matter, they were headed to the gulag or a drunken firing squad.

The parallels in the US are obvious. We’ve seen the true believers reach out to quickly remove books form libraries and schools. The fantasies some have of their political opponents arrested, en-masse, are beyond troubling. An administration targeting public opposition with threats of investigation or being charged with the thinnest of crimes. Violently abducting immigrants, and not being too concerned if any citizens who are opposed are also arrested and roughed up. Threatening news outlets with law-suits or revoking press access because they made the dear leader unhappy. Or the sycophancy on display during public events. Or working with police to use excessive force at every opportunity on protesters. Or even taking over the reigns of culture at the Kennedy Center. If you don’t see it, you are pathetically and hopeless ignorant or are a willing participant who won’t admit to it.

A degree of social control is part of the picture, but it is no longer total. We will be allowed some degree of opposition. California exists as a foil to the goodness of the autocrat and his worshipers. A hell-hole of crime and liberal values that the core supporters can contrast to their own cozy sense of safety. The dictator doesn’t need to disappear California politicians from the street. It is enough to force his presence into their civic life. Soldiers standing around a Humvee in the middle of a park. The dictator keeps the protests in check by making it known accusation of excessive force are of no concern. South Park, until it becomes too much of a threat to the profits of its owners, can continue to make essentially obscene mockery of the dictator. The blogs and the “liberal” social networks can continue to exist. As long as it doesn’t actually threaten the hold on power, costly totality is not necessary.

Authoritarians Are Toxic

My previous post touched on nationalism. The weakest leg of the “fascism” or “Nazism” stool. My statement that those labels are grossly overused still stands. The second leg is authoritarianism. What most people decry as “fascism” or “Nazism” bears little resemblance to the ideas and ideology of either the Italian or Germany movements. But both those movements were deeply authoritarian. Authoritarians can have different excuses as to why they need power, and National Socialism or Fascism were movements appealing to Germans and Italians, respectively. Unlike nationalism, there’s no healthy level, or positive light, for authoritarianism. Authoritarians subvert the law, custom, and social order to enforce their will, and will do so with the full violence of the state. And once in power, the goal of an authoritarian is to remain in power. In many autocracies, they are willing to stack their citizens dead bodies like cord wood before losing power.

At what point is a country authoritarian? Is Singapore, with its strict laws and harsh punishments authoritarian? Or is Saudi Arabia authoritarian? Is a benevolent dictator or good king (about as real as unicorns and dragons), an authoritarian? Some believe one man’s authoritarian is another man’s hero. For example, a college president decides to send a message by suspending the rules and expelling anyone accused of sexual assault. A no-tolerance approach can be lauded as a positive step toward finally treating sexual assault seriously. But if we stop and think about it, authoritarians are never heroes. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we will see that we will have blind spots regarding the abuse of authority that we are willing to tolerate. Why is our relationship to authoritarianism so complex?

Prior to the 17th or 18th centuries there is largely no concept of modern authoritarianism. Many countries had monarchs and they were sometimes checked by a parliament or council. The average 18th century Russian would not have the lexicon or frame to discuss authoritarianism. They might say a policy is harsh, unfair, or unjust. But the idea that the government was constrained in any way would be alien. You might have more luck with the average Brit or American, who had varying levels of suffrage and civil rights. It isn’t until you get to the late 19th and 20th centuries that the notion of authoritarianism is a widely accept concept.

What changed is the belief that we have rights, even when those rights are in conflict with the state. In some cases these rights are simple and direct, for example, we don’t believe the state can imprison you, for no reason, and as long as it wants. In many countries the right to a trial is explicitly enumerated, there are legal precedents enshrining that right, and popular opinion that creates a politics that secures that right. In the US, the Constitution enumerates the right, the body of precedent protects that right, and the expectation of that right by the people checks the local, state, or Federal authority. That doesn’t mean a sheriff will never violate the law. But consequences ranging from criminal indictment to losing their next election have been real. This is an improvement over almost all of human history. But this is a recent 20th century concept for most of the world.

The authoritarian believes that just the authority of the state, or the needs of favored groups, is sufficient to set aside your rights. The college president that sets aside the due process to expel students accused of sexual assault is behaving as an authoritarian. The police officer that ignores a white supremacist carrying a gun at a protest, but arrests a black counter-protester with a gun, is an authoritarian. They are operating outside the law, and either granting special rights to a group they like or taking rights away from another. As citizens we have to understand we are not free of authoritarian tendencies. We all have a special group, special rights, or cases we think are too important to be left to anachronistic or ineffective laws.

If one sheriff arbitrarily abuses their authority, the country itself is not authoritarian. It is a continuum and we may never visit the extremes. As long as there are consequences for acting as an authoritarian, I would argue the country is the opposite of authoritarian. Someone who takes away the rights of people and then faces prosecution or loses their office, is evidence of a healthy response. But excusing or pardoning their behavior is the start of an authoritarian slide. When enough of the electorate indulges their authoritarian leanings, we slide away from a healthy democracy. Years ago an Arizona sheriff made headlines by violating the rights of people he arrested, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of some of his prisoners. When people like Joe Arpaio in Arizona find broad support, that is a canary.

When people no longer see authoritarians as dangerous, the political will to hold authoritarians accountable falls away. A large portion of the electorate is willing to punish their representatives at the primary ballot box, should they challenge the current administration. The Republican party’s lack of will to challenge unconstitutional behaviors by the administration is a reflection of an electoral reality. They are often followers more than leaders. Their willingness to approve judges and appointees that are clearly unqualified authoritarians is part of the peoples’ slide away from rule of law. Had it been imposed on a healthy population, there would have been a sudden backlash. A healthy population would think any destruction of rights could be applied against them. I would argue we are far from a healthy polity.

Authoritarians will always probe the limits of what is acceptable. They need to go just over the line, but not far enough to create a popular reaction that removes them from power. The ability to jail journalists or arrest people for non-violent political speech does not happen on the first day. It’s only when the window of public opinion has been moved to the point where that arrest is just over the line. And maybe the next time it isn’t just an arrest for speech, it’s to root out their “collaborators.” The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy in this case. It is part of the plan. To sudden a change too quickly creates problems for them. A steady slope rather than big steps is how the movement toward dictatorial rule is facilitated. It is the plan that has been repeated in many “backsliding” countries to date.

Authoritarians often accelerate their concentration of power by declaring emergencies. Many have the mistaken belief that democracy is only for peace time. They believe that during a crisis, a strong, dictatorial leader is needed. We consume plenty of entertainment where a ‘hero’ has to do illegal things, break the rules, or act without authority because of the emergency. The autocrat plays on this belief by bringing common social and economic problems forward as emergencies. Any excuse is valid to declare an emergency. The US courts have so far failed to deter the administration by deferring to the administration on whether an emergency exists. Is there a crime or immigration emergency that requires deploying troops to US cities? The learned judges in the US can’t say and will just take the administration’s word. Emergency measures are core to the dictator template. Whether it’s Turkey, Hungary, or Russia, emergency measures that strain any surviving laws and limits on power are constantly invoked.

Once the line is crossed, it becomes the new normal. Was it crossed? Yes. Was it legal? No, but it happened. Now on to the next distraction. Firing independent agency heads like the FCC, countering 90 plus years of precedent is dry, boring, and old news. That has been normalized. The window has been moved. The courts have been shaped. A plurality of the public supports it, but most are barely aware. Even the “liberal” press finds itself writing about the upside of troop deployments into cities to address a non-existent emergency. The mass firings of federal workers, and the data of those agencies turned over to the regime’s illegally appointed operatives, has now become old news. We rarely talk about our data. I sound like a broken record, still harping on some settled matter, like the lunatic at the bar screaming about a red card in a football match ten world cups ago. The very fact we have moved on from these issues shows how we can be lead down the road to dictatorship. The new “red lines” to cross have been moved so far that it’s sometimes hard to understand what will preserve the American rule of law and our basic rights.

One question, on the technical matter of the definition I stated above, does authoritarianism exist when legal means are used to empower authoritarians? Is a democratically elected authoritarian really an authoritarian? The answer is yes, in the same way we saw Italy, Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, Cuba, the USSR, etc. as authoritarian. The idea of “if that’s what the people want” is not a new “loophole”. I remember many on the left excusing communist countries as non authoritarian because there was a degree of consent by the population. That’s not a good argument. That form of apology ignores the violence and coercion used to shape that public will. Not willing to get your teeth kicked out over something you hate does not mean you consent. It doesn’t stand up to credulity, to say that North Korea is not authoritarian, even if most North Koreans like the regime.

States where authoritarians are cemented into power through legal means are still authoritarian. That these right exist is part of the modern mind and transcends specific situations. While it might not have been part of the 15th century mind, it is definitely part of the 21st century mind. The modern mind sees a right as being taken away, even if it is taken away through a legal process. Ideas like the equality of the sexes, racial minorities, or religious minorities before the law, and in all meaningful matters, is part of the modern mind. It might not be organically part of the a brain structure, the same way vision is part of our brain, but it is part of our mind. Even if the constitution of the United States is legally amended to provide the current administration with unchecked authority, that does not mean we would lose the notion of those rights.

Just as these ideas were created in the mind, they can be suppressed. Just as we have suppressed ideas from our past. Today’s kids are growing up in an era where adults have normalized the taking of rights. When they grow up, they may see this as normal. The change might take more than one generation, but I can imagine a world where teachers teach the fascist notion that the elected president should be supported in every way by good citizens. That society only moves forward if all members as bound together in the same struggle. And that blind obedience is what is expected. The popular will has been expressed and, like the sticks in the fasces, we must create an unbreakable whole. That was the road Italy was on in the 1920s. There’s plenty of polling to indicate upwards of around 70-80 million voting Americans are fine with this.

It is possible to have a degree of national love or national pride that is not pathalogical. However, there is almost no degree of authoritarianism that is healthy. How to deal with it is difficult. What happens after the current crisis, should the Democrats come to power? The next administration will find itself with a mess. Either it begins mass firings of the incompetent ideologues of the previous regime or they live with a mass of political saboteurs, leaking information and subverting policy. Democrats have based their legitimacy on opposing the illegal firing of staff. The are not likely to support mass firings. What do you do about senior military leaders that are ideologically opposed to the administration and push back on any order? Traditionally the military has avoided partisan politics, but the administration is pushing that taboo. And what happens when the courts find a 6-3 or 5-4 majorities to restrain the new administration, using the veneer of re-establishing old norms for brazenly political decisions?

The Republicans won’t lose their backers should they lose power. They will make the situation difficult for the new administration in a way the Democrats have failed to do for this administration. Part of which is a myopia that blinds them to the truth that adhering to laws in a lawless country can make little sense. The Republicans managed to attempt an insurrection in the way Democrats will not be able to do. There’s an unspoken asymmetry many pretend does not exist. The Republicans understand this and realize they can act with impunity because they won’t be subject to the same lack of norms. They learned this under the tutelage of Mitch McConnell, who realized he could cross norms and lie to the face of Democrats and not fear any consequences. They would negotiate with him in good faith, no matter how much bad faith he exhibited.

That’s the good scenario, where the party that facilitated authoritarian control of the government is rejected. The dark scenario is that they are not rejected. Or the power is ensconced in such a way that makes action by the other party virtually impossible. In which case any change in power becomes a brief respite between lurches toward a president that is, in effect, a 10th century king. Don’t the Americans have a ‘throw out the bums’ mentality that brings new people into power? Two simple statistics come to mind that make this feel different. About 79 million Americans voted for Donald Trump and around 90% do not regret their vote. I find absurd the idea that four years was enough to create a cultural amnesia about what Trump was and what he tried to do the first time. A large plurality has chosen to go down this path and does not want to change.

Beyond the abstract notion that rights are taken away, what is the problem? We are seeing it play out in small ways. When the authoritarian comes to power, corruption follows. Being in a position to stop business deals over politics becomes blocking business deals until you also get a ‘taste’ of the deal. The president asking for just under a quarter of a billion dollars for being prosecuted by the justice department may be a bridge too far, but giving his supporters sweetheart deals for private prisons, defense contracts, or government office space may not be. Ignoring insider trading by his supporters, assuming they contribute appropriately, will erode the quality and efficiency of the markets. We see a back-room channel through his crypto coins which are bribery behind a threadbare fig-leaf. Countries with this kind of corruption and authoritarianism have a non-abstract problem of dismal economic growth.

But that’s a feature. As it becomes harder to make money, and supporting the authoritarian is a way to make money, the authoritarian bakes in a base of support. It becomes easier to teach your kid to show up at the right rallies, donate to the right causes, and make the right friends than it is to teach abstract notions of rights. This ensures the poison spreads to the next generation. You can’t eat democracy, as newly liberated Russians would tell me. And that system of patronage helps the authoritarian retain power. The economic vassals formed through corruption have a natural interest in maintaining the status quo. Corruption may feed on self interest, but it is a key tool to retain power. We find ourselves with a vindictive FCC that can approve or deny deals for media companies. They allow the owners of compliant media companies to make lucrative deals. Had the president just ordered the Secret Service to arrest Jimmy Kimmel, there would have been a backlash. But now he has economic vassals that will help control the narrative for their own economic benefit.

In short, I don’t believe this is just part of the pendulum, or we’ve seen this before and come back from it. In an age of infinite access to information, enough of the people are willing to turn away from facts, reality, and their history to support an authoritarian. We can’t claim they were just simple pioneers, manipulated by fear of attacks by first Nations peoples. Or there was no education system to teach them basic civics. Or that books were expensive, and hard to come by, if they were literate at all. They believe setting aside our rights is acceptable. Or more correctly, they believe setting aside other peoples’ rights is acceptable. This is the freedom for my religion only crowd. Or maybe they derive pleasure to see people they don’t like hurt. There is a variety of motives, but I don’t see their support waning. They are fine seeing the law made into a cudgel of control. When they can’t deploy it as a weapon, they ignore it.

As I’ve said, we need to be honest with ourselves. There are things that irritate us to the point we might support suspending the law and the normal customs and just be rid of it. I would like to see militia leaders arrested and jailed. I would also like to see the incompetent, servile, political hacks in the bureaucracy drummed in the next administration. Even if it means mass firings at ICE. I would love to see the companies that benefit by supporting the autocrat (and may be ideologically aligned) be split apart. But either I am an authoritarian or I am one who believes in our rights. I can’t normalize what they do and I can’t just ignore the reality of what they leave behind. And that is why they are toxic. Because they pollute the water so that even if they lose power, it is befouled for whoever follows.

Nationalism is Not Fascism

While some things follow a disturbing parallel to the rise of the German National Socialists in the 1930s, I don’t think fascism or Nazi are quite the right labels. First, it’s been diluted to the point of uselessness. The ‘fascist’ HOA doesn’t like the rose bush I planted. The fascist coffee shop won’t give me a plastic straw. The Nazis on the county board made my grocery store charge me $0.05 per plastic bag. And so on. The problem is that the better labels are less sexy. They’re less evocative of righteous resistance.

Let’s start with nationalism, not as the most troubling aspect, but because it’s actually the least problematic label, and also falling to irrelevancy. During the Olympics, all the people who never follow any of the sports are suddenly cheering for their national team. Send someone abroad and they are almost guaranteed to chafe at some local law, regulation, or custom almost all in the host country find more than reasonable.

Most people forget that 200 years ago, there was no Italy (1861) and there was no Germany (1870). When the Italian fascists came to power, it was about 60 years after Italian unification. And the same for Germany. It was a sense of national self, stewing in the 1800s, that made those nationals possible. By contrast the French nation came to be in the 17th century. And prior to that most people saw themselves as Burgundian or Provencal and not French, except by language. And we are currently seeing resurgence of Welsh and Scottish nationalism in the UK, that seemed to be waning during the end of the 20th century, as the a series of governments seem to continuously stumble.

There are various reasons the nation state came to exist. One is industrialization. Having broader national boundaries provides economic and developmental benefits. It’s hard to run a rail road between two major cities if it is subject to the regulations of a series of principalities. Defense against invasion, trade regulation, and social services like education (which were entering the remit of governments) would be easier at a broader, national level. A love of being French, Italian, German, or British, even if you had a different dialect and diet from other parts of the nation, was a necessary ingredient to building the modern nation state.

Nationalism in itself is not an evil. Americans are right to admire things about their country, such as the entrepreneurial spirit, independence, belief in fundamental equality, and the idea that legitimacy comes from the people, not the church or a blood line. Where nationalism sours is in its utility as a trowel to shape an enemy. The golem could be in the form of immigrants, it could be racial, rumored foreign influence, or even the insufficiently nationalistic. It’s one thing to cheer your team at the World Cup, and it’s another round people up in mass arrests. Almost always this enemy isn’t an actual enemy, but just different and weak enough to attack with impunity. For this reason, we need to be aware of the dark and violent ends to which nationalism may be employed. Appeals to nationalism are a warning sign of dark motives.

Does that mean we rid ourselves of nationalism? An absence of nationalism is like an absence of ego. Someone completely without ego is kind of non-functional. And while the death of the self is a goal of meditation, you won’t last long in any society if you aren’t willing to assert your own needs and desires. Would you just let anyone cut in line in front of you, because you aren’t any more special than anyone else (including your beliefs about fairness and queuing)? Maybe hope that someone else would stick up for you? A nation with no nationalism, no sense of self, no belief in their distinctiveness, or that they contribute, won’t be a nation for long. Would you let the Russians just take over because you don’t believe your nation brings anything worth preserving to the world stage?

And while I don’t believe faceless bureaucrats in Brussels see the eradication of all nationalism as their goal, it does sometimes feel that way. That you could live in one Ikea decorated apartment in a major city, existing on a diet of kabobs, Thai, and curry, and move to another city’s Ikea decorated apartment with the same cuisines, without noticing you are in a new country, appears to be their ideal. Over time a national identity can expand in smaller and larger ways. It’s hard to imagine Germany without the Donner sandwich. In the span of a person’s life, the change may need to be moderated. Take the German who says they only like spicy, foreign food out of Germany for a year and they’ll be eating Spätzel the day after their flight lands. I was abroad for a year and developed a craving for KFC. I normally go years without eating KFC.

Like most normal people with a sense of self, most people have a sense of their national identity. Maybe they aren’t educated on all the fine points and interpretations of their nations’ sordid pasts, but come unification day, liberation day, constitution day or whatever, they wave a flag and happily watch a parade. They are proud of their distinctive contributions their scientists, poets, composers, philosophers, artists, or explorers made to shape the world. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t also acknowledge that contribution. They are part of that national self and often believe, in some small part, they contribute to a nation’s goodness. It is a part (to a lesser or greater degree) of who they are.

If you try to take that away, there are many who will react badly. You are denying them a sense of themselves. When you attack someone’s self, who they are, they will almost always take it as a deep, personal attack. An attack on their own existence, or right to exist. When we criticize any sense of empathy with “nationalist” claims because of where those ideas could lead, we forget maybe a majority of the country shares parts of that empathy. They can remember where they used to get decent fish and chips and it’s now a cell phone repair store. It’s next to the other cell phone repair store that used to sell pies. (Food, especially, is tied to national identity and a sense of self). No one seems to ever go in and out of those shops, except the young men loitering there all day. And while they also find the skinheads at protests revolting, they also see neighbors that share their concerns. While they aren’t passionate enough about pies and chips to march, they do understand the loss of part of their own identity.

One way to look at why fascism and not communism came to power in Germany after World War I is that Communism was internationalist. This is also why it made sense in Russia, a multi-ethnic empire. Germans were happy to feel German pride, as that was the path to unification. Italians were happy to feel Italian pride, and their basis for unification. While some of the fascist and Nazi leaders got their start in workers movements or self-declared soviets, they were never part of an international brotherhood of the proletariat. They were the German proletariat and the Italian proletariat. They felt betrayed by the forces of commerce and capitalism that put money, lucre, ahead of the Italian and German national interests. The takeover of industry by the state, to bend it to the needs of the international proletariat, is abstract. To make the economy and society more fair to Germans and Italians is more concrete.

This is the landscape we inhabit. A left that wants to actively minimize national distinction. This is not new and has been a feature of the far left from before World War I. A far right that is capitalizing on the push back as policies on immigration bring in new cultures. This is not new and has been a feature of the far right since before World War I. The closing of a German Christmas market is seen by one side as a sign of enlightenment by giving others a break from cultural imperialism, and by the other as evidence the national character (and by extension the individual’s self) is being killed. The sad truth is the vendors made so little money it was hardly worth the effort. But the “left infected” main stream press minimizes it, while the “far right” protesters over state it. And neither bothered shopping at the market.

And just like railroads were the kind of problem that made a nation more attractive than a string of independent duchies, more problems are regional. Easy commerce between Rotterdam and Prague means drugs, guns, and trafficked people can move easily between those same cities. Dutch police have to work with German police and German police have to work with Czech police. Your country could be picked off by the Russians, or you can create a defense pact with other countries. You could depend on your own electrical generation, or you can tie to a larger grid with better economies of scale. And so on. This does mean ceding local sovereignty to regional bodies, with the EU probably being ahead of the game. And this does mean you need to see yourself as part of a larger whole and not just German, Czech or Dutch.

As Europe ages, its relatively high wages will attract people to live and work there, providing much needed labor. The answer would be for Europeans to make more Europeans, but they seem to be unable to bring birth rates to anywhere near replacement rates. At this rate their adult populations will need to spend an inordinate percentage of their work-force on caring for the large, elderly populations. Without workers from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, the demographics for Western Europe are not in line with much economic growth. And while some come to Europe for political freedom denied to them in their homelands, others are just coming to work. They are also from societies where membership is tribal and by blood. They don’t expect to become German, French, or Italian any more than they expect to grow wings. They want their local food, local dress, and local habits. Of course this means displacing some of their host country’s food and habits in the process to create these enclaves.

While Europe is the place where these changes are most easily seen, the trends are present in highly developed parts of North America and in Asia. The native birth rate in the US is not as bad as most in Europe, but below replacement. And the Koreans and Japanese wish their birth rates were as high as Europe’s. And the reaction in America and Asia to immigration being now worse than Europe’s. With the United States engaging in a virtual pogrom and the continued, quiet racism of Japan and Korea preferring robots over non-Koreans and non-Japanese. Even in the developed parts of China and India, the birth rates are dropping well below replacement. And the same needs for regional cooperation and governance are precipitating a shared notion of defense amongst historical enemies in Asia, while the US is choosing the path of least cooperation.

Center-left politicians have been failing and threading the needle on nationalism and have elected to throw a lot of baby out with the bath water. They have bent over backwards to make themselves bland and European, or bland an American, to not antagonize the ethnic minorities residing in their countries, and to avoid the horrific excesses of their recent past. They apologize profusely, taking part in cringe-inducing rituals such as land acknowledgements. They have ceded the ground on nationalism to the right. With nationalism itself considered the providence of those with terrible ideas about race and tolerance. And as more “regular” people see more change, more foreign enclaves, more cringey prostrations, that attack their sense of self, the more fertile ground the right has found.

I’m receptive to taking an unflinching eye to one’s past, but a portion of the left wants to reduce any historical accomplishment to just ‘theft.’ And that the US and Europe especially should have nothing to say on the matter. But if we apply the same logic to the past, there is almost no region that hasn’t, at some point, waged near genocidal war on another. Whether it’s the mongol invaders, the Huns, the Egyptians, Muslim armies across parts of North Africa and Europe, or even the Africans who migrated into Europe, displacing the Neanderthals. We are now reconstructing the rich spiritual tradition those Neanderthal tribes might have had. They were displaced by new arrivals from a foreign land, and made extinct. And while not Homo Sapiens-Sapiens, the Neanderthals were close enough to breed with the new arrivals. The difference with the present is we have pictures, documentation, and detailed stories. While all we have from the past are the barest of records and trinkets dug from the ground.

What should those politicians do, going forward? How do we stop this slide to an authoritarian right that seems to be infecting Asian, American, and European politics? At the very least, your desire for a better life (as problems and opportunities are more likely regional than just national) depends on constructing a solution to this problem. The first is losing the seemingly visceral reaction against nationalism. It’s important to understand you are proud and happy to be of your nation. And not follow that sentence with a ‘but’ to elaborate or qualify what you mean. Quite a few successful politicians on the left already do this but not emphatically enough. Second, you have to define a vision of nationalism that is conducive to a better future. For America, that nationalism should be based on ideas in the constitution and declaration of independence. They’re good ideas. They just need to be implemented more broadly.

Third, there needs to be a frank conversation on immigration. It can’t be ‘this is what you need to accept, otherwise you are a bigot.’ It must be about a future as Germans, Italians, or Americans, and how that future involves new citizens. That immigration is part of the story of economic growth. But growth as a stronger Italy, Germany, America, etc. It should never be along the lines of we need to become a more diverse, more multi-ethnic, and therefore must sacrifice our national identity to make room for other identities.

And that conversation can’t just be with the native population. It must be with the immigrant population as well. Parts of Europe are already starting this process, by making sure that (men especially) understand that women are truly free. Not covered up to be free from being ogled by men, but free to dress as they chose, be with whom they chose, and become educated as they choose. And that immigrants will send their children to non-segregated schools to learn the local language, local customs, and a reasonable indoctrination as good citizens. Assimilation need not be the eradication of their cultural heritage, but they should understand they need to become good citizens in the host country, not dwellers in alien enclaves. And if they aren’t there to become good citizens, there will be no place for them. Otherwise, in the future, there might not be room for those who actually do want to be good citizens.

Finally, the center left needs to deliver. If the perceived choice is between no change and immigration changing the character of your country, or no change and no immigration, you might choose no immigration. After all, you might still be on a slow, downward slide, but at least you’ll ‘have your country.’ More layers of bureaucracy are not necessarily the solution. More committees to make more reports to be further vetted by other committees to build a single public restroom in a park is not good government. It is bad government. Not addressing the needs of the people because too many layers exist make sure all possible concerns are addressed is terrible government. At some point just do things. Even if imperfect, something accomplished beyond re-paving the same roads legitimizes your power.

Finally, if you still believe nationalism is bad and there’s no good way to court it, I’ll leave you with the example of the Ukrainians. They are countering Russian aggression because of the belief their nation, their national identity, their families, their land, and their freedom to lives as the choose are worth fighting for. It is much cheaper to live as a vassal state to Russia, like Belarus or what Hungary might prefer. It is also easier to just emigrate abroad than live in the shadow of Russian aggression. Yet they continue to resist, paying a price few of us understand, to live as they choose. Nationalism is what is helping to keep them going and to help keep them free.

[One comment was that maybe I meant patriotism instead of nationalism. That’s arguable except that I would argue patriotism can’t exist without a state or cause. Someone could be a German nationalist and have a sense of pride or love for German culture, accomplishments, food, or art in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but only be a Swiss patriot. French partisans, during World War II, were patriots, allied to the French government in exile. But some French felt they were patriots volunteering for the Charlemange SS Divsion. Even though their patriotic ideals were different, they were both likely French nationalists. Native Americans did their ‘patriotic’ duty, volunteering to serve in the US armed forces, but are probably not American nationalists, in the commonly accepted sense of the term. In fact, America is the example of a country with patriots who also love in addition to the one where they reside and may have served in the armed forces.]

I wish I was like you/easily amused

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