Theories Aren't Certainties
A welcome and some meta commentary
Hello, hello. A quick note of welcome to the over 1,000 new subscribers who signed up in the last month. I have to admit to being a bit astonished that The Dead Economy Theory took off the way it did—well over 100k reads, front page of Hacker News, links from prominent folks on the far right and far left, lots of hate mail, the works.
Any sane person who desires to go viral hasn’t gone viral before.
The past several weeks have been a bit much. If you’ve left a comment or messaged me without a response: I’m sorry. I’m just a guy, and I have a toddler, a law firm to run, and several novels to write. I’ll try to get back to you. When I wrote The Dead Economy Theory, my publication had about 350 subscribers, and I knew many of them. I was writing for friends and colleagues; there’s some shorthand in it, there are some inside jokes (the terrible AI slop headers), and it’s a little looser than I would have written it had I known it would break containment.
With that said, I am amused by the number of people who took issue with the piece because they assumed I was predicting the future with some kind of gnomic certainty. Folks: I’m just connecting some dots. None of this is prescriptive, just diagnostic. This is why I wrote the follow-up piece, which refused a detailed plan to avoid the worst-case scenario. (It’s also, to my mind, a much better piece, but it’s always the case that the ones you toss off get the attention, innit?)
None of the individual elements of The Dead Economy Theory are new. As one fellow cheekily noted, it’s a pot-luck of all the doomerism narratives in one article. I don’t know that I quite agree with that assessment, but it’s not an unfair summation. Mostly, the piece was an attempt to coalesce some half-formed thoughts that had been banging around my head, to pull together threads that can be read as a single rope. There’s been a lot of talk of a polycrisis lately, and part of what I’m seeing—and this is something lawyers are trained to do and folks with ADHD do naturally—is how seemingly disparate pieces fit into a larger story.
I could be wrong.
It may well be the case that I’m misreading what’s happening. It may be the case that I’ve misread a key thread in the story I told that undercuts the rest. Or it may be the case that I’ve missed something entirely that alters the veracity of the argument made in the piece. I find myself to be wrong about things frequently, and update my thinking based on that new evidence.
I did the foolish thing and read basically all of it. (Easy to do when there are ten comments; masochism when there are 200.) Most of the pushback came in two flavors. The first: people who told me, with total confidence, exactly how the future goes. That I should “learn to love the bomb,” that it’s “fear porn,” that I’m “gobsmacking[ly]” unable to tell purpose from work, or that “you’re dead in less than 10 decades, better to roll the dice.” Every one of them certain about the future in the same breath they accused me of pretending to know it.
The second: finding one sentence, declaring it the keystone, and dancing once it’s pried loose. One reader announced I’d “made serious factual errors that undermine the credibility of the whole piece,” then a few replies later allowed that the offending claim was “not a load bearing pillar” and that I “could delete it and the rest of the essay would continue to stand.”
What I’ll say for the critics who actually argued, the Brian Villanuevas and the Ebenezers who pushed hard and in good faith: those exchanges were the best part of all this. They gave ground, got some back, and we both left smarter. That’s the conversation I wanted. I am more informed because of it.
With all that being said, The Dead Economy Theory is a little different from the normal course here. If you signed up to get a steady dose of AI talk, I’m afraid you might find what’s on offer wanting. You’ll find plenty of discussions about literature (and the novels that I’m writing), music, law, some reluctant political pieces, and reflections on parenting. I’ve separated out these topics into different sections within The Palimpsest, and you can choose which to subscribe to, if you don’t want to subscribe to all of them. Here are the sections:
Bitter Buffaloes—creative nonfiction and general cultural writing
The Venal Times—politics and law
On the Record—music
Sonder Union—my on-again-off-again podcast
are belong to us—the new AI section I’m standing up now
It’s easy to choose which verticals you want:
Go to substack.com/settings (or click your photo in the top right of any Substack page and choose Settings).
Under Subscriptions, click The Palimpsest.
Toggle each section on or off. A gray toggle means you won’t receive that one. Keep whatever you like, switch off the rest.
One heads-up: subscribing signs you up for every section by default, so if you only want a few, this is where you trim.
I really appreciate every one of you who’ve signed up for this ride. I won’t promise you will like everything I send you, but I will promise that I won’t send anything I wouldn’t want to receive.
Please feel free to reach out anytime.
“Anybody who wants to go viral has never gone viral.”
-Owen McGrann
I’ve just read both previous pieces and enjoyed them.
The Inquisitor post made me think of the Amish and the deliberate rejection of modern conveniences that they deem corrosive. While I don’t agree on all counts, the price of gas and my most recent auto repair bill suggests that they might have a point.
One corollary to your point on “deaths of despair” in the Dead Economy post: I think we don’t fully grasp the extent to which vice is abetted, and even encouraged, by modern technology. The proliferation of “prediction markets” and sports-betting apps is a good example. We also see reports of the deleterious effects of omnipresent…adult content, shall we say.
My inner conspiracy theorist sees a deliberate, top-down effort to impose decadence and degeneracy. Considering the ever-more-grotesque revelations about the Epstein class, it feels less like a theory all the time.