The Virtual World Includes Multitudes ... of realities

The virtual world brought with it millions of parallel experiences. It didn’t just expand our access to information - it partitioned our lives.

One person is lost in Dungeons & Dragons, another in Friends reruns, another defines their reality through three friends - each of whom sees the group differently. Another orbits a band, a Twitch stream, a Reddit thread, a symphony.

Once upon a time, America was divided into 13 colonies, later 50 states. Now, in the age of virtual immersion, the United States is divided into 335 million personal realities - each fed by its own feed, its own curated symbols, memories, and narratives.

In this world, the idea that one political ideology - left, right, libertarian, socialist, populist - can command, convince, or unify more than a sliver of these realities seems less like ambition and more like delusion.

At best, a political ideology today can annoy a majority.
Commanding consensus? That’s not just unlikely - it’s based on an outdated map of a country that no longer exists in one place at one time. Jefferson's world had borders. This world does not.

The Deceit of the Internet and the Honesty of the Library

One of the ways a library was more honest than the internet is that it showed you the truth up front: rows and rows of shelves, a vast sprawl of knowledge that made it clear you could never consume it all. You knew your limits. So you focused on the book in front of you.

The internet, by contrast, only shows you a screenful at a time, and in doing so creates a subtle illusion: that infinite knowledge is within reach, just a few more clicks away. So we scroll. And scroll. Deluded by the tidy edges of our screens, we think we’re almost there - almost caught up - while the sprawl behind those edges grows exponentially.

The library was humble. The internet is seductive.

The library told you: this is more than you can ever master - so choose wisely, and dig deep.
The internet whispers: you’re almost done - just one more link, one more scroll, one more tab.

We are drowning in an ocean of information disguised as a mirage, a manageable pool. And unless we learn to recognize the shore—real conversations, deliberate thinking, quiet presence - we risk losing ourselves in the illusion of knowing, without ever truly understanding.

The Politics of Theater and Democracy's Intermission

The information economy is about getting attention and that is mostly about theater. The Greeks invented democracy and theater about 2,500 years ago and after 250 years we Americans have apparently decided we can only choose one.

Schrödinger’s Cash

Meme in circulation:
15 years ago, a man spent 10,000 Bitcoin on 2 pizzas, worth $41 at the time. Today, that number of Bitcoin would be worth more than one billion dollars.

Of note: this remains the last transaction ever made with bitcoin.

Commentary:

I know, I know - my "of note" is a lie. But think about what’s being communicated here:

You should invest in bitcoin because it’s the currency of the future… and only a fool would ever use it as actual currency.

It’s Schrödinger’s cash:

If you never spend it, it might be worth billions.

If you do spend it, it won't be worth much.

A Brief, Almost Plausible Theory of Memes

Perhaps you’ve been told that meme comes from a variant of gene - a unit of cultural information, replicating through the human hive mind the way genes carry DNA. That’s part of it.

Meme shares an etymology with mesmerize. They connect with our subconscious mind, the part that puts aside skepticism and is greatly susceptible to ideas that cozy up to our preconceptions. Memes mesmerize, hypnotize, captivate, bedazzle and affirm our priors in the most gratifying way. They are to the mind what junk food is to our gut.

Memes are partly like genes. They’re also partly like magic spells.

They don’t spread by reason - they spread like pop songs with catchy tunes, images, messages, variants on themes.

They’re less evolving ideas than mesmerizing daydreams, less reliant on a well-supported argument than a well-supported feeling, the Muzak of concepts.

The Priest and the Jester

What do the priest and the jester have in common?

Their wardrobe doesn’t let you confuse them for a member of the audience.

They both stand slightly apart.
Not because they’re better, but because they’re playing a role:
One to reveal the sacred, the other the ridiculous.
Both let you see the routine -
One as part of some profound mystery,
The other as part of some strange prank.

They don’t offer certainty, exactly.
They offer perspective.
One through reverence, the other through ridicule.
And if they’re good at what they do,
You leave the room slightly less sure of how things must be - 
And slightly more aware of how many possibilities remain.

So if this blog sometimes sounds like a sermon and sometimes like a setup for a punchline…
That’s because I’ve always felt the priest and the jester had more in common than they’re usually allowed to admit.

Crypto Fundraisers - Bake Sales Give Way to Block Chains

I’m launching my own cryptocurrency.

I'm calling it Fiat Money.

Backed by central banks. Unlike yours.

Another, targeted at fans of a particularly vivid world: "Tolkien Tokens"

• You call it crypto.
• We call it currency for a strange new world.

Whether you're bartering with hobbits, investing in elven startups, or escaping Mordor's inflationary spiral, Tolkien Tokens travel farther than fiat ever could.

Backed by myth, meme, and mild delusion.
Spendable anywhere dreams outrun reason.

Finally, as government spending continues to erode and the odd fascination with crypto continues, it is (weirdly) easy to imagine a world in which school fundraisers come in the form of issuing some odd crypto called "Baker Elementary Crypto Coin!" Crypto as the new bake sale.

“Instead of a bake sale, we’ve issued 10,000 $BKR tokens—buy now and help us replace the gym floor!”

You can almost hear the PTA meeting now:

• “Should we mint an NFT of Principal Ramirez doing the Chicken Dance at last year’s talent show?”

• “What if we offer staking rewards in the form of homework passes?”

• “Is anyone else worried that our bake sale is now subject to SEC regulation?”

Neighborhood schools could leapfrog from cookie dough to crypto wallets. It’s like merging Little House on the Blockchain with Silicon Valley.

A Man of Many Apps

He was the most literal man I knew. All of his apps were actual appliances - he just called them apps to sound contemporary. He had a rotary phone app. A radio app. A tea kettle app. A rice cooker app. A fire alarm app. A fireplace app. An easy chair app.

To be fair, his apps were - in some ways - more advanced than the ones cluttering his friends’ smartphones. “Do you have an app that can make toast?” he’d ask. “No? Well, I do.” And then he’d bring out his butter knife app and prepare the toast with a flourish.

The Allure of Racism and Nationalism

Why are racism and nationalism so alluring? Because they offer status without effort.

You’re told you’re somebody - superior, even - simply because of two things you didn’t choose and didn’t earn: your race and the place you were born.

It’s the seductive promise of taking pride in something that was - literally - effortless.

Trump Continues The Wild Swings Between Democrats Lowering Deficits and Republicans Raising Them

Notice how in this graph, starting with Carter and Reagan, Republican presidents sign off on the budgets that increase the deficit and Democrats signoff on the budgets that lower the deficit.
There are a few deluded souls who think that Trump will be signing off on a budget that lowers the deficit but that simply isn't the way politics works in these United States. Trump will cut benefits to the poor but not as much as he will cut taxes to the wealthy. He will increase the deficit he inherited while increasing the wealth of people already debating about whether to leave more money for charity or their kids in their will, people who won't even spend the extra money Trump will give them.

It could get much worse. One thing that few people - definitely not Trump - understand is that for every dollar of trade deficit, there is an offsetting dollar of financial inflow. It is accounting. And that means that our trade deficits with the rest of the world and the rest of the world's willingness to finance our debt are tied.

If Trump puts in place tariffs that lower trade deficits (an uncertain outcome but one he claims is his goal), it will actually raise the cost of debt as foreign capital inflows slow commensurate with a diminished trade deficit. Raise the cost of debt just as that rate of debt accumulation again rises.

Trump will cut benefits like Medicaid. Aid to the poorest. Some of those poor people voted for Trump, unclear they'd be losing benefits just for voting against immigrants and those trans people. But those budget cuts will be smaller than the cost of those tax cuts to the most affluent among us.

The gap between rich and poor will continue to widen. And the poor - still convinced that Trump policies have nothing to do with their poverty but convinced that they're brave warriors in a cultural war - will suffer more. And there will be yet another in a series of red bars that shoot upwards.

Why You Keep Hearing About Fascism

Everything evolves - and nothing is ever precise at the time. But here’s why you keep hearing the word fascism in 2020s America.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, communism meant total state control:
Intellectuals were silenced or exiled.
The press printed only what the state deemed “true.” (Pravda means truth. )
Labor unions had no independence.
Corporations barely existed.

Fascism, as practiced by Hitler, kept all that but added corporate partnership:
Big business thrived under military contracts and infrastructure projects (think the autobahn).
The state and corporations shared power.

Communism: The state dominates everything.
Fascism: The state and corporations dominate together. Think of it as for-profit totalitarianism.

Now contrast that with FDR’s America:
Labor unions could strike. And they often did, to the annoyance of many who thought that this should not be allowed.
The courts blocked major legislation (like efforts to end child labor), to the annoyance of many who thought that this should not be allowed.
Congress resisted and often changed and sometime rejected FDR’s policies, to the annoyance of many who thought that this should not be allowed.
The press, intellectuals, and public argued – loudly, to the annoyance of many who thought that this should not be allowed.

It was slow, messy, and full of friction - but it worked. 

After WWII, Nazi Germany collapsed and the Soviet Union ossified, quality of life only slowly improving and dissent largely squelched. 

The US, after having loudly and clumsily gotten so many different moving parts aligned, enjoyed the fastest growing economy – and until about 1990 the greatest narrowing between rich and poor – in the history of the world.

So why do some Americans now flirt with fascism?

Because it’s tempting.

It promises:
Order in place of argument
Certainty in place of debate
Progress without (messy, contradictory, loud, inefficient, cognitively dissonant) process

To people exhausted by democracy’s delays and ossified, ineffective and inefficient institutions, a strongman who silences dissent and drives change looks like relief.
Dictatorship promises cognitive peace and quiet. It promises to “get things done!”

But that peace is a mirage.

Because in the end, a dictatorship must wage war on dissent - and on reality itself. Reality is always messier and more complicated than any model of it. If you try to ignore realities, you don’t just crash against different interests and opinions. You ultimately crash against reality itself.

Fascism appeals to those who want wealth and simplicity.

But the world isn’t simple.

And when systems stop evolving, something new continually emerging out of messy conflict and loud noise, they don’t thrive.
They break.

AI Promises Gales of Creative Destruction the Likes of Which We've Never Seen

 Stunning if true...

Google’s Jeff Dean predicts we’re about one year away from having an AI capable of performing like a junior engineer - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And the bigger challenge? Senior engineers may soon find themselves managing the equivalent of 40 AI assistants. (These claims are made around the 24-minute mark of this video.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq8MhTFCs80

If this doesn’t stir really, really strong feelings - both amazement and unease - you’re wired differently than me. It’s hard to imagine this won’t have sweeping implications for productivity, pay, and employment.

Engineers and developers may soon shift from being solo contributors or small teams to managing entire squadrons of AI assistants. On the surface, that sounds like a dream: productivity through the roof, rapid iteration, endless capacity.

But it should also make you pause - because it raises profound questions.

Will this replace jobs - since one person can now do what once took forty?
Probably.

Or will it create jobs - as companies scramble to hire every engineer who can manage a digital army and generate compounding returns?
Also probably.

The economic logic for hiring skilled people becomes overwhelming. The leverage of a single employee expands dramatically. And the fear that someone, somewhere, will be replaced by a machine is matched only by the hope that those machines will unlock new opportunities, industries, and tools we’ve only begun to imagine.

Either - or especially both - promises gales of creative destruction of hurricane force. It’s hard to imagine this playing out like anything we’ve experienced before.

In a moment like this, I feel like the only honest way to spell AI is as an exclamation:

“AI… Ay yi yi!”

It may be artificial intelligence - but the feelings it provokes?
Very real.

The Pyramids Created the Egyptian Empire

Consider the possibility that it was not the Egyptian Empire that created the pyramids. It was the pyramids that created the Egyptian Empire.

This inversion captures something essential about how civilizations emerge. It’s tempting to see great structures as the product of centralized power — as monuments built by empires. But it might just be that it’s the other way around: the ambition to create something transcendent becomes the catalyst that brings an empire into being.

To construct pyramids required coordination across regions, professions, and generations. They necessitated systems able to organize labor, standardize materials, distribute food, transmit and preserve ideas, and turn meaning into something everyone could see and grasp. Before you could create pyramids, you had to create institutions like religion, rulers, priests, managers and work hierarchies. And those institutions – like language itself – turned out to be plastic, could be used for something more than simply constructing a pyramid. Or more to the point, one had to create so many subassemblies before one could create a pyramid: an economy, a dynasty, a religion, and a mythology. All of that added up to an empire. Oh, and with pyramids as literal monuments to what they’d constructed.

Survival organizes tribes. Shared purpose organizes civilizations. When a society takes on a task that outlives any individual - whether a pyramid, cathedral, transcontinental railway, or a moonshot - it activates capabilities and connections that redefine what that society is. The monument becomes both product and producer of civilization. Not merely a reflection of something bigger than an individual life or lifetime, but the foundation and context for them.

Progress Is Reversible

 John Gray makes a quietly unsettling point.

Technology tends to build. Once we figure out how to split the atom or send emails or make vaccines, that knowledge tends to stay with us. We can build on it. Add layers. Each breakthrough has the potential to become the starting point for the next.

But moral and political progress? That’s more complicated.

Gray calls it entropic. It falls apart if you don’t keep after it.

Democracy doesn’t maintain itself. If a people or a generation ignore or distort it, it won’t be automatically discovered by the next generation who can use it as a starting point. It can be lost. Rights can be rolled back. People forget. Norms get corroded. One generation's hard-won freedoms can slip away in a generation — or less.

We like to think:

"Civil rights? That was a problem in the past but we’re beyond that now."

"Democracy? Obviously."

"War? We have peace treaties now. We’re not animals.”

But history says otherwise. The Roman Empire collapsed. Its roads outlasted its laws. Technology often endures. Civilization’s ethics and social norms are more fragile.

And here’s the really sobering thing.

We’re still running modern society on ancient hardware. Our instincts, impulses, and tribal reflexes haven’t changed much in thousands of years. Civilization is a thin layer of software running on old biology. No wonder it sometimes glitches.

Parents know this.

Raising a child is re-teaching civilization from scratch. Language. Fairness. How not to hit. How to live with others. How to find meaning or recover from failure or heartbreak.

We can build on past successes but it is not automatic. The lessons have to be learned. Again. And again. They’re vulnerable. They can be lost or distorted.

Progress in ethics and politics is not permanent. It’s provisional.

Again - and as Gray reminds us - entropic. It will lose energy without reinvestment. Ignore it for too long or begin to distort it with lies and moral shortcuts, assume that it’s already been solved, and you can start to lose it. You’ll think you’re building on the third floor and you might suddenly find yourself in the basement.

Of all the investments we make, working against entropy in the realm of politics and ethics might be the most essential.

250th Anniversary of the Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence and The Pursuit of Happiness as the Compass for Progress

"Well, it means exactly what it says, it's a declaration. A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it's something very special to our country."
— Donald Trump, on the Declaration of Independence

Let me offer a slightly different explanation.
2026 will be the 250th anniversary of two extraordinary documents.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

One became the foundation of a new democratic government. The other, a defining statement of market economics. Together, they shaped the modern world through the interplay of democracy and markets — two forces through which ordinary people, not kings, express their will and shape their world.

Much of Jefferson’s Declaration is devoted to grievances against King George III, whose authority rested on divine right. By contrast, the new American executive would draw legitimacy from votes — not divine claims, but choices that could be counted and verified. Jefferson’s words marked a profound shift: from power ordained by heaven to power grounded in reason and consent.

Newton defined natural laws that governed the fall of an apple or the orbit of the moon around the earth or the earth around the sun. Jefferson extended that idea to government: political authority, too, should arise from natural laws or rights. Earlier documents, like the Magna Carta and England’s Bill of Rights, advanced liberty but did not fully embrace this view. Jefferson went further. In the Declaration’s opening, he invoked “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” anchoring Enlightenment thought at the heart of American self-government.
Isaac Newton had revealed the laws governing the physical universe. John Locke applied that logic to society, arguing for inherent rights to life, liberty, and property. Jefferson followed Locke, but famously revised his formula, replacing “property” with something at once more expansive and more human: “the pursuit of happiness.”

That change mattered. Divine right could not be verified. Votes could be counted. Where monarchs ruled by decree, presidents would govern by consent. Jefferson's was a world where legitimacy would no longer descend from above but rise from below, from what the people perceived would make them happy.

This was revolutionary. Britain held parliamentary elections, but the United States combined regular legislative and executive elections in a way that arguably made it the world’s first modern democracy.

Jefferson’s idea seemed modest: happiness, not divine will. Yet in that modesty lay its radical promise. Government and markets alike would exist not to impose order but to enable individuals to shape their own lives. Smith’s invisible hand and Jefferson’s ballot box became twin arenas where citizens, through dollars spent and votes cast, could pursue their ambitions and shape their world.

When Abraham Lincoln rose at Gettysburg to justify a war that threatened the nation’s survival, he did not turn to the Constitution. He returned to Jefferson. It was the Declaration’s assertion — that all are created equal and that government exists to serve the governed — that Lincoln called the nation’s true founding idea.

The Declaration of Independence did something extraordinary. It replaced the invisible decrees of monarchs with the visible hopes (or at least countable ballots) of citizens. It made happiness the compass for navigating this new world.

Jefferson’s Declaration and Smith’s Wealth of Nations together launched a world shaped not by kings or mystics, but by citizens — expressing their will through markets and ballots, building a future no monarch could command or predict.

Two hundred and fifty years later, that interplay continues. Happiness remains elusive, unfinished, and yet still animates the choices we make — at cash registers and ballot boxes alike.

So no — the Declaration has not always delivered unity or love or even respect. But it did deliver something far more enduring. It gave ordinary people the right to shape the government and markets as their tool, not a king’s.

And that, more than anything, is what the Declaration of Independence is about.