I usually provide a snippet here, but the detail supporting the thesis is worth the full read. And it’s a long one for Techdirt. Here are the first few grafs, beyond which things go sufficiently far into the weeds to make tick spray a good idea:
There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.
This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.
We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by bureaucrats.
And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.
This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what makes us human in the first place.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.
Rare is the piece of this length that I fully agree with. But this provides a nice, comprehensive overview of just how fucked we are.
We can just blame the greedy humans for designing the world this way. To squeeze as much out as possible and create even more efficient ways to squeeze.
The answer is very clear.
Holy moly, that is a good essay. Below are a few bits that resonated with me.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood this: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” Peace without justice isn’t peace—it’s imposed order. It’s the peace of the graveyard, the peace of submission, the peace that comes when one side stops fighting because they’ve been crushed.
That made me cringe thinking of the current state of the Supreme Court and how they are making true Justice harder to reach.
The problem isn’t efficiency itself—it’s optimization imposed by algorithmic systems or corporate interests without democratic input about what human values should guide that optimization. When we optimize transportation, do we prioritize speed, safety, environmental impact, or community connection? When we optimize education, do we focus on test scores, critical thinking, creativity, or civic engagement? When we optimize healthcare, do we emphasize cost reduction, patient outcomes, doctor-patient relationships, or population health?
These aren’t technical questions with objectively correct answers—they’re moral and political questions that require democratic deliberation. The current system optimizes for metrics that can be easily measured and monetized, often at the expense of human values that are harder to quantify but more important to preserve.
This called to mind the same author’s essay from 2 days earlier (Brock, Ideas Without Love) about Peter Thiel:
What makes this particularly dangerous is that Thiel possesses genuine intelligence and insight. He’s not ignorant or deluded. He correctly identifies patterns of decline, understands technological risks, predicts political dynamics. But he approaches all of it with the emotional engagement of someone debugging code rather than someone whose species’ survival depends on getting the answers right.
Back to this post, two more insights I appreciate:
Poverty, for instance, is not meaningful struggle—it’s systematic deprivation that prevents people from engaging in the kinds of challenges that actually generate growth and purpose.
The choice to remain human is not a single decision but a daily practice requiring constant vigilance and continuous effort. It begins with the recognition that magical thinking serves not our interests but the interests of systems designed to eliminate human agency.
All this reminds me of the critique on U.S. society that we are no longer “joiners” and now put artificial barriers between ourselves and our neighbors. We don’t join the Elks Club or attend Township meetings or have block-party get-togethers where it doesn’t matter if it is a mix of Trumpers and Biden-backers, or vegans and beefeaters because everyone is there to get the road fixed or raise money for the library or whatever the cause of the day might be. I am guilty of this failure, too. I am fully aware that online chat is siloed and doesn’t count, so I really need to join something. I just wish my body wasn’t giving me mobility issues that make the task so hard.
I tend not to think about just how long ago 2006 was, but I lived with my fiancee in a small apartment complex where we pretty much all knew each other … nine units all facing a courtyard. In the summer, I’d roll the large Weber grill out to the grass, light the coals, and anyone who wanted to throw some meat on was welcome to do so.
This was pretty much every night; in exchange for my charcoal contribution, I’d often be offered tri-tip leftovers or a bespoke burger. We were a very diverse group, and I can’t imagine that we’d all agree politically on any given point.
Nonetheless, we’d congregate around the grill, having brought out our camp chairs, and we’d sit there for hours, just shooting the shit, telling stories, playing cards or board games, and laughing our asses off while drinking beer. Bonding over food and drink as humans have for millennia. Smartphones weren’t a thing yet, nor was Facebook.
It was just neighbors hanging out, a chance for social interaction without being overwhelmed. We formed a bowling team with one of the other (redneck as fuck) couples, and politics were just never discussed, because whether you like the president doesn’t affect your odds of a strike.
The suffusion of politics into everything, along with the rise of manipulative social media, has killed these simple moments of humanity. I just want to go join a commune at this point.
I think that’s really interesting. I often think about these moments of community/humanity. The closest I can get is if I have a nice conversation with a neighbor if I have the time. Or finding like-minded people online to chat with.
Smartphones became common place in my last year of high-school, but even at that point mobile data plans weren’t large enough to cause a major impact, but community gathering spots were already gone by that point where I live, so school was the community place. Once I graduated, that was gone. Very weird time to grow up. I’m meeting a lot of people in their early 20’s now who don’t even have the luxury of remembering those simpler times.
It feels super odd because it seems reminiscent of old stories passed down from generations. I hope that this trend ends positively in the future and that the future youth remember these terrible years as a paragraph in a history book and how we overcame these issues.
To paraphrase … someone … You can’t unfuck in a single graf what took three prior volumes and an additional 20 chapters in Vol. 4 to lay out. There’s a lot of soul searching that needs to be done before we start moving in the right direction.
Thank you for again sharing good stuff Powderhorn. I appreciate it/you.
I try my best. Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks for the share.
Mike Brock is one of the few “doomer” types I read because his analysis is usually enlightening. I guess maybe that means he’s not a true doomer.
This is my first time running into his work. I intend to dig deeper now that I’ve seen how no-bullshit insightful he is.
