In this piece, I explore how our economic reality is increasingly manufactured by automated outrage machines—bots that flood our information ecosystem with tribal signaling rather than factual understanding. This digital chaos creates the perfect environment for justifying the engineered economic downturn we are seeing (and that I wrote about last week) through these trade policies and other choices, which are all presented as necessary 'detox' despite causing real suffering.

Meanwhile, the Trump family's 1789 Capital quietly builds a parallel 'MAGA economy' that aims to monetize on the cultural division by creating ideologically-aligned alternatives to mainstream institutions. All this unfolds in a collective state of temporal dysphoria, where our social media-warped perception of time makes it impossible to process events coherently, or to sustain the patient, focused attention that once enabled America's greatest achievements. Information warfare and economic volatility are fundamentally reshaping American power, both domestically and globally.