Yeah man. That's the pessimistic case. I think around 1:21:30 in the podcast I did with Packy's Not Boring Radio on this essay I spend like 5mins trying to lay it all out, with the intention of semi-seriously blackpilling the audience a bit.

And the reason I think you have to START with the doomer scenario is that if you just jump feet first into doing "little things", you're going to be crushed and reduce the available "energy" in the system that could've gone towards something more meaningful. In general, I think repeated failures actually just get people accustomed to failing. They don't learn much.

So yeah. You've got electorate issues, media issues, logic of capital issues, corruption issues, education/labor issues, infrastructure issues, cultural issues and so on. Any one of them feels bigger than an individual actor could solve. So what? We just sit around moping??

My take is that I write these things in the Elite-Approved Language of Ideas and perhaps on the margin I can increase the potential for future coordination around the topic and seed some of the bones of the movement. It's a low impact, low probability of success thing. But hey, it's my penance for a career in B2C/B2B SaaS!

The other option is to try and take a crack at solving these problems all first hand by starting to build the business(es) needed. Perhaps my ambitions are currently too small. Perhaps I lack the requisite courage to attempt it right now. Perhaps pessimism is so attractive because it suggests inaction, and inaction is so safe & easy. I'd accept any of these charges -- because fighting against the whole weight of the system feels too daunting.

Regarding systemic change, I think certain chemical reactions are a good analogy here -- as energy is added to the system, absolutely nothing happens. And then, at a certain Activation Energy, everything changes all at once. Banking on the transition point happening at any given point in time can be a fool's game, however, as "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" and the price paid by people attempting systemic change unsuccessfully is usually "everything they've got, and then some." I do not think we are at the required Activation Energy yet. If people try to do small things and fail, they may drain the required energy from the system such that we never get there.

But. It might happen. It could work. We'd just need to be committed to the bit.

That's the silver lining. It could work. Our default is pessimistic bifurcation on every axis, I do believe that. But...we don't have to go down the default path. America is an exceptional country. We do exceptional things.

[Podcast linked at top of the essay and here at the appropriate timestamp for reference -- youtu.be/6wc2ENUCdqA ]