Promissory note

Let me tell you a story.

In the 2013 essay collaboration Does Capitalism Have a Future (2013), Randall Collins writes about the many dead ends of developed economies as economic growth slows. Globally, manufacturing improves efficiency and requires radically fewer jobs. Countries like the United States, but also the Philippines and Pakistan, shift to service sector employment in reaction. However, all attempts to make the service sectors more productive has been at best marginally successful. For countries that were poor at the outset of this shift, they will never become wealthy if call centers can only improve throughput by 1% a year.

Part of the AI bubble, besides being a predictable stock swindle, is a pitch that it can make office work immensely more productive. AI has an issue though, which commentator Ed Zitron notes: AI is rank at doing anything.

At some point, the putrid margins around generative AI will begin to eat into the already-tenuous profitability of these companies, leading to some, I imagine, having to either vastly increase prices or drop the tools altogether, assuming that the competitive landscape doesn't mean that keeping them is a necessity to compete with others.

This is a detour into the usual social problems material I write, but I have a in-my-feelings point here. Just a bit more.

So when Collins talks about derivatives, he identifies that any economy that allows and participates in derivatives will have a boom and bust cycle. Derivatives in stock markets allow for incredible multiplying effects that regular securities cannot offer. Much like parlay sports betting, there are people throwing money into moonshots where mutual funds can make immense profits.

The thing is, these derivatives and what they demarcate, in dollar value, can eventually represent much more than the total value of the economy. Margin investment and ways to borrow more money than an actor could ever cover, creates local and then global instability. It is thus not the actions of individual persons and companies that create a house of cards, it is the very core rules of the contemporary capitalist economy.

The way I interact with others is like how derivatives work. When I talk to people, I get a pretty information-dense interaction with a lot of good body language and tone of voice. I feel relatively confident that even if this person is not fully telling the truth, I know how far they are from it.

Texts are much less communicative- I have a friend I have struggled with mostly because their text style I find cold and it worries me. With less information, I psychoanalyze people I know, or barely know. I think about intentions, goals, maybe dreams I have of things I want to do this them. After considering their intent, I then make an assumption off that- an emotional derivative. Then another off of that.

Eventually I am so over-leveraged emotionally, I begin to try to 'simplify' and cut down all this thinking. It makes me prickly and I give a cold aura in person. I hurt someone early last year because when they suggested being physically closer I locked up. I didn't communicate why I was feeling uncomfortable, and that had very bad consequences.

However much I sincerely believe I am a beautiful soul, my heart is brittle. Brace for impact.

Artemis