oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith

AI can't do our learning or thinking for us, but it excels at making us dependent on its substitution of learning and thinking, and the resulting state of helplessness when we have to think for ourselves.

The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media.

It's hard to take a joke when our entire economy and financial system is the joke.

The only "reform" that changes our lives in a fundamentally positive way is radical decentralization via distributing centralized power.

If there was a black market for systemic risk, we'd make a completely different set of decisions.

In many cases, we're actually only "renting" the functional / monetary value of what we "own," and that makes the value of "ownership" far less certain than we might imagine.

What matters is seeing the fuse burning and realizing it's going to blow up, and planning accordingly.

There is no substitute for mastery.

Add all this up and what we're hyper-hurriedly "manufacturing" is an automated army of self-cloaking digital sociopaths.

Authentic community takes time and effort and a set of values and priorities that can't be commoditized into a profit-maximizing venture or government program.

I anticipated these developments earlier this year when I wrote a short story entitled "The Peculiar Death of Mr.

While the Everything Bubble has soared to new heights, consumer confidence has fallen to new lows.