Metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a Monarch butterfly. In my opinion, this is the kind of transformation all of society is in right now.
Just a reminder to the more geeky readers that, from October 2019 to April 2020, I wrote a 20 chapter book/blog thing online called Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1. At the time, late 2019, I believed we were going into a great depression, a 5 to 7 year economic downturn, along with major social transformations predicted by a couple of ultra-long term theories I believe are pretty solid. The Repo Market crisis was a month old when I started writing this. Covid-19 hadn't even popped up in China, it was not on anyone's radar here in the U.S.. The stock markets were hitting all time highs, and the conventional wisdom was that there might be a minor recession in late 2020.
I disagreed, I saw us heading into "The Tumultuous 2020's," a time of unparalleled economic, technological, cultural, and social change. Here's a quote from chapter 20, written in April 2020, about six weeks into the Covid era:
"Change. Our current Dystopia is massive change. We are in a period of societal change unlike anything in our known history. Several aspects of human society are changing, all at once. And that's hard. As adaptable as we'd like to think we are, we humans don't like change. But change is here, it's big, and it will keep happening for some time to come, like it or not. The downside of this is that what we call "normal" is collapsing around us. The upside is that we, as humans on Earth, get to build something new."
"Dystopia," as I refer to this 20 chapter beast of a book/blog thing, goes deep into ideas few have even heard of. I got things wrong as I looked forward from what is now the "pre-Covid Era." I dramatically underestimated how much money the Federal Reserve would create to prop up the banking system, major businesses, and Wall Street in particular. So the economic part is playing out different than I expected. But I got the change part right.
"Dystopia" can be read by single chapters, it's more a bunch of essays than a non-fiction book with a well-defined through line. Or, if you're a glutton for pretty big ideas, you can try to read it all, straight through. I just wanted to remind people that's it's out there, just chillin' on the interwebs, waiting for adventrous brains to come check it out. It was written at the end of the "old times" and the very beginning of the "Covid era." And it was written by me, a man who was homeless for four of the six months I was writing it. If you want to check it out, click the link above.
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