How I Interpret the Times in Which We Live

Autocratization (a.k.a. democratic backsliding) is happening around the world. While it is not solely caused by foreign adversaries of the West, it is being amplified by them as they seek power with cost effective levers that fall below the threshold of conventional war.

With this disposition, it is in their interest to gradually morph us all into being the coarsened architects of our collective demise. At best, the outcome is the bottom-up rewiring of Western values to align with theirs. At worst, it is civil war and societal collapse. Reality is rarely binary.

Ongoing technological advances combined with exploitable properties of open societies and market economies enable them to surveil and influence our behaviour, beliefs, and cognition with growing scale and granularity.

Incentives are stronger than ever for commercial enterprises, political campaigns, and individual citizens to behave like a cancer: preserving themselves at the cost of the civil society that holds them together.

We are the proverbial frog in the pot, swimming in an information environment that is boiling away the values that bind our social fabric.