Apology and explanation: a brief change in the tempo of notes. Normally I try to avoid more than one per week. Yet these are not exactly normal times… This note is somewhat of a bridge between the previous one, which offered an updated reflection on some of the major forces shaping the present, and the next note in coming days that will revisit comprehending the contemporary through the polycrisis frame. After that, a pause to allow for the attention vortex around the impending inauguration of Donald Trump to fully manifest, as the internet / world goes ‘right to ludicrous speed’.
Start by restating: A world defined by acceleration, escalation, entropy, extraction and force. Behaviour shaped by anger, fear, greed, identity and ressentiment.
In such conditions, Gramsci as meme arrives and often in the more dramatic rendering provided by Zizek (the closer translation is ‘morbid phenomena’). Now it is Ezra Klein’s turn to roll it out:
Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era. I find myself returning to a famous translation of a line from Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”
I ended up drafting a rather lengthy chapter on Gramsci and interregnum last year, and published a brief version in a prior note, in which I observed:
the most common response is to invoke Gramsci as a theoretical prop... At its most banal, ‘morbid symptoms’ is the hook for listing whatever ills or woes to be discussed. The result is reducing Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’ to ‘a theory of the obvious’, revealing little about the genuinely confusing conditions of the present conjuncture. Yet cliches contain within them kernels of truth, so often do banalities, and this does apply to Gramsci’s overused notebook entry. It does speak to the moment, but more partially and patchily.
Invoking Gramsci is to acknowledge a truth many know and readily accept: that there is some type of gap, a breaking apart, the old ideas and frames feel more and more ill-fitting for contemporary conditions. The old persists, but does so in tawdry, unconvincing fashion. Failure does not generate a response, force has not been met with counter-force, there is no clearly formulated alternative. Our condition is more piteous than in Marx’s analysis of Louis Bonaparte: tragedy, and then farce, but then what? That is what we are left discovering in real-time, with concepts and theories that feel like shabby sock puppets used in a not particularly funny, not particularly interesting performance.
The challenge is staying with the open space. One useful way of thinking about these conditions is provided by Ivan Krastev who presents 2025 as an inverse / mirror of 1989 in ‘Why Liberals Struggle to Cope With Epochal Change’:
The difference was that the world that collapsed in 1989 was theirs, the Communists’. Now it is ours, the liberals’. …
Living through such moments in history teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable.
This piece reminded me of Alexei Yurchak’s book on the collapse of the Soviet Union, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More:
Many others have described a similar experience of the profound feeling of the Soviet system’s permanence and immutability, and the complete unexpectedness of its collapse. And yet … many Soviet people also quickly discovered another peculiar fact: despite the seeming abruptness of the collapse, they found themselves prepared for it.
In terms of how to understand some of these changes, the recent Bungacast episode with Michael C. Williams on ‘Welcome to the World of the Right’ is rich and worthwhile. It is based on a recent book he has co-authored.
Of ordering, reordering, Russell Napier offers an insightful analysis on ‘America, China, and the Death of the International Monetary Non-System’:
Something changed in America in the 1990s. … The key structural change that led to these distortions was the creation of a new international monetary system in 1994, when China devalued its exchange rate and, through prolonged and extensive exchange rate management, imposed an international monetary order on the world. This international monetary system is now collapsing under the weight of its own debt and the geopolitical tensions that it played a key role in creating.
That article pairs well with Michael Every’s Rabobank report from late last year, in which he argues that:
markets should be prepared to supplement purely economics-focused macrostrategy with a fusion geopolitical ‘grand strategy-plus-economics’ lens, which we dub ’Grand Macro Strategy’. After all, a more geopolitical world, by its very definition, should arguably preclude a reliance solely on business-as-usual economic thinking.
Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2025 has a rather infotainment feel to it, but there are some good formulations, such as the risk of ‘Beggar thy world’:
The world’s two largest economies are set to export disruption to everyone else this year, short-circuiting the global recovery and accelerating geoeconomic fragmentation.
A more accurate phrasing would be China and the US ‘are set to continue exporting disruption’. In terms of the US, last October Adam Tooze observed:
In all three arenas – China, Ukraine and the Middle East – the US will say that it is responding to aggression. But rather than working consistently for a return to the status quo it is, in fact, raising the stakes.
And for China, its ‘pacman approach’ to economic and security is creating global imbalances as now seen in its 2024 trade surplus. Chart from FT and text from NYT:
When adjusted for inflation, China’s trade surplus last year far exceeded any in the world in the past century, even those of export powerhouses like Germany, Japan or the United States. Chinese factories are dominating global manufacturing on a scale not experienced by any country since the United States after World War II.
Staying with flows, but moving to people and images, this New Yorker piece by Jordan Salama is excellent: ‘On TikTok, Every Migrant Is Living the American Dream’. It really develops and expands on the dynamic of ‘migrant influencers’ that the NYT previously highlighted, and also speaks to a note I wrote last year on ‘digital worlds’ that considered what happens as the rest of the world is brought online via smartphones and social media. The tendency to focus on the impact of social media in the context of Anglophone / Western countries often results in a narrow focus on certain harms and trends, while missing how these devices and apps reshape relations elsewhere. Pulling a quote from Salama’s article would not do it justice, I really recommend reading it. Nuanced, thoughtful, proper long-form writing.
For all the talk of deglobalisation, it is perhaps more appropriate to think in terms of changing forms and forces of globalisation, as we keep on moving and connecting. It is expected that globally there will be 5.2 billion airline passengers in 2025, a 6-7% increase on 2024. All the EVs in the world won’t help much with that.
In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton invariably lurch into overstatement, but in their anger they do powerful capture the delusion and denial of current conditions. Writing about the first years of this decade:
Seven words from Theodor Adorno summed up the situation: ‘society is not in control of itself.’
Indeed.