Our Crisis-Prone Future
Geopolitical and volatility shocks will shape our collective, near-term future.
A. In 2004-05 when I worked on the Smart Internet Technology CRC’s report Smart Internet 2010 (2005), the main school of thought for me was the Disruptive Internet. The final version got watered down in the publicly released report in order to align with early Web 2.0 euphoria. Now, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s assistant governor (financial system) Brad Jones has warned of the crisis-prone future that I foresaw: geopolitical and volatility shocks. What Jones in his speech calls “contingency planning” was called prospective or strategic foresight in the early 2000s. However, that framing and language is not really successful in Australian in comparison to its greater uptake in Europe and the United States. Jones notes the rise of coercive statecraft instruments like sanctions, grey zone warfare, cyberattacks, and the need for greater compliance for international financial institutions.
B. Prior to the SpaceX IPO this week making him the world’s first trillionaire, The New Republic ran a lengthy profile on Elon Musk’s ideological politics. Human-Machine symbiosis was the hyperfocus in the 1990s of Extropian and Transhumanist schools of thought. Now, such utopian future visions are used to create social media narratives to raise investor capital. The TNR article is a long-form review of Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Penguin, 2026).
C. For the past 5 years I’ve been researching some as yet unpublished material on the Alt-Right, the MAGA Movement, and contemporary metapolitical thinkers. I’ve circled around the Russian geopolitical thinker and ultranationalist Alexander Dugin who has advocated a Eurasian informed vision. I’ve also been aware of the late Baron Julius Evola and his Traditionalist influence on contemporary initiatory networks that are helpful to spread political propaganda via multi-level metacommunication. Now, Arktos has released Dugin’s new book Julius Evola: Political Traditionalism which is my reading this week.
My estimative assessment of Dugin differs from Marlene Laruelle, who I saw speak at an invited workshop at the University of Melbourne. For Laruelle, Dugin is not “Putin’s brain” (biographer and translator Michael Millerman) and he is instead pre-framed as Russian Oligarch funded. This causal flow between Dugin and Putin is a little too Rasputin-like in terms of its posited Bayesian priors and its historical analogies. For me, Dugin’s role is more to influence transnational networks, notably in building US-Russia and Russia-Europe nodes and connectors.
D. The other material I’m reading this week is the CAIA Association’s professional designation for the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst. Aced It Publications has two unofficial guides on Level 1 (Foundations) and Level 1 (Asset Classes).
E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on the Philosophy of Love created by Dr Lee Perlman.
F. The Social Reckoning (2026) - the sequel to The Social Network (2010) - now has a trailer.
G. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has posited a US-China war scenario.
H. The infamous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault that happened on 22nd October 1971.
I. Author Charles Bukowski on dying and how to write.