Avatar photoSteven Savage

The Recovery Is The Hidden Problem

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So right now people seem pretty worried about the US economy (yes, we still have one, in theory). AI is starting to hit predictable skids, data centers are both annoying people and not completing as fast as claimed, Iran hasn’t met a Strait they didn’t want to shut down, and so on. A lot of people are predicting some kind of crash of the stock market and the US economy.

Now I have my concerns on that, which perhaps I’ll share another time. But having been through many an economic crisis since being born in the late 60s, I have another concern – the recovery from a likely crash or severe downturn.

Namely, my concern is that there won’t be one like we’re used to. There may not really be one to speak of.

Recoveries take awhile. The 2008 crisis took five years for the stock market to recover – and the stock market isn’t the economy. The history of the 2008 crisis and its many year followup is wild, and I’m sure we all know people who didn’t recover or didn’t live long enough to recover.

This is where I get concerned about the next US downturn, which is almost certainly coming. I don’t think we’ll have the kind of recovery we’re used to, and it may be a dismal slog after a “new normal.”

Here’s why:

First, our position in the world is shot. We’re losing allies who are bypassing us for defense, technology, trade, etc. We won’t come back as fast as long as other people don’t trust us.

Second, the Iran situation has long-term impacts from the rearrangement of trade to affecting growing cycles due to fertilizer shipments. Will iran keep blockading the Strait of Hormuz (and possibly the Red Sea)? If Iran does regulate traffic under some agreement, the throughput won’t be the same. If Iran just opens up there’s still months of securing the area and clearing mines. The impacts will have repercussions for years.

Third, it’s pretty clear our stock market is propped up on a few big players. Any of those take a hit and who replaces them? For that matter, who might try to replace them and inflate values – only to make mini-crashes.

Fourth, a lot of Americans have been on the edge for awhile. They won’t have a recovery if there’s not enough to recover with. Young people already facing enormous headwinds won’t be able to get going.

Fifth, in no way do I trust our current government to do any kind of effective bailout – corrupt or otherwise! I mean I trust corrupt, but not effective. I have big problems with the money games played in response to 2008, not enough people went to jail, and we needed companies to fail while PEOPLE got supported. But there was at least some effort made – though I expect a few ham-handed efforts to keep things going.

Sixth, and finally, the US is going backwards. Science has taken a hit. We’re stuck in oil (and the people profiting from it) while the rest of the world heads for solar and wind. China and Europe are doing their thing. We’re the past.

So whatever economic crash we may see, I think the real issue will be the recovery won’t be so great. There may be no recovery to speak of, just a new normal of slower growth and less opportunities. I keep hearing Stagflation invoked, which is a flashback to my childhood and worrisome.

Sometimes it’s not the crash, it’s the recovery. And that’s where I’m even more concerned.

Steven Savage

Fighting The Last A-Hole

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Humanity has survived for aeons, is able to inhabit any environment, take control of its own evolution. Humanity also keeps producing utter a-holes hellbent on greed, malice, and wiping out large chunks of humanity. It’s almost a testimony to the fact we’ve survived our own weird stupidity in enabling people like that. Like we somehow outlive our own dumbassery. Go, humanity.

While contemplating the a-holes in the world for reasons that I’m sure are entirely obvious, I thought of something. Maybe our problem is that we’re fighting the last a-hole.

I got this idea from watching Vladimir Putin (an a-hole) get his aging, paranoid backside handed to him by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians aren’t fighting the last war – they’re fighting war in a new way. Putin may have been pretty good at bribery and propaganda up to a point, but when he decided to shovel his military meat shield towards the Ukraine, the Ukraine took the support they got from freer nations and rethought war.

Putin may have been a modern a-hole to some extent, with his troll farms and the like, but militarily he was old school. However, having seen Kremlin talking points penetrate various Influencers, political parties, etc. Putin was thinking ahead. Just not far enough, though judging by the people I saw discounting or lauding the murderous bastard, he got pretty far.

So as I often hear talk of how people lose by “fighting the last war” (as the US seems to be in danger of doing in Iran), I think we loose by figuring the next tyrant or dictator or genocidal maniac will be like the last one.

That might seem like a good bet because tyrants are incredibly predictable to a point. I’m amused that author Timothy Snyder could write On Tyranny, his quick guide to resisting tyranny, so concisely. However dictators and tyrants are in many cases the same, but smart ones are updated.

You aren’t going to get the next Hitler, because people did Hitler and that didn’t work. You will get someone like him, someone possibly inspired by him, but they won’t be the same because people learned about him. Apparently not enough to judge by the state of politics in some countries, but at least enough that “hey, someone’s doing a Hitler” alerts some resistance.

(Meanwhile, you can see a lot of media who don’t want to acknowledge dictators desperately wanting to discount it, but that’s for another rant.)

For people who are pro-freedom and pro-human dignity we have to act like an immune system. We don’t just learn from the last dictator but need to identify “similar infections” and rally to stop them. We need to be ears open for when history rhymes because it never repeats. We need to be ready to predict the next a-hole.

Of course what we really need to do is focus on freedom and functional, healthy, responsive societies a-holes can’t twist, turn, and exploit. But that too is for another essay, perhaps.

We need to keep an eye out for a-holes, updated or not. We’re the immune system, and maybe that gives us space to build a freer world that’s harder for a-holes.

Steven Savage

Going Meta Into Nothingness

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In one of my recent readings of Cory Doctorow’s valuable blog, he discussed the value of “vultures” in the economic ecosystem, and reminded us of an important idea by Douglass Rushkoff explaining the weird “abstractions” we see.. To quote Doctorow:

“Douglas Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don’t rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don’t start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don’t invest in the company, but options on the company’s shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk.”

Going meta is something we see everywhere, to the point we are used to it. Giant companies with packages of packages of companies. Financial jobs that are, as I heard it once put “sloshing money around and scraping up what falls out.” Hell, with Kalshi and Polymarket and the various betting markets, we’ve gone meta on reality, allowing people to bet on anything, including things that are already pretty meta.

A friend recently summed up the overwhelm of modern technology by noting how much of what we do is metadata. You can fill out a paper form and have to store it and retrieve it – but if you put it on a computer it needs a name and a location – and cloud storage involves even more metadata behind the scenes. New software that lets you “easily” track information often has “new” features that require you to enter even more data to use features. At some point paper seems easier because the metadata can take more effort than the data.

(Remember, I once interviewed at software company that did Scrum with post it notes, having given up on tools.)

The ultimate meta is AI. AI takes our data, our metadata, and approximates us. It’s a world of data centers funded by this group, run by that group, and owned by another group. The power and water consumption are abstracted away. That’s if things are even being built, which seems to be a point of confusion – but boy companies want AI in everything.

It feels like our world is more and more meta all the time. Actual, hands-on, reality has layers of layers over it and we consume the reality to power the unreality.

Everything else is pretty meta too. Ever notice how these days in 2026 that our health care decisions by the federal government seem to be driven by internet conspiracy theories not based in anything? How memes and rumors can drive actions even if they have no existence in reality? Watch the news and people are trying to talk about reality with a thick layer of marketing and political opportunism. Even the propaganda seems meta, if people even know it’s propaganda, and sometimes I’m not sure the propagandists know.

So what I wonder is how much time and energy are we wasting doing meta but you know not doing stuff? I mean here in May 2026 farmers seem to be pretty impacted by whatever the hell is up with the non-ceasefire in Iran but it’s not making the news enough. Various Influencers famous for being famous are going around being famous and Influencing, but what are they about? People are betting on various important events in the world while others short markets, making us suspicious of what’s happening why. Also software seems to get exponentially harder to use as we add more stuff because of . . . I dunno, sales or something?

I mean how much time and energy are we burning here? Well time, energy and planet. Not sure much meaningful is happening, you know.

The problem with all this “metaness” is I think we won’t notice it breaking down until a lot of other stuff does. All the meta stuff, all the abstraction, the financialization, the investment vehicles, the BS media hype, that can keep going for awhile as it has money and momentum. But there comes a day when memes don’t fill your bank account, you can’t use AI as fertilizer, and you didn’t bet on very angry people being upset about unemployment. The people who think meta miss this stuff.

It’s best we don’t.

Steven Savage