This week we talk to friend of What Rough Beast Cy Canterel—whose Substack Abstract Machines is essential reading right now—about why Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney just gave a eulogy for neoliberal capitalism at Davos, and what comes after the fiction falls apart.
We discuss:
* Why Carney’s Davos speech was the diplomatic equivalent of taking down the communist party slogan from the greengrocer’s wall (Václav Havel would be proud)
* The surprisingly dark connection between Horatio Alger, Jeffrey Epstein, and the extractive core of the American Dream
* What H-Mart Gate revealed about proximity to power, model minorities, and who gets to be Cassandra
* Why we need to stop asking powerful people to change themselves (because they won’t)
* Mass transitions, rubber bands, and the moment before the grid snaps
* How level three maintenance techs have more power than your congressman (and what that means for resistance)
* Direct action vs. endless petitioning: where the real pressure points are in a failing system
* Cy’s wild career arc from coding on Andy Warhol’s software to working inside GE as it collapsed to becoming a perfumer because smell can’t be digitized
Plus: why hope means accepting that the future is dark (impenetrable, not doomed), the wealth defense industry as target, and what it means to finally stop living by lies.
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