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How to Topple the House of Prosperity There’s a question that’s been on my mind — and maybe on yours. Why did America make it so easy for itself to collapse? Let me explain what I mean. American collapse has many causes. One cause is that it America grew socially destabilized, ruptured, fractured. It was … Read more

Why The Organizations We Build Must Be Models of the World We Want to Create Apr 11, 2018 Save Perhaps you think, as I do, that the world is in a troubled place these days. If so, then maybe you’ve observed what I have. Something’s going badly wrong in our organizations. At every scale. Whether … Read more

Or, Why an Economy Empty of Real Prosperity Isn’t Much of One Apr 5, 2018 Member-only Save One day in the not too distant future, they’re going to use Facebook as a case study. In how to do everything badly. From management to leadership to innovation to social responsibility. At business schools, executive courses, in … Read more

And Why Humanity’s Future Depends on What’s Next Imagine that I told you you had to build a machine with somewhere between a million and ten million parts, each one made to sub-millimeter precise specifications. Imagine I told you you’d have to build the organization of thousands of people to put it together. Imagine I … Read more

Or, How Social Proof and Dopamine Tech Make it Possible to Hack Entire Societies As the scale of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal becomes clearer — that millions of people were reached by propaganda — a tiny thought keeps popping into me head.

Or, Why the Best Defense Against Authoritarianism is Democracy on the Offense Imagine a school with a newspaper that only ever covered its bullies — what they’re wearing, what they said today, which one was on top. Would you want to send your kid to such a school? And yet that’s precisely what America’s…

The World is Turning Catastrophically Stupid. Here’s How Not to Join It. I’d bet, these days, shortly after reading the headlines, you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.” You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the … Read more

A New Synthesis I was talking to someone recently and in the middle of a perfectly civilized conversation about our impending doom they blurted out: “but you’re a socialist!” Whoa. I’m not any of these things, capitalist, socialist, atheist, any-ist. I believe in three things only, disco, chocolate, and true love, and they’re all the … Read more

The Gun, the Blindfold, and the Gag Pity the poor liberal. It’s become fashionable to point out that liberalism is collapsing — and yet, the question is, why? Just this morning, I read a tweet from an anonymous superstar pundit that said: “No!!! This wave of fascism isn’t about economics! It’s about culture!” This little … Read more

Or, Why Neoliberalism is Ending in Authoritarianism Rising Around the Globe Again You might be surprised, and a little disheartened, as I am, to look around the world in the early 21st century, and see it, well, giving up on freedom. There is America, lapsing into comic-book authoritarianism. There, China has a newly forged lifelong … Read more