Tuning into the vibeconomy and the vibeocracy it almost feels as
though there are tectonic tensions building and building. To outward
appearances not much changes from day to day but the entire group of
systems that we live with and depend on, economic and social, political
and religio and scientific and constructed exist under tension that is
increasing.
If the geological analogy is anywhere near accurate
the pressure will find a way to release itself. Either bit by bit,
deforming human-made institutions but maintaining most aspects of the
structure, the way a fault-line slips or the pressure will be relieved
catastrophically with unimaginable force and unpredictable first,
second, and third order effects.
And like birds or cats human
beings pick up on the vibe or piezo-electic effect or whatever it is
that is sensed and have a just barely conscious feeling of unease.
From The Philosophical Salon, March 4, 2024:
Trust in Institutions and the War Dividend
Even if almost no one wants to admit it, our “system” is obsolete,
and for this reason it is now morphing into a “closed system” –
totalitarian in nature. It is equally clear that the few who continue to
benefit materially from the capitalist system (the 0.1%) are willing to
do whatever it takes to prolong its obsolete existence. At its root,
contemporary capitalism works in a simple way: debt is issued from one
door and purchased from another through the issuance of new debt in a
depressive loop from which most of the destructive phenomena of our time
originate.
The facilitators of the “debt-chasing-debt” mechanism are a class of
profiteering technocrats whose main psychological trait is psychopathy.
They are so devoted to the mechanism that they have become its extensions
– like automatons, they work tirelessly for the mechanism, without any
remorse for the devastation of human life it dispenses. The psychopathic
dimension (uninhibited, manipulative, and criminally antisocial) is
not, however, an exclusive prerogative of the transnational financial
clique, but extends both to the political-institutional caste (from
heads of government to local administrators) and the so-called
intelligentsia (experts, journalists, scholars, philosophers, artists,
etc.). In other words, the institutional mediation of reality is now entirely mediated by the mechanism itself. Whoever enters the system must accept its rules while also, ipso facto,
assuming its psychopathological traits. Thus, blind capitalist
objectivity (the drive for profit-making) becomes indistinguishable from
the subjects representing it.
Because of their personality disorder, the technocrats in the control
room tend to overestimate their ability to enforce a closed system that
might conceal the decline of capitalist socialization. First, the
tragic pandemic farce, and now the cold wind of permanent warfare, are
putting the average citizen’s unconditional trust in their
representative institutions to the test. If it was relatively easy to
silence doubt and dissent with “humanitarian lockdowns” and emergency
rule – which allowed a most opportunistic political class to briefly
regain some clout – the complicity in the Gaza genocide coupled with the
neo-McCarthyistic construction of the “democratic front against the
Russian monster”, with related arms race, are beginning to undermine the
old certainties of the silent majority.
In the new totalitarian normal, reality does not quite make it to the
newsfeeds or television screens. What we get instead is the hyperreal
as theorized by Jean Baudrillard, which is neither real nor fiction, but
the narrative container that has replaced both. Thus, the brutal ethnic
cleansing of Gaza continues at full throttle along with heart-bleeding
humanitarian concerns for civilians, telegenic appeals against all forms
of extremism, and cynical warnings of rampant antisemitism. At the same
time, we are reminded 24/7 that the Russians (who else?) are preparing
for nuclear cyberattack from space and the invasion of Europe.
Without even realising it, the conspiracy theory ghostbusters turn into
the very thing they love to hate. The resulting maelstrom of
infotainment induces a state of collective hypnosis which proves to be
more effective than traditional censorship, since it eliminates ex ante the request for a real referent, in all its radical ambiguity.
The hyper-mediation of the world aims to become the only available
world. The events narrated by corporate media are no longer thought of
as something other than their narration, since, in the
hyperreal reversal, it is the narration itself that thinks the subject.
Our saturated info-space is in the form of an infinitely malleable
self-referential spectacle that a priori sterilizes all critical
thought. The official debate on Gaza or Ukraine, for example, is
continuously reframed into a debate on the debate itself,
strictly demarcated by morally preformatted binary codes
(democracy/terrorism, etc.). This tendency to liquidate the referent
must be understood in its etymological sense as a tendency to “make it
liquid”. It established itself, historically, as a consequence of a
process of economic virtualization based on the replacement of the
profitability of wage labour (real valorisation) with the simulated
profitability of speculative capital.
We live in a world where the stock markets of Japan and the United
Kingdom reach record highs as their economies slip into recession, while
the United States manages to stay afloat courtesy of a monstrous
deficit guaranteed by monetary and military hegemony. Regardless of the
crash or drastic correction in the making, the ongoing financial market
party (with very few invitees) is inextricably connected with the
euphoria of war. Why? First, military production for “long-term security
commitments” is now an essential support for increasingly sagging real
growth as measured in GDP. For example, 64% of the $60.7 billion
allocated to Ukraine in the latest aid package will be absorbed by the
US military industry. The source here is not Putin’s TASS but the Wall Street Journal,
which also admits that since the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict,
US industrial production in the defence sector has increased by 17.5%.
But, above all, techno-military-industrial excitement continues to
function as tailwind for a hyperinflated financial sector now in thrall
to AI mania. The current S&P 500 bubble is the result of the
hysterical overvaluation of a handful of tech corporations, the
so-called Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft,
Nvidia and Tesla, which today are actually down to the Magnificent Two:
Nvidia and Meta). The strong imbalance closely resembles the dot.com
tech bubble of the late 1990s, when the internet excitement led to the
overvaluation of Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, eBay, Qualcomm etc. While
these companies managed to save their own skins, many start-ups were
wiped out by the bursting of the bubble. Ergo, a sensational
market moved by the lever of Artificial Intelligence would do better to
prepare itself for an equally sensational fall.
Let’s keep in mind that financial risk today is immensely higher than
twenty-five years ago. Over the last two decades, the system has made
itself hostage to the rather elementary ruse called “creation of
liquidity out of thin air” (and related scapegoats), whose purpose is to
refinance the mass of outstanding debt which supports state deficits as
well as speculative bubbles populated by heaps of zombie companies. A
stock market collapse of around 80%, like that of the dot.com at the end
of 2000, would now be equivalent to a barrage of atomic explosions –
metaphorically and literally....
....MUCH MORE
The above is by Fabio Vighi, one of our favorite Marxist professors.
Here's his latest at The Philosophical Salon, March
9:
Predictably, Iran is the next crisis in line. No sooner were we told
to obsess over the latest unsealing of the Epstein files than our gaze
was already redirected toward the geopolitical brinkmanship now
threatening to engulf the entire Middle East. It is Iran’s turn, then,
in rapid succession after Venezuela, the ongoing strangulation of Cuba,
and especially the Gaza genocide – a catastrophe abruptly pushed from
the news cycle. The theatre of war must be permanent, and it requires
fresh meat. The long-awaited Iranian escalation fits the role: the
latest bloodletting in a permanent and carefully curated carnival of
violence, chaos, and outrage staged by the custodians of our glorious
civilisation. The carnage is real, and so are its victims. But to focus
on this theatre alone is to miss the main event, the hidden trigger of
the violence now detonating around us. The real story of American power
in the twenty-first century is being written in the arcane world of bond
auctions, speculative bubbles, repo markets, and the relentless, silent
mechanics of debt.
The modern financial system is no longer built on productivity,
wages, or shared prosperity. It is built on highly leveraged
speculations: an ever-expanding, increasingly abstract tower of claims
on future wealth creation that the underlying economy can no longer
generate. Since the 1980s, as technological productivity surged and
labour’s share of value stagnated, finance metastasized to compensate.
Leverage substituted for growth and debt became not just an instrument
but the system’s organizing principle. And now, as the United States
confronts an unprecedented wall of IOUs that must be refinanced, this
foundational reality has come to drive everything else. With almost $39
trillion in federal debt and a maturity profile that demands constant
rollover, the United States does not merely prefer low interest rates
and exceptional monetary injections – it structurally depends on them.
Moreover, it is not only the federal government that is drowning.
American private-sector debt – corporate, household, and financial – now
runs into the tens of trillions, much of it floating on a sea of opaque
leverage and asset bubbles that would burst if interest rates failed to
fall or liquidity dried up. In this context, geopolitical dominance
should be framed as monetary dominance. Crisis drives capital into
Treasuries, suppresses yields, and enables rollover.
Thus, the Iran escalation could paradoxically extend the lifespan of
the AI bubble: geopolitical risk boosts defence-AI spending, while an
oil shock may crush consumption and suppress core inflation (as the
“pandemic shock” did in 2020), opening the door to renewed Federal
Reserve easing and the liquidity injections required to keep the
debt-driven architecture of U.S. markets intact. The strikes themselves
were a joint US-Israel operation, blending American surveillance
architecture with Israeli precision targeting. Notably, they were
executed through AI-assisted military systems – reportedly involving
models such as Anthropic’s Claude, already deployed in earlier
operations like the Venezuela raid – illustrating how the very
technologies inflating financial markets are simultaneously becoming
embedded in the infrastructure of modern warfare. Historically,
capitalism’s great technological leaps – from railways to nuclear energy
to the internet – have advanced in tandem with the machinery of war. AI
proves no exception.
Strip away the geopolitical drama, then, and the real story is
financial fragility. The least one can say is that without the weekend
bombing of Iran, U.S. market drops would have been more chaotic and
disorderly, because investors would have focussed directly on financial
fragility. The pressure has been building for months in the sprawling
private-credit market, where lightly regulated lenders have pumped
hundreds of billions into companies that traditional banks would not
touch, from subprime auto financing to leveraged corporate borrowers.
Early warning signs – such as the collapsing of Tricolor Holdings and
First Brands (both filed for bankruptcy in September 2025, with
extremely high liabilities) – suggest that cracks are appearing first in
the weakest corners of the credit cycle, precisely where excess
liquidity tends to accumulate when expanding. The latest rupture is the
collapse of Market Financial Solutions (MFS), a UK property lender
forced into administration after creditors alleged that the same
collateral had been pledged multiple times, leaving more than 80% of
roughly £1.2 billion in debts effectively unaccounted for.
Markets had started to notice, as even Wall Street giants like
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have seen sharp equity declines of
roughly 6%. It is a worrying signal when institutions of systemic
importance come under pressure rather than the usual fringe lenders.
Against this backdrop, warnings
from Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan) about risks echoing the 2007-08
Global Financial Crisis sound less like cautious rhetoric and more like a
reminder of a familiar pattern: excessive leverage, opaque credit
structures and complacent markets suddenly colliding with tighter
conditions. If the system begins to buckle, the Federal Reserve will
once again be expected to step in.
The financial architecture operates through two interlocking
mechanisms, both converging on the same objective: keeping U.S.
borrowing costs low. The first is the dollar’s exorbitant privilege as
world reserve currency. When the U.S. asserts dominance, global
uncertainty rises – but mostly outside U.S. borders. Capital tends to
flee the periphery and concentrate in the core. Treasuries absorb this
demand, and yields fall. In these instances, American power is rewarded
with cheaper financing. This privilege must be actively maintained.
Military assertiveness entails permanent commitments, including defence
spending, security guarantees, and reconstruction. These are not costs
incurred in service of stability; they are the machinery through which
instability is perpetuated. We inhabit a permanent state of exception, a
system that must manufacture enemies and crises in order to suspend
fiscal and monetary restraint. In such a system, the measures justified
as temporary quickly become permanent. War-related costs widen deficits,
accelerate Treasury issuance, and eventually test the market’s capacity
to absorb debt. At that point, the second mechanism begins: central
bank intervention. The same state of exception that justified the bombs
now justifies the printing press.....
....MUCH MORE
