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Even if almost no one wants to admit it, our “system” is obsolete, and for this reason it is now morphing into a “closed system” – totalitarian in nature.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:
Bombs for Bonds: Iran and the Geopolitics of Refinancing
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
