"The Wayback When Machine"
A warp speed journey all the way back
to the Age of Abundance (February, 2022)...
by Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Something a little different for you today, dear reader; a journey in the Wayback When Machine. As you may have noticed, we’ve welcomed a whole new cohort of readers to our humble ranks over the past month or so (if that’s you, pull up a chair and get comfy)...As such, we’ve been “circling back,” as the former White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, used to say, taking stock of where we’ve been... and trying to get a feel for where we might be headed next.
Looking back through our growing archive of Sunday Sessions, we came across the following issue, first published on February 13 of this year, barely one week before Russian tanks were to roll across the Ukrainian border.
Of course, we could have had no idea of the events that would come to pass in the weeks and months ahead... from the conflict itself to the consequent sanctions, including the weaponization of the US dollar, from supply chain disruptions to ongoing deglobalization, from energy shocks to forty-year high inflation ripping across the US and Europe, and plenty more besides. And yet, reading over that issue with the benefit of hindsight, and listening to Byron’s characteristically sound and sage insights, we can’t help but wondering if there weren’t some clues along the way, some breadcrumbs that were pointing toward some version of what was to come.
It is not given to man to know his fate, as they say, but a working knowledge of our recent history, coupled with an unflinching assessment of our own flawed and predictable nature, can help us form a picture of what might lie in wait.
And so it is in that spirit we invite you back to a simpler time, when armed conflict on European soil was still a twinkle in Mr. Putin’s eye, when power outages in highly industrialized nations were the stuff of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists and when persistent, generation-high inflation was still in its “transitory” infancy..."
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“Why, sometimes I've believed as many
as six impossible things before breakfast.”
~ The Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland"
"Nary a day goes by that we are not invited to suspend disbelief, to take leave of our senses, and to accept on the one hand the utterly preposterous, and on the other the inexplicably divine.
We rise every Sunday, a small miracle in itself. Like many Dear Readers, we take our coffee (flat white, extra shot) as if it were a matter of course, scarcely appreciating the many hands that went into its careful production. Our eggs, likewise, arrive on our plate, hearty and nutritious, as if delivered by angels in aprons. As for the bacon, it is as though Demeter herself husbanded the perfect breakfast drift, with our very taste buds in mind.
Our clothes, too, are delivered from exotic lands... Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka... sewn by gentle hands, packed by calloused ones, then shipped and freighted across the wine dark seas to anonymous nobodies, hunched in front of laptop screens. These gadgets, in turn, are assembled, meticulously and expertly, by people we will never meet, in factories we will never visit. They are imagined by futurists, engineered by geniuses, and distributed to the far reaches of the known world on vessels and vehicles of unimaginable complexity.
And yet, what have we done to deserve such a bounty? What new land did we discover? What disease did we cure? What invention did we bestow upon mankind, that we are lavished with such luxury? Nada. Nil. Zilch.
No Ode to a Grecian Urn flowed from our pen. No Eureka! moments sprang from our cranium. No complex machines, statues of David or unfinished symphonies emanated from our hallowed being. And still, we can summon a private chauffeur with the click of a button, as easily as a king might command his cavalry. Expert chefs will prepare our meal, in any cuisine of our choosing, and deliver it to our door within the hour. And if we so wish, we can do as poor Dedalus only dreamed of: board a flying contraption and soar through the heavens to any destination on God's green earth.
We mention such wonders, if only in passing, to underscore the precarious nature by which the global economy hangs together... and how easily it can all be disrupted, especially by well-meaning world improvers, who would ignore the lessons of history only to impose their top-down, command economy style “solutions” to problems of their own making."
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"Joel Bowman and Byron King: If we only knew what we know."
"Earlier this week, we spoke to Harvard-trained geologist, geopolitical expert and all round man-of-letters, Byron King. What Byron doesn’t know about the energy markets may well not be worth knowing. And what he sees coming down the proverbial pike should alarm people who enjoy things like... oh, functioning light switches, buttons on their shirts, antibiotics, white in their paint, landing gear on their aircraft, steel in their bridges. You know, the kind of stuff we are routinely invited to take for granted, until it disappears.
Over the course of a freewheeling hour or so, Byron warned of the impending molecule crisis (“it’s not just energy, there’s a shortage of everything...”) the folly of the Great Energy Transition (“turns out you can’t power the world with Facebook ‘likes’ and invitations to your birthday”) and the geopolitical risk of offshoring critical industry, particularly in the “stuff economy.” You’ll find our conversation with Byron in this week’s (Feb. 10) episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast and transcript, right here…"
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