The idea that we'd could somehow balance out tech markets by becoming good at something new has no path to success. Europe exports data and imports products refined from it, and we build our society on foreign-controlled infrastructure that sets terms for our laws and governance. Sounds familiar?
Our friends in the global majority can see it from miles away: the dynamics that best capture Europe's position today are those of neocolonialism. The end state isn't to become a formal colony but having to choose who to be a client state of.
We still have the capacity to turn this around, a lot of it actually. But for that to happen, we need leadership whose understanding of reality has moved on from watching reruns of The West Wing. It's not clear that we have it.
I wonder if the human instinct to ignore the tyre fire going on in the US instead of internalising that the US government is actually on fire because we’re so busy dealing with all the small effects of the tyre fire in our lives - that self protective normalisation without which we can’t function…
Do EU leaders have that too? “The US as a functional entity can’t really be gone can it, I mean the planes are still flying and we all just went over there and faced down Trump and he didn’t sign over Ukraine to Russia so we can still work with this” or whatever?
I mean, it’s such a weird reality to try to understand!
you've got it right though. it's not that the US is done, but this will be a long period of instability AT BEST, and if you're preparing for the best case then you're not doing your job.
Hope for the best, expect the worst (I saw the 12 chairs at a formative age)
My read (which of course could be wrong) isn't so much that the problem is US-centric as it is misunderstanding the geopolitical shift. If they somehow manage to avoid the worst from Trump and if the US somehow returns to normal, the geopolitics will still have irretrievably changed.
And they're not ready for that. The era has changed. This started before Trump I even, even though that and Brexit were the obvious events. But there's no going back to the international global rules-based order that they are comfortable operating in.
arguably globalism ended in the 90s, it just wasn't immediately obvious
It did, it's just that the 90s went all the way to ~2016.
i really liked what john ralston saul had to say about globalism a while back (youtu.be/90UAEtt0ta8 and especially youtu.be/F58AkoeSpn0?...) —"globalism" doesn't mean "international trade" per se (although it incorporates that) but rather all human interaction viewed through the lens of economics
oh why does he have to be on substaaack 😭😭😭
Ooh, thanks, I'll have to watch that.
somethng about Fukuyama and that 'end of history' nonsense and thinking that economics had taken over from history in there maybe?
heh yeah i still haven't read that but feel like i should for posterity
too many large powers (*cough* Russia China maybe India *cough*) who don't *do* rules, even before the US copied their approach