This is a long post, for that I will not apologize. It is the culmination of me trying to make sense of why the US refuses to respond to the climate crisis, which I believe is an existential threat for large portions of humanity. In trying to answer that, I came to a systems-level theory of the US that also explains the way the AI boom is happening. I don’t know that it’s an uplifting theory, but it fits a lot of things together for me, and I hope it makes you ask interesting new questions about the world!
Back when Twitter was worth using, there was an account on it called @horse_ebooks. This account would post random little fragments of sentences or paragraphs that were absurd and often strangely poetic. One of the most famous posts from the account is 4 words that have since become a mantra to me:
Everything happens so much.
It’s a mantra because well, everything seems to be happening, so much. The internet has become a black hole for attention, and it seems to be overwhelming us with all this information. What’s more, the effort required to take in the information and the never-ceasing firehose of more information prevents us from ever sitting down and making sense of what we know. Everything happens so much. What the fuck is happening now? What does it all mean?
I don’t imagine this problem is going away soon; if the world suddenly got a lot simpler and easier to understand that probably means some major crisis has happened (new problems!). I assume everything will continue to happen so much, and then I’ll die.
My brain wants this world to make sense. I think this is a reasonable desire; to live in a world that one can make sense of. “Make sense” means I have some sort of big picture story for how things work. If I have a story that helps me explain the big picture of the world, then I can use that story to interpret many of the things that keep happening so much. The big story is a frame that I use to make sense of new political horrors, to make sense of plans to improve something, to make sense of other people’s actions, etc etc.
I find being able to make sense of the world is grounding. When I can make all the information I have about the world fit together in a coherent narrative, it’s easier to sleep. I also find it easier to handle the news. I find it easier to sort through all the explanations for the world offered by others, and determine which ones are worth taking seriously and which ones only raise more questions. Even though everything continues to happen so much, and even though I continue to deal with the firehose of information resulting from the everything happening, I am not consumed by the chaos. I have a path for stability. Thus, in my life sense-making has become a practice for grounding.
Right now, in 2026, the so much of everything happening is a lot of crises. There is the climate crisis, which is changing the world we live on in ways we understand enough to know the future looks a lot less stable and familiar. The climate crisis is happening simultaneously with a global mass extinction event the planet has not experienced in eons. This extinction crisis seems mostly caused by the vast industrial reshaping of the world humans have undertaken in the past few years. In the US, there’s a bunch of other crises at play; there is our sudden swing to right wing authoritarianism under Trump’s republican party, and also the rise of LLM technology branded as AI, which is sowing chaos amongst our labor markets and financial markets, with no clear resolution in sight. Inside all of this, there are various other crises; we’re depleting water supplies in some areas (SW USA) and poisoning it in others (Iowa and other ag states). Despite the US having one of the largest GDPs in the world, most people in the country are deep in debt and one crisis away from insolvency. Thanks to the tech industry, there’s basically no more shared consensus of reality that we can operate from, it’s just vibes and Joe Rogan and short-form, tall-screen videos.
Everything happens so much.
In the past few years I’ve become very interested in Systems Theory. I grew up religious, where narratives about how the world worked were either grounded in “there’s a deity in charge of everything, so everything happens by design” or very moralistic linear narratives where all problems had very simple, obvious solutions (e.g. criminals are bad and should go to jail, end of story). Both of these ways of thinking felt insufficient; it seems like there’s a lot more happening that might be relevant to consider when explaining things. Systems Theory has been a balm for my neurons; finally a way of approaching the world that embraces complexity and focuses on relationships and interactions rather than simple cause/effect.
Learning about systems theory has changed my sense-making practice. Most of the books I’ve read about systems are technical and academic, which is annoying, because that makes them broadly inaccessible. I believe strongly that we should be able to make sense of our world—all of us, not just people who can read dense technical books. The joy of systems theory is it gives you a bunch of tools for making sense of systems even if you do not have complete information. I don’t think we’re ever going to know everything about this complex world, so finding a way of making sense of the world that embraces imperfect information has been enthralling, personally. The thrilling part for me is that thinking with systems theory requires zooming out constantly; the question “is there more context that is relevant” is always on your mind.
In the past few years, I’ve started building a theory about the United States. A “system story” of what the US does. I read a lot of people who are critiquing or analyzing the US from various lenses, and all have been helpful. But my brain loves zooming way out to the big picture, and I wanted to make sense of the US in a way that helps me interpret the current realities in light of the country’s past behaviors. If you take all of the parts of the US—the government, the legal system, the geography, the people (citizen or otherwise), the international relations, all the stuff that combines to create the thing we call the United States—what does this system do? A useful answer to this question would help us step back from the everything happening so much and ask some fundamental questions.
This post is my attempt to outline a theory for what the function of the United States is, starting with why it was created and then describing how it is serving that function today. This idea really wants to be a book. Or, I want to be able to explore it at book length. Maybe I will get that opportunity, but for now, it’s a blog post and as such operates at a very high level.
The last thing to note up front: I think the beauty of system stories is that multiple stories can be true; there are all sorts of complex relationships and histories involved. The way a story is framed—the details that are emphasized, the relationships that are highlighted—impacts the narrative. There are multiple other ways to tell the story of the US as a system; many already written. Because systems are messy, ever changing things, different stories can be useful for different goals. My goal below is not to say this is the best and only way to explain this country. Rather, it’s to say this is a way of explaining this country that has proven very generative for me. Maybe it will be for you as well!
A Systems Story of the United States
The story of the US as a system starts 4-ish billion years ago. Humans are one species among millions that live (or previously lived) on earth. Earth’s history is billions of years longer than the human species’ history. So far as we know, all species trace back through a genetic family tree to some ancient early life form. Life emerged and started evolving. All species on earth exist because evolution is the most creative, experimental, absurd force operating in the universe. A few hundred thousand years ago, all the myriad variables and factors at play in evolutionary development of life produced humans, and we have successfully avoided extinction since then. Go us! There’s millions of species who can’t say the same.
In our first few hundred thousands years of species existence as a species, humans have made up everything that constitutes human culture. Truly everything—language, government, construction methods, keyboards, telescopes, the concept of effervescence, pens, underwear, maps, the words “obsequious”, “fart”, “bullshit”, sportsball in myriad forms—I could just keep listing millions things that didn’t exist until humans created them. Much like evolution, we are a creative, experimental, absurd species.
Starting US History at this deep history level attunes my mind to the first points of grounding: humans are a part of the natural world even if we believe otherwise, and the human world is a built thing—built through human action, choice, and labor across our history. I like to think about this because it reminds me of a correlated fact: not a single bit of human civilization was fore-ordained. From the completely random emergence of our species on this planet to all the historical human activity that has shaped the world we now live in, nothing was inevitable. There have been billions, maybe trillions of other ways history could have possibly happened. None of the following parts of the story I’m telling were inevitable; it’s what some humans did (or are doing) to create / shape / build / destroy / change aspects of the world and the way it is arranged.
One of the uncountable number of things we have made up is countries. Countries are magical invented concepts that have immense power in shaping the reality of every human who exists within one. In the US, our country was shaped and built through a history that’s extremely violent. The country today is majority white people despite the fact that barely any white people lived anywhere inside the current boundaries of the US just a few centuries ago. At that time, the land that today is called the US was hundreds of different nations of indigenous people, with many thousands in each nation. The current state of the country exists because white people (my ancestors) made up doctrines based on their religion that gave them the right to declare some humans as “real humans” and others as “lower or not humans,” and then they committed to long campaigns of genocide, war, enslavement, and other forms of dominance to build the country that now exists. Those campaigns actually had two distinct facets that some call our “original sins”: there was the genocide waged against indigenous people to (unsuccessfully) erase their existence and claim the country as “empty,” given by a god to humans of one skin color for them to manifest their destiny. At the same time there was also the large-scale campaign of human trafficking people from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean to be enslaved humans forced to labor and turn the newly emptied land into wealth-generating property.
These two original sins ought to be the type of history that forces future generations to question fundamental things about the way the country works, but in the US that project of questioning is never allowed to take place. My system story suggests a reason for this.
Interlude: POSIWID
Before I go any further, I must talk about my favorite idea in systems theory: POSIWID. The Purpose of a System is What It Does. This heuristic is a way of guiding us to accurately describe a system, and that means stating what it does rather than what we want it to do, or believe it to do, or wish it to do. The clearest example of POSIWID I’ve ever seen is this classic tweet:
Systems theory has improved my thinking about complexity and how the world works so much. POSIWID has taught me that accurately describing the system requires treating the behaviors or outputs of a system as if they are the result of the system working as designed, not a malfunction.
To break down the tweet: If the coyotes keep eating my outdoor cats, I have lots of ways to make sense of it. I could believe that a deity is spiting me. I could believe the coyotes are being evil. I could believe that the cats had it coming. Those beliefs could provide an explanation, but not one that improves my understanding of the situation. They would not guide me to seeing the proper solution to the problem. Only by accurately understanding the system based on what it does— that I’m just feeding cats to coyotes—can I see that the cats will continue to disappear until my behavior changes.
POSIWID clarifies the world by treating it as a place that makes sense, and preventing us from writing off consistent behavior as aberrations. If we instead treat those behaviors as functional output, POSIWID is an invitation to view unexplainable behavior or unresolvable contradictions in a system as a sign that we are misunderstanding the system. A good systems story explains what the system actually does. This clarifies systems because it challenges us to stop focusing on what we expect to be happening or behavior we believe is occurring. Our expectations or behaviors may be desirable, but if they are not actually happening, then we have work to do to change the system or update our model of it.
Back to the US as a System
In my story of the country as system, I think how the US came to exist is important. Our original sins were not incidental to the founding, they were the foundation for it. Taking the original sins into account means recognizing the US has been—from before it became an official country—premised on the idea that some people’s existence is more important than others. You can see this gap in our founding documents, which claim all men are equal. But those same documents fail to mention women, define Black people as three-fifths of a person, and referred to indigenous people as “merciless Indian savages”. The foundation of the US proclaimed rhetorical equality but was structurally designed on inequality. This reality has meant many groups of people who live in the US have spent the past 250 years fighting the system (at a variety of levels: politically, culturally, educationally, and literal war) to gain equality in the country. We still have not found success on that goal!
After a quarter of a millennium—despite the ongoing efforts by large numbers of people to make equality of rights a reality since day one—a POSIWID framing seems more useful: the US functions as a system for maintaining inequality.
Knowing that the country has consistently refused to treat all people as equal despite consistent rhetoric otherwise makes me wonder: what has it done instead?
Looking back to the founding documents, the founding structure of the country only allowed white, male landowners to participate in the democracy. That is, when the country as a system was formalized, it defined people with wealth as the only people who mattered. The work to expand equality has been continuous and arduous with varying levels of success. What I am theorizing is that the modifications to the system have mostly focused on whose needs count but at no point in our history has the centrality of wealth been challenged.
Here then is my theory: the US was created to be a system that preserves wealth. This is clearly seen in who was actually given power in the founding documents. Over the past 250 years, access to power and participation has evolved and expanded, but at no point has the purpose of the system ever been challenged. The US—a system of many constituent parts—works to preserve wealth wherever it is found. The wealth it was created to preserve was generated through the results of our violent original sins, which is why the system took shape in the way it did.
I believe this description of the system holds up, even if it seems quite radical compared to how Americans mythologize the country. I will now use the theory as a lens for making sense of a looming crisis, as a way of showing that it has really helpful explanatory power.
In the 1980’s we started figuring out that certain gases collect in the atmosphere, and in turn traps the heat of the sun, functioning like a greenhouse. We named those gases greenhouse gases; a category including Methane and CO2. The atmospheric accumulation was not in and of itself an issue, just the way the earth’s systems work. What was a problem was that the entirety of modern human civilization for the past two hundred-ish years was built on technologies that produce massive amounts of methane and CO2 as part of their normal functioning, and the futures we are invested in assume that civilization will continue. Our future involves a lot more greenhouse gas production, the consequence of which is more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which will cause more of the sun’s heat to be trapped. This will significantly affect every single environmental and ecological system on earth in ways that harm the majority of living beings.
None of these facts should be controversial, but we live in a world of complex systems, including many made up human systems like business and politics, and those systems do not treat facts like these neutrally. Now I’m going to assume if you’ve made it this far into this blog post the existence of climate change is not necessary for me to litigate. I bring it into this system story because it’s very useful for providing clarity on how the country (and world, but one blog post can only cover so much) functions.
Since we first understood the impacts of greenhouse gases, we have increased our production of them without ceasing. Climate change—the large-scale unintentional human terraforming of planet earth from an very habitable place to a potentially uninhabitable place—has not caused the country to react in a way commensurate to the severity of the crisis. Mostly—with some exceptions—the country as a whole has sought to protect the status quo, often with the excuse or justification that mitigating and adapting to climate change is too expensive.
Do you remember when I mentioned that everything in the human world is made up? Well that includes money. Money is a technology we invented and use to abstract “value.” When we’re trying to figure out what things are “worth” we’re working across many domains: some people have skills, some people have goods, others have spaces (buildings, farms, land, etc), and trying to translate the value of all of those things can be messy. Money is a technology that simplifies the translation to a single dimension of comparison — dollars (in the US, obvs).
Money started as a pretty direct abstraction, it represented goods or services, but now it’s much less tangible. I will come back to this in a bit, but let’s start here: the made up aspect of money means that its accumulation (as wealth) is a result of processes and activities (that we also made up). That means all of the money that exists in the world came from somewhere. That somewhere is all on earth because (aside from sunlight) we don’t generate money or wealth or value from anything beyond the earth. This includes recognizing that it does not come from a god or some sort of magic process, it came from actions taken in history. Which to me makes clearer how the climate change crisis is actually a result of the history of wealth generation. Another way to say this is that the climate crisis exists in part thanks to the process that made the country so rich. If, in a different world, the country had not gotten so rich in the ways it did, climate change would not be nearly as significant of a crisis.
The assertion that addressing climate change is too expensive is absurd to me. This claim implies that we can only ever afford to harm the habitability of the climate, if doing otherwise is too costly. This contradiction confounded me for years. If climate change was the result of natural, known processes that we cannot change (as it is), and we understand that human civilization is the main driver in creating the crisis (as we do), then why is the richest, most powerful nation (as we mythologize ourselves) not using its massive wealth to respond to the crisis?
Eventually—and here I must give credit to reading Black feminist writers (Tressie McMillan Cottom, adrienne maree brown, Octavia Butler, Saidaya Hartman among others) and Indigenous writers (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Nick Estes, Winona Laduke, Vine Deloria Jr and more) for helping me unlearn a bunch of deep-seated misunderstandings about the country—I realized that the easiest way to explain this lack of action was to stop attempting to resolve the contradiction between facts and inaction. I needed to POSIWID it. The climate crisis—and specifically the undoing of our reliance on fossil fuels is a threat to a lot of wealth. And if I make sense of the US as a system designed to protect wealth then the US’s (lack of) response to the climate crisis is 100% predictable. The system is working as designed.
The US—which again is not simply the government, but all the structures of power that constitute the country, including government and legal system, military, businesses, international treaty orgs, state governments, etc, etc—is responding to the climate crisis as a risk to wealth, and the top priority is to ensure that the wealth is preserved. Because addressing the climate crisis means destabilizing many of the structural financial parts of the world (the energy system, the scale of industries, global supply chains, billions in future debt payments), the risk of addressing the climate crisis actually is too expensive, if your goal is to preserve the wealth. Only if your purpose is to equally care for all people does the scale of the crisis necessitates spending whatever is necessary. The US is not doing that, because that is not its purpose.
Up until now in this narrative I’ve been describing the shape of the country in a radical way that I think helps me make more sense of what happens inside of it. Which is always my project: find a way of thinking about the world that in turn helps me fit the absurd chaos of the mid-2020’s into some sort of longer story. Having now built a theory for what the country exists for (preserving the wealth our original sins generated) and examining our response to the climate crisis as evidence for that theory, I think we can talk about some of the mechanics of wealth preservation. This is where the story moves from merely descriptive to useful for hypothesizing about what might happen in the coming decades.
I started the story with evolution and the emergence of humans first because I think the evolutionary process and systems theory are really great concepts to think with. Systems theory helps us conceive of systems as a bunch of parts that are all related in various ways, interacting and reacting to each other in a dynamic, ever-changing manner. Consider a tree; it’s a single system made up of parts like roots and capillaries and bark and leaves, but it is also a component in many bigger systems such as forests, watersheds, ecosystems. These larger systems’ are shaped by the air, the seasons, the moon, the weather patterns. Systems theory creates a toolbox for noticing and describing these many other parts, systems, relationships, interactions and more, all in service of better understanding the world. Because systems are constantly changing, systems theory requires us to be alive to systemic shifts and evolve our own understanding.
The description of evolutionary development I first learned was Darwinian survival of the fittest, some pyramidal war where every species was in an existential threat to survive fighting all other species. Survival of the fittest turns out to be a rather small aspect of evolutionary development. While individual members of a species might be in ongoing battles for survival, generally speaking at the species level, evolution is a huge tool bag involving chance, serendipity, possibility, interdependence, dependence, collaboration, relationship and more. Our initial view of evolution framed the world as a competitive environment. We now better understand the world is a creative environment with room for all sorts of forms of success, where many beings and ways of being can coexist with minimal competition.
When I try to make sense of systems, part of the process involves understanding how they can evolve. The more dynamic the environment a system exists within is, the more the system must be flexible, able to handle big changes. Life on earth seems to have learned that in order to handle the scale of changes this planet can undergo it is necessary to be as creative as possible in its evolution. The natural world is full of examples of beings and systems that can adapt to a wide variety of shifts in environmental conditions. My favorite creatures are tardigrades. Microscopic “water bears” that live in the water that collects in moss, eating bacteria. Sometimes, though, there’s no water, and so they just dry up into little desiccated, suspended animation states and hang out until there’s water again. They evolved the capacity to survive extreme deprivation, so that they can navigate the world they live in successfully (I think tardigrades are so cool I got a tattoo of one lounging on a mossy log pinup style on my leg). They are a more extreme example of life’s evolutionary creativity among millions of others on the planet.
The fact that all living creatures from single-celled organisms to megafauna use the full toolbag of evolution freely suggests that it’s critical for the continued survival of life. At no point has life found it could succeed better without evolution. Which is an interesting and curious fact, to me that I will return to.
Human systems are dynamic as well. We’re gaining new technological skills, going to war with each other, laws are changing, power is changing hands, you get the picture. So just because you can accurately describe a system at one level—say what the function of the US is—does not mean you have any idea the inner mechanics of the system. Without some theory for how the system functions it is hard to track how it has evolved or to determine what options are available for changing it.
When Turtle Island (the indigenous name for North America) was first colonized, wealth was represented in mostly tangible assets; beaver skins, wampum, land, gold, commodities, enslaved humans. The founding of the US was a declaration of independence from the countries that wanted to siphon the wealth from the colonies—wealth that had been accumulated via our original sins. The genesis of the wealth preservation system was some people got really rich and wanted to make sure that other people couldn’t lay claim to their riches.
The wealth preservation theory adds some interesting perspective to major events in the US history. When the civil war ended legal slavery and freed a bunch of people who had previously been counted as assets; the many people invested in the slave trade viewed this primarily as wealth elimination rather than expansion of justice. The country had a period of ~15 years where the structure of the country started shifting, and equality amongst more people in the US genuinely expanded (read Eric Foner’s Reconstruction if you haven’t!). For that period, the system stopped preserving wealth and opened up the possibility for other functions. Then the “Redeemers” rose up and unleashed a backlash that erased the system changes. While the “wealth erased” was not recovered, the power systems that had preserved it were all rebuilt, including the rise of Jim Crow to prevent Black people from gaining future power or wealth in the system. A few decades later, the US entered the Great Depression. I will explore this further later in this piece, but using a wealth preservation lens the series of events from Gilded Age to Great Depression to New Deal suggests that the country hit a breaking point, that the wealth preservation system was winning out over other concerns. The New Deal involved some of the biggest wealth redistribution that’s ever happened in the country, which I read as a moment of system regulation, where it was understood that the country must be able to keep existing in order for the wealth preservation to be successful. One other US historical event comes to mind: the financial crash of 2008. Notoriously, a crash generated by the financial industry ended up decimating millions of people in the US who lost jobs and houses, while the financial firms were bailed out and mostly made whole. That’s exactly what one might expect a wealth preservation system to do.
One of the tools systems theory offers is incentives. To understand behaviors inside a system, one can try to understand what is incentivizing those behaviors. Incentives are like physics; even if you do not know about them, they are still at work. Not knowing the concept of gravity does not allow you to levitate, just means you lack an explanation for the force that keeps bringing you down. Gravity’s a good example: if you put a ball on a playground slide, it will roll right on down because that is the easiest thing for it to do. Gravity makes rolling down (vs staying put or floating up or whatever) the easiest behavior for the ball. We can reverse engineer what incentives are at play in any system by determining which arrangement of the system is easiest.
In the early 1970’s, the US moved from a system where our currency was linked to a real-world asset (gold) to a system where money is completely made up. This is what is called “fiat currency” if you’ve heard of that. I typically hear about the gold-standard from right-wingers, and fiat currency from crypto people, so let me just be very clear neither of those are the paths I’m interested in going down. I am trying to describe the behavior of a system, and not argue about monetary policy. A key feature of fiat currency compared to currency marked against a physical asset such as gold is that the money supply is infinite, the only thing constraining its production is policy.
From a systems perspective, it seems that when we removed any limiting factor by dropping the gold standard we (unintentionally?) divorced wealth generation and accumulation from any real-world constraint. In so doing, we created the conditions for financial capitalism to emerge.
Previously, there was a finite pool of cash all anchored in actual assets, and it was much harder to let inequality get too extreme, because eventually resources got so imbalanced that people could not survive. The Great Depression, in this telling, was a system correction where wealth had to be spread back out a bit for the US to be able to keep going. Wealth preservation had to find a stable system arrangement to prevent complete erasure. If too much of the total wealth available in the country was hoarded by a small number of people, the rest of the country was unable to afford survival. This did not work out well for us.
I think the divorcing of money creation from any real-world constraints removed a limitation in the system. That limitation was an important constraint preventing the system of wealth preservation from becoming too harmful for all us non-wealthy people. The era we’re now living in, what is called Financial Capitalism, is a world where money has become the driving force for shaping the world. The money supply is infinite, but the world itself is still finite. We are all gas, no brakes for wealth generation, no matter the consequences.
There are two examples I think provide the best evidence for this theory, and then I’ll get to the point where I tie all this together.
Every major country in the world except for the US has some form of universal healthcare. This is a curious thing. Universal healthcare makes the entire country healthier, it helps people live longer, and it accepts that healthcare is not a market-type activity; anyone may become sick or injured at any time no matter what precautions they take. The US absolutely refuses to recognize these facts; instead healthcare is begrudgingly offered to disabled and old people by the state, and then everyone else is required to solve the problem on their own through private insurance. In a world of finite resources and money, the value of ensuring maximum healthiness amongst a population is obvious; it ensures you have plenty of workers available to keep the economy going (which has historically been a requirement for wealth generation).
But wealth generation is no longer dependent on the production of value in the old-fashioned ways, in fact that’s a smaller and smaller part of the US economy each year. Now, it’s possible to generate money from money itself. Financialized capitalism babay, where we’re going we don’t need productive economic activity. In this world, the holders of wealth—though we focus on billionaires it’s actually corporations and the financial industry—have no incentive to encourage universal healthcare, because it reduces the pool of money available for them to leverage. If a government is just paying healthcare providers for services, and the providers are paying the healthcare workers, and the broader population gets healthcare when needed—that destroys the current system. And that current system creates large pools of money that the finance industry leverages and expects to be available.
The current US healthcare system benefits the finance industry in 3 ways. First, it creates massive middle-man companies (insurers) who can siphon money off every aspect of the healthcare industry without needing to add any value. These companies are some of the most valuable in the world. Second, the necessity of healthcare and the absence of universal healthcare generates medical debt, and debt is one of the financial industry’s favorite tools. Third, the linking of healthcare to employment creates extremely strong incentives for staying employed; it reduces the agency of millions of people who might do other things with their time and labor, but instead hold down jobs to maintain health insurance. These three benefits to the finance industry become incentives to preserve the status quo; to refuse changes that would benefit millions of people. This also explains why biggest change to the US healthcare system in recent memory has not been to expand healthcare access via state coverage (universal healthcare like other countries have) but rather to subsidize the current industry (via the ACA). The country made the current healthcare system more sustainable by artificially reducing the cost of private insurance, ensuring all 3 above incentives remain in place.
Let me be clear: I am not making any claims of conspiratorial actions to prevent universal healthcare in the US. I am saying that the shape of the current system creates incredibly strong incentives for the people who have the most power in the system to refuse change. They may not know the incentives exist, they may or may not think in the same terms I’ve used, but the incentives shape what is the easiest course of action in the system.
The second example I want to offer as evidence is the current AI boom. The case against developing and rolling out LLM technology in the way we are doing it is really strong. Even if the technology could live up to some of its hype (I don’t believe it does or will), the tech industry is operating as if AI is more valuable than human survival. This is not hyperbole: the climate crisis is a real thing that is worsening with every year we refuse to stop pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The latest estimates show that energy usage for AI grew about 17% year over year, and is on track to double current usage in the next 5 years alone. The major AI companies have—in the past year—committed to energy purchases and data center buildouts that are impossible to achieve with massively expanding fossil fuel usage, which means significantly more greenhouse gas production in the foreseeable future.
This is happening despite there being significant questions about AI from a variety of dimensions—its scalability, its actual efficacy, the medium to long-term consequences of broad adoption, the list goes on. An intelligent species would be able to recognize that the costs currently far outweigh the benefits then change course until such a time that the math worked differently.
But the AI boom is not the work of intelligence and intention, it is the work of finance. The financial incentives at play are driving everything. Over the past 50 years wealth inequality has grown to ludicrous levels. Levels that have no precedence in US history. This has happened because the divorcing of money from supply constraints opened up fun new ways to shape the economy and accumulate wealth. Financial firms—banks, hedge funds, and then VCs—had huge incentives to explore those new possibilities (wealth accumulation like never seen). They have been and continue to be wildly successful.
What is happening with the AI boom is that it is believed to be the next frontier for wealth generation, and the true believers believe that the sky is the limit for how much wealth it can generate, if it successfully replaces a majority of workers without destroying the economy. If AI could fulfill the dreams of its biggest hype-sters, it would create (what they believe to be) infinite money machines. The narratives about the AI-based economy truly portray the future as all upside, and those who aren’t on board will lose out forever. The finance industry, which exists to make as much money as possible, has every incentive to treat the most profitable future as the strongest bet. Being wrong might mean total wealth loss. But the incentives at play are causing the financial industry to act in ways that guarantee the entire world loses. Exactly how much remains to be seen.
Why can’t we stop them?
Bringing it all together
Just to quickly review: I think we can theorize about systems in part by narrativizing them. In this post, I’ve described the country of the US as a system designed to preserve wealth. My systems story does not focus on the components that make up the US (what type of government it has, how the legal system works, population changes, states, etc) but rather tries to describe the way all of those components have operated in the past 250 years, attempting to define the US by the thing it has consistently and successfully done since its inception: preserve wealth. To bring that function into focus, I described how our original sins of indigenous genocide (to acquire “empty” property) and human slavery (to make the property profit-generating) created the wealth that the country was then founded to preserve.
I then tried to test the story out; if we look at the big picture of US history does the system consistently act in ways that preserve wealth? Yes, across many major events wealth preservation matches the behavior and outcomes of the system.
In looking at the impact of dropping the Gold standard, my narrative suggests that this changed the structure of the system: what had been a system for wealth preservation that had some built-in constraints on how unequal (in wealth distribution) it could get before shit hit the fan, is now a system where wealth accumulation is unbounded. Money is no longer finite, or derived from a finite constraint, so it can grow limitlessly. Which it has. The Fed graph of US GDP is hilarious. From 1980 to now the US GDP has grown from $2.8 trillion to $32 trillion, a growth rate of more than 1000% over the period. GDP is a measure of economic activity, and not the same as wealth, but if we want some rough proxy for the amount of wealth available to claim, then GDP works fine. In less than 5 decades, the potential wealth available has increased 10x. The US economic planning assumes this is a trend that will continue.
In a system designed for equality or prioritizing everyone’s needs, if there were 10x more money available, one would imagine that everyone would feel a bit richer, or we’d have figured out how to improve the overall quality of life. That’s supposedly the point of getting richer, right? Easier living? Getting out of scarcity and into abundance is typically what we’re chasing. Surely we’d get some cheaper healthcare or more affordable housing out from such growth?
We have not done that, as a country, have we?
The final part of my system story is trying to make sense of what the financial industry functions as now. The US—prior to infinite money—mostly functioned as a wealth preservation system that had some sustainable boundaries. While wealth-generation was always a part of the system, it was always bounded by real-world constraints: how much new economic activity could be produced. The expansion of territory (adding new states) opened up property; the invention of new technologies (trains, communication mediums, automobiles) would create new industries. Each of these industries had a cap to the amount of economic activity or new assets they could generate, and thus the amount of wealth they were able to generate for the system. When money stopped being a constraint, the system changed.
I believe we now exist in a wealth preservation system being driven by an unconstrained wealth-generation system.
We can look back to the US’s original sins to make sense of what is happening now. The sins were vast injustices—violence on a scale that is hard to fathom. I do not want to suggest that what is happening today is the same thing as happened then; the differences are obvious and significant. Rather, we need to see what each of those sins accomplished, to create the conditions for the creation of the country.
If you read history books focusing on how the early colonists described their own actions, the horrific, awful violence they committed was constantly a means to an end, and the end was always wealth-building. Indigenous people were seen as savage, less-than-human beings whose existence prevented the colonists from using the land “productively” as they thought god wanted them to do. The genocide was intended to empty the land—to create a bunch of property that could be claimed as a form of wealth. The early colonists constantly talked about how indigenous people “did not improve the land” by which they meant use it for profit. The purpose of chattel slavery was to turn humans into wealth, and also as wealth that could generate more wealth (through procreation and through agricultural labor). Chattel slavery was a labor system where (unpaid) human labor was used to turn land (itself an asset) into sellable goods (generating profits).
The functional purposes of our violent original sins were to 1) colonize the land and 2) force humans to produce more wealth from the land.
Since the 1970s, the financial industry has pursued the same goals in modern forms.
Today, nearly the entire economy has been colonized by the finance industry. We have become financialized—just about every single bit of economic activity in the US has a financial company siphoning some of the exchange. This colonizing of the economy has taken decades but has faced very little resistance. To wit, the US did create a regulatory agency aimed at protecting consumers in the wake of the financial crisis, but it has been effectively dismantled by the current administration as it harmed wealth generation.
Today, the financial industry controls the majority of the wealth in the US. Over the past 5 decades it has incessantly explored all sorts of tools and technologies for using money to generate more money—via interest (on debt payments), investments, debt, leverage, honestly everything else I could name is debt-based. The financial industry has found myriad ways to take money (which it has loads of) and turn it into types of debt that generate all sorts of more income. The financial crisis of 2008 was caused by layers of debt; companies figured out how to give bad mortgages to consumers and package them all together into sellable assets, which then became the basis for more debt.
The financial industry took over the economy and has figured out how to use all other economic activity in the US to generate more wealth for itself. And the US as a system is doing what it does best: working to preserve the wealth that is generated.
Conclusion
There you have it, my system story for understanding the function of the United States. I think the country was invented to preserve (stolen) wealth, and then about 200 years after it was created the way money is created changed, generating opportunities for wealth generation that had previously been impossible. The financial industry has now taken over our economy, and we are beholden to its logic and incentives.
The logic of the financial system is that it’s too expensive to rethink the shape of the world to address the very present risks that climate change presents while, at the very same time, we cannot afford to not invest in the extremely unlikely possibility that AI succeeds. Both addressing the climate crisis and missing out on the possibility that AI becomes an infinite wealth machine are serious threats to the money, and the US is treating each risk as such.
This theory has been extremely generative for me as I’ve pieced it together, and there is so much more I hope to write about it in the future. In the meantime, some concluding thoughts.
First, I find it critically important to center that none of this was inevitable. It happened, we find ourselves where we are, but that does not mean there are no other options, now or in the future. Historically speaking, all empires have 100% failure rate, and there’s no reason to believe that the US is an exception. To me, the point of spending years building a systems theory and puzzling all the pieces together is to regain agency: if I can make sense of the world, I can share that sense-making with others, and with our shared clarity we can ask better questions. We can look anew at the parts of the world that previously were unquestioned or hard to make out, and we can make them questionable.
Second, I think the financial industry has been extremely successful in its project of colonizing the economy to turn it into a wealth generation engine, but I think the consequences of that success have barely been felt. If you read about ecology and human industrialization a bit (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and James C. Scott each have rich books on this topic), one of the patterns that’s become very prevalent is that when we try to colonize an ecosystem to our own purposes, we quickly destroy all of the subsystems that allow the ecosystem to thrive. In Scott’s book Seeing Like a State he discusses German Scientific Forestry, where certain humans decided to rationalize messy forests and turn timber production into a neat, predictable, industrial process. It worked for a single generation of trees, and then the humans learned that the “messiness” of the forest was not optional. Forests thrive when there is diversity, a richness of life, a full ecosystem of beings all working together. The rational forests had removed all of those parts in order to optimize for specific goals. The “optimizations” to the system destroyed its ability to exist.
This seems like a rich metaphor for understanding the financial industry’s reworking of the US for its needs. Today, the US is optimized towards a single dimension: ever increasing financial profits. I believe this optimization has destroyed or hindered a great deal of other aspects of human culture that we are dependent on, and the costs have not yet been revealed. Or maybe I should say, the US is currently doing a lot of things to try and cover up the costs, but I do not believe they will be effective in the long run. More on that in the future.
Last of all, I believe pretty strongly that we should be looking to the myriad ways that life exists on this earth for understanding all what possibilities exist to imagine our futures. Evolution is ridiculously good at creating all sorts of living systems that take advantage of environmental abundance, to create capacity for change. The threat of extinction is always present, and so species the world over find ways to flourish in ways that do not destroy the environment they are dependent on. If a crises emerges—there’s a drought or some big weather event or their food is in limited supply for some period—the entire species is not threatened. This ability to survive crisis is called resilience.
Humans are resilient too; we have created all of our culture and systems and scaled them up over time. It’s now very clear that our systems are not serving the majority of us. The country is refusing to deal with the climate change crisis and setting us all up for lots of misery and disaster, all because otherwise the rich people might get less rich, and our system finds loss of wealth more unbearable than mass misery and death.
As a species, we know so much. We have so many skills, and so many talents, and so many things that we’ve built up. Our resilience, our skills, our knowledge, our creativity & love & adaptability & everything that’s already built are the raw materials we’re working with if we decide to move beyond this wealth preserving system (which is called capitalism, although I have intentionally avoided that word until now).
Today, everything happens so much in a single system. That system is large, and frankly, it sucks. What I’m eternally curious to understand now is: what if we tried different everythings, what if we employed all of our absurdity and creativity to evolve this world into more that we have now?
What if we explored the everything else, so much more? What if new things happened so much?
I like to dream about building that future, and I hope this story makes you curious to dream similar dreams. Thanks for reading.
