The Kind-of Ridiculous Future and the Retrospective Sublime

How did we get here?  Three useful perspectives, one from George Soros (in the New York Review of Books, of all places), one from Mary Meeker, and one from Charles Morris.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."  It's good to know how we got here, but more to give us a sense of closure than a look ahead.  In different ways all three items are about leverage -- old-fashioned buy-now pay-later borrowing; and the age of financial leverage is definitely over.

What will take its place?  The Longish View is a view ahead.  A good place to check in with is Charlie Stross, the great science-fiction writer.  He points to a Vermont law, just passed, allowing the purely virtual software corporation.  He also points to this great piece of online sleuthery about lawn-sign marketing.  Virtual corporations, operating in coordination over vast distances to set up near-zero-cost franchising: that's the new leverage.  It's not financial leverage, it's operating leverage: put some effort in, get more effort out.  For another example, consider Barack Obama's recently-completed Presidential campaign, as Umair Haque did.  The tools in use are no longer new -- invented in the first 8 years of this decade, just as the tools of financial leverage were forged in the 1990s but reached their broadest application only in the late boom.