By Dave Winer on Monday, November 21, 2011 at 2:06 PM.
It might just be me, but everywhere I look, the institutions I grew up accepting as constants are in pretty shaky condition.
The economy is hanging on a thread. Last time we got into really deep shit, we solved the problem by building another bubble. This is something we, as a species, are good at. We depend on it. It's the illusion we create that there's meaning to the things we say have meaning. Of course they all translate into money, and money has no intrinsic meaning. Ron Paul, if he gets this, only admits to the first layer of the onion being a scam. The problem is it's a scam all the way through to the core.
The reason this was a supportable illusion in the past is because we had something to do. Our job was to invent enough technology and deploy it, and educate our people on how to use it, to overcome nature. How would we know when we got there? When most of us live our natural lifespan, and can reasonably expect that in our lifetimes we will not be wiped out by a flood, fire, famine, pandemic, something nature did.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, sometime in the last 100 years we got there. And we kept building. Until it was impossible to teach us how to use the civilization we had created. Computer networks are the latest instance. The bubbles we create these days are basically features of the computer networks. When the Chairman of the Fed prints money he doesn't actually print anything. Somewhere in some data bank somewhere a disk changes a value. A number increments. That's all.
When a hedge fund makes a bet, it's a piece of software running somewhere talking to someone else's software.
Meanwhile, oil is either running out or destroying the environment. You pick the one you like best.
The economy is hanging on a thread. Last time we got into really deep shit, we solved the problem by building another bubble. This is something we, as a species, are good at. We depend on it. It's the illusion we create that there's meaning to the things we say have meaning. Of course they all translate into money, and money has no intrinsic meaning. Ron Paul, if he gets this, only admits to the first layer of the onion being a scam. The problem is it's a scam all the way through to the core. 
