Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Let’s deal with world politics today, just because it is Sunday. I think it is a good idea to take a step back every once in a while and have a look at what is happening around us. We can clearly see how our attitudes toward the USA as an ally are changing and Canada is moving into its spot, how we lose hope that Russia might play nice again, and how AI becomes a new type of supervillain.
We also need to play more. Just for fun. Take a time out. Do board games more. I am the worst possible person for that, but I do understand the argument. Maybe I will suggest to play a round of Hitster or something today.
I refuse to acknowledge that fall is around the corner and I think if I continue to walk around in pink shorts and my old Birkenstocks Arizona I will somehow slowdown the end of summer. Or I might just catch a cold, who knows?
The American Age Is Over
For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.
President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.
While it would be nice to have the USA be an ally again we can trust and rely upon, I fundamentally think that the old post WW2 order has already shifted a lot and Europe needs to understand that we have to define our own interests better.
Mark Carney Is Dismantling Canada
For decades, Canadian governments treated problems with Washington as temporary weather systems. An American president might be protectionist, impatient, ignorant about Canada, or actively hostile to a particular Canadian policy, but the underlying relationship was assumed to be permanent. The storm would pass, another administration would arrive, and Canada would return to managing the most important economic and security partnership it had.
Carney appears to have decided that assumption itself has to be dismantled. He isn’t merely diversifying trade around the edges or buying a few European weapons so he can say Canada has options. He’s constructing what the Wall Street Journal describes as a much denser relationship with Europe, helping push European leaders toward military, technological, and economic systems that are less dependent on the United States.
Canada still sends nearly 70 percent of its exports to the United States, so Carney can’t simply cut the rope and float the country toward Europe. He knows that. But dismantling doesn’t necessarily mean ending the relationship; it can mean ending the assumptions that governed it.
I am not very deep into Canadian politics, but I find it fascinating how Carney deals with Trump. Canada has becoming so much more present in our European political discourse and anecdotoral evidence suggests that it also has become a bigger tourist destination since Trump took office again.
Will Russia Ever Be ‘Normal’?
Ironically, Russians are trapped in a vicious circle of their own making. Abandoning the political culture of greatness and imperialism would pave the road to normalnost, but it would also upend a key source of affective empowerment and national pride. Dismantling or at least slimming the imperial state would go a long way to making more normalnost possible, but that too would require either a massive Ukrainian victory that undermines the current state’s integrity or a Gorbachev-style perestroika that loosens the internal bonds of empire.
Normalnost isn’t just a desirable goal for Russia. It’s also of great importance to Russia’s neighbors. Although neither the culture of greatness nor the imperial state are necessary or sufficient for Moscow to start wars, both facilitate war-mongering and make aggression much easier to sell to Russian elites and the public. They thus make war more likely. Imagine a counterfactual: Would a normal Russia bereft of its imperial culture and all-powerful, centralized state have embarked on a genocidal war against Ukraine? Possibly, but not likely.
I visited St. Petersburg some 20 years ago when we hired Russian software developers and set up a near-shoring company. It was a weird atmosphere back than, a combination of a positive can do approach and complacency. And that was the time when Russia was looking like almost becoming a real democracy.
A.I. Is a Threat, but Not in the Way You Think
The problem is, the A.I. future our tech oligarchs have been selling isn’t here yet. Legitimacy, in this country, still requires the consent of the governed. And people are taking A.I.’s risks seriously. They are protesting, coast to coast, against data centers, against politicians’ nondisclosure agreements and against the idea that we are merely pawns in some tech god’s simulation. Data center moratoriums are just one visible example of the way some aspects of our government are responding to the growing negative sentiment.
For the tech bros to remain dominant, their story has to change. So, Silicon Valley’s best storytellers no longer want our capitulation to their technology’s inevitability. They want us to panic, instead of seriously deliberating at the polls, in community meetings and in Congress. Panic is chaos without direction, affect set free from the discipline of curiosity, debate and accountability.
The current AI hacking incidents are very concerning and we need more and better regulation. At the same time we have seen this playbook before with different nuances. AI has become very powerful, but not very useful for most people. It’s great for coding, research and a bunch of other tasks, but it is not as big and useful for most people as the hype around the possible IPOs suggest. Many people view AI as a job killer first and foremost, which might be interesting for business leaders, but not for the majority of people.
Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score
The entire architecture of digital life – with its algorithmic feeds, frictionless production and the ambient expectation that we should be consuming or optimising at all times – nudges us towards chasing outputs rather than generating meaning. We track our sleep and score our calm. Fitness apps turn the morning run into a contest; meditation apps gamify stillness with streak counters; language apps award achievement badges for what used to be called curiosity. Even journaling apps nudge users toward consistency scores. The gamification of leisure has turned into work everything that used to exist as its counterpoint. Leisure has become a third shift with its own metrics, its own guilt, and its own sense of falling behind.
I am so bad at this. I have my Oura ring that tells me to move when I am sitting too long and I also hate playing board games, for instance. Maybe I need some gamification reward system that tells me to do something without rewards every once in a while…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico