💋 Pinecones & Satellites: Ashes & Laughter (vol. 5)

09 Sep, 2025

i.
The Death Of Truth By A Thousand Cuts
A new study estimates that more than half of what you see online is machine-generated or machine-translated. Some say that within a year that share could reach 90%. And that's before you factor in all the other digital toxins—the plagiarized posts, manufactured outrage, low-grade news churn, spam, and the endless tide of AI drivel. What we call the internet is fast curdling into a murky, fetid, fast-expanding information swampland.

For years, scientists have warned that our information ecosystem was becoming "dangerously polluted." That was before the latest wave of AI slop hit the system.

The death of truth won't come as a single guillotine strike. It will come by abrasion. A miscaptioned video here, a synthetic quote there, another "breaking news" ping that leaves you unsure if there was a fire or only smoke. Each cut tiny, each cut deniable, until the floor of reality itself rots through. We're fast losing the ability to know what's real. What's generated. What's designed to enrage us. Or soothe us.

We live in a world where lies travel faster than facts, where algorithms reward outrage over accuracy, and where the very tools meant to connect us are rewiring our brains to crave the artificial over the authentic.

As the swamp rises, instead of figuring out ways to escape it or fix it, we're learning to breathe underwater.

ii.
On Play and Laughter To Rebuild Our Shared Reality
As our shared reality buckles, as truth takes a long, shuddering pause, the world feels like a pressure cooker left untended. You can hear the hiss, you can feel the metal rattle. If we continue to ignore it, like we have, the steam will turn poisonous, the vessel will burst.

History tells us what happens when pressure builds without release. We get fracturing, divisiveness, violence, revolution. Cliodynamics, a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economic history/cliometrics, macrosociology, and the mathematical modeling of historical processes, treats history as a science. It informs our future by looking back carefully at our past.

In his eye-opening book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023), Turchin warns of cycles of violent revolution with elites clashing with other elites, and the rest of us caught in the implosion. Nature offers the same lesson. Magma chambers swell until the mountain finally blows. Glacial lakes brim until the ice wall gives way in a single night. Every system under strain finds its outlet. The only question is how.

We've already seen one version. On January 6, 2021, Americans tuned in to the same live feed and came away with radically different stories. Some saw a planned "insurrection," others, a "protest," and still others, a "patriot uprising." Even with the footage broadcast live, the country managed to see a dozen different things at once. A nation that can't agree on what it witnesses live is a nation teetering.

But pressure doesn't always have to vent in rage. It can also release in play. Imagine if the crowd on the Mall that day had gathered for a festival instead of a fight. Water slides instead of barricades. Laughter in place of screams. The same bodies in the same square footage but oriented toward joy rather than vengeance.

Evolutionary psychologists tell us play and laughter evolved as crucial social signals among mammals. A low-cost way to say we're safe, we're friends, no need to bite. Watch people at a cocktail party and you'll hear nervous chuckles between strangers who've said nothing funny. Watch chimpanzees tussle and you'll hear pant-hoots that mean "this is play." Laughter is how we disarm one another. Play is how we remove threatss and collapse distances. Both are proof of trust.

But unlike most of what now fills our feeds, laughter can't be faked for long. A laugh is either real or it isn't, and we know the difference in our bones. That's what makes it precious. In an age of synthetic speech and engineered outrage, laughter is one of the last reliable markers of the human.

So yes, the pressure is real. But maybe the release doesn't have to be catastrophic. Maybe the antidote to a thousand cuts of falsehood is a thousand small bursts of shared amusement. The world is teaching us to breathe underwater. Laughter is how we remember there's still air above the surface.

iii.
The Next Big Thing Will Be Cleaning Up The Mess of The Last Big Thing

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
-Semisonic, "Closing Time" (1998)

When World War II ended, the guns fell silent but the devastation was absolute. Europe was a continent obliterated. Warsaw was leveled. London lost a quarter of its homes to the Blitz. Only four of Germany’s 54 largest cities escaped major damage; Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden were gutted. One in five German homes was gone, leaving up to 13 million people without shelter. Across the continent, roads, rails, bridges, water systems were erased. As many as 60 million people were left displaced, wandering a broken landscape.

The parades marking victory ended the fighting but not the work. The real work was just beginning. Reconstruction took decades, billions, and a collective will as immense as the destruction itself. Nations would have to be raised back to life brick by brick, institution by institution. The work was slow, costly, unglamorous, and in many ways, it defined the future more than the battles had.

We're now confronted with that same dynamic. After decades of digital "progress"— smartphones, social feeds, algorithmic outrage, misinformation, deepfakes, and a deluge of AI-generated slop—we stand in our own smoldering rubble. The ruins aren't cathedrals and factories, but scorched attention spans, fractured communities, collapsing trust, rising loneliness, and an information ecosystem so poisoned it's hard to know what's real. Cultural critic Ted Gioia recently warned in Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months:

"At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality."

So what then does rebuilding look like when the thing collapsing isn't a bridge or a water system but reality itself? A twenty-first century Marshall Plan, one focused on two fronts—one aimed at making truth verifiable, the other at making life livable and more enjoyable. Both represent enormous opportunities for founders and builders. Maybe not as intoxicating as the mobile, social, or AI booms, but reconstruction projects often outlast booms. They become the scaffolding every new wave must climb.

The first of these builds is technological; the second is cultural.

The Repair Economy is a technological push toward real proof. Just as Europe needed physical infrastructure, we'll need to reconstruct our informational infrastructure. That means truth anchors as durable as books and archives. Proof layers that travel with images and text, cryptographic signatures baked into photos and videos that make fakery expensive and verification cheap. Rigorous chain-of-custody for digital files. And above all, a new class of professionals Gioia calls custodians of reality. These part notaries, part journalistists, part archivists will stake their reputations on what actually happened. This will be slow, unsexy, thankless work but the kind that holds everything else up, restoring the floor under our public life.

The Return Economy is a cultural push toward live culture. Long before AI deepfakes, people were already rebelling against the endless scroll of our glass-box lives. Friendships reduced to notifications, parties replaced by feeds, childhoods spent on glowing rectangles instead of ballfields. We need to claw our way back to something Kyle Chayka calls temporal realness—the craving for live culture, for things that happen in real life, in real time, in physical spaces, with actual bodies in the room. A concert that exists only once. A dinner table where no one is half-listening, half-scrolling. A conversation whose authenticity is guaranteed by the fact that you were there to hear it.

In a world where everything can be manufactured, the only thing left that feels real is presence itself. And presence, according to trend strategist Anu, creates a new aspirational value called charisma capital (absolutely love and agree with this), the premium we place on human texture, trust, and the ability to hold a room when everything else can be faked. Rizz, she tells us, is the new intelligence.

Together, these two rebuilds, one to make truth verifiable again, the other to make life livable again, sketch the outlines of the next Big Thing.

On the repair economy side we'll need builders willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of making reality verifiable again. On the return economy side we'll need IRL-specialists to lead us back to temporal realness, to rooms and meals and moments that can't be edited, scaled, or faked.

Two reconstruction projects for the twenty-first century. One for truth. One for life. Neither are likely to deliver the sugar high of prior tech booms, but both matter more. Because when the bombs stop falling, or the bots stop flooding, what endures isn't what we create but what we repair.

This time, the product is reality itself, with receipts.

#entrepreneurship #favorites #geopolitics #laughter #play #rot #society & culture #technology #truth