Back in December 2024 I made predictions for 2025-2026 along the lines of what in business intelligence/marketing is called ‘Environmental Analysis’ (of the competitive business space). This often goes by the acronym PEST Analysis, for Politics, Economics, Sociological factors, and Technology.
Macrobius Makes Predictions for 2025-2026 | Phora Nova
I did P pretty thoroughly, leaving the rest for later … hey, I had 1-1/2 years to make calls for Midterms, right?
A little later, I did the T:
Where is Technology going, 2025-2026 | Phora Nova (April 2025)
Programming as we know it will disappear this year | Phora Nova (Mar 2025)
T was hard to call in December, but after DeekSeek (January) and Agentic AI, it was pretty clear which problems were going to be solved and how *if* they were going to be solved before 2027.
This lead to a fairly solid prediction that the Economic and Social outcomes were going to be very dependent one the building of power infrastructure (and then, we had some grid collapses to give us a taste of coming attractions). A few factors are missed in the ‘public narrative’ for the most part — one is the continuing drop in male sperm rates, and what that implies for demographics in technological societies, and the other is the possibility of an ‘extinction attractor’ related to the use of AI technology, the so-called ‘Singularity’. We shall have to say something about these, but they will not be dominant in our 2026 prediction window.
P wasn’t so bad — it was very clear that we were in the midst of the ‘Polycrisis’ and that the slow social learning around Peak Oil, Anthropogenic Global Warning, the fate of Globalism and the ‘Global Supply Chain’, as well as the general direction of Geopolitics,
Of course now we know, which no one did in December 2024, that Trump and Vance were in *fact* going to be seated, and how that was going to go down, and what sort of policies, as opposed to campaign promising, were really going to be initiated. Now, eight+ months later, we have a pretty good idea of the political battlespace, with much more certainty than we did when the Old Man handed over the keys to the kingdom to the Little Baby that was 2025, in Time Square at midnight.
In this thread, I am going to flesh out E and S (and hopefully be done before the beginning of 2026!)
Short form: E is now utterly dependent the answer that Neo-Liberal Capitalism and its Oligarchs have decided to give to the Polycrisis and Immigration: attempt to bring down the cost of Labour by using ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and in any event building out the Power Grid, both Nuclear and Solar, for various reasons only some of which are the big bet on AI. Both E and S are going to depend, therefore, almost exclusively on Herd and Network effects.
We need, first off, to spell out where Herd effects *come from* and why they are important to both to the polycrisis (the power grid and logistics that depend on it), and to Artificial Intelligence. That is, how are Energy and Information Theory related?
To make clear where I am going with this, let us consider bitcoin, and a conjecture of mine–I will call it a conjecture, not a hypothesis or observation, because someone really should prove this from first principles in an economic model. Maybe that someone should even be me. But anyone can make …
The Macrobius Bitcoin Conjecture:
> Proof of work gives you the minimum energy cost, needed to force the blockchain distributed system from the babbling equilibrium into the truth-telling equilibrium.
I suppose I shall need to explain what a babbling equilibrium is first, though we certainly had experience of that in the 2024 Election Cycle.
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