When order comes apart
Some notes from a Saturday in late spring at the Kennedy Center. The Financial Times had organized a day-long festival for its readers and the journalists who write for them. The task was straightforward enough: think out loud about what was happening. But the mood suggested something else entirely. It was a gathering of people trying to make sense of their own irrelevance.
Most of those in attendance had built entire careers inside the postwar order. They had prospered in it, shaped it, defended it. Now, watching from floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Potomac, they were confronted with something they had not quite expected: The possibility that their world was ending. What was once unthinkable had become routine. What was once unsayable was now discussed, if only in carefully modulated tones, behind closed doors. The institutional guardrails that had held for nearly eighty years were not just creaking, but were quaking loudly. And everyone in that room knew it.
The real notes were not what was being said aloud. It was the texture of the silence of what was unspoken.
On the unraveling of economic order
Tariffs had been announced some months prior. The financial and trading architecture that undergirded American dominance is shifting in massive ways. The assumption that America would be the underwriter and the consumer of last resort appears to be ending. A reasonable person could file all this under "alarmism." A reasonable person, lately, has been wrong a lot. What interested me was not the diagnosis, but how serious people tried to think when their working models had stopped working.
Some speakers suspected that the deeper shift beneath the familiar metrics is unmeasured because no one yet knows how to measure it. But markets remain mostly complacent. One panelist reached for the Brexit comparison, where risk premiums doubled, and suggested the same is coming. A more worrisome question is, to me, when trade becomes pure ideology, does war always follow? Here, one could easily grasp historical analogies like the Boston Tea Party, the Opium Wars, and the late Roman tax regimes. Each happened at a moment in time when commerce started being a symbolic tool of coercion dressed as policy. Each preceded a major shift in political and economic regimes. It seems that when economic instruments become blunt-force instruments in political theater, the risk of systemic breakdown rises. The United States, with its low tolerance for consumer pain and deep political volatility, might be especially exposed compared to other countries on the world stage.
On the durability of speech in changing epistemological order
In a different register, the session on Socrates and Cicero was surprisingly practical. Politics, by and large, has always been a performance, brutal, and morally fraught. It has often been cyclical, too. Cicero lived it, as his trials were theaters. He navigated a legal order unraveling into vengeance, ending with his own gruesome death. It was said that the orator kept speaking carefully till the end because in moments of disintegration, the form of speech is itself a form of resistance. Speech that holds its shape marks the edge of what is still intact in society.
Philosophy is dangerous in times of hierarchical upheaval and moral panic. It begins with dialogue, assuming the other person is your equal. It demands that you slow down. It strips you of certainty. This is a moment built around accelerated certainty, so slowing down is not a small thing. What if you walked through life without assuming you knew how to live it? What if you couldn't do it alone?
On what we're building/unbuilding with tech-enabled intimacy
The mood in the technology sessions ran with a different type of anxiety, decidedly not with a zeal of techno-optimism, but with an ambient fear of losing human-human intimacy and control. The starting point, we can agree on, is that commercially successful digital platforms monetize human craving by design. Platforms are also incentivized to optimize for engagement to increase time spent. In this sense, the promise of connection and affirmation on digital platforms boils down to programmed feed.
The Hinge CEO touted that AI can be used as a facilitator of intimacy. But if the goal is indeed vulnerability, why outsource its initiation to machines in the first place? These are not new questions, and they have grown more acute in recent years. There is an uneasy feeling that the tools we build are quietly rebuilding and modulating us and our relationships with each other. There is also an asymmetry of power: billions of users and a handful of designers. This has not been reckoned with by the institutions and networks that might once have done the reckoning.
On the grammar of visual power and syntactical discomfort
The fashion panel was the one I kept returning to. What is the American style now? People tend to criticize the current ruling family in the U.S. for lacking taste and for an aesthetic they find incoherent. I find the style to be rather coherently maximalist, gilded, and reliably Corinthian. Incoherence exists more as a departure from political norms. The aesthetic vocabulary of the moment is doing political work that the political vocabulary can't, and carrying a degree of grievance over a lost order of respectability.
Style is how power communicates when it is not speaking. So the bigger offense I see to the old style guards is the blatant appearance of striving. I.e., the style of the ruling class is not subtle enough. Taste functions as a proxy for class, and effort signals striving, and striving breaks the illusion of access. When this happens in the upper class, the political stability of the entire system is thrown into question.
Two currents still animate the visual order in the popular imagination these days: utilitarian solidarity and leisure fantasy. It is in this context that the once practical vest now connotes a particular techno-libertarian politics. Yet good things, like linen, persist.
These are notes from a weekend. They are not coherent. The conference was useful precisely because nobody pretended otherwise.