by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Long after being a journalist slipped out of my fingers, I’ve finally reached the point where I realize I just don’t have it in me to be a “serious” journalist. I may one day get to write for a living again, but it will after I sell my first novel as an old coot and start to churn out novels on a regular basis.
— Shelton Bumgarner (@sheltgarner) February 3, 2023
In the few remaining years I have before I drop dead, of course.
Ugh.
I fucking hate being old.
Anyway, someone at New York Magazine or Wired should write a thoughtful piece about the looming, theoretical “perfect storm” the global economy may faces between now and, say, spring of 2025. The scenario goes something like this — Republicans fuck up the global economy because they play chicken with the debt ceiling. This causes a severe, global recession.
This, in turn, causes businesses to turn to the “just good enough” chatbot technology to replace an array of jobs across the economy. This, in turn, causes an already severe recession to get worse. The severe recession hides that we’ve reached a Petite Singularity in the sense that a lot of jobs replaced by chatbots just aren’t coming back.
So, as we enter the 2024 presidential cycle the fucking MAGA fascists gain a huge amount of power because of a downturn….that they caused…and Trump wins the 2024 election. But his incoming agenda is so absolutely radical that Blues say “fuck that” and begin the process of leaving the Union. So, as such, my dystopian hellscape prediction of Something Big happening in late 2024, early 2025 becomes a reality.
I wish I could lay theory of the case out for New York Magazine or Wired, but I’m a drunk crank loser in the middle of nowhere struggling with my first novel. Ugh. Maybe someone else will write it.
