Chartbook 451 What times are these? Crying fire in a Berlin lecture theatre.
In Berlin last week, it was a panel with good, sensible people, making proposals that I largely agree with.
And, yet - as happens quite frequently at the moment - I felt like the mad uncle in the attic, crying fire!
Whence my dysphoria?
If the theme of a meeting is “Crisis and Transformation” - in the abstract, in the large, in the here and now - can we really begin our answer by invoking old promises?
The promise of municipal socialism? (NOTHING against the Mamdani project. More on the political economy of NYC to come over the summer.)
Or, the promise of price stabilization, vouchsafed by historical examples?
Or, the hope of financial market and digital regulation, to delivered by the EU. Because who else?
Don’t we have to start by asking: What time is it?
Which historical continuities can we still meaningfully invoke?
Or, after a nice pushback (h/t DC), to the point that at any given moment there are multiple temporalities and timelines in play:
Not “What time is it?”, but “What times are these?”
In the moment, what came to mind was the analogy between the idea of layered temporality and the layering of overtones in sound.
We can specify not just a note, but its quality.
I tried (and failed) to illustrate the point from the stage. On a flute it is easy to demonstrate.
The word I was looking for - it struck me later - was timbre, or tone color
So what times are these, could be translated into a question about the timbre of this moment.
The relative presence of difference resonances of the past, of anticipations of the future.
On the panel, in Berlin, last week the differences weren’t nuanced.
We were in different worlds of time and sound.
My co-panelists were playing pleasant historical tunes. Urgent, no doubt. Serious. But, ultimately, they were familiar tunes.
As I listened, I realized that I could not carry that tune.
Not only because I am not one for easy policy prescriptions. But because the world just seems too ruptured, punctuated, discordant.
As I scan the news, the tones that form in my head are not a tune.
Even Penderecki’s Threnody would seem too orderly, too orchestrated, too clearly theatrical.
With regard to time, the assumption of historical continuity seems borderline nostalgic.
As the organizer of the meeting said to me beforehand, talking about crisis almost seems like welcoming an old friend.
Why assume the relevance of precedent?
And with the loss of precedent, do we not also have to let go of inspiring examples of the past?
Or if we do invoke them, must we not, at least, display a high degree of self-consciousness.
Must we not acknowledge such arguments as exhibiting something akin to a camp sensibility?
Perhaps my intense sense of rupture had to do with the fact that I had volunteered to do ten minutes on US capitalism and AI.
I had Nordhaus’s (2021) vision of the “euthanasia of the labouring classes” (sic) in my head.
And THAT Dallas Fed graph. The one that calmly maps the end of the US economy as one option for the next couple of decades.
Perhaps my dysphoria had to do with just having read Niall Ferguson’s latest from Hoover in which he asks precisely the kind of unprecedented question that was not on the agenda in Berlin:
Are we the horses? This was the question posed by the historian Matthew Lowenstein in a 2023 paper. “In a world with Artificial Superintelligence,” he wrote “humans will flourish only at the pleasure of more intelligent machines … the replacement of horses by industrial technology took centuries, whereas the replacement of humans after the advent of powerful AI is likely to take less than a decade.” Following the horse’s domestication on the Eurasian steppe nearly 6,000 years ago, the world horse population grew from less than half a million to a peak of over 100 million. The UK horse population grew from roughly 1.3 million in 1811 to 3.3 million in 1911. But it then slumped … By 1965, there were only 21,000 horses still being used in British agriculture, a decline from peak to trough of 98 percent. The U.S. farm horse population peaked between 1910 and 1920 at roughly 20 million, but then plummeted to 1.6 million in 1974, a decline of 92 percent. The steam engine and then the internal combustion engine had rendered the horse obsolete. This did not lead to unemployment. It led to population collapse. The fact that there remain roughly 7 million horses in the United States reflects our sentimental or atavistic fondness for riding as a leisure-time activity. … From my vantage point, large language models are rapidly getting better and better at precisely the things I do well. Gemini can write sophisticated and well-researched historical articles very fast indeed, with only occasional “hallucinations” (i.e., fabrications). ChatGPT and other LLMs already generate a very large proportion of student assignments and probably grade a rising share of them, too. Claude is clearly better at coding than almost everyone. It has also developed a rather endearing nutty-professor persona. I devote some of my time to trying to anticipate economic and political developments on the basis of historical data and human intelligence. But Mantic’s prediction engine now seems to be as good as the best human superforecasters. … Given the available evidence, I find the idea that I am essentially a mid-twentieth-century horse quite plausible, though the employment prospects for, say, plumbers may be brighter so long as world models remain in their infancy and humanoid robots struggle to perform simple tasks such as running.
Or, perhaps, I was remembering the mood in the final session of the seminar I taught at Columbia this spring. The session was on AI, US capitalism and democracy. The sense of gathering anxiety, of truly radical uncertainty, I have not felt in a classroom before.
My point was not that we should all be taking strong positions on whether or not AI will have an imminent or dramatic impact on the economy.
The point is that the question is urgent. The range of possible answers is spectacular. No one knows. And all the while, anticipations of that future and trillion-dollar wagers are driving markets and creating wealth on a scale that dwarfs anything before seen.
Since 2022, as averse as I am to nominating “central dynamics of capitalism”, AI has clearly been the driving force of US capital accumulation - not finance, not oil, not the military-industrial complex. The level of stock market concentration has reached a historic pitch.
This poses a delirious set of questions, for us all. Delirious and inescapable, surely. I assumed.
Except not, in that auditorium in Berlin.
Which forced the exclamation from “the historian on that panel” - me - What time is it?
Which could be seen either as a radically historical, or ahistorical question. Depending on how you take it.
And then a few hours later, starting some summer reading, I found the famous preface to Mann’s Zauberberg (Magic Mountain) - a narrative published in 1924 about the era before 1914 - with this wonderful passage:
The exaggerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place—or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place—in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again.
And that patched things together for me.
We may not have experienced a Great War, but is there not a similar sense of rupture separating us from the the 20th century and its precedents, its models and its inspirations?
Has that history not become legendary?
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Adam, your dysphoria is real and the Mann comparison is apt. But I want to push on the gap between what you're feeling and what you're naming because I think the gap is doing political work that benefits the forces producing the dysphoria.
You describe the Berlin panelists playing "familiar tunes" i.e. municipal socialism, EU regulation, price stabilization, etc. in a world too ruptured for historical analogy. You feel the rupture viscerally. And then you reach for Mann rather than a mechanism. That's the tell. Mann gives you the phenomenology of rupture without obligating you to name what's producing it.
Let me try to name it.
What you're experiencing as a discordant timbre is unbounded pleonexia in its late phase; not ordinary greed, but the structural disposition that, when unchecked by adequate institutional containment, accumulates until the accumulated power can purchase the institutions designed to check it. The Berlin panel's "good, sensible people" are proposing changes within a framework whose operating assumptions the accumulated power has already captured. They are playing jazz in a room where the sound system belongs to someone else. The proposals are fine. The room is wrong. And the reason they can't hear the room is that their credentialing and discourse systems have been shaped, over decades, by the same force they nominally oppose. They propose what is proposable. The grammar of rupture isn't available to them without losing the institutional standing that makes them "good, sensible people" who get onto panels in Berlin.
The Ferguson horse question is where the sleight of hand is most visible. He asks whether we are the horses — and it's a legitimate question as far as it goes. But horses didn't own the steam engines that displaced them. Workers, through enormous social struggle, eventually won a share of the productivity gains from mechanization: unions, collective bargaining, the welfare state, the 40-hour week. The AI question isn't "are we the horses?" It's: who owns the horses' replacements, and what coercive or constitutional capacity do we retain to recover a share of the value they generate? The AI companies drew on publicly funded computer science, publicly subsidized internet infrastructure, and the entire accumulated corpus of human writing and art — every book, every essay, every act of civic and cultural life that the commons of meaning produced. That is appropriation of res communes omnium for private accumulation. In Roman law, which took these things seriously, there's a name for consuming the substance of the commons without compensation or restoration: abusus. Ferguson naturalizes the outcome as though ownership structure were a weather pattern. It isn't. It's a political choice, and it's reversible.
The AI-enshitification dimension you gesture at connects here directly. AI paired with knowledgeable human input — editorial, curatorial, epistemic — is a genuine tool. AI driven purely by the profit impetus, without that check, is a mechanism for producing fluent confabulation optimized for engagement rather than truth. The profit function and the quality function diverge as platforms mature. Enshitification is not a bug; it is the predictable output of a system with a single terminal objective operating in an environment of weakened competitive constraint. The commons of meaning, the accumulated substrate of human cultural and intellectual inheritance, cannot survive being processed at scale by systems optimizing for retention metrics. It gets flattened into the average of its training distribution, dressed in confident prose, and delivered as authoritative. The knowledgeable human is the only thing that can identify when the system is confabulating, and the profit impetus systematically removes the knowledgeable human because they are expensive and they slow things down and they sometimes say no.
Your Columbia students' anxiety is real. But I'd push back gently on framing it as merely epistemological: uncertainty about AI's economic impact. The deeper condition is that these students have been formed in a period of advanced atomization. The parallel enclosure that ran alongside the enclosure of material commons, the enclosure of meaning itself, the progressive commodification and fragmentation of shared story, has left them without a tradition of resistance to place the rupture inside. A population that shares no story is easier to manage as isolated consumers than as citizens with collective agency. The rupture you're feeling from the stage in Berlin is precisely the rupture between what the historical tradition of reform assumed (a citizenry with collective story, collective institutions, collective memory) and what the decades of atomization have actually produced. Municipal socialism requires municipalities. EU regulation requires a demos that believes in the EU. Both assume a substrate that the pleonexic logic has been methodically dissolving.
What's missing from your Berlin panel, and I say this with real respect for the tradition you're working in, is a physical baseline. Not better historical analogy from a slightly longer window, but thermodynamic constraint as a constitutional fact: the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, not an autonomous domain. The accumulation model consumes the substrate it depends on. This is not a moral claim. It is a thermodynamic one, and physics enforces its arguments on timescales longer than any oligarchy. The 1945–1990 window from which the familiar tunes are drawn is exceptionally short, and it excluded these constraints by design, because the growth model required their exclusion. Historical precedent drawn from inside that window will systematically mistake the exception for the baseline.
The Mann consolation you found is pointing in the right direction: the pre-war world became legendary. The post-oligarchic world needs, right now, to become plausible and be named in enough detail and with enough internal coherence that it can be recognized as possible when the moment arrives. That is the work. Not because the fire is dousable this afternoon, but because the next generation needs to know what a building that doesn't burn looks like, so they can argue for it when the ash clears.
For anyone who wants to see what that naming actually looks like in practice — the mechanism identified, the physical baseline established, and solutions proposed that are grounded rather than gestural — I'd point to a Substack called The Freeze-Frame Revolution (squirrelbrain77.substack.com). It does something rare: it names pleonexia as the structural threat outright, grounds the argument in Roman jurisprudence, thermodynamics, and evolutionary biology simultaneously, and proposes a constitutional architecture to match the diagnosis rather than offering policy tweaks inside a captured framework. It is not comfortable reading. It is honest reading. Which, given the times, is what the occasion requires.
What does it take for a human to survive? Food, shelter, a community where he/she can find status? What else? For most of the "civilized" era lower classes the later was achieved by work and skills. Butcher, baker , barista, goat wrangler, ect. But as machines take over the search for status get harder and more frustrating. What has been coming for working class jobs for 200 years is now coming for high status jobs. As a retired carpenter I have to ask. Why is it suddenly a crises?