Bravo Johnson

@bravojohnson

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In this light, progress becomes a kind of nostalgia in disguise. What we call innovation is merely the preservation of ambitions already calcified, objects placed in glass cases before their use has even been tested. The future does not arrive to inhabit these creations; instead, it becomes a curator, interpreting them with a dispassion we can’t imagine. It does not inhabit our blueprints but catalogs them, as archaeologists would catalog a lost civilization.

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Perhaps that is the final limit of visionaries: they do not conjure the future but instead craft its museum, arranging their dreams as exhibits for an audience yet to exist. Each boulevard, policy, or technology is less a step forward than a carefully placed relic, not built to withstand the future, but to be observed by it.

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Foreign policy: Jacksonian Right, foreign policy is only worth it if it’s a World War II-style righteous crusade—or at least one where we don’t come out looking like chumps. Anything else is someone else’s problem. Tech right: foreign entanglements are dumb unless they involve securing lithium for batteries or lowering cocaine prices Neoconservatives, every single foreign policy challenge is a life-or-death re-enactment of Munich 1938. If you’re not marching in to topple dictators or “spread democracy,” you’re basically Neville Chamberlain handing Hitler the keys to the world. Rinse repeat

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On Cultural Values Jacksonian Right: Culture is barbecues, church potlucks, and Toby Keith lyrics. If it doesn’t involve a flag, a gun, or a front porch, it’s probably un-American. Camo gear is preferred and not having a truck is pretty disqualifying TechRight: Culture is an 8 bit NFT of a flaming eagle or whatever Roman Empire meme. If the kids are coding it, but they’re not suffering like in the movie whiplash they’re not doing it right. Fun comes years later when you make fun of chuds. Meant to fix cybertruck but didn’t come around to Neocon Right: It’s the Magna Carta, the Federalist Papers, and Saving Private Ryan on repeat. Anything modern is suspect unless it can be repackaged as a Blue Sky tv show series about heroic U.S. intelligence “Judeo-Christian values” and served with a side of military recruitment ads.

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For you who’ve been in a deep Christmas hibernation and just woke up blinking at the mess, let’s do a deep dive On Government Jacksonian Right: Government is fine as long as it’s a muscular sheriff with a shotgun, chewing tobacco, and telling brown people to shove off. Anything more complex smells like Ivy League meddling, socialism or child trafficking Techno-Libertarian Right: Government should be a smartphone app that deletes itself after pump-and-dumping the next Mars colony. If the Department of Defense can be decentralized on the blockchain, great. If not, just slice up the military and sell shares. Anything more involved is tyranny. Neoconservative Right: Government is an all-knowing, all-seeing guardian angel of freedom and my expense account , tasked with making sure every world country votes correctly, buys U.S. weapons, and watches Top Gun—

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After hours of grueling back-and-forth, the Jacksonian mutters, “You know, any of you even know what George Clooney’s doing these days? Don’t know said the Neocon I was watching Taylor Swift. She win? You guys even keep up with that anymore? The Techno-Libertarian, shaking his head in disbelief, looks around, incredulous. “What kind of hell is this? It don’t even have a goddamn copy of the New York Times! They all fall silent. In that moment, the absurdity of it all hits them. And there they sit, each secretly longing for the very things they once swore they hated—the pomp, the self-righteousness, the spectacle of a world that at least had the decency to pretend it knew what it was doing.

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The Neocon, strutting around like a whysky-soaked war hawk, insists the only way out is to make the desert glow and bomb the world into a freedom-shaped crater, accusing the Jacksonian of being a “cowardly isolationist” and the Techno-Libertarian of being a “fucking armchair general.” Meanwhile, the Techno-Libertarian, hunched over his phone in his Patagonia vest declares that everything would be solved if they just let him re-centralized the internet and put him in charge, slapping around smart contracts, 1200 pages terms of use and blaming both of them for “ruining innovation and lowering birthrates”

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No Exit Christmas Special: Locked in a suffocating room, a Jacksonian, a Neocon, and a Techno-Libertarian stew in a surreal cacophony of complaints, each convinced the others are the root of all the world’s misery. The Jacksonian, clutching a tattered American flag, howls about the “pussification” of America, blaming the Techno-Libertarian for flooding the country with “goddamn H1B visa workers,” turning real jobs into code-based fiefdoms for SV elites. He calls the others “namby-pamby globalists,” who wouldn’t know a real fight if it crawled up their asses and bit them.

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This is a great disservice to 10% of devs and engineers that probably have a very good idea of where things should be going tech-wise. So, hard to reconcile both.

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The brilliance—and the tragedy—is that this isn’t a bug. It’s the system working as designed. Investors don’t want impact; they want exits. Founders don’t want products; they want liquidity events. Everything else—utility, community, innovation—is just noise, a convenient cover for the relentless churn of the valuation engine.

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The real revelation isn’t that crypto metrics are gamified. It’s that the gamification itself is the product. The protocols, the tech, the communities—all of it is just theater, a sprawling stage set for one moment: the valuation. The IPO. The token launch. The liquidity event. Everything else—active wallets, TVL, developer activity—is just window dressing, scaffolding around the one thing that matters: the runway to the payout.

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Patrick Atwater

On a secant, I find the broader c-suite-ification really silly. For example, LA County recently expanded the board of supervisors and created an elected CEO position. Really that should be a Mayor like the City and County of SF. CEO is an odd title for a general government executive. Also see the growth in c-suite titles in NGOs and the like. Both are downstream of the state capacity crisis and overproduction of elites

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If you think this is bad, just wait until Trump gets back in office and Doge-backed speculators turn the Soviet-style fire sale of state capacity into a meme-fueled casino. Imagine the machinery of government sold off at auction to the highest bidder, except the bids are denominated in shitcoins, and the auctioneer is livestreaming it on TikTok. The last scraps of state capacity will be repurposed for vibes: national infrastructure rebranded as NFTs, federal agencies spun off as startup incubators, and every last public good turned into a subscription service. It won’t just be bad governance—it’ll be a spectacle of entrepreneurial theater, with a live audience cheering as the scaffolding of the nation comes crashing down. Think of it as late-stage capitalism with a postmodern twist: a state-capacity yard sale where the winners aren’t even serious players, just grifters who stumbled into power by accident or algorithm. It’s not dystopia; it’s clownworld, but with higher stakes.

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In short, we’re here because the systems have become self-sustaining feedback loops of mediocrity. They’re all built on short-term gain, hollow metrics, and empty signals. As real productivity and progress have been sidelined, the only thing left is the illusion of action. The result? A world where nothing works, but it looks like it should. Feedback loops reinforce the rot, and everyone is too busy playing their part in the theater of competency to notice the stage is collapsing. It’s not that nobody cares—it’s that nobody dares to admit that the emperor has been naked for decades.

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Cause let’s not pretend the private sector, propped up by the “best of both worlds”—a steady infusion of free money from artificially low interest rates and an endless buffet of government subsidies, is any better. It survives on the same cocktail of managerial posturing and state-backed largesse, only it’s better at hiding it. The difference? The private sector doesn’t have to produce results, just valuations. It thrives on hype cycles and cheap cash, masking its dysfunction behind IPOs and PR campaigns. NGOs and government might bloat themselves with meaningless titles, but the private sector takes it a step further: it bloats its entire existence on the fiction of perpetual growth, subsidized failure, and the illusion of innovation.

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It’s peak managerial theater. As real governing and operational capacity declines, we see these performative structures take root. The titles grow fancier even as the ability to execute declines. Credentialed and non credentialed elites with nowhere to go, invent roles and titles to give the illusion of necessity. C-suite titles in NGOs and local governments aren’t a sign of progress; they’re a symptom of mirroring rot.

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The feedback loop is brutal: you can’t just have a job anymore—you’ve got to be the CEO of something, even if it’s just a half-baked idea running on vibes and angel funding. It’s not cynical to say most startups are worthless. It’s just calling the game for what it is: an overpriced signaling mechanism, dressing up mediocrity as innovation, until the house of cards collapses.

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Low interest rates have bankrolled this circus for years, inflating the importance of entrepreneurial theater. Want to differentiate yourself? Slap together an app that’s just x for [insert industry] or a platform to “revolutionize” something nobody asked to revolutionize. It doesn’t matter if it’s solving anything, as long as positions you. But as soon as rates tick up and the cheap money dries up, we’re starting to see how many of these “visionary founders” are just overqualified bullshit-jobbers in Patagonia vests.

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Startup inflation is just the credential inflation of the capitalist hustle culture. If everyone has a degree, it’s worthless. If everyone has a startup, that’s worthless too. We’ve gone from “what school did you go to?” to “what’s your pitch deck?” and the answer is often the same level of vapid. The whole system is less about building value and more about building a persona. It’s positioning, plain and simple.

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It’s the same guy

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