“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” -Gramsci 1 Everyone quotes Gramsci now. It has become the default frame for this moment, a preferred sign-off on an email signalling that you know there is
On forecasting, portfolios, and futures On forecasting, portfolios, and futures “We need to spend more time on Horizon 2,” they both say. One is a program officer at a climate and nature philanthropy. The initiatives they’re funding risk being captured by the dominant political economy in the U.S. or co-opted by greenwashing actors who sound
Performing Economic Realities: Climate Week on Value, AI, and the Contest Over Contribution My worlds all collided at Climate Week, and it’s taken me another week to metabolize the bafflement of many and find the corners of coherence, trying to remember more than the variation of seating charts, convening experiences, and which rooms were set
A story about unimaginative visions for efficiency and who gets to decide what intelligence serves. The machines are learning. But not what you think. The machines are learning how to hollow out human work and pour the profits into distant accounts. The machines are learning the language of efficiency, which means “we don’t need
A compelling narrative is emerging in business and finance: a shift from funding effort to paying for results. On the surface, outcomes-based models, results-based finance, and impact-linked finance appear to be a logical evolution toward greater efficiency and accountability. This approach, however, is not a panacea. It’s a complex tool whose application merits careful critique,
The signs are everywhere, if you know where to look. A German state announces it’s done with Microsoft Teams. A billionaire venture capitalist podcasts a manifesto justifying the rule of tech elites. AI researchers scramble to prevent a “data winter.” These might seem like disconnected events, but they reveal something deeper: three distinct responses to
Limits to paying only for the results that count Imagine signing a contract that promises “no results, no bill,” only to discover later that “results” were defined by someone else, measured with flawed data, and delivered through a system you barely control. Outcomes-based models promise perfect alignment: you pay only for success, and your solution
The dance of protest and capital The day after Earth Day, the streets of New York felt less like a celebration and more like an intervention. The Wall Street Bull: Early morning commuters passed a freshly scrubbed bull on Broadway, its hide briefly splashed green before activists wiped the paint away.1 Meatpacking District: The green paint
Inside and Outside the System That’s Cracking Reflections on TIIP’s 4th Conference: Where the Center Meets the Edge It’s a strange thing to attend a conference on long-term financial stewardship while the global financial system is actively coming apart by design. Outside the room: volatility, capital flight, stalled investment, and the fallout from the so-called Liberation
We are entering a strange hall of mirrors. In a time when LLMs and LRMs are marketed as tools that “reason,” many of us are now using these same tools to generate business models, especially for AI-driven ventures. But what are these models really doing? Remixed from ivodich They’re not reasoning. They’re remixing. Thanks