SWL Week in Review - The Narratives of ’26
So what are the themes of the year that actually matter?
The stories we tell ourselves about the world have always mattered a great deal… but we live in a particularly strong moment of narrative power and narrative instability. Fundamentally this is all because of the internet -- a new human superpower we have where for the first time in history everyone can talk to everyone else instantly, frictionlessly, and for free. Everything is downstream of this new human reality… so going into 2026, the thing I have been thinking about is what narratives / what stories we are telling ourself matter the most for how the year will unfold. Here is my off the cuff list of stories that matter going into the year…
AI & ECONOMICS & WEALTH
How the economy is changing, the stories that drive it, and how they can break in different directions where it matters…
- The Narrative Collusion on Debt / GDP growth imperative / AI buildout between Washington, NYC, and SF — Will it Hold Up? — The story is US debt is out of control, only way out is to get GDP growth to historically absurd highs, only way do that is for AI to hit and encourage near religious belief in that story. Call the data-center buildout basically a Chinese housing boom for housing computers in a country that doesn’t have enough people…. But on the flip side, the Chinese housing boom for people to store wealth in but not live in actually kind worked? — the question this year is whether the narrative breaks in the face of data, or the collusion cabal sticks together and the plates keep spinning,… or it turns out it actually is real and it is the best case of finance, tech, and government working together (and we can count our absurd historical lucky stars).
- The Global Search for Other GDP Sweeteners Beyond AI Regardless of What Happens — but what if the AI/GDP narrative collapses? Well that must be part of the Venezuela story… which is we go searching for other GDP sweeteners where we can… and war is good for GDP (see Russia) as is getting access to lots and lots of natural resources.
- The AI Compounding of Wealth & Classification of The ‘Ruling’ Class in The West — The story that AI, way way short of AGI — shifts power away from labor and towards asset owners seems pretty hard to refute — I doubt that narrative shifts this year unless the pitchforks (confiscatory taxes) come out. But the question of story is whether people feel like AI is pulling up the ladder or not. The US has always thrived on the fact that everyone thinks they are a millionaire down on their luck & one turn away from making it. If AI accelerates this feeling with startup success and opportunities, that story continues — if it plays out that actually wealth inequality from tech & compounding returns on being already big / rich are insurmountable — it might start to break.
- The Story That The Value of Human Labor is Going to Zero.. — relatedly but separately — there is the narrative floating around now even ahead of practical reality that the big implication of AI is that the value of human labor (physical or intellectual) tends rapidly to zero. No more careers, no more safety — If you don’t have value for being willing to work anymore as a human people get really mad and really depressed. Even if this is the long-term trend (and meaning must come from elsewhere) this year the story either accelerates (still ahead of reality) and political and social implications follow, or it subsides as folks realize this is more theoretical than practical for a long time.
- The ‘Degen’ / Yolo / Gambling Response of The Capital Light Youth — also related but separate to inequality and lack of value from labor … all the young people that can’t afford homes… the ‘gambling’ economy / just put it all on black really becomes logical. This has been true for a long time — and has existed as a theme in science fiction even longer — but it is going mainstream… and the thing about this story and others is that the reality of the situation matters less / the story can far outrun what the nature of things -- so even if not everyone should be a degen yet in reality, if they think they should, they will.
- The Inevitability of Wealth Taxes and Confiscation With No New Terra Nova — which leads to this idea that wealth taxes and confiscation is almost inventible on some timeline… which makes the owners of assets very nervous. We will see big cards flipped this year in California and New York on how ‘inevitable’ this all feels… and on what timeline. There is nothing to do about it / no train to stop - Tech will push efficiency, devalue human labor relatively, etc. and compound inequality … and without an escape valve where we can send folks (west, digital, etc.) to generate their own wealth and make their name and fortune — if money keeps pooling up and people keep living longer, and keep working longer because why not when you can dial in from your yacht — things get spicy.
- Who does the economy / capitalism serve as all the disposable income pools up in the 0.1% — net of all this and the harrangings over who has what and who keeps what as society evolves — there is in some ways the biggest question of all… which who the economy and capitalism really serves. You think of it as ‘the market’ capitalism finds a way to serve people with what they want and need and allocate resources appropriately… but that isn’t quite true — what capitalism really serves is the demand of the marginal disposable dollar…. And the issue with all the dollars pooling up is that that means all the work and service and products made also start targeting serving where the dollars are concentrated / with a smaller and smaller number of people.
TRUTH / REALITY, LAWFARE, RULE OF LAW AND PANOPTICON
One layer up from the economy - questions of how people think about truth, alignment, and the rules by which the game are played.
- People Care about Reality Less and Less — with fewer people owning assets / homes, and fewer people having kids && most people have less and less stake in the real world and live more and more of their time digitally and in chosen cults and communities … truth and reality just tend to practically matter less and less to them. What is entertaining or engaging actually has more practical impact on their lives than what is real. This has been reinforced so many times recently when ‘real things’ where absorbed as shocks for them by governments, etc. (covid in the US was all things considered shockingly smooth with stimmy, etc… 08 got papered over etc.) — and as the market gets moved on the margin by stories about the future more than DCFs — people rightfully stop caring about reality. We don’t live in a VR metaverse, but in practice the disconnection predicted by those stories is alive and well in all other forms — it is hard to imagine this reversing this year vs accelerating….
- People Also Trust What They Hear Less and Less — The story was supposed to be that deep fakes are so prevalent you have no idea what to trust… in reality deep fakes aren’t all that common BUT they are plausible enough that people just tune out what they hear … it isn’t ‘probably’ fake… but the fact that everything is ‘possibly’ fake and inconvenient or expensive to consider, means that most people just stop trusting most things as true (which in turn massively opens up what can happen, because you can just claim anything is fake and enough people will believe your or be unwilling or unable to sort out reality anyway) — this can also really only accelerate.
- The Technical Reality That Actual important Truth Can’t Come From Anywhere — to drift for a minute… there was a counter-narrative against the professional press and this idea of ‘citizen journalism’ for a while / democratization of truth — this has always been a joke. Historically it never made sense, for a brief 20th century window where recordings of reality where cheap (audio, video, photos) but expensive to fake — the aperture of where truth could come from opens up — but now, with the war of attrition on truth rebalanced by technology AND the legal cost of standing your ground on truth expands — punditry can come from everywhere but the truth will be under ever-heightened assault, and ironically less and less practical care by the vast majority of folks as they live lives more and more disconnected from a shared physical reality.
- Which all leads to extreme lawfare & the attempt to financialize courts — so the upshot of all of this — consolidating power, asymmetry, and lack of trust and truth etc. is that folks start aggressively using the courts as financial engines… where power and money do absolutely get leverage. The original purveyors of this may have been class action legal financial cowboys attempting to take from the powerful on behalf of themselves (and a bit actual people) — then it became the mell brooks line on Robinhood “he took from everyone and kept everything” — but where we are going is that the fiefdoms and powerful use their relative financial leverage in the law to defend themselves, attack enemies, etc. This can only continue and accelerate (though maybe some of the tools for doing this can at least be marginally democratized).
- So can the trust in courts and rule of law survive? — Everyone still trusts the courts for now big picture (thank god)… and I think will continue to in the US for a while to come… but I world in which the courts are the only functioning part of government and are trusted is a difficult one and eventually that alone cannot support the rule of actual law… even if the courts have their own police force.
- Which all stems back to the biggest question of all - political power struggle -- states vs. federal government, federal vs. state… can democracy continue to work or is technological pull of executive power too strong? . There are legitimate reasons why executive power (at companies and in states) grows with tech — you need more nimble decision making, you don’t need as much bureaucracy, etc. But the more power is consolidated into few hands, and those hands feel less constrained themselves and take more degrees of freedom even for good-ish (Venezuela) … you are forced to confront the question of whether we can govern with democracy in an age of technological leverage, AI, and increasingly perfect panopticon-style insight…
COMPANIONSHIP, CULTS AND COMMUNITIES
- Default Depression — so look, where does this all end on a human scale? More default depression and sadness for a lot of people. They see more clearly than ever great looking instagram lives / what is possible, they have no high-trust way of earning their way towards that… with a globally integrated single information-sphere they no longer can take pride in being the best basketball player in their town the way they could be ‘basketball guy’ locally pre-internet.. and that makes people default sad. People want purpose and place / they want to be valued for their contribution by others … but default direction here is that they don’t get that anymore… and that isn’t going to change…
- Which leads to the natural reaction - find your extremist— with melted geographic boundaries and natural physical friction, people search further and further afield into weirder and weirder sub-cultures looking for their purpose and place / to carve their own niche of meaning and belonging… this continues and the world gets more cult dominated… the variety is great / spice of life to embrace — but it pulls us further and further apart.
- And companionship / relationships? . well…. If internet people like you are cheap and easy vs. real relationships in the real world with actual difficult people (and variety of people you have to get along with) — just wait for your AI girlfriend — who gives you just exactly what you want all the time no questions asked. People are going to continue to get worse and worse at real human relationships as cheap and easy relationship digitally get better and better and more and more frictionless… sugar digital relationships are just increasingly appealing for most even if they will kill you… real world actual valuable relationships which are difficult and painful but vegtables that keep you alive and make you strong… those are a luxury good.
- Which makes us all worse at getting along at all levels — because we are trained on digital / our diet is sweets, and we don’t HAVE to deal with anyone or anything for survival… we don’t have to hold down jobs or build a career… or family… even if you wanted those things they are mostly unattainable and unaffordable with any predictably.
SO WHAT
This all sounds pretty depressing writing it out TBH… even if we get the GDP growth we want and pay off our debt (back to question number one) if we do it in a way that doesn’t change relationships or include the vast majority of people we are still in a rough spot…
Is it all bad?
No — that is the great irony. There are so many great things going on in the world with science and technology, longevity, access to information, other people etc. There is a lot that is great… but just stream of consciousness… when I think about 2026 the actual issues in play are all pretty rough trend wise, and it is pretty unclear how to buck the trends.
Which is why… in the ultimate end…. While I think it is completely delusional, I get why a bunch of kids are running around with religious ideas about AI (both to the positive / god and negative / devil) end — they want agency, they want their lives to feel like they matter… and they want something to believe in that totally topples the checkers board, because they feel right now / deep down… that the social implications of our moment are all pretty scary and pretty bad.
Happy 2026
S
SL | X | MoL Podcast | Slow Newsletter & State of Venture | 1636 & Take on Harvard | Lettermeme Sources | Stop | Get added to my weekly NL
Similar newsletters
There are other similar shared emails that you might be interested in: