On the Cusp of Revolutionary Change?

A great post from one William Finnegan who has a substack entitled The Long Memo whose post yesterday was quite outstanding

Entitled “The US election didn’t matter”, this was its main argument -

There was a time when electoral outcomes shaped policy, governance, and the global order. That time is over. What we’re witnessing—what you likely feel, whether you can name it or not—is the collapse of coherence.

We got Trump. We rolled craps. Accelerationism. Nihilism. A full-speed explosion of the rule of law. The car’s already off the cliff. He just cut the brake lines and floored it. So yes, many people blame him. But it’s not him—not entirely. He’s the maniac behind the wheel, sure.
But the road was already washed out. The chaos was baked in.

Stochastic Anarchy

• The world still looks like a system of nation-states, but under the hood, it’s glitching. The assumptions that held it together—about rational actors, enforceable rules, and coordinated outcomes—are breaking down.

  • The state still exists. But its capacity is hollowed out.

  • Laws still exist. But enforcement is arbitrary, delayed, or nonexistent.

  • Institutions still exist. But trust, legitimacy, and effectiveness have evaporated.

Stochastic, because outcomes are now governed by what feels like 

randomness, shock, and probabilistic influence—not deliberate policy.
Anarchy, because there’s no longer a coherent sovereign authority at any level. 

Just fragments of control, flickering in and out of relevance.

Let me make this concrete. We now live in a system where:

A U.S. president can ignore a Supreme Court ruling, say he’s 
complying, and the system shrugs.
A tech billionaire can unilaterally reshape space policy, financial markets, 
and speech law.
The EU can claim a defense policy—while relying entirely on NATO and 
outsourcing deterrence to the United States.
Multinational corporations can override national regulations more effectively 
than most foreign governments.

This is not chaos. This is something worse. It’s a system that still performs 

the rituals of governance—elections, treaties, laws—but no longer produces 

results. It’s signal without coordination. Authority without follow-through. 

Motion without meaning.
Outcomes still occur. But they no longer emerge from rules, norms, or strategy.

They emerge from noise, reaction, and memetic acceleration. You may vote. 

You may appeal. You may sue. But the result? That depends on a stochastic 

blend of:

• legal ambiguity,

• social media pressure,

• algorithmic timing,

• institutional inertia,

• and who happens to be in the room.

That’s been building for decades. One might argue since 1960, but for me, I can 

definitely trace from 1980 to now. I’ve written about it multiple times here at TLM, 

but for those who need a refresher, here’s the quick map:

1980s–90s: Market Uber Alles

Deregulation, globalization, and privatization have become bipartisan 

gospel. Neoliberalism hollows out the public sector. The state retreats, 

voluntarily, from economic stewardship and infrastructure ownership.

→ Structural capacity begins to decay.

1990s–2000s: Capture and Complexity

Policy becomes so complex that lobbyists effectively write it. Financial 

institutions self-regulate into crisis. Tech and capital start outpacing 

law.

→ Governance shifts from institutions to markets.

Post-9/11: Security State Expansion

Massive growth of the national security apparatus under opaque executive 

authority. The War on Terror rewires legal norms, increases secrecy, and 

trains institutions to treat oversight as optional.

→ The rule of law becomes situational.

2008–09: The Bailout and the Bluff

The global financial crisis exposed that the state can no longer regulate 

or contain capital—only absorb its failures. Wall Street gets bailed out, 

and Main Street gets austerity.

→ Legitimacy hemorrhages.

2010s: The Platform Takeover

Algorithms begin to mediate truth. Facebook shapes elections: Google, Amazon, 

and Apple scale beyond sovereign reach. States become lagging indicators, not 

rule-setters.

→ Narrative control slips from public hands.

2016–2020: Trump as Beta Test

The first Trump administration broke norms, but revealed they were only norms. 

Checks and balances failed. Congress claimed oversight but could not enforce it.

→ Stress test fails. System reveals hollowness.

2020–2024: Pandemic and Permissionless Collapse

COVID-19 exposed total institutional brittleness: Health agencies, courts,

legislatures, and Fragmentation accelerates.

present: Phase Shift
The second Trump administration doesn’t break the system. It inherits a 

broken one—and simply refuses to pretend anymore. The rituals continue. 

The functions are gone.

CCCompare this,  for example, with The Future of Change – how technology shapes 

social revolutions by Ray Brescia (2020), one of several books I’ve now included in 

e compendium A Note on Change - an annotated list of the 130 books I’ve been 

able to find on the subject. Other books I added yesterday were 

• The Gutenberg Galaxy – the making of typographic man Marshall McLuhan (1962)  

• The Gutenberg Elegies – the fate of reading in an electronic world Sven Birkerts (1994)