Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

And the more similar we become, the more everything starts to “escalate towards extremes.”

among the Silicon Valley set by Peter Thiel, our wants tend to be borrowed from other people.

Yet passive investing destroys the price discovery process. No risks are taken and no investments are made based on a determinate vision of the future, because all that matters is the size of a stock or derivative and whether it will get included or excluded from an index. As a result, financial markets have become homogenized, dominated by a few p

In contrast to mere imitation, which refers to the positive effects of copying someone else’s behavior (which facilitates learning, for example), mimetic desire—desiring the other’s desire—opens up a deeply violent dimension.

Instead of creating a fixed “exchange rate” between computations and the resulting currency accumulation, the Bitcoin protocol essentially adjusts the exchange rate by making the math puzzles more difficult.

He even ordered employees to take lie detector tests. (One worker’s came back clean, while everyone else refused to take it.) For the

Even filter bubbles are capable of creating positive feedback loops. On the one hand, they can describe toxic circumstances, such as severe political partisanship. But a filter bubble can also be an environment that leads to the pursuit of new ideas, despite widespread beliefs that they won’t work. Yes, QAnon exists in a filter bubble, but so did M

A taxonomy of bubbles: Speculative versus filter bubbles

Unsurprisingly, the Human Genome Project also exhibited a bubble dynamic, driven as it was by an ambitious vision and characterized by excessive government overinvestment.