This is a useful mental exercise, Matt. Thank you for offering. It’s something we ought to consider (and none of us wish it) because of the social and political trajectory we’re on. That said, you could have added demographics and ethnicity as considerations (perhaps in the culture or politics section)…after all, that is precisely the reason for the current restrictive immigration policies, which are dividing this nation like nothing else. The theory of cultural replacement (the Administration and supporters’ fear of it) is real.
Years ago a book came out The Nine Nations of North America, I have forgotten the author. The book was not a prediction of a breakup, rather a discussion of economic water sheds.
Yes. Exactly. And that is where all human evolution begins.
And culture follows technology, as learning about how the world about us works, and how we can take the world about us as we find it, in some specific way, and change it to work more a way we choose to make it, in that specific way: the Promethean gift of fire.
Technology inspires Enterprise, as the social coming-together of physical/human Knowledge + Networks + Routines for organizing the concentration of time, effort and expertise on doing the work of paying cost-for-value to exchange value-for-price by making an abundance of unique artifacts of technology available in surplus to popular choice, as technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our own best lives, as best we can, under the circumstances then prevailing, everyday: Nutrition (food and water, all the technologies involved in supplying ourselves with sufficiencies of food and water); Habitation (clothing and housing, and all the technologies involved in supplying ourselves with sufficiency of clothing and housing (including housing for both domestic/residential and non-domestic/commercial and institutional human activities; health, both physical and emotional/psychological/spiritual/social, and all the technologies involved in supplying ourselves with sufficiencies of physical and emotional wellness and wellbeing; energy & materials for forming the unique artifacts of our technology; and knowledge, information and communication for informing all this work.
The true story of our human history is the tale of inquiry for insight and new learning that inspires new doing, to form the worlds in which we live, out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born
Brilliant. A great realization will soon be upon America , a realization , that America never really existed as a nation with a common story , its a loosely assembled midland cultural groups that resisted internal pressures and fought off monarchy , to fight off slavery, to fighting the industrial era robber barons , fought fascism , and now to fight off oligarchs and techno billionaires. All to preserve our “ way of life” but more to secure Basic human rights .
Colin Woodard wrote a book called American nation that discussed these vital signs of national disunity. The Albion seed also talks about cultural disparity and discusses how like minded cultures tend to live close by and not integrate.
Chris Armitage also discusses “soft secession “ in his blog the existential republic on Substack talks about how states rights can be used to hold the squeamish federal government to account. He’s a brilliant advocate for downsizing.
Look at the way Europe over the centuries has evolved to smaller more culturallyCompact nation states. It’s a function of governmental evolution. It’s coming and I can’t wait to see it because finally we can try to break free of grid lock and an completely ineffective government we have grown to despise, we have to try to be better. J.
A friendly challenge from the supply-chain angle. Ed Conway's Material World traces what it actually takes to make one microchip: quartz from a handful of mines, ultra-pure silicon grown in a couple of plants, one Dutch company's lithography machines, and neon gas that arrived mostly as a by-product of Soviet-era steel mills in Ukraine. Every step depends on every other, and most steps have no backup.
We already ran the experiment you're describing. In 2022 a regional fracture cut that neon supply — and the shortage didn't stay in Odesa. It landed in Taiwanese and Texan chip fabs within weeks.
That's the part I'd push on. Fragmentation doesn't hand a region back its self-sufficiency; it removes one link and everyone downstream loses a capability at once. A bioregion can feed itself. It cannot make an insulin pump, a transformer, or a drone.
So here's my question. You expect the breakup to leave people living more locally and providing for themselves. But breaking a country apart doesn't build new factories — it only cuts the routes to the ones that already exist. The likelier outcome is regions that keep needing things they cannot produce, from suppliers they no longer have reliable access to. What is the actual mechanism that turns fracture into local self-sufficiency, rather than into shared, permanent scarcity? That step is carrying most of the argument's weight, and it's the one I'd most like to see spelled out.
Agreed. I think we are headed for a bit of a de-industrialization, no matter what happens. As our environmental systems break down, our societal and economic ones (and political systems) that depend on those environmental systems will break down as well.
Those people providing more for themselves locally will do so mostly out of necessity. We should be building those local systems as much as possible now as we will need them.
Local self-sufficiency doesn't mean that you can produce a next replacement for your iphone, or bluetooth headphones locally. You won't - so there is not such mechanism.
I think it is inevitable that we will have less luxuries that technology now provides. That will include things we really don't need but like (like an iphone) but will also include things like insulin, which can't be provided easily just down the street or across town.
I'm not rooting for that world - I just see it coming and think we should try to design things as much as possible to prepare instead of just letting disaster happen. Things that depend on a supply chain of 100+ partners will fall away in a collapse. The more brittle the system, the more likely it is to fall away.
I have not heard of Ed Conway - thanks for that knowledge. I'll look him up. Peter Zeihan's - "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" gets into those supply chain issues as well.
Agreed on where this ends up. The part I'd slow down on is how we get there — because I don't think it's a slide downwards. I think it's a swing, and two very different kinds of power are driving it.
First the mechanism. Think of an old shower with a slow water heater. Too cold, so you turn the tap. Nothing happens, so you turn it further. Then scalding water arrives, you yank it back — and thirty seconds later it's freezing again. The problem isn't the tap. It's the delay between acting and seeing the result. Supply chains now have that delay, and it's enormous: a new chip plant takes 3–5 years, a new mine 10–15. The buffers that used to absorb small shocks — warehouse stock, spare capacity, a second supplier — were stripped out decades ago in the name of efficiency.
Now add the two hands on the tap.
One is political, and it keeps jerking. Russia's war removed Ukrainian neon, a gas most of the world's chip factories depended on, and the effect landed instantly in Taiwan and Texas. Tariff policy under Trump has made the cost of importing anything a moving target. China responded by restricting rare earths, gallium and germanium — controls now suspended, not repealed, with the framework sitting there ready to switch back on. None of these are shocks a company can plan around. They're a hand that turns the tap at random.
The other hand is capital, and it thinks it's stabilising things. Musk, the hyperscalers and their investors will not let these chains break — they're spending over a trillion dollars on data centres in 2026 alone. But protecting a chain and pulling it toward yourself are the same motion. Chip factories are switching production to AI memory, so the ordinary memory that cars, medical devices and industrial equipment need simply isn't made. Memory prices are up around 700% in a year, and no new capacity arrives before 2028. That's the third such cycle this decade, each swing wider than the last.
Which is why this cuts against the comfortable version of collapse. It isn't scarcity arriving evenly. It's scarcity allocated by who can pay — while the total still grows.
And it bears directly on your advice. Building local systems means buying transformers, pumps, batteries, refrigeration. None of that is made locally; it's bought from this same swinging market. In a swing, the giants hold long-term supply contracts and a small town holds an order form — so when supply tightens, the small buyer is the one who waits, or pays triple, or is told no. That's the bind. You're urging communities to build local capacity while there's still industry left to build it with. But the same years are when the swings are sharpest, and each spike hands another slice of that remaining capacity to the largest buyers. The equipment you need to become less dependent is exactly what gets rationed away from you first.
So my question: if the descent swings rather than slides, is "build local now" still the right instruction — or is it "build fast, in the troughs, before the next spike prices you out entirely"?
A very interesting study is the 11 Nations of North America that stitches the present day reality with the historical and cultural founding that drove N/A demographics not to mention our daily culture .
As a Canadian living in Nova Scotia ( New England) perhaps the Trump silliness could be quelled by a United Provinces of Canada
Assortment of the US west coast,all of Canada,the mill states and New England.
I think the question is not whether the US breaks apart or expands or stays the same. Those are all possibilities, but there are a lot of ways and reasons for breakup, and snatching the resources of what are now other countries can likely best be done without trying to officially annex them. And there are a lot of changes other than borders. It looks to me like the rich and powerful are trying to set up a Panopticon-guided police state, where they presumably live in luxury in fortified enclaves while the rest of us struggle for survival on the outside on a ravaged planet. But they're depending on AI and robots for this fantasy, and they are facing fierce resistance to the data centers and an AI bubble teetering on the brink of popping, taking a good deal of the economy with it.
I don't disagree. I can see the AI bubble popping and the current administration bailing out the bad actors, which could lead to a real revolt. Best case scenario is that the U.S. and other places break up into more manageable bioregional based regions. That governance would need to be sorted out and would by no means be smooth. But on the other side of that could be no global hegemon able to systematically pillage anymore - or at least to a much less extent.
Unless China, whose government is more prudent and makes decisions with an eye to sustainability rather than just private profit, takes over. Would it then behave as badly as the US? Hard to tell--it has seemed more responsible but once freed of the US, y know, power corrupts.
50 years? Sooner? Maybe? No way to tell. Only time will tell. One can speculate.
Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959.
Thank you sir. I wasn't sure of the dates, so I looked it up to make sure I had it correct ... and then typed it in incorrectly. :)
This is a useful mental exercise, Matt. Thank you for offering. It’s something we ought to consider (and none of us wish it) because of the social and political trajectory we’re on. That said, you could have added demographics and ethnicity as considerations (perhaps in the culture or politics section)…after all, that is precisely the reason for the current restrictive immigration policies, which are dividing this nation like nothing else. The theory of cultural replacement (the Administration and supporters’ fear of it) is real.
Years ago a book came out The Nine Nations of North America, I have forgotten the author. The book was not a prediction of a breakup, rather a discussion of economic water sheds.
Damnit man. You just added a book to my reading list.
"Politics follows culture”.
Yes. Exactly. And that is where all human evolution begins.
And culture follows technology, as learning about how the world about us works, and how we can take the world about us as we find it, in some specific way, and change it to work more a way we choose to make it, in that specific way: the Promethean gift of fire.
Technology inspires Enterprise, as the social coming-together of physical/human Knowledge + Networks + Routines for organizing the concentration of time, effort and expertise on doing the work of paying cost-for-value to exchange value-for-price by making an abundance of unique artifacts of technology available in surplus to popular choice, as technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our own best lives, as best we can, under the circumstances then prevailing, everyday: Nutrition (food and water, all the technologies involved in supplying ourselves with sufficiencies of food and water); Habitation (clothing and housing, and all the technologies involved in supplying ourselves with sufficiency of clothing and housing (including housing for both domestic/residential and non-domestic/commercial and institutional human activities; health, both physical and emotional/psychological/spiritual/social, and all the technologies involved in supplying ourselves with sufficiencies of physical and emotional wellness and wellbeing; energy & materials for forming the unique artifacts of our technology; and knowledge, information and communication for informing all this work.
The true story of our human history is the tale of inquiry for insight and new learning that inspires new doing, to form the worlds in which we live, out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born
Brilliant. A great realization will soon be upon America , a realization , that America never really existed as a nation with a common story , its a loosely assembled midland cultural groups that resisted internal pressures and fought off monarchy , to fight off slavery, to fighting the industrial era robber barons , fought fascism , and now to fight off oligarchs and techno billionaires. All to preserve our “ way of life” but more to secure Basic human rights .
Colin Woodard wrote a book called American nation that discussed these vital signs of national disunity. The Albion seed also talks about cultural disparity and discusses how like minded cultures tend to live close by and not integrate.
Chris Armitage also discusses “soft secession “ in his blog the existential republic on Substack talks about how states rights can be used to hold the squeamish federal government to account. He’s a brilliant advocate for downsizing.
Look at the way Europe over the centuries has evolved to smaller more culturallyCompact nation states. It’s a function of governmental evolution. It’s coming and I can’t wait to see it because finally we can try to break free of grid lock and an completely ineffective government we have grown to despise, we have to try to be better. J.
A friendly challenge from the supply-chain angle. Ed Conway's Material World traces what it actually takes to make one microchip: quartz from a handful of mines, ultra-pure silicon grown in a couple of plants, one Dutch company's lithography machines, and neon gas that arrived mostly as a by-product of Soviet-era steel mills in Ukraine. Every step depends on every other, and most steps have no backup.
We already ran the experiment you're describing. In 2022 a regional fracture cut that neon supply — and the shortage didn't stay in Odesa. It landed in Taiwanese and Texan chip fabs within weeks.
That's the part I'd push on. Fragmentation doesn't hand a region back its self-sufficiency; it removes one link and everyone downstream loses a capability at once. A bioregion can feed itself. It cannot make an insulin pump, a transformer, or a drone.
So here's my question. You expect the breakup to leave people living more locally and providing for themselves. But breaking a country apart doesn't build new factories — it only cuts the routes to the ones that already exist. The likelier outcome is regions that keep needing things they cannot produce, from suppliers they no longer have reliable access to. What is the actual mechanism that turns fracture into local self-sufficiency, rather than into shared, permanent scarcity? That step is carrying most of the argument's weight, and it's the one I'd most like to see spelled out.
Agreed. I think we are headed for a bit of a de-industrialization, no matter what happens. As our environmental systems break down, our societal and economic ones (and political systems) that depend on those environmental systems will break down as well.
Those people providing more for themselves locally will do so mostly out of necessity. We should be building those local systems as much as possible now as we will need them.
Local self-sufficiency doesn't mean that you can produce a next replacement for your iphone, or bluetooth headphones locally. You won't - so there is not such mechanism.
I think it is inevitable that we will have less luxuries that technology now provides. That will include things we really don't need but like (like an iphone) but will also include things like insulin, which can't be provided easily just down the street or across town.
I'm not rooting for that world - I just see it coming and think we should try to design things as much as possible to prepare instead of just letting disaster happen. Things that depend on a supply chain of 100+ partners will fall away in a collapse. The more brittle the system, the more likely it is to fall away.
I have not heard of Ed Conway - thanks for that knowledge. I'll look him up. Peter Zeihan's - "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" gets into those supply chain issues as well.
Agreed on where this ends up. The part I'd slow down on is how we get there — because I don't think it's a slide downwards. I think it's a swing, and two very different kinds of power are driving it.
First the mechanism. Think of an old shower with a slow water heater. Too cold, so you turn the tap. Nothing happens, so you turn it further. Then scalding water arrives, you yank it back — and thirty seconds later it's freezing again. The problem isn't the tap. It's the delay between acting and seeing the result. Supply chains now have that delay, and it's enormous: a new chip plant takes 3–5 years, a new mine 10–15. The buffers that used to absorb small shocks — warehouse stock, spare capacity, a second supplier — were stripped out decades ago in the name of efficiency.
Now add the two hands on the tap.
One is political, and it keeps jerking. Russia's war removed Ukrainian neon, a gas most of the world's chip factories depended on, and the effect landed instantly in Taiwan and Texas. Tariff policy under Trump has made the cost of importing anything a moving target. China responded by restricting rare earths, gallium and germanium — controls now suspended, not repealed, with the framework sitting there ready to switch back on. None of these are shocks a company can plan around. They're a hand that turns the tap at random.
The other hand is capital, and it thinks it's stabilising things. Musk, the hyperscalers and their investors will not let these chains break — they're spending over a trillion dollars on data centres in 2026 alone. But protecting a chain and pulling it toward yourself are the same motion. Chip factories are switching production to AI memory, so the ordinary memory that cars, medical devices and industrial equipment need simply isn't made. Memory prices are up around 700% in a year, and no new capacity arrives before 2028. That's the third such cycle this decade, each swing wider than the last.
Which is why this cuts against the comfortable version of collapse. It isn't scarcity arriving evenly. It's scarcity allocated by who can pay — while the total still grows.
And it bears directly on your advice. Building local systems means buying transformers, pumps, batteries, refrigeration. None of that is made locally; it's bought from this same swinging market. In a swing, the giants hold long-term supply contracts and a small town holds an order form — so when supply tightens, the small buyer is the one who waits, or pays triple, or is told no. That's the bind. You're urging communities to build local capacity while there's still industry left to build it with. But the same years are when the swings are sharpest, and each spike hands another slice of that remaining capacity to the largest buyers. The equipment you need to become less dependent is exactly what gets rationed away from you first.
So my question: if the descent swings rather than slides, is "build local now" still the right instruction — or is it "build fast, in the troughs, before the next spike prices you out entirely"?
A very interesting study is the 11 Nations of North America that stitches the present day reality with the historical and cultural founding that drove N/A demographics not to mention our daily culture .
As a Canadian living in Nova Scotia ( New England) perhaps the Trump silliness could be quelled by a United Provinces of Canada
Assortment of the US west coast,all of Canada,the mill states and New England.
I think the question is not whether the US breaks apart or expands or stays the same. Those are all possibilities, but there are a lot of ways and reasons for breakup, and snatching the resources of what are now other countries can likely best be done without trying to officially annex them. And there are a lot of changes other than borders. It looks to me like the rich and powerful are trying to set up a Panopticon-guided police state, where they presumably live in luxury in fortified enclaves while the rest of us struggle for survival on the outside on a ravaged planet. But they're depending on AI and robots for this fantasy, and they are facing fierce resistance to the data centers and an AI bubble teetering on the brink of popping, taking a good deal of the economy with it.
I don't disagree. I can see the AI bubble popping and the current administration bailing out the bad actors, which could lead to a real revolt. Best case scenario is that the U.S. and other places break up into more manageable bioregional based regions. That governance would need to be sorted out and would by no means be smooth. But on the other side of that could be no global hegemon able to systematically pillage anymore - or at least to a much less extent.
Unless China, whose government is more prudent and makes decisions with an eye to sustainability rather than just private profit, takes over. Would it then behave as badly as the US? Hard to tell--it has seemed more responsible but once freed of the US, y know, power corrupts.
Is it okay if i be it’s Aurelian? (Politically-wise, of course)