The title of this year’s Booker Prize winner, by M. John Harrison, is The End of Everything. It’s a book for our times, depicting a postapocalyptic Britain being stealthily invaded by enigmatic aliens called the iGhetti. The Guardian’s reviewer got the point: “these eerie non-humans that. . . insert themselves into the neighborhood could be interpreted as LLMs made flesh.” The novel, wrote Michel Faber, “burrows deep into our psyches—into the psyche of our civilization—and exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now.”
There has been a lot of that kind of talk since last Tuesday’s midterm election results, which stunned tech bros and their hedgie fanboys, all of whom assumed that, whatever else happened, even a nightmare blue tsunami, Texas would be safe. But just as the Kent coast couldn’t keep out the iGhetti, so Austin couldn’t keep out the iDemi.
This was a turning point, one leading hedge fund wrote. It signified the political death of MAGA, though not of economic populism. Where previously voters were open to the Donald Trump combination of deregulation, tariffs, and tax cuts, now the voters want protection from the market when prices go up, and that means taxing and regulating business. This was a fundamental change in the forces shaping policy debate, and required a complete rethink by investors.
Well, maybe. But there’s a difference between a paradigm shift and a vibe shift (a term widely used to characterize the November 2024 election result). We now know the half-life of a vibe shift: two years.
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