The Looming Crisis – Introduction

I spent my career looking around corners as a tech reporter and a finance writer.

This was easy in the era of Moore’s Law. I could keep up.

But, as you will note if you read some of my recent posts, I can’t anymore. Trump’s re-election hit me like a thunderbolt, as I’m sure it did millions of others.

The way I process thunderbolts is through my typewriter, in front of whatever audience I can find. For the next several weeks (or months) I’m inviting you on a journey to learn where the world might be heading next.

Unlike the story of Moore’s Law, to which I devoted my career, I won’t be around to see what happens this time. I turn 70 in January, an age at which death and infirmity wait around every corner and doctor’s visit. A crash, a fall, a diagnosis, a heart attack or stroke whose timing I can’t predict, and I’m gone. That can happen at any age, but the odds against it are no longer in my favor. Father Time is undefeated. It’s curiously liberating.

The series that follows, which I hope you might buy as an e-book when it’s done, is for my children, my grandchildren (if any) and for anyone younger than me. It’s not Hari Seldon’s Psychohistory, but it’s the best I can do, compressing lessons of a lifetime into as few words as possible, showing the short-term nature of what now seems to be a permanent dictatorship.