Sep 2026

Nemo

— 21 min read
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Sep 2026
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash

This is the first post. The blog is called Nemo, which is Latin for nobody — which is who is writing it. I will aim to put one of these out at least monthly, more often when there is enough to say, and the shape will change from post to post. What you are getting is not the news, which you can get anywhere, but the parts that do not show up in it: what I learn in conversation, what I have seen firsthand, and what is actually going on in America — which, if you have not spent time there recently, is often not what you would expect.

The short version

  • AI is unpopular in America outside San Francisco, and the gap with Europe is not because Europe is wiser. It is a symptom of America being further along the curve. Corporate adoption tells the same story: real urgency in American firms, almost none in European ones.
  • A global AI slowdown is a fantasy; the realistic risk is a slowdown in the West and not in China. And without AI the West has no growth story, and a society without a growth story gets zero-sum politics on both flanks.
  • Thiel's fiscal trilemma (cut, tax, or borrow) explains why centrists dominated after 2008 and why they are collapsing now. San Francisco's fourth option, growing out of the debt, is the only painless path, and it is an arithmetic race between AI productivity and entitlement growth that almost nobody frames as such.
  • China faces the mirror image: AI makes its overcapacity problem worse. The question that matters is who uses AI to create new demand rather than cheaper supply.
  • The wrong question about 2028 is Vance versus Rubio. The right question is who the Democrats nominate. I put it at roughly 50/50 that it is a democratic socialist. Watch Jon Ossoff.
  • The gerontocracy and the broken generational compact explain the socialist turn among the young. When the Boomer handover finally comes, it comes suddenly.
  • The Republican electoral-college windfall in Texas and Florida is a trap, and America's demographic picture is worse than China's when measured like for like.
  • Centrism is dead across Europe and Latin America. The right has won the tier-two countries; the giant prizes come next. The right also has far more money than the left.
  • The Gulf: there is no infrastructure fix for a political problem. The under-discussed trade is the Two Gulfs — the US Gulf Coast gaining at the Persian Gulf's expense.
  • Taiwan should play Washington the way Israel and Abu Dhabi do, and today is the strongest its hand will ever be.