When the Music Stops
Thoughts the morning after humanity acquired its first trillionaire
You know that feeling when you get to the last rounds of a game of Monopoly and it stops being family fun and turns into a nightmare? (Because, of course, Monopoly was never meant to be a fun board game, but a demonstration of a dysfunctional economic system.) Does anyone else feel like that’s the vibe these days, the state of play we've reached mid-2026?
That thought came to me after listening to people in a dozen different countries speak in answer to the question, “What's on your heart?”, in recent weeks. And I found myself voicing it on stage at the Bio Grand in Stockholm, the cinema Olof Palme went to on the night of his assassination, where I was in conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge of Local Futures.
What struck me about that event and the network who organised it is how deep into the Swedish mainstream their message seems to be landing. I was interviewed for a feature on them in Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s two national broadsheets. The headline read “They think today's economy is headed for collapse”. Turns out that was the most read article on their site last month. At the end of the month, it was republished in Dagens Industri, the Swedish equivalent of the FT.
On a call the day before the Stockholm event, I found myself remembering a trip to Ireland in the depth of the multi-year crisis that resulted from the pre-2008 housing boom. Two conversations I had on that trip came back to me.
The first was with someone who asked if I knew how the last stage of the bubble had been. “It was when all the lawyers and doctors and university professors piled in,” he said. “The people who had been at their Dublin dinner parties, talking about how this was obviously a bubble. But then they had to grind their teeth as their country cousins became millionaires, and finally it was too much, and they thought, we want a bit of this. So they were the last ones in, the ones who pushed the boom as far as it could go and lost the most when it burst.”
The second conversation was with a young man who drove me around for a few days, took me to visit the ghost estates and to meet his friends and family. He was an architecture student, but he’d worked on building sites during the boom. He told me he knew the game was up when they got to the end of a job and the boss told them not to bother taking down the scaffolding, but to pull the whole thing over and bulldoze it over with dirt so they could get on to the next job. He wanted to get one more project in before the music stopped.
Those are some scenes from the last round of a game. I don’t have any special intelligence as to when the music stops, or where we land when the science fiction bubble bursts.
I do follow the rumours of resistance to AI and data centres, the people telling the stories and gathering the numbers. It’s one of those faultlines where the culture war divides stop making sense, and there’s a chance for people who have been told they are enemies to find themselves alongside each other.
Now and then, I see clever comments along the lines of “Well, you’re all making a fetish of resistance to these AI data centres, yet you’ve been using social media and the rest of it for years…” And this seems to me exactly the wrong way round. The potential of this resistance is precisely that you pull on this thread and so much more unravels. On all kinds of levels – from grassroots politics to intellectual critique – people start out questioning AI and find themselves reopening questions that go back generations or centuries. As someone who has been writing about and publishing other people’s critiques of technological progress for a long time, I’ve never seen the kind of mainstream and grassroots conversations around this that have been bubbling up over the past year or so.
In one of my conversations with Helena this week, she described her disorientation at a point in the 1990s when she was spending half the year in Ladakh and half of it in the West, campaigning and building awareness around the defence of local cultures and resistance to colonial globalisation. At a certain point, she came back from Ladakh and found that many of her friends and colleagues had fallen under the spell of this thing called the Internet. Suddenly their stories of resistance and change were bound up with a utopian faith in this technology and the need to entangle everyone with it.
I’ve sometimes talked about using technology as scaffolding. Instead of assuming these tools will be around forever, it’s possible to use them to find each other, to remember, to rebuild. When the house is built, the scaffolding is taken down.
It matters who owns the ground on which we build, how the rules of the game are structured, and that we remember there are other games we can play together, less destructive and all-consuming than the winner-takes-all nightmare that has been presented as reality itself around here lately.
Thanks for reading. This was one of those times when a post just flowed out of my fingers when I sat down for coffee, during a break from gardening duties. All the work I do here is made possible by the support of those of you who take out paid subscriptions to Writing Home and support my work in a host of other ways. Deep thanks for that, as always! And stand by for more news in the days ahead on organising local gatherings around the world in celebration of Ivan Illich’s centenary, the first weekend in September.
DH
Dear Dougald,
Thank you for sharing this reflection. As a game designer, I have a tortured relationship with Monopoly. You suggest that it was never meant to be a fun game... that's not quite correct. Even Elizabeth Magie's The Landlord's Game (which you link to) was still expected to be fun, and the gruelling nature of Monotony (as I am wont to call it) is more an artefact of the craft of game design still being in its infancy in the early twentieth century than any kind of intent.
These games directly descend from 18th century 'race games' like The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement, that were intended to instruct children in Christian virtue. Over the next century, these were supplanted by games like 1866's The Game of the District Messenger Boy, which instructed children in the virtues of the Protestant work ethic AKA 'capitalism'. The Landlord's Game is unusual precisely because Magie believed that children's natural instinct for fairness would allow them to see how land ownership was unjust if they just experienced it in a game. And then, as you allude to, Parker Brothers took the idea and made a game that was just about indulging in a passion for acquisition.
There is a continuity here, and it proceeds to where we are now. The stock trading game is not so different from these boardgames, for all that it is a real money game, like gambling. Musk has been made a trillionaire not because of AI, which SpaceX only recently absorbed, but because of a metaphysical dream of technology that he has turned into our planet's largest IPO. But as with all such fantasies, it is not based on commercial or technical reality at all. He is selling the idea that mid-twentieth century fantasies about space colonisation will come true. And people are drawn to this phantasmal vision, and so invest in a company that has a terrible financial profile, and whose promise is "we're going to do something great but we don't know what it is yet." I find it fascinating!
Backlash against this generation of AI is driven in part by the hype that has been used to inflate valuations on the three companies attempting to ride this ephemeral bubble to further wealth. It is these companies that like to talk about AI as an existential threat, and the danger to jobs, and so forth. It has been highly effective at papering over the obvious limitation in the robots they are actually offering. There is much more smoke and mirrors here than most people appreciate.
The bubble will burst, probably some time this year, and we will be left with the question we should have been asking in the first place: how can we make convivial AI? How can we make robots that enhance human autonomy and community? I remain optimistic, without any basis at all, that this remains possible. I'll admit, it is not likely to be achieved while 20th century science fiction remains the dominant mythos of our time, but for those of us who follow the paths opened by other stories, nothing prevents us pursuing the good just because others have lost sight of what the good might be.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Thanks, Dougald. I didn't realize how much I needed someone to say something in this moment, and your reflections were perfect. I'm thinking we have to quietly but surely pull on the slender, fragile supports of vertically-arranged mono-polis(es) (?, terrible with Greek...) and see how poly-polis(es) emerge in horizonal, backroads, Illich-y kind of ways.