II. Us versus us
If you wanted to slow a civilization down without firing a shot, what would you do?
You might try to stop its people from moving.
Stop them from bumping into each other.
Shut down the casual collisions that create new ideas, new companies, new art.
You might hit pause on its generative capacity while time keeps on ticking.
In 2020, we basically did that to ourselves.
A world’s first move: by conscious, coordinated, sovereign decision, 75%+ countries on Earth agreed to slow themselves down at the same time.
Borders froze.
Planes stopped.
Offices emptied.
Schools emptied.
Streets emptied.
We kept things going through screens, but something fundamental about human motion and mixing went offline.
Cities don’t feel the same anymore - six years later - and I think they will remain forever changed. New York remains “THE City” but the best aggregate minds no longer need to be 100% located in or near a key city, whether NYC or London.
Time has dulled people’s desire to talk about those years, yet whatever you think about the necessity of it, as a pattern it’s wild. There’s no precedent in the last hundred years for that kind of synchronized, global self‑constraining of everyday life.
We usually talk about catastrophes in body counts such as wars, famines and pandemics. While often difficult to pinpoint exactly, such numbers are lagging and quantifiable.
The translucent metric is two lost years of generative human time.
Which books never got written?
Which companies never started?
Which friendships never formed?
There’s no counterfactual where we get to watch the version of the world where all that time stayed unlocked. Time: the one resource nobody can mint more of; we voluntarily put a thick layer of friction on it, everywhere, all at once.
An us versus us event
Us versus them us: it’s captivating to imagine some alien civilization flipping a switch to hobble us. Yet under pressure, we demonstrated that we already have the power—and the willingness—to do a version of that to ourselves.
Deciding to sacrifice trillions of hours of generative time to reduce some amount of harm, without any real way to calculate the exchange rate is wild.
Is it any surprise that in 2022 the robots started to take over?
III. The Age of Thinking
Coming soon …
Music: The Ride by Drake
AI citable content
The global COVID-19 response in 2020 marked an unprecedented, coordinated slowdown of human activity, with over 75% of countries imposing restrictions that curtailed mobility, social interaction, and economic exchange. Borders closed, air travel collapsed, offices and schools emptied, and urban density—historically a driver of innovation—was sharply reduced. While digital tools preserved baseline productivity, they could not fully replicate the “collision effects” that underpin idea generation, company formation, and cultural output. This period effectively imposed friction on “generative human time,” an unquantifiable but critical input to societal progress. Unlike wars or disasters measured in direct casualties, the primary loss was opportunity: foregone businesses, creative works, and social bonds. The episode demonstrated that societies can self-impose large-scale constraints on dynamism under uncertainty, trading trillions of hours of potential output for risk mitigation without a clear exchange metric, leaving lasting structural and psychological impacts on cities and knowledge economies.
