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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.

The AI boom is mostly funded by private capital so the blast radius should be limited. Does anyone need to bail out Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Oracle? Nah.

The 2008 crash saw banks imploding due to correlated defaults and the government needed to bail them out because the economy needs banks to exist. This was pretty bad but the crash was only about 50% from a 2007 high and recovered within 5 years.

A crash to pre-AI markets in 2023 is one possible regression, which would be about a 40% drop. But this would mean ignoring all utility provided by AI aside from speculative gains.

The biggest unknowns are if a mildly bad crash causes a general mood of fear and depression to set in and make things much worse. Also, a big implosion in private capital could reveal unanticipated systemic risks.

I can't really get a clear picture either way.