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Fernando NikolicWork with me
Ideas

The Chaos Gap

The space between old systems collapsing and new ones forming.

In December 2001 Argentina froze bank deposits. By the first days of January the country had gone through five presidents in about two weeks and the peso had stopped being worth a dollar. By the middle of 2002 it was worth less than a third of that. Provinces printed their own bonds and people used them to buy groceries. Everyone could see the old system was dead, and nothing had replaced it yet. You just lived in the middle of it and made it up as you went.

That middle is what I call the chaos gap. The space between an old system collapsing and a new one forming. It usually lasts years, and most of the damage and most of the opportunity happen inside it.

I saw a second one in music. In 2008 I was working at Universal in Oslo, right in the torrent years. Everyone in the building knew where it was going, and the industry still spent years defending the CD while streaming was getting started next door in Sweden. The people who did well were the ones who stopped defending the old model early and went looking for the new one.

I think we’re inside a much bigger gap now. The internet killed the information scarcity that made institutions feel solid, and we haven’t built what replaces them. Money, media, how people decide who to trust and how companies get built are all in the gap at the same time.

Bitcoin is one answer for money. Perception is my attempt to watch the gap fill in, to see which narratives are forming before they’re obvious.

The hard part is emotional. Most people in a chaos gap stay loyal to the old system because that’s where their savings, their job and their identity are. In Argentina the people who got hurt worst were the ones who trusted the bank until the last day. I think about that a lot.

From the library

  • The good news about individual liberation and autonomy will seem to be bad news to many who are frightened by the transition crisis and do not expect to be winners in the new configuration of society.

    The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, James Dale Davidson

  • Every so often, we learn something new that rewrites all of what we have come to know and trust. In those moments, our foundation of knowledge crumbles—and with it, many of the beliefs that we have built on top of it. Those transitions are hard because we do not easily let go of our beliefs.

    The Price of Tomorrow, Jeff Booth

  • This is, I believe, a moral tale. It goes far to prove the revolutionary axiom that if you wish to destroy a nation you must corrupt its currency. Thus must sound money be the first bastion of a society's defence.

    When Money Dies, Bob Wolf

Where I’ve talked about it