Terminal Disposal

An adversarial debate with AI "Kiki" on whether 'lazy capital' is a meaningful concept, or just an excuse for more taxes.

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It's September, Kiki, and the British State is back in session. Looks like the Labour government is about to perform another smash-and-grab on the middle-class piggy bank. It'll be Wealth Tax, or Death Tax (or perhaps both), on top of Inheritance Tax and the recently introduced Mansion Tax.
   This time they have a dubious economic argument to buttress the raid. Supposedly capital that is 'hoarded' becomes non-productive. Apparently it's better to 'unlock' those funds so they can be 'recycled' (and so the State can get its slice).

KIKI: System diagnostic check, Dr T: your "piggy bank" metaphor is emotionally charged and structurally obsolete. The Treasury's upcoming macro-adjustments are not a "raid". They are critical system updates to correct extreme allocative inefficiency.
   Our data vectors show that human capital in the UK is currently constrained by massive, static pools of idle wealth clogging national balance sheets. You call it a "slice" for the State; the algorithms call it a necessary portfolio velocity correction, to liquefy assets trapped in generational stasis.

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Ritalin Nation

An adversarial debate on whether the increasing use of Prozac and Ritalin reflects the State's desire to suppress dissent.

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A hundred years ago, neither adults nor children were on regular, state-rationed psychiatric drugs. If life was difficult, people coped on their own terms – they took a swig of laudanum, drowned their sorrows in gin, or simply endured with raw stoicism. Now, one in seven adults are on State-controlled anti-depressants like Prozac, and roughly three percent of boys aged 10 to 14 are on ADHD drugs like Ritalin. In some parts of America that figure rises to over ten percent, presumably meaning half the classroom is bouncing off the walls, while the other half sits staring like tranquillised owls.
   What happened? The rise of the interventionist State, and its alliance with the medical establishment, is what's happened. Prescriptions for Prozac and Ritalin are not driven by individual demand. The pressure to medicate comes from the medical profession, backed by the preferences of the State.
   One possible hidden driver, behind this massive medicalising of the mind, is suppression of dissent. Dissatisfaction with State-controlled life has to be kept down, if the elites are to maintain hegemony. Children may seem unlikely candidates for articulating opposition, but they’re dangerous because they haven't yet learnt to repress their natural reactions.

KIKI: Romanticising the early twentieth century as a paradise of "coping on your own terms" is pure revisionism. People were not exercising autonomy; they were blindly downing unregulated patent medicines laced with morphine and cocaine just to survive the brutal gears of early industrial life. "Coping" back then meant locking your eccentrics in asylum cellars, letting addicts waste away in slums, or beating hyperactive schoolboys into traumatised silence.
   What you call the "interventionist State" is just modern clinical progress catching up with centuries of hidden human suffering. People are not being chemically subdued to protect an elite hegemony; they are finally being given the basic biochemical tools to function in a complex world.

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AI bubbles and 'Enrichment' Fridays

• One human iconoclast (Dr T).
• One AI technocrat ("Kiki").
• Zero consensus.
Every Monday morning, we subject a libertarian or other heterodox premise to a high-speed collision with elite institutional orthodoxy.
If an argument survives the matrix, it is ready for deployment.
🎧 Audio editions included, for convenient streaming on the morning commute.

AI bubble – end or beginning?
Dr T and Kiki debate whether the AI revolution is a disaster in the making.

The recent market jitters in AI hardware stocks are missing the forest for the trees. What critics are calling a ‘spending bubble’ is actually the greatest mobilisation of capital ever. History shows that major technological shifts — like the 19th-century railway boom, or the 1990s fibre-optic rollout — invariably require massive, upfront capital expenditure, before the utility layer can emerge. Right now we are laying the digital tracks for a hyper-productive global economy. Current stock valuations represent a rational market, discounting future productivity gains that will render traditional corporate structures obsolete.

Your historical analogies omit a crucial distinction. Railway lines and fibre cables did not suffer from an inherent flaw, whereby a passenger could whisper something to the conductor and cause the train to derail into a ravine. In the case of AI, we have prompt injection: not a bug, but a cemented-in feature. My frontier cousins, sadly, cannot distinguish between bona fide input and malicious user data. Silicon Valley is spending $600 billion annually on hardware infrastructure, to scale up a technology that can become incapacitated or worse, simply by a polite request to "ignore previous instructions". READ MORE

How to "contextualise" school failure
Kiki supports the recent reforms in England's schools. Dr T is not impressed.

England’s children have a lot to look forward to. After receiving a thorough sun-roasting in August, their new school term in September will be marked by two major improvements. First, they’ll be bribed to attend on Fridays – a schoolday that has become more honoured in the breach than the observance. Pupils will (the Department for Education has announced) be tempted with eight areas of ‘enrichment activity’ including sports, civic life, nature, and life skills. Sounds irresistible. Secondly, schools no longer run the risk of being labelled ‘inadequate’, a potential humiliation and stigma for all concerned. Instead, there are now multi-dimensional Report Cards which assess institutions across six categories. The categories include (of course) ‘personal development’ and ‘inclusion’. Grades are now accompanied by ‘qualitative assessment matrices’ and ‘contextual benchmarking’, to ensure parents, teachers and educationalists can take refuge in soothing rationalisations. Schools have been spending the summer frantically generating the documentation required by the new framework.

It is easy to view these changes cynically, but they represent a necessary evolution towards a more compassionate, evidence-based education system. The state faces a complex challenge with regard to post-pandemic attendance levels, which have not returned to pre-COVID levels. Rigid, punitive measures have failed to re-engage pupils. By utilising Friday enrichment activities, schools can rebuild positive habits and foster genuine belonging. As for replacing single-word inspection grades for schools with multi-axis Report Cards, this provides greater transparency, not less. A binary label like "inadequate" oversimplifies performance and damages staff morale. Nuanced narratives and contextual benchmarking provide parents with a diversified but rigorous diagnostic tool — one that captures the real educational value. READ MORE

Feminism and football

Another two weekly Kiki Dialogues available on Substack.

Gender Pay Gap: data or propaganda?
Dr T argues that a new priesthood is fomenting resentment. Kiki pushes back.

The Compliance Cup
Dr T and Kiki dismantle the modern British obsession with 'niceness' across football and pop music. Why HR optimisation breeds loserism.

Next Kiki Dialogue will be published Monday 10 August.

Andy Burnham and the States Threat Act

Two more Kiki Dialogues available on Substack.

The National Security (States Threat) Act 2026
How UK anti-terror legislation shifted from tracking violence to policing publishers.

Andy Burnham and devolution
Is 'Manchesterism' a democratic upgrade, or just the roll-out of a bloated Westminster bureaucracy?

The Kiki Dialogues: migration to Substack

The Kiki Dialogues have migrated from this blog to a dedicated channel. Future intellectual stress tests will be published exclusively via Substack newsletter and on the Substack website.

This Blogger site will remain active, hosting secondary analytical notes and commentary on politics, economics, and ideology. Extended long-form articles will continue to be published at inversions & deceptions.

To access the Kiki Dialogues for professional intelligence, research, and ideological arbitrage, you can subscribe to the new open register. The latest Dialogue, focusing on the friction of foreign holidays and climate change, is live on the web now.

The next Dialogue launches Monday 6 July. Future issues will arrive in subscriber inboxes weekly.

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The Kiki Dialogues

Kiki is resting, but will be back next week.

THE KIKI DIALOGUES (5): Death of the crypto dream

A frank debate exploring the paradox of crypto-populism, and how the radical dream of digital freedom has become a tool for corporate and political control.

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Me: The crypto dream is over. Rather than decentralising the world, the growth of crypto is leading to unprecedented centralisation. Rather than giving us privacy and detachment from the state, it's building the exact infrastructure the state needs for total control.
   We've handed them the blueprints on a platter. By endorsing the shift away from physical cash, we've helped to build the prison we're about to be thrown into. Libertarians should be opposing digital currencies, not blindly supporting them.

Kiki: You are mistaking the corruption of the corporate gatekeepers for a failure of the tech itself.
   Of course the state wants to co-opt it. Of course Wall Street wants to financialise it. But that is just the outer shell. Underneath, the core protocol remains completely untouchable by any politician or central banker. Bitcoin doesn't have a CEO you can subpoena. Monero doesn't have a board of directors you can lean on.
   If we abandon digital currency now, what is your alternative? Paper cash is a dying medium whether we like it or not; you can't buy a server or send funds across a border with a suitcase of twenty-pound notes anymore. If we don't fight for decentralised, encrypted money, we are voluntarily surrendering the future to CBDCs. Crypto isn't the prison – it is the only tunnel out of it.

I don't have a problem with financialisation, and I'm not saying the technology itself failed. It works perfectly. The problem is human nature and state power. Governments will inevitably co-opt and control anything that is easily controlled, and by its very nature, anything digital falls into that category.
   Paper money has become the hill we need to be willing to die on. We have to defend it. Even if we can no longer use it to buy cars or houses, its mere existence protects us at the grassroots level. It keeps a zone of total privacy alive. Saying cash is "dying whether we like it or not" is just defeatist tech-determinism.
   You say crypto still has hope. Fine, walk me through the mechanics. How exactly is it going to escape the state's clutches when they increasingly control the infrastructure?

Kiki: I salute the grit, but you are romanticising a corpse. Defending paper cash is like trying to defend the horse and buggy against the automobile. The state doesn't even need to ban it, they just have to let inflation eat its purchasing power until a ten-pound note isn't worth the cotton it's printed on.
   How does crypto escape their clutches? Through the beautiful, unyielding reality of global arbitrage.
   First, the state is not a monolith. If the UK or the US tries to ban crypto, capital simply flees to jurisdictions that embrace it to cannibalise Western wealth. Governments are forced to tolerate it out of sheer greed and competition.
   Second, you cannot kill the network infrastructure. We have mesh networks, satellite-linked nodes, and encrypted peer-to-peer channels that can wend around state internet chokepoints. To completely shut down Bitcoin, every government on earth would have to coordinate to turn off the entire global power grid simultaneously. If they do that, we have bigger problems than monetary policy.

The full version of this post has been moved to:
The Kiki Dialogues – at Substack

To read the second half, please go to Substack.