2024 Short-Term Predictions

What is Imperium Bullish and Bearish On?

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Many right-wing commentators make predictions for the coming year, but our analysis here at Imperium is a bit longer in its time horizon than that. Much of our concern is with historical forces that work over a course of centuries or even millennia. Still, a clear bird’s-eye view will help you see the details with better clarity too. So, in this article we will offer some short-term predictions, and next week we will offer some long-term ones.

One prediction we made was back in November of 2022 when we started talking about the fertility crisis. Before that, you might have seen one-off articles in the Economist, the Guardian, and similar magazines that mention that something is happening with birth rates in the third world. Unfortunately, mainstream analysis has treated this issue with only superficial attention to the causes behind it.

Since then, “the third world is going to cop it” is now a mainstream talking point—if phrased differently—and has filtered into the radical right. We are (at least somewhat) aware of who reads this blog, so it’s quite possible that some from both camps have picked up on it from here. It certainly has exploded into a major issue over 2023 and is now among the predictions being made by others.

Before we get into our predictions, we’d like to thank you all for reading and subscribing to this blog. Anyone who is on the fence about a paid subscription, we ask that you consider one. This blog helps Imperium Press keep the lights on and is an important part of how we stay in business. You get a weekly article with a perspective you won’t get anywhere else.

With that, let’s get into the short-term predictions.

1) 2024 ELECTION WILL BE QUIETER THAN THE LAST

The theme of mainstream politics since Brexit has been “let’s get back to normal”. This is impossible in the long-term because we are now leaving a period of abnormality, and to us abnormality looks normal. Since the end of the Cold War, we have only known unipolarity, but multipolarity is the historical norm. America has squandered its monetary and civilizational capital however, and so it has entered into an irreversible decline. We are leaving Pax Americana in the rearview mirror and things are getting rather unstable.

This instability was on display in 2020, when the permanent government in the US had to show that it was in control at home. The results were riots in the streets for friends (the underclass), and lockdowns and job losses for enemies (normal people). In 2020, the state was still smarting from being humiliated in 2016 and the public was going to vote right this time no matter what. Things had to go back to normal, and they did.

But the overall trend is toward instability, and the managerial class in the Anglosphere desires stability above all. Trump looked like a destabilizing force but turned out to be no threat, only a minor irritation that riles up puerile societal elements who are easily controlled anyway. The ardent wish of all managerial foxes is to get back to business as usual, so the theme of 2024 will be “adults in the room are in control”, meaning a much quieter election season.

The exception may be for dissidents and critics of the system—things could get much worse for them. The main issue of election 2024 will be management of narratives, or “misinformation”, and it may become borderline illegal to say things the permanent government doesn’t like. We suspect that all the JQ talk on Twitter will be brought to heel rather quickly.

2) THERE WILL BE A MAJOR RECESSION IN 2025–2026

COVID was of course a real disease and not a “psyop”. But as it turned out, it was not really a big deal as a disease. While election 2020 played into the decision of Western governments to convert to authoritarianism, that is not the whole story.

In about September of 2019, economic indicators began to point to a large market correction, probably precipitated by the US bond market. Conveniently, in 2020, the entire world was converted to command economies so this correction was forestalled. But alas, you can’t keep pushing water uphill forever—naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.

This issue has been worsened by the fact that the West has been humiliated in its inability to bring the Ukraine conflict to a swift close by use of 5G warfare. Confidence is low in the strength and resolve of the state apparatus to do much of anything except fight racism. And the fundamentals of the US economy are in worse shape than even in 2019. The US government saw its net interest costs¹ rise by 39% in one year. Once that cost exceeds tax revenue it’s game over, so having that cost double every two years is not a good sign.

That said, the economy will sail along smoothly through 2024. The Treasury has made it clear that they are willing to run deficits to the tune of 10% of GDP to forestall a recession. But this can’t keep going forever—we have seen economic downturns every 10–15 years like clockwork going back over 100 years.² These are “corrections” reflecting a long-term trend of declining energy return on investment. It has been 15 years since the last.

A major economic downturn will not be permitted during an election cycle when the inner party is in power, but it cannot be put off forever. If Trump wins, 2025 is the year. If Biden wins, we’re looking at 2026.

3) STATE AUTHORITY WILL DEVOLVE TO MORE LOCAL STRUCTURES

We mentioned energy return on investment.³ This is a fundamental thermodynamic concept which measures relative energy inputs and outputs—roughly, how efficiently a system converts one form of energy into another. Economies are just large physical systems and operate on the same principles as a fuel source or a biological organism.

This return on investment has been declining in the West for a long time now. Much of what’s driving it is poor economic decisions, such as a focus on things like the knowledge-based economy over primary industries like food production and mining. Declining IQ and the rise of other maladaptive psychological factors also play a role. But the key problem is plain parasitism, which can’t be solved by a simple policy decision.

As a result, our social structures are “top-heavy”. Much of the economy, but also governance, is now devoted to things that are mostly unproductive. Everyone and his dog has a humanities degree, but infrastructure is decaying, medical treatment is inaccessible, family formation is unaffordable, and emergency services are overwhelmed.

This has opened up a gap between people on the ground and central state authority. This gap used to be filled by intermediary structures like churches, unions, and charities, but where these have not been liquified, they have been turned to the purposes of shunting refugees into the West or enshrining gay rights and so forth. Central power is too busy with these matters to make society function properly, so increasingly, that task is falling to third parties.

We can look at Greece as an example. When austerity was really biting, a huge chunk of the Greek economy was devoted to government services but these services were woefully inept. At the same time, in the mid-2010s the migrant crisis reached a full boil and exacerbated the petty crime that austerity had worsened.

Since the government was unwilling or unable to help, citizens turned increasingly to the Golden Dawn. Ostensibly a political party, it was also something approaching a gang or a mafia organization that could enforce order within a small sphere. Since the Golden Dawn was able to exert power more efficiently at a very local level than the state, citizens began calling them rather than the police for things like mugging, burglary, or vandalism.

Things are not as bad in America or Britain as they are in Greece, but all Western countries are headed in a Greek-looking direction. The Golden Dawn was forcibly dissolved by the Greek state, but the time is coming when such things are not so easily done. Central authorities will continue to jealously guard their sovereignty, but bit by bit, this will be wrested from them until they are only nominally in control. This will not happen uniformly everywhere, and national differences in this devolution will create their own dynamics, but that is another story.

4) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL BE SEVERELY REGULATED

AI is a levelling tool. In this it compares with gunpowder, and it has the potential to be just as transformative. But in some respects, it is quite different, specifically in just who it’s useful for—foxes or lions. Whereas gunpowder enabled the first estate⁴ to ultimately take over managing warfare from the second estate,⁵ AI evens the odds in favour of the warrior. When gunpowder was brought to Europe, warfare was hand-to-hand, 1G warfare. It is now 5G warfare, waged on a front that is unimaginably more abstract.

We have written about the generations of warfare elsewhere, but the takeaway is that warfare now encompasses much of what we think of as peacetime functions, like economics, information flows, and law. These are far removed from the violence of war, but never entirely. Ultimately, lawfare cashes out to the use of state-enforced violence; ultimately, economics cashes out to state enforcement of property rights; ultimately, “words are violence”, as the left is so fond of saying, and is right to say. Where these differ from simple violence, though, is in being highly abstract, intellectual activities requiring a great deal of specialization and training.

AI farms out the need for specialist training to a dataset—its job is to replace specialist expertise. This is a direct threat to “democracy” as it’s called, or more accurately, managerial technocracy.

Technocracy is rule by expert, and one of the important functions it serves is to maintain a strict boundary between ruler and ruled. It is practically impossible to effect a coup over a technocracy because this involves replacing the current regime with one which is just as adept at manipulating the baroque machinery of the state. This requires skills so specific and complicated that it requires the modern equivalent of a guild to train its own replacements, who can be thoroughly vetted and indoctrinated into the right class values. Putting economists and political scientists in charge of a country is a good way to run it into the ground, but it also guarantees zero entryism.

AI routes around all that. It takes away the advantage enjoyed by the priestly class in a managerial system, by simply automating the management of the system. You no longer need an economics degree; you just need to brute force a mountain of econometric data. You no longer need (at least lower level) military expertise; you can ask the box to crunch a million tactical scenarios. You no longer need to ask a team of lawyers what your legal options are; you’ve got an army of legal experts in your computer.

These are all fairly high-level applications that have not yet come to pass. But AI is useful at a lower level too, and it’s here that the immediate threat emerges. Coordinating online activism of the kind we’ve seen on Twitter in 2023 will be immensely easy. In fact, outright faking it will become a piece of cake. Imagine going on to social media soon and finding that 90% of it is bots talking to bots, that the “public square” is barely inhabited by humans at all, and that the main ideas in politics are determined algorithmically. This is the near future in a world of unregulated AI, where social media has been made useless and the state has thereby lost a major intelligence apparatus.

We could enumerate many similar scenarios, but the point is that AI augurs nothing good for technocracy. So, the simple solution is to regulate it.

In typical fox-like fashion, this will not be done by passing sweeping legislation, but by biting off chunks of imperium piece by piece. If the state wants you to stop driving, it doesn’t make driving illegal. Rather, it begins by making driving inconvenient. It stops subsidizing the price of fuel. It then mandates carbon reduction and fines for not meeting targets. It then introduces laws that discourage driving, like those proposed in 15-minute cities. Over a period of time, driving becomes more expensive, less convenient, and less popular, until the state simply points out that people aren’t doing it anymore, and then it moves to abolish it for you (but not for itself).

Something like this will happen with AI. How that happens—whether by making data scraping more difficult, mandating “guardrails” on emergent software, or by some other means—is anyone’s guess. But incrementally it will be made impossible for just anyone to use AI to shift informational warfare to their advantage.

1. The cost to cover the interest on the national debt.

2. https://t.me/ImperiumPressOfficial/1939

3. Credit is due to KanaKrant for raising EROI as a concept relevant to economics. https://kanakrant.substack.com/p/the-artillery-of-history-takes-aim

4. “Priests” in the broadest sense, think blue states.

5. “Warriors” in the broadest sense, think red states.