Parting thoughts, 2022
Work has been busy and my 17 month old daughter keeps bringing the plague back from kindergarten, which means my sleep has been disturbed, my mind foggy and my pen blunted.
Weak and feeble, I instructed ChatGPT to “write an entertaining, acerbic and insightful summary of 2022 in the style of Christopher Hitchens”, but this AI phenomenon proved to be of little assistance in my hour of need:
So I resolved to write something original instead.
Word of the year
Lexicographers end their year by debating what single word or phrase best sums it up. The technical term for this is synecdoche; where the individual part stands for the whole. A bit like “Truss and Kwarteng” standing for “the disgraceful decline of a once economically literate nation”.
The past few weeks have been filled with a flurry of announcements from the world’s major English language dictionaries. Here is what they came up with:
Merriam Webster : Gaslighting (verb) the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage. When I looked it up I was surprised to find nothing but an image of Sam Bankman Fried. The text must have been transferred to the Alameda dictionary shortly before I got there.
Collins : Permacrisis (noun) an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events e.g. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, massive flooding in Pakistan and countless other climate disasters, a global economy slipping into prolonged stagflation, the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the inability of certain individuals to observe an orderly queue to see the Queen lying in state etc.
Oxford English Dictionary : “Goblin mode” refers to the condition of giving up and slobbing out, embracing self-indulgence and forgoing discipline. As someone who couldn’t be bothered to give their name said “It’s about hedonism, and in some cases nihilism and withdrawal, in the face of current chaos and disappointments”. Although there are crossovers with quiet quitting — seen by some as a smart way to approach the pointlessness of modern work — goblin mode feels like a more committed and all encompassing lifestyle choice.
Yet none of these choices sum up the quintessence of 2022; a year in which various underlying trends and systemic risks conspired to create a sense of polycrisis (noun). A polycrisis is not simply a series of bad events in close succession (i.e. a permacrisis) but describes how these events connect up to create feedback loops, where the sum is far worse than its parts. If you still need convincing I recommend this explainer by Adam Tooze. For all the goblins out there, don’t let this get in the way of eating mozzarella like an apple on your sofa. Mange, mange!
The great VC pullback
VCs’ bullishness has given way to bearishness, which has led to a sharp decline in dealmaking, a closed market for initial public offerings, and a funding crunch for many private tech companies. Men in patagonia vests, sporting Audemar Piguet Royal Oaks, just aren’t making those bold calls from their Tesla’s anymore. I wrote about this in detail over the summer, but it was only from June onwards that the fallout really began to grip: 140k tech job cuts, down rounds, sociopathic founders feigning compassion but still managing to f*ck up the comms, and a shift from chasing a big valuation to a laser sharp focus on revenues per FTE.
The terms that have lit up my VC-startup industrial complex bingo board, figuratively speaking, have been: “extending the runway”, taking “corrective action”, prioritising “profitability over growth”, and “doing more with less”. Please add your favourite euphemisms in the comments. The result for hardworking people building businesses was neatly summed up by Atomico in their annual State of European Tech Survey, when they asked 100 participants how fundraising dynamics had changed during this annus horribilis:
Mega rounds have been replaced by bridge loans, structured equity and convertible notes. We are seeing a flight to quality and a “bonfire of the vanities”; the vanities being the bullshit ideas of charismatic founders that should never have been funded. Given how tough 2022 has been for the startup ecosystem let’s momentarily transport ourselves back in time to the frothy days of 2021. Here are a few ideas from my “Unicorns of the future” G drive folder. It used to be a closely guarded secret, but now that visionary ideas are no longer being funded I thought I may aswell waive the NDAs and open source this gold dust. You’re welcome.
🚀 Mindfulbragly.io — earn crypto by being mindful. A new exchange for grounded creators to mint good vibes. Make inner calm your growth asset. Available coins : Ummm, Chakra, GURU and FLOW.
🚀 Blah : TikTok for podcasters. Launch a 10 second audio clip and try to go viral. The most popular posts are turned into a 12 part series. Recent sensations include “Podcast lip synching : a guide to exhaling hot air” and “Fruitee : The kaleidoscope sounds of peeling fruit”.
🚀 WeBeMeta : the world’s first virtual workplace, forming a new generation of disembodied entrepreneurs. Rent a desk, meeting room or inflatable flamingo to work how you want, where you want. We charge €20 / month to rent a VR headset. Enjoy free virtual fruit, coffee and aderol.
🚀 NeverPay : is a fintech platform for creating and trading collateralised BNPL debt. Easily bundle and repackage subprime consumer loans using our suite of tools and seamlessly list and sell your CDOs to the highest bidder, who pays you back in instalments.
🚀 Silent Sigh : a private messaging network for quiet quitters. A safe space to share how little you are working, and how demotivated you are by the pointlessness of your role. Recruiters pay a monthly subscription fee to access disillusioned employees and find them their next role as life coaches, yoga teachers or anything else that gives their clients “purpose”.
(Not to be confused with Sigma Grind, an alternative professional network for 24/7/365 grindset hustlers to share tips on protein supplements and shout loudly about “becoming better” to up level community performance).
Britannia unhinged
I live in Germany, work for a Swedish company and sound terribly British (I’m told). Which means I am often asked “WTF is going on in Britain?” by non-British colleagues, clients and random people I sit next to on flights, trains and in bars who happen to hear me speaking the Kings. A pound shop Hugh Grant with zero English genes, if you will.
Genuinely concerned Europeans want to understand why Britain has resorted to frequent self harming. As Jean Claude-Juncker said during the early rounds of Brexit negotiations:
“Everyone understands English, but no one understands England”.
This has been a recurrent theme since Brexit, but concerns increased with the election of Boris Johnson, and reached an all time peak in the aftermath of Truss and Kwamikazes disastrous “mini budget” on the 23rd September 2022; an action that cost citizens and government an estimated £30 Bn. Value destruction on par with SBF / FTX, achieved in similar timescales. But lettuce move on.
I have tried to explain how a country like Britain got to this point, but I never seem to manage to tell the same version of events, in the same order. There is no objective truth to it, and the country is as divided now as it was on the day of the Brexit vote. What has changed is that we now have six years of economic data to quantify the impact of a protest vote; a mutiny no less, by those shut down and shut out by Blair and Brown’s New Labour (1997–2008) and David Cameron’s ‘Austerians’ (2008–2016), instrumentalized by a small cadre of Oxford tories searching for a defining cause in post-Thatcherite Britain. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) — a non-departmental public body funded by the UK Treasury, that the UK government established to provide independent economic forecasts and independent analysis of the public finances:
Leaving the single market and customs union has reduced UK goods trade by around 15 per cent, trimmed GDP by 4.9%, and driven up household bills by an average of £210 a year — all other variables being equal.
This is the same non-partisan body that Truss and Kwarteng bypassed en route to their disastrous fiscal statement, because deep down they knew their vision of a Singapore-on-Thames would not survive contact with reality. For those of you who want to go a bit deeper, I recommend you read John Springford’s report on the costs of Brexit. If you can’t be bothered this is the TL;DR chart you need to remember.
Brexomertà
The last words I write this year are words I should never have penned. Talking about Brexit is not something one does in polite company. It’s something we have to accept, to live with, and get on with. As Alistair Campbell recently put it on my favourite podcast of the year, The Rest Is Politics ; Brexomertà has become a code of silence on a divisive plebiscite. So we (Brits, Europeans, World Citizens) have no other option but to Keep Buggering On. I wish you all a recuperative Christmas break and a Happy New Year. KBO.
