Author: Laura Slot

The End of Short-Term Thinking

~ Laura Slot

Read in Dutch on The Fire Online

All institutions and companies have short-term thinkers and long-term thinkers. Short-term thinking is the prioritization of obvious, easy gains over lasting value; it is a form of self-sabotage and short-sightedness. The only good thing about short-term thinking is that it always ends quicker than long-term thinking. The main question is how much damage is done before it ends.

For Dutch public television, it seems to be ending soon. A few well-known TV hosts spilled the beans last week, on air, on the hidden political agenda’s of their corrupted bosses. For years these hosts were cruising comfortably on a short-term-thinking sinking ship, now they’re expressing their built-up anger and bewilderment over the fact that it’s really sinking. Once these icons jump ship, many may follow, until one day the public funds cheque gets voided.

The short-term thinking reign in Big Tech is also progressing towards its end, albeit more gradually. Blogger and author Cory Doctorow describes how specific circumstances enabled the short-term argument to dominate the decision-making inside these companies over and over again. It’s why tech giants have gradually extracted so much value from the internet instead of enhancing it:

The enshittification of the services we once loved and still rely on represents a series of victories for the forces of evil over the forces of good – a victory for the people who want to use the internet to trap us, over the people who want to use the internet to set us free. As it got harder for users to leave online services, it got easier to abuse users.

The increasingly absurd exploitation of the internet may eventually take the tech giants down all together, since they aren’t showing any signs of moving from evil to lesser evil. Long-term values such as transparency and neutrality are absolute, therefore a full 180-degree turn is a minimum requirement to avoid demise. Perhaps, Doctorow writes, ‘they have become so corrupted, piled up so much sin and callous disregard for human thriving, that all that is left is to burn them to the ground.’

One of the most damaging displays of short-term thinking is also the most unpredictable: the dilution of currency by central banks. Whether you place ‘the beginning of the end’ in 1913 with the Federal Bank Reserve Act, in 1971 with the Nixon Shock or in 2008 with Quantitative Easing, the short-term-thinking ponzi scheme is turning currency into toilet paper with a success rate of zero percent. These are the darkest of short-term thinkers: forcing everybody to abandon ship while preparing a luxurious lifeboat only for themselves.

Doctorow gives us the only advice we need. The long-term thinkers inside the institutions and companies can only influence decisions if we ensure that short-term thinking comes at a risky high cost. A cost that each individual can raise by directing time, energy, loyalty and money wisely.


To help those people win their arguments – to win the arguments with them – we need to make sure that their point is never merely “this is wrong,” but also “this will cost us more than we can possibly gain from it.”

The Conditionality Curse

~ Laura Slot ~ 1 Comment

Read in Dutch on The Fire Online

Freedom is the absence of conditionality. In this industrial, mechanical, technical era, however, conditionality is the ever-expanding center of existence. All of our appliances and software revolve around the concept “if this, then that” – it is conditionality that enables functionality. It is easy to spot conditionality in advertising: if you buy this, you’ll gain that. Contracts, insurances, marriages, they all define conditions, and so examples are plentiful. Conditionality has been spilling over from business into personal lives, where it is causing lots of emotional pain. It is increasingly obvious that conditionality has become a curse.

Conditionality once was a practical tool for business and commerce, a tool to be handled with care. It has now spread so far and wide that it has become the devilish center of personal life. The Dutch people protesting in the streets after last week’s parliamentary election are reminding their fellow citizens – their neighbors – of the conditions they place on them: “if you vote like me, I will tolerate you.” It is proving too tempting to place conditions on other people, as if they were technical appliances, with little to no regard for their boundaries, their experiences, their inner world or their values. If you do this, I will do that.

While the desire to break the Conditionality Curse is growing, the illusion of limiting and removing conditionality is successfully sold: “if you do this, that will be liberating.” By putting up solar panels, for instance, many people had hoped to gain more self-reliance, to get rid of some of that damned, red-tape conditionality to life. Politics and business then started making legal changes, revealing that the power networks will continue to set the conditions, not the people.

A more extreme example of the illusion of liberation is the idea that gender is a conditionality coming from nature. There is a push to believe that nature is conditional, and that therefore people must progress as far as to abide by an artificial socio-cultural reality – which happens to also fill the wallets of big business – that dictates that freedom and unconditionality can not possibly be found in nature, it has to be found elsewhere. Like all illusions, it feeds on the desire but accomplishes the opposite.

In nature, conditionality is absent. Things just are. They exist without conditions. The sun comes up and goes down again, and seasons change. Humans will therefore always experience emotional difficulties, consciously and subconsciously, when conditionality is dominating personal lives.

Modern life is not, and never will be, who we truly are at our core. Nature is the only place where the Conditionality Curse can be broken. In his poem Simplicity Jorge Luis Borges wrote that, possibly, heaven may one day offer us the highest thing: a place where we are simply allowed to exist, ‘like stones and trees’.

When the Worst Won

~ Laura Slot

Read in Dutch on The Fire Online

In a kakistocracy the worst of all people are in charge. This Greek word can be applied to any governed entity, a country, an institution, a company, et cetera, and it reflects a situation that is inherently harmful. Leaders are incapable of doing their jobs, either morally, practically or both. The reasons behind their failing are highly relevant, although never as relevant as the primary, tragic fact that the job is being failed. There has been a lot of needless suffering – in all walks of life, in all layers of society, affecting everyone directly or indirectly, visibly but most often invisibly. I do believe something is fundamentally changing.

There are three categories of causes for, or reasons behind, kakistocracies. Firstly, there can be individual reasons like stupidity, mental and emotional problems or the relentless pursuit of money and power. Secondly, there can be institutional, systemic reasons, including nepotism, cowardice, power games, lies, secrets, conflicts of interests and more. These are primarily fueled by environmental conditions and facilitated by individual weaknesses.

The third and last category, evil, means people are not failing at their jobs – although it seems that way – instead they have hijacked their positions to cause harm for its own sake. This is always facilitated by both institutional conditions and individual reasons. The evil factor can not succeed without the other two categories. Writers like Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have tried to remind humanity of the capacity for evil behavior within each human being.

I have written about human suffering in most of my articles, covering addiction, mental illness and homelessness, and I will continue to focus on this. Last week I met people who work in Dutch healthcare, nurses who care for the mentally ill elderly. I heard their stories of their management being replaced during the past five to ten years, in a relatively short amount of time. They saw good, capable people leaving, without explanations, while unscrupulous, unintelligent and desinterested people took their places. The ‘kakistocracy’ was gradually and silently established. Until this day, it is causing a lot of needless suffering for the healthcare workers and their vulnerable patients, and resistance is steadily growing.

We are coming from an age in which the worst people were promoted over and over again. A time in which the worst won. The last few decades have shown this pattern, even the entire last century shows it in many instances, depending on the industry and geographic region. Yet the title of this blog is written in the past tense, because I believe that much of what we are witnessing these days comes from demoting the people who used to be promoted. Yesterday’s winners are today’s losers. Initially this means that ‘the worst’ are losing popularity, credibility, respect, recognition, and later on a wider variety of losses. It is an intense 180-degree turn that so, so many resent so, so much. Life used to come easily to the unscrupulous, but not anymore. The tide is turning and ‘the kakistocrats’ are holding on for dear life.

Heroic Historians

~ Laura Slot
This list of historians is continuously updated

At the moment I am writing a history book and I am realizing that our old ways of conducting historic research are existentially broken. The information I find in university libraries –on this topic– is just as unreliable as a random internet page, the only difference being that the library book carries a generally presumed legitimacy it does not deserve. Once information is published in a book somewhere, it is infinitely referenced in other books. One flawed axioma creates a body of work that is nothing but a house of nonsense cards, keeping us all in limbo. When I dig down to the original source, a historic government record for instance, it turns out that it is surrounded by red tape. Polluted at the source, much of our history is tainted by a codependent web of wrongful assumptions.

Without a somewhat accurate, reliable account of our common history we can’t work towards a better future – if we do not know who the villains were and who were the heroes, if we do not know who were the afflicted and who were the comfortable. For instance, public opinion on Barack Obama is currently divided fifty-fifty. Half of the people say he’s a war criminal, the other half says he’s hope to believe in. On the scale of Lady Justice, only one half can be right.

Sometimes time will tell. Sometimes time will set the record straight, but time relies on us, so we better get going. Valuable historic research can be found in the works of the historians mentioned below. They have a level of integrity, curiosity and clarity of mind to properly report on what they’ve found – which is a costly, time-consuming and highly risky thing to do.

  1. Edward Chancellor. Financial historian, author of the 2022 book The Price of Time.
  2. Stanley Kutler. Known for getting the Nixon tapes released in court in 1996, in a FOIA case against the US National Archives.
  3. Stephen Kinzer. For writing about government corruption.
  4. Howard Zinn. American history from the perspective of The People.
  5. Russell Jacoby. My former professor, criticizes academia for losing free speech.
  6. Curt Gentry. For his work on FBI corruption.
  7. Athan Theoharis. For his work FBI corruption.
  8. David Garrow. Argues for non-partisanship, for interviewing real people as opposed to referencing other historians, revealed surprising facts on Barack Obama, some of which show Obama’s ‘memoir’ is a work of fiction.
  9. David Talbot. Wrote about US power structures and JFK’s murder. See his books.
  10. Daniele Ganser. Swiss historian whose books focus on geopolitics.
  11. Jennifer Burns. Stanford historian who is one of the few in academia who writes with a level of integrity about the history of libertarianism.

Between Coincidence and Conspiracy

~ Laura Slot

There is one specific article by Edward Snowden that has been inspiring me since its publication in August 2021. It’s called Apophenia – How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One. ‘Apohenia’ is a term coined by a German psychologist during the Second World War, it means seeing patterns that aren’t really there, a type of conspiracy mindset, an epiphany into delusion instead of reality. Today, this term leads us back to a crossroads between right and wrong. In his article, Snowden writes:

Humans are meaning-making machines, seeking order in the chaos. Our pattern recognition capabilities are a key determinant in defining intelligence. But we now live in a dystopian digital landscape purpose-built to undermine these capabilities, training us to mistake planned patterns for convenient and even meaningful coincidences. 

Public thinkers who have spoken up in recent years are aiming for mankind to get out of this ‘Conspiracy of One’ experience of the internet, argues Snowden. In other words, governments villainize so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ while they are often aiming for ‘regular folks’ to break free of ‘The Trueman Show’-like conspiracy of a manipulated online experience:

You know the drill: email a colleague about the shit weather and start getting banner ads for cheap flights to Corsica (I hear it’s nice?); google “ordination license” or “city hall hours” and watch your inbox fill with rebates for rings and cribs. (…) Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage. But in this case it’s staged specifically for you, the audience who’s also the star.

Contemporary public thinkers, in the often undesirable role of whistleblowers, are creating an antidote to the fact that people, and human nature, are literally being ‘consumed’ by Big Tech and governments. The public thinkers have been offering insight into methods of resistance to this ever-growing web of psychological manipulation, as has been described most eloquently by Jacob Siegel. And so it is no surprise that public thinkers are being chastized by The Power Hungry as ‘the conspiracy thinkers’, or those who have the nerve to convince you that there is more to life than the disempowering voices in mass media, that you’re worthy of connecting with others –expressing yourself– without all your data being stored and used to influence you, and that freedom is possible.

Once you wake up to the idea that the world has been patterned, intentionally or unintentionally, in ways you don’t agree with, you can begin to change it.

Historians in my own academic circle have been silent on the consequences of the internet as described in Snowden’s and Siegel’s work, which is unfortunate and unexpected, because historians are trained to focus on cycles, patterns and, particularly, turning points in history that have either served or harmed mankind. Evaluating this is not merely an intellectual proces but requires empathy and, as Snowden calls it, ‘basic human decency’. There have been plenty of historians who are obviously accomplished in the intellectual division but have fallen tragically short in emotional intelligence, undermining and sometimes nullifying their entire work. After all, we ideally would cherish the good things from the past and lose what proved harmful. Isn’t that the definition of wisdom?

Public thinking –in-depth writing, reading, speaking and thinking out loud with others– is indispensible to a productive mind and the quality of public debate. Snowden links this type of work to Karl Popper’s definition of the ‘social theorist’, a public thinker who aims to improve society, as opposed to the ‘conspiracy theorist’, who is a victim of overpowering institutions. The contemporary public thinker as a ‘social theorist’ is a fitting and optimistic idea, even when it may be not be a coincidence that we never hear about ‘social theorists’ as much as ‘conspiracy theorists’.