| Surviving the Viral New Mania of the Pols  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
Spencer Reiss, former Newsweek foreign correspondent, Wired contributing editor, and now impresario of tech conferences from New York to Monaco, is still on a prophetic tear. The worse the politicians get, the more Spencer’s contrarian insights sparkle. He used to irritate me with his rote dismissal of almost everything said or attempted by my once and sometimes heroes in Washington and state capitals. He was skeptical about Middle Eastern wars, gold standards, tax cut monism, Republicans, food fads, regulators, political protests, Democrats, fashionable ideas, and pompous institutions of all kinds. Reiss even instigated John Perry Barlow’s historic “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” You may recall its stentorian rhythms: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather… We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before…” And so on into Grateful Dead lyricist Barlow’s immortal poetic defiance of authority. In the age of the Great Firewall of China and government tentacles across the Internet everywhere, with even conservatives eager for regulation, Barlow’s bardic voice is sorely missed. He died two years ago as a result of an infection contracted in a San Francisco hospital where he went for a routine procedure recommended by his doctor. Spencer says at least Barlow was saved from the current San Francisco, “where you can’t walk the downtown streets without protection by a ‘poop patrol.’” Spencer thinks that there are too many cities for his “new economy” vision. Either we start letting in immigrants galore, he says, or many currently complacent conurbations will wither away. He cites Matt Yglesias’s new blockbuster One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Yglesias is a leftist but one of the many benefits of the Trump administration may be to make the left receptive to the immigration necessary to shake up and revive increasingly dormant American capitalism. So we can be happy that we still have a thriving Spencer Reiss. Taking a Trip Down Memory Lane In the age of COVID mania around the globe, it has become almost impossible to exaggerate the power-mad fecklessness and fatuity of the pols. The world has rotated round to Reis-ville. Back in the late-1990s and early-2000s, Spencer wrote what in retrospect turned out to be the most prescient of all the newsletters from my previous company. Entitled the New Economy Letter, it focused not on the chip and telecom hardware stars of the Gilder Technology Report but on such transformative players as Amazon, Apple, and Google. Hey, my companies made his companies possible. Without Qualcomm. Nvidia, Intel. and Applied Materials, there could be no ubiquitous internet. But the stock market value mostly migrated to the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) and other leviathans at the top of the “new economy.” With the COVID ascendancy of the new economy paladins, I decided to risk a trip to Connecticut for lunch with Spencer at the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, confident I could make my way across the border and back without being quarantined or arrested for the porosity of my mask or the incendiary garland of ideas. Meeting yesterday, Spencer was preening over his bet made with a New York Times reading friend on August 15 that even official COVID deaths would not exceed 200,000 by September 15. Happy to bet against the death side, he won with some 5,000 to spare… Top U.S. Economist George Gilder Makes Big Prediction | 
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