| Technology is Eclipsing the Mounting Complexity of the World  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
While our retro-phasist comedian Governor Charlie Baker retreats from his tentative-reopening teases in phase four COVID plans — moving back to phase 3B with more masks and curfews — I got an emergency call from John McClaughry, a dauntless humorist and colleague from my youth. An eminent Vermont legislator, founder-chairman of the Ethan Allen Institute, and author of the hilarious screed Fair Play for Frogs by Nestle J. Frobish — John was in a re-panic mode, suffering from satirical sclerosis (SS). SS is a deadly affliction that sets in when reality outdoes parody or comedy. It’s victims’ smiles stiffen into a mortuary rictus, like a Governor issuing new COVID rules. I just ran in a half-marathon Halloween trail race in snowbound Thacher State Park outside of Albany, where in years past, “Hairy Gorillas” in masks ambushed us on the trails with Halloween howls and the course was bordered with cardboard gravestones with the names of the runners. This year they decided, “That’s not funny!” and required the runners to wear the masks. We all had to be face-covered at the starting line, though we went off in waves six feet apart. Then they mandated reapplying the face coverings whenever we passed anyone on the trails and when we finished, and ordered us to carry cups with us in order to avoid contamination or congestion at water stops, and not gather after the race for prizes (no awards or food). And on and on into an egregious parody of precautionary overreach (like Baker’s glove mandate in nail salons, or Starbucks sealing off restrooms for “our safety and wellbeing.” Don’t they know that coffee is a diuretic?). All this pettifoggery for outdoor racing has the chief effect of keeping people indoors where the virus (mostly innocuous) may actually spread. While 80% of the infections happen indoors, the mask rules chiefly apply outdoors. It’s another case of SS. Joking about the COVID panic, I feel as if I was back in my anti-Feminist days of Sexual Suicide. “That’s not funny!!!” I’m told, and indeed no one is laughing any more in Maskachusetts or New York. They’re too busy piling up the “cases” with massive tests and retests and covidizing flu and pneumonia deaths into a fake second or third wave crisis (look ma, no flu anymore). In this SS extremity, I have got to call in cackle-power from out of state. The Centralization of Technology In a new compendium of decentralist essays, McClaughry threatened to reprint a chapter of my 1989 book Microcosm: The Quantum Era in Economics and Technology that appeared first in the Harvard Business Review in early 1988. “Hey, that’s long-ago John,” I complained, “I’ll have to rewrite it. The Law of Micro-COVID SS, how no one appreciates our jokes anymore.” But John was strangely serious. So I dug up the old Harvard Business Review and reread my “Law of the Microcosm” article. It read well — “The computer on a chip outperforms the computer on a pedestal” — but it did need some rebalancing between the rise of smart phones decentralizing everything, and the rise of data centers recentralizing information technology. In the article and book, I answered the argument for centralization of technology by such multiply degreed pundits as Harvard’s Robert Reich, critic of chronic entrepreneurialism, MIT’s Lester Thurow, prophet of a zero-sum society, and MIT’s Charles H. Ferguson, exponent of a law of technological complexity. Big Prediction From America's #1 Futurist | 
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