Hollowed Out

The status quo has pushed everything to an extreme of hollowed-out instability to maintain a superficial appearance of normalcy and stability. But it's all fake.

The phrase that best describes the present era is hollowed out. By hollowed out I mean the exterior facade still looks pretty much the same as it did in the past, but the internal structure has corroded / eroded to the point that little remains of what provided strength and stability. What's left is the illusion of stability.

Our spectacles have been hollowed out, lifeless, rote repeats of past performances, reduced to unintentional parodies of what was once vibrant.

Our entertainment has been hollowed out, dominated by remakes, retreads, threadbare extensions of tent-pole franchises and sound-alike songs.

Even our outrage has been hollowed out, perfunctory displays phoned in from afar, as we all know outrage has been exhausted along with everything else.

Our "innovation" has been hollowed out, with toys such as flying motorcycles and self-driving taxis presented as "solutions" to phantom "problems," "solutions" that boil down to hype, clickbait or another reach for higher corporate profits. The most visible result of AI is AI Slop:

AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (29 min) (via Richard M.)

Our incentives have been hollowed out, leaving only the most perverse extremes. The motivation to flood social media with AI Slop is the faint hope of creating a viral link that earns a pittance for the AI Slopper.

Our realm of romance has been hollowed out, leaving a hellscape of dating sites and the wreckage left by ubiquitous online porn.

Our food has been hollowed out, ultra-processed slop remorselessly worked into "new" "innovative" products that are parodies of quality and innovation: you've just got to try the new jalapeno-yuzu-crawfish bagel...

Our politics have been hollowed out, with the only useful reform--requiring politicians to wear the logos of their corporate campaign donors--nixed because it would have made obvious what everyone knows: politics is now an open auction for favors and influence.

It would be far more honest if we conducted the passage of congressional bills as open auctions on eBay for all to bid and all to see: Buy Now for only $500,000: a tax break hidden deep inside the untouchable Defense Appropriations Bill.

Our economy has been hollowed out in virtually every sector, from Higher Education to Healthcare to housing. Much of what passes for "growth" is either waste (BS work, planned obsolescence, fraud), statistical trickery or artificial stimulus.

The shell remains standing but it now requires massive injections of borrowed money to prop up the rotted facade. Consider Higher Education. Before it was hollowed out, millions of college students were educated without needing to enter debt-serfdom to pay tuition and fees. As this chart shows, student loans were zero in 1993.

Now there’s $1.5 trillion in student loans. The number of administrators quadrupled, while federal legislation made student debt the one form of debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, effectively legalizing debt-serfdom.

The Higher Ed / student loan industry's relentless hype machine drummed the idea that doom awaited any young person without a university degree, or better yet, a graduate degree or MBA. The net result, as we all know, is a vast over-supply of MBAs, graduates of law schools and computer programmers, all fields currently being decimated as AI tools do to white-collar work what industrial robots did to blue-collar factory work.

Meanwhile, back in the real economy, the nation has a severe shortage of skilled trade workers--yup, the kind of work denigrated by the "you gotta go to college" machine. Yes, the kind of work AI and robots can't do: What AI Can't Do Faster, Better, or Cheaper Than Humans (June 2, 2025)

The housing and mortgage sectors have also been hollowed out, creating overpriced facades propped up by $2+ trillion in Federal Reserve purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). How did millions of households manage to buy homes from 1946 to 2001 without the Fed nationalizing the mortgage sector and inflating one housing bubble after another in the process?

Private-equity and corporations with bottomless credit lines courtesy of the Fed have feasted on housing, pushing valuations to extremes of unaffordability while jacking rents to the stratosphere to maximize shareholder value at the expense of the workforce.

The status quo has pushed us into extremes of hollowed-out instability to maintain a superficial appearance of normalcy and stability. But it's all fake. If Higher Education now requires students to become debt-serfs, that is not a system worth propping up. It should be allowed to be obsoleted by much more effective and cheaper alternatives, for example what I proposed 13 years ago in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy.

Everything has been hollowed out by insiders being enriched by a system that must be propped up with trillions in borrowed money lest it collapse under its own bloated weight. Insiders, grifters and apologists always trot out rationales which boil down to transparent self-serving excuses cloaked by piteous bleating. Garsh, it wasn't our greed, it was a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon...

Now that everything's been hollowed out, nobody is accountable or takes responsibility for any of it. Disconnecting self-serving greed from consequences is the key dynamic in hollowing out once-functional institutions and sectors.

Our experience of the real world has been hollowed out, too, something I explore in my new book Ultra-Processed Life, which is available at a 25% discount (ebook edition) and 19% discount (print edition) through Friday, June 27.

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