Monday Momentum (published on Tuesday)
December 23, 2024
Merry Christmas to all of you reading these words during what I hope will be a pause for reflection and connection.
The next two weeks carry a single, focused mission: clarity. Each of my ventures deserves a sharper articulation of what it is, who it serves, and why it matters. Not more noise. More signal.
The Wine That Brought People Back
I didn’t push it. The Christmas wine offering was simple, perhaps too quiet by modern marketing standards. And yet—clients I hadn’t heard from in months reached out. Not to buy. To reconnect. Some helped me with introductions. Others just wanted to catch up.
This is the difference between being present and being available for purchase.
We’ve grown so accustomed to convenience—the saved time, the competitive pricing—that we’ve stopped counting what we sacrifice. When we transfer value entirely to the end consumer (who is also, let’s remember, a worker), we feed a monopolistic machine governed by American big tech platforms that remain poorly regulated both in Europe and internationally.
And when that machine consolidates power, it creates the conditions for something darker: low-grade populism where the autocrat du jour targets whichever minority cannot effectively present its own voice.
We’ve seen this pattern before. Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all rose to power through the same mechanism: identifying an enemy minority, blaming all problems on them, and eliciting hatred to form a political majority. The Jews in Nazi Germany. The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire—scapegoated for the Ottoman Empire’s problems and ultimately subjected to genocide. The kulaks in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Ibos in Nigeria. The Indians in Idi Amin’s Uganda—visibly different, economically successful, the perfect target for resentment.
The pattern doesn’t always end in genocide—but it always begins the same way. Europeans in Brexit Britain and immigrants in Trump’s America represent earlier stages of this trajectory: scapegoating of ethnic minorities and migrants is more likely to occur in periods of declining economic conditions, and those who engage in scapegoating expose their own antidemocratic nature or intent. History has shown that the practice is a warning sign of further repression to come.
I collect these threads not to be grim at Christmas, but because understanding patterns is how we refuse to repeat them. Maybe one day they’ll become part of something I’m building.
Coming Soon: Two Stories Worth Telling
In upcoming ideas editions, I’ll explore two very different topics that have captured my attention:
The Double Ratchet Algorithm — The cryptographic protocol behind Signal, WhatsApp, and secure messaging for billions. Developed by Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike in 2013, originally named the “Axolotl Ratchet” after the salamander with extraordinary self-healing capabilities. It provides both forward secrecy—ensuring past messages remain secret even if keys are compromised—and post-compromise security, meaning conversations recover security after a breach. There’s a beautiful metaphor here about resilience, about systems that heal themselves, about trust architectures that assume compromise will happen and design for recovery. More on this soon.
The Funeral of Mani — On December 22nd, Manchester’s cathedral hosted the farewell to Gary “Mani” Mounfield, the legendary bassist of The Stone Roses and Primal Scream. His coffin, decorated with John Squire’s iconic dripping-paint artwork from the band’s debut album, was carried by Liam Gallagher, Ian Brown, John Squire, Alan “Reni” Wren, Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes. David Beckham, Gary Neville, Paul Weller, Peter Hook, and Bez among the mourners. Manchester is saying goodbye to one of its own. I’ll reflect on this during this break—on what it means when a city stops to honour its artists, and what that says about community, identity, and showing up. Amelie and I will visit Manchester in 2026 for a rock event we are looking forward to.
For now: clarity. Presence. The work of articulation.
Merry Christmas. Be with the people who matter.
Fab
Sources / Further Reading:
- “When Politicians Start Scapegoating Minorities, They Are on the Road to Authoritarianism” — The UnPopulist (2022) https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/when-politicians-start-scapegoating
- “To Find an Authoritarian, Just Follow the Scapegoat” — Freedom House https://freedomhouse.org/article/find-authoritarian-just-follow-scapegoat
- “Law as Scapegoat” — Cary Coglianese, University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020) https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2200/
- “Middleman Minorities: Jews, Armenians, the Overseas Chinese and Other Victims of Their Own Success” — Hunter Maats, Medium https://medium.com/@huntermaats/middleman-minorities-jews-armenians-the-overseas-chinese
- “Intellectuals and Race: Part III” — Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate (2013) https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/03/13/intellectuals-and-race-part-iii
- “Genocide of the Armenians” — World Without Genocide https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/armenian-genocide
- “World Report 2017: The Dangerous Rise of Populism” — Human Rights Watch https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/global-4