San Francisco, 2025. Up in the Hills, the Masters of the Universe are slumped in Herman Miller chairs, IV-dripping horse tranquilizers straight into their overclocked nervous systems. Ketamine—the official drug of the techno-aristocracy—keeps the existential dread at bay, smooths out the jagged edges of a collapsing world. One minute they’re at a fireside chat mumbling about “democratizing innovation,” the next they’re drooling into a Patagonia fleece while their brains take a scenic detour through the void. Every other venture fund has a “longevity” startup now, some new-age alchemy promising to stretch their miserable existences past the point of relevance. Not that it matters—there’s no product roadmap for obsolescence. A hundred AI startups fighting to replace each other, a thousand identical crypto schemes still chasing last decade’s dragon. It’s all just another bubble, another high, another illusion that reality can be patched with a software update.

Elsewhere, in the corridors of Washington, the air reeks of bourbon, burning money, and the desperate sweat of bureaucracy watching their golden age circle the drain. In D.C., the suits are cackling like hyenas on a mescaline binge, slashing corporate taxes while waving the Stars and Stripes like a bloody matador’s cape. “Freedom! Markets! Democracy!” they scream, as Apple stashes billions offshore and Amazon dodges the IRS like a tweaker evading a court summons. In between horse tranquiliser microdosing the Tech Edgelords are drunk on their own supply, cheering on the deregulation stampede without realizing that everything making their global empires possible is now on the chopping block. Trade agreements, diplomatic muscle, military-backed stability—all those tedious “big government” interventions they love to hate are the only reason they can ship iPhones to Jakarta and sell ad data in Frankfurt.

The Horse tranquilizer is having its effects. Meanwhile, the real play is happening in the shadows—where a new breed of Edgelords, crypto-fascists, and hollow-eyed libertarian cultists are busy laying the foundation for America’s own Great Firewall. They won’t call it that, of course. They’ll dress it up in the usual flag-waving bullshit—“Protecting American innovation!” “Fighting foreign influence!” “Defending free speech by banning the bad guys!”—but the result will be the same. The land of the free is about to seal itself off from the world like a dying animal crawling under the porch to rot in peace. First, it was TikTok—too much data heading to Beijing, too many kids dancing in ways that made the Heritage Foundation nervous. Then came the crackdowns on foreign semiconductors, software, financial exchanges. “National security!” they shrieked, as if the real danger to America wasn’t its own leaders strip-mining the country like it was a liquidation sale.

The Roman Empire Retvrn LARP morphing into Andrew Jackson Americana LARP is pure schizophrenia. It’s like trying to cosplay both Caesar and the barefoot, mud-streaked rebel fighting imperial overreach—two contradictory fantasies jammed into the same national hard drive. One exalts global dominance, military expansion, and an iron grip on trade routes. The other spits on foreign entanglements, shrieks about sovereignty, and fetishizes an America that never actually existed. You can’t be both the empire and the plucky underdog at the same time, but that doesn’t stop the system from trying to execute mutually exclusive political processes in parallel while sharing the same memory space. No amount of error handling can resolve this architectural contradiction—it’s a corrupted program running a loop until the hardware melts down.

And now? The walls are going up. Trade barriers disguised as patriotism. Visa restrictions under the banner of sovereignty. Silicon Valley, once a global hub of innovation, now reduced to a gated community where failing startups suckle at defense contracts and pretend they still run the world. The same Edgelords who built their fortunes on open markets, open networks, open access are now welding the gates shut, convinced they can lock the rest of the world out and still keep raking in cash. But that’s not how this works.

The United States is about to do something truly remarkable—it’s going to disappear behind its own Great Wall, just like China did centuries ago when it decided it had nothing left to learn from the world. Once upon a time, the Middle Kingdom was the global superpower, sitting on an economy so vast and advanced that it saw no need to trade with the barbarians beyond its borders. And then? The world moved on without it. The British showed up with steamships, opium, and gunboat diplomacy, and suddenly the empire that thought it could wall itself off was being forcibly reopened at cannon-point.

The same thing is happening now, but slower. Instead of gunboats, it’ll be supply chains shifting, economies decoupling, the slow but inevitable realization that the rest of the world doesn’t need America nearly as much as America needs the rest of the world. Europe won’t ditch the U.S. overnight—they’ll still wear Levi’s and drink Starbucks—but little by little, they’ll start buying EVs from BYD, shopping on Temu, and hedging their bets with a global market that doesn’t begin and end with Wall Street. The tech trade will fragment. The dollar’s grip will loosen. And one day, America will wake up behind its firewall and realize it’s been left out of the future, reduced to a decaying theme park of its former self, hooting about sovereignty while the real economic action happens somewhere else. The U.S. could stop this, of course. Fix the tax racket. Reinvest in alliances. Play the long game. But that requires a government that still believes in strategy rather than short-term stock bumps. If the spiral continues, don’t be surprised when the U.S. slips behind China, Europe, and—just to rub it in—California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, watching the rest of the country from across a firewall of its own design. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The Great American Firewall is coming. And when the last fiber optic cable is cut, when the last backdoor is sealed, when the last dollar of foreign investment shrugs and moves on, the final joke will be revealed: the so-called defenders of “economic freedom” will have walled themselves off from the only thing keeping them alive. The rest of the world will watch, shake their heads, and move on. Buy the ticket, take the ride.