Nobody’s in Charge

Our lives aren’t ruled by masterminds. They’re ruled by consequences.

Not the kind dreamt up in smoky backrooms with a ten-step plan to enslave the masses, but the kind that tumble out of people making decisions for themselves. Or never quite getting around to making them at all.

That’s the thing conspiracy theorists always miss. It’s comforting to imagine a villain with a masterplan. It gives chaos a script. But most of the time, the people who seem to be pulling the strings are just trying to get the next budget signed off, wondering if they can retire early, and mentally outlining a memoir that no one will read.

Yes - of course there are people who want control, who lean toward harm and exploitation. Chomsky wasn’t wrong about power leaning wherever it’s allowed to lean. But even the most ruthless operators can’t take what isn’t already offered up. They don’t invent the currents; they ride the ones that are already flowing. They follow the incentives, not some immaculate blueprint. The design is always flawed. Fate, friction, and human error keep slipping through the cracks.

Action, or inaction, that’s what really starts the ball rolling.

A headset gets launched, people laugh, and Google Glass ends up in a landfill. A social network promises to connect the world but can’t keep the servers online, and the would-be “global control system” dies of embarrassment as Friendster. An electric car rolls out decades too soon, and what kills it isn’t a cabal of oil barons in black cloaks - it’s a wheezing battery that dies after sixty miles and the absence of a charger on the horizon.

But when the splash of those consequences reaches us, we assume the wave was meant for us. It’s easier to imagine that every outcome was plotted than to admit we’re standing in the blast radius of somebody else’s half-cooked idea.

The truth is far less cinematic: people are too flawed to control the future with precision. Too lazy, too greedy, too distracted, too busy scrolling in meetings. The world isn’t a chessboard run by geniuses; it’s a pub full of dart players who keep missing the board and insisting it was part of the strategy all along.

That’s the real joke: the future isn’t written by power or money. It’s written by whoever actually bothers to throw the dart, and by how badly they miss.

Keep on keeping on.