Blain’s Morning Porridge Halloween 2025 – A Horror Story from 2035 – Technofeudalism.

“The smug mask of virtue triumphant can be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.”

What will the future look like? Many Porridge readers fear Technofeudalism – where a new aristocracy of big tech will replace democracy and make serfs of us all. What might it look like…?  

CHECK OUT THE PODCAST VERSION – HERE!

But first, check out a real Halloween Horror Story  – Bill Blain on the TV. Yep… catch me on Friday Mornings on Trade Live with IG! The fools have given me a show – The Morning Porridge! You can watch it on YouTube: (here is the link)

It might be interesting – what can a chubby old bloke contribute to the sum of human health and happiness, but particularly wealth with his market insights?

Meanwhile.. back in my imagination… .

Today is Halloween – a festival the Americans have captured and commercialised into monsterous tat.. (literally!) The motifs which now dominate, from the Mexican Day of the Dead, are largely invented, overwhelming us with pretty skeletons and skulls. When I was a wee boy, Halloween was a very special day. It remains a favourite time. We were not a religious family, but there was a witchy gene running through the family. My Aunt is a Wiccan White Witch following a long tradition of wise women looking after society. We claim vague links with the last witch burnt at the market cross in Dundee, Scotland.

We celebrated Samhain (Sow-in) – the ancient Celtic festival that marked the end of the Light, the Harvest and the beginning of the Dark Months. Much of it will still be familiar back home; traditional games like dunking for apples, guising (rather than trick or treating) by singing a song in return for sweeties, trying to eat messy treacle scones swinging from string, feasting and dressing up.

But it was also the time when the veils between this world and the next were stretched thin – ghosts would cross over. Young girls would seek clues as to who they would marry. Young men would seek directions to wealth and favour in love. And we would try to perceive our futures, however darkly. Sahmain is a time to remember the past, but look for our futures….

And… as so often happens in the Morning Porridge office, this morning a report from October 2035 crossed between worlds and arrived in the Morning Porridge’s inbox….

The Morning Porridge Oct 31^st 2035 – Be Happy. Or else!

End of the month is never easy. As a pensioner still working 60 hours a week, like everyone else I struggle to pay the bills.  There’s a couple of million for Electricity due to the Monks of Westinghouse, Baron Luckey of Gondor wants half a yard of $Trump to pay our share for the swarms and shoals of Andruil Drones that now protect these islands.

His boss, the Lord Theil, demands ever more gold (he’s stopped accepting dollars) for our access to the Palantir Health Service (formerly the NHS), while the London Recovery surcharge gets bigger every month following Duke Brin’s nuclear decapitation strikes on Facebook’s entire leadership at the start of Google’s hostile acquisition of Meta. (Did someone not tell him Nick Clegg had retired?). The bill from the Reform Corporation for water, road-tax, air-tax and the NBC Licence, (Nigel’s Broadcasting Company) is out of any proportion to the nothingless it delivers.

The gruesome public execution of Gavin Newsom on the Trump House lawn for thought crimes against King Scotty (he did, after all, commit the unforgivable sin of suggesting a US election, perish the thought.. which it did), reminds us all to be suitably grateful for the peace King Scotty has brought to our hemisphere. Long Live the King… in DC. (Not the one who was forced to hand the keys of Windsor Castle to Earl Altman before being bundled off into exile on St Kilda.)

0Airstrip One, America’s unsinkable Eastern drone hub against the Sino-European Co-Prosperity League, remains in defensive lockdown after the riots against Soyabeans for every meal.

While King Scotty’s Lordlings are encouraged to battle each other for supremacy, power, prestige and wealth, the contrast across the Channel is striking. The Emperor Xi permits no political freedoms and dissent among its Tech-Lords is ruthlessly suppressed. Entrepreneurs are rewarded solely on how much they pay their workers – demonstrating a surprising truism that well paid happy workers buy more stuff and work harder to afford it. Successful Tech Lords are elevated to Xi’s court.

The Co-Prosperity sphere encourages entrepreneurship, invention and innovation and is obviously a terrible way to run any economy. (You never know who might be reading….) Rapid medical advances in the wake of China’s advances in quantum computing mean the average lifespan in Europe is increasing rapidly and people stay well and productive for longer, while Brit and American serfs are dropping dead at ever younger ages – often as a result of sudden lead poisoning in the destructive corporate M&A battles that characterise unfettered the New American Capitalism.

While Luckey and his allies; Earl Altman and Duke Marco remain patrons of The Lord Theil who stays in his mountain-top fortress. They face outright competition with Lord Brin, a war that could threaten the prosperity of the realm – Nuclear armed corporates are unpredictable. It is said the King encourages it from the Resolute Desk in the Trump House. “If they are fighting each other, they aren’t fighting me.”

However, the whole court of King Scotty remains on the hunt for the renegade traitor Elon Musk. Although the $1 gazillion bonus on his head is worth less than the gold fillings in his teeth, the glory and preferment his bonce would fetch would be reward indeed.

The rise of the Musk-Cult, who believe he sleeps in a cave in the Namibian desert, waiting the call to restore his adopted nation, is in contrast to the charge from DC that he fled to Beijing, where his organs were harvested by Emperor Xi (to whom DC propaganda says thousands are sacrificed each day to preserve his youthful visage)!

More likely, according to the German right-wingers who escaped to Birmingham, Musk is hiding in the outback from where Xi sent him to direct the rapid colonisation of the Moon over the last three years, and is now heading the joint South-East Asian Mars programme. The new StarGalleons being launched from Australia appear to have solved many of the power issues that killed SpaceX’s Starship before he fled America.

In what was once Britain – it’s 10-years in the Greenland rare-earth mines for even thinking about the past! In what was once Latin America, Viceroy Hegseth and his ICE Guard are stamping our Spanish and Portuguese as Un-American.

While minor American tech lords tend to die in hails of well-directed bullets and mosquito sized drone-swarm attacks in takeover battles, falling out of windows remains the leading cause of death among the wealthy and powerful elsewhere. After it happened to Tzar Putin, China intervened to secure stability in Russia – before declaring it a province. Ukraine got Crimea and most of Belarus from Xi, and is now a thriving client state of the Middle Kingdom. Former French President Macron is now the President for Life of the European Union, rubber stamping Xi’s control of Yoorp.

If there is one lesson in the new American Monarchy, it’s this: While the Tech Lords who own the economy, charging economic rents over every aspect of it, are extremely inventive in their destruction of each other, their increasing paranoia has seen growth and tech innovation stagnate.

In contrast, the twin Chinese policies of “letting a thousand flowers grow of any colour or nation, as long as they do what they are told…” and paying workers enough to make them happy seems to be working rather well…

…..

Back in the real world..

Out of time and have a great weekend…

Bill Blain

CEO – Windshift Capital

Author – The Morning Porridge

Partner – Shard Capital