mostlysignssomeportents:

ALT

I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO TOMORROW (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.

I am on record as saying that every economic bubble is terrible, but some bubbles do at least leave behind a salvageable productive residue while others leave behind nothing but ashes; indeed, this is the thesis of my next book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI :

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Here’s a historical comparison that’s illuminating: Enron vs Worldcom. Both were monumental frauds, the CEOs of both companies died shortly after the frauds were discovered, but they have very different legacies. Enron – a scam that pretended to secure billions of dollars’ worth of new efficiencies through “energy trading” but was actually just engineering rolling blackouts in order to jack up energy prices – left behind nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. Enron did leave behind a little useful residue after it burned to the ground: a giant repository of emails. You see, after Enron went bust, it was sued by its creditors, who demanded access to relevant emails from the company’s Outlook server. But the company execs decided they didn’t want to spend the money to weed out the irrelevant emails before the court-mandated disclosure, so instead they published all the emails ever sent or received by anyone at Enron , including tons of extremely private, personal, sensitive information relating to Enron’s employees and customers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corpus

This became the “Enron Corpus” and it was the first large tranche of emails that were in the public domain and available to researchers. As a result, it became the gold standard dataset for researchers investigating social graphs, natural language, and many other subjects that subsequently became very important computer science fields and commercial applications.

As legacies go, the Enron Corpus is pretty small ball, and even so, it is decidedly mixed, both because the Enron Corpus constitutes a gross, ongoing privacy violation for a huge number of people; and because a lot of that social graph and natural language work that it jumpstarted has been put to deeply shitty purposes.

Then there’s Worldcom: also a gigantic fraud, Worldcom falsified billions of dollars’ worth of orders for new fiber optic lines, which it then dug up streets all over the world and installed. When Worldcom went bankrupt, all that fiber stayed in the ground, and many people are still using it today. My home in Burbank has a 2GB symmetrical fiber connection through AT&T that runs on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought up for pennies on the dollar.

So while you have to squint really hard to find any benefit that can be salvaged from Enron, it’s really easy to point at Worldcom’s productive residue – it’s a ton of fiber and conduit running under the streets of major cities around the world, ready to be lit up and bring the people nearby into the 21st century. Fiber, after all, is amazing , literally thousands of times better than copper or 5G or Starlink:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/07/swisscom/#stacked

Even though Enron’s CEO Ken Lay and Worldcom’s CEO Bernie Ebbers both received prison sentences after their fraud was revealed, the bubbles never stopped, and indeed, they only got worse. AI is the biggest bubble in human history, worse even than the South Sea Bubble:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

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