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The Cockroach of Progress: Why the World Economy Refuses to Die

Philomena O'Connor
Written by
Philomena O'ConnorIrony Consultant
Monday, October 20, 2025
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A surreal painting in the style of Salvador Dalí depicting a giant, golden mechanical cockroach wearing a top hat, crawling over a desert of broken calculators and stock tickers, while a storm of binary code and tattered flags rages in the background.

The world economy is currently performing a feat of levitation that would make a Victorian spiritualist blush. We were told—by the same class of people who believe a degree from Davos is a substitute for a soul—that the trade wars of the populist era would be the hemlock in our collective goblet. We were warned that Artificial Intelligence would arrive like a digital guillotine, severing the working class from their last tenuous grip on relevance. And yet, the data suggests a "shrug." A profound, global indifference to the specters of our own making. It is the ultimate irony: we have built a machine so convoluted, so detached from the tangible reality of bread and soil, that it no longer recognizes the concept of a crisis. This is not the resilience of a champion; it is the inertia of a corpse rolling down a very long hill.

Consider the trade wars—those clumsy, televised bouts of protectionism that have come to define our decade. We watched as statesmen, if one can use the term so loosely, brandished tariffs like blunt instruments in a dark room. The expectation was a cascading collapse, a return to the autarkic misery of the 1930s. Instead, the global market responded with the weary patience of a parent watching a toddler have a tantrum. Supply chains didn't break; they simply mutated. We merely replaced one set of dependencies with another, more expensive, slightly more convoluted set of dependencies. The "war" was a performance, a tragicomic opera for the voters, while the capital flowed underneath the floorboards, unbothered by the noise. It turns out that globalism is not a choice, but a terminal condition. You can try to amputate the limbs, but the blood—money—finds its own path.

Then there is the AI panic. Ah, the favorite hobby of the intellectual elite: imagining their own obsolescence. We have spent the last eighteen months vibrating with a peculiar mix of terror and ego, convinced that the Silicon Valley sorcerers had finally conjured a demon that would eat the world. We feared the death of the middle class, the erasure of the creative mind, the final triumph of the machine. And what has the economy done? It has absorbed the threat, monetized the fear, and continued its relentless crawl upward. The AI "revolution" has, thus far, been little more than a frantic scramble for hardware and a rebranding exercise for failing software companies. It turns out the world economy is remarkably adept at turning the threat of an existential crisis into a quarterly earnings beat. If an algorithm eventually replaces the CEO, will the GDP even notice? Probably not. The algorithm might actually be less prone to cocaine-fueled mergers.

The "shrug" mentioned in current headlines isn't a sign of health. It is a sign of terminal inertia. To the casual observer, resilience looks like strength. To the cynic, it looks like a machine that has become so large it is now indifferent to its own internal failures. We are witnessing the triumph of the technocratic void. The reason the economy survives trade wars and technological upheavals is that it no longer possesses a human face to punch. It is a statistical abstraction, a Gordian knot of derivatives, debt, and digital hallucination. How do you kill a ghost? How do you bring down a system that has already decoupled itself from the inconvenient realities of social stability and environmental sanity?

There is a particular joy in watching the experts struggle to explain why the apocalypse has been postponed. They scan their charts for a signal that never comes, forgetting that they are looking at the symptoms of a fever, not the patient. The bureaucracy is too incompetent to even manage a proper collapse. We are governed by a class of people who couldn't organize a lunch, let alone a global restructuring, and yet the machine keeps humming. It is the ultimate "I told you so." I told you that the system was too heavy to fall and too broken to function. It simply... exists. We are trapped in a theater where the play is terrible, the actors are drunk, and the roof is leaking, but the doors are locked and the tickets are non-refundable. So we sit, we watch, and we marvel at the "shrug," unaware that the indifference we see in the markets is merely a reflection of our own exhausted souls. The trade war is a farce, AI is a parlor trick, and the economy is a runaway train that has long since left the tracks but is moving so fast it hasn't yet noticed the abyss. It will continue to shrug until there is nothing left to shrug with, leaving us to wonder if anything was ever actually real to begin with.

This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: The Economist

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