“A sailor doesn’t control the sea, but understanding the waves matters enormously.” — Mikko Ketovuori
Our mood, as always, is miserable. Iran, the price of oil, the AfD, the long-term cancers from 9/11 dominate the headlines. But today’s guest thinks we’ve got the mood wrong. The writer Mikko Ketovuori — who wrote the intro to the Finnish edition of my own The Internet Is Not the Answer — has a new book out, Waves of Change, which is a study of the zeitgeist. Social mood drives events, Ketovuori argues, not the other way around. So the news measures nothing but the mood itself.
Are our times actually bad? “No,” Ketovuori insists. Things — from the arts to our abundance of food — are actually pretty good. Today’s perceived misery is, in fact, just the undertow. Surfing the waves of history — from the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century to the 19th century philosophers buried in Highgate cemetery to the swinging Sixties — Ketovuori is actually bullish on our current futures. So buy the future. It will cheer everyone up.
Five Takeaways
• Social Mood Drives Events. The inversion: mood comes first, events follow, and the news is merely “a sociometer.” Are times actually bad? “We are doing pretty well… What else do we need?”
• The Beatles and the Dow. Prechter founded socionomics on the Beatles-Dow correlation; Ketovuori replicated it with Nokia and Finnish pop. The sixties made the Beatles — “the time decides whether you succeed.”
• Marx & Spencer, Staring. At Highgate, the fathers of socialism and capitalism lie buried face to face — with Litvinenko completing the triangle. Some things don’t change; they return cyclically.
• The Finnish Corrective. Independence kept by fighting back; politics now importing American arguments verbatim — “we are not Americans.” And the PISA shock: Finland’s fabled schools have fallen. “Look to Estonia.”
• A Sailor Doesn’t Control the Sea. We steer our lives; nobody steers the mood. Technology amplifies but doesn’t originate — the Internet books were euphoric before 2008 and dark after. The wave will turn.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Buy Waves of Change: collectiveinkbooks.com
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: the news is bad — as always
00:02:20 News as sociometer
00:03:25 The core claim: social mood drives events
00:04:34 Socionomics: Prechter and forty years of waves
00:05:21 Are times actually bad? “We are doing pretty well”
00:08:06 The Beatles and the Dow: the founding correlation
00:08:42 Nokia and Finnish pop: the replication
00:09:58 Chicken and egg: did the sixties make the Beatles?
00:11:55 Where will the new optimism come from?
00:14:02 Highgate at night: Marx and Spencer, staring
00:15:43 The Litvinenko triangle
00:16:38 The Finnish experience: the Winter War and after
00:17:58 The PISA shock: look to Estonia
00:19:18 Agency: a sailor doesn’t control the sea
00:20:29 Wagner, mad Ludwig, and the nineteenth century
00:23:22 Disney versus Welles: Taxi Driver and the shark
00:25:06 Socionomics meets the Madness of Markets
00:26:54 The American paradox: exuberance and apocalypse
00:28:44 Amplification, not origination
00:29:55 On the brink of disaster — or its opposite