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Custom Health Announces Appointment of Chief Financial Officer and Board of Directors and Shareholder Approval for Proposed Public Listing
Custom Health Announces Appointment of Chief Financial Officer and Board of Directors and Shareholder Approval for Proposed Public Listing Jason Nalewany has been appointed as Chief Financial Officer of Custom Health and, following the completion of the Arrangement, the Resulting Issuer. Jason will support both companies by providing public company compliance, financial reporting, capital allocation and long-term growth strategy. The Resulting Issuer and the operations of Custom Health will be supported by an experienced Board of Directors that bring deep expertise across healthcare, technology, capital markets and governance to the Resulting Issuer.
https://www.webanditnews.com/b/qi1?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social
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Open source is no longer just an engineering choice. It’s a boardroom issue. It affects resilience, innovation, vendor risk, and digital sovereignty. My latest post breaks down why governance matters. #OpenSource #governance #DigitalSovereignty
https://www.korte.co/2026/05/14/board-brief-open-source/ -
Cannabis Lies Vol. 9: The Reform Lie
Filed Under: Policy Fiction
The federal apparatus has spoken. The Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration have announced a shift in the regulatory status of cannabis, moving state-licensed medical products to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act while pointedly leaving adult use, unlicensed, and synthetic THC products in Schedule I. Headlines across the country erupted with the language of victory. Outlets hailed this as a historic acknowledgment of the plant’s medical utility, a shift that supposedly recognizes the plant’s reality after decades of denial. The public was told that the prohibition era was entering its twilight and that the federal government had finally conceded that the plant possesses medicinal value.
None of this reflects the actual legal impact of the order. This announcement is the latest manifestation of the Reform Lie. It is a calculated piece of bureaucratic maintenance designed to satisfy the demand for progress while ensuring the core structure of prohibition remains entirely untouched. As Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche stated in the order, the new policy mandates that:
“Marijuana in any form covered by a state medical marijuana license, be placed in Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.”
It is a classic maneuver by the state to preserve its authority by offering a small, controlled concession that changes everything on paper but leaves the reality of the drug war exactly where it has always been.
The Reform Lie is the mechanism by which the state manages the tension between popular opinion and its own mandate. It functions by acknowledging that a substance has medical value without ever addressing the fundamental injustice of its criminalization. When the government moves a substance from one box to another, it claims it is following the science. When that same government keeps the prisons full, keeps the borders militarized against possession, and keeps the threat of federal intervention hanging over every state-sanctioned interaction, it is not following science. It is managing optics. For decades, the apparatus has faced growing pressure to address the disconnect between federal law and the public reality of cannabis use. Instead of dismantling the structure, the government has repeatedly opted for symbolic reform. These gestures generate cycles of positive press. They allow officials to claim they have acted on the issue. They provide a release valve for public anger without ever sacrificing the underlying authority to arrest, prosecute, and punish. This is the central trick. The Reform Lie presents a change in tax status as a change in morality.
To understand the scope of this deception, one must look closely at what the shift to Schedule III actually achieves. Under the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule III is home to substances such as anabolic steroids and certain prescription painkillers. It is a designation that implies a potential for abuse, though one that the state deems less severe than those in the Schedule I category, which the government defines as having no currently accepted medical use. Moving state-licensed medical products to Schedule III finally acknowledges what has been true for thousands of years. It acknowledges that the plant has medical value.
However, the change in classification does nothing to address the core conflicts of the prohibition era. The federal criminal penalties for the unauthorized production, distribution, or possession of cannabis remain firmly in place for everything outside that narrow, state-sanctioned medical window. The interstate commerce ban survives completely intact. The government continues to treat the transport of the plant across state lines as a federal crime, regardless of the legality of the substance in the states of origin or destination. Banking remains a fractured landscape of private risk and federal oversight. Employment in the federal sector remains hostile to users, and the firearm restrictions that strip rights from medical patients do not budge.
Most critically, this move provides no relief for those currently held in the carceral system. This order structurally excludes any mechanism for record relief, sentence modification, or pardon, leaving the carceral status quo entirely intact. It does not vacate criminal records. It does not end the status of cannabis as a tool for immigration enforcement. It does not stop the random, localized harassment of the population by federal agencies that still view the plant as contraband outside of the narrow, state-licensed framework.
This is a victory for the balance sheet. It is a win for the corporations that have spent millions lobbying for the ability to deduct ordinary business expenses under the tax code. As of April 22, 2026, state-licensed medical cannabis is no longer subject to 280E. It is a stabilization for the industry that the government has deemed acceptable. For the average person, for the patient, and for the citizen who does not operate within the protective bubble of a state-licensed medical program, the reality remains frozen in the past. This bifurcation of the population is intentional. It creates a system where legitimacy is not a right inherent to the citizen. It is a commodity to be licensed. The people who work within the sanctioned industry are protected, taxed, and monitored. The people who exist outside of that bubble, who grow their own, who share, or who live in states without functional medical programs, are left to the mercy of a law that has not changed. The government has not legalized the plant. It has simply professionalized the privilege of interacting with it.
This strategy is not new. It follows a consistent historical pattern. In every generation, the state has used cannabis policy as a messaging tool to address shifting cultural demands. This is not about the plant. It is about the maintenance of control. The lineage of this deception is long and well-documented.
Consider the era of the Gateway Lie. The government needed a way to justify the expansion of its police power, so it framed the plant as the first step on a path to hard drug use. This narrative was never about safety. It was about creating a bridge between a benign cultural habit and the perceived chaos of the heroin epidemic. It gave law enforcement a justification to monitor, harass, and incarcerate individuals who were otherwise peaceful. The Gateway Lie was effective because it operated on fear. It suggested that a single act of consumption was a moral failing that would lead inevitably to destruction.
Consider the Crime Lie, where the plant was the supposed accelerant for violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state pivoted to a narrative of aggression. It claimed that cannabis use caused psychosis and fueled the drug trade. It used this narrative to justify the militarization of police forces, the introduction of civil asset forfeiture, and the explosion of the prison population. The Crime Lie turned the consumer into a danger to the public, a threat that had to be neutralized by the full weight of the judicial system. It was never about the drug. It was about the expansion of the carceral state.
Consider the Teen Epidemic Lie, where the narrative focused on the alleged destruction of youth, or the Addiction Lie, which served to pathologize a human relationship with a plant. Each of these lies served a purpose. They provided the state with the moral cover required to expand surveillance, increase budgets, and exert control. The Reform Lie is simply the modern evolution of this pattern. The state no longer needs to argue that the plant causes violence, because the public no longer believes it. So, the state shifts the narrative. It pivots to the language of regulation. It claims to be fixing the system. It is a retreat, but it is a managed retreat. The goal remains the same, which is to maintain the state’s position as the final arbiter of what a person can put into their own body.
The most devastating impact of the Reform Lie is the erasure of the human cost. When the headlines celebrate a minor technical shift, they drown out the voices of those who continue to suffer under the full weight of prohibition. The Reform Lie tells the prisoner that their incarceration is necessary because they did not have the right paperwork. It tells the immigrant that their status remains precarious because the federal law still views the plant as an illicit substance. It tells the veteran that they must choose between their medical treatment and their access to federal services. It tells the small grower that they are a criminal while the corporate entity next door is a taxpayer. By focusing on the tax status of corporations, the conversation ignores the individuals who are still being processed through the system. It creates an environment where progress is measured by market capitalization rather than the restoration of liberty. It turns the struggle for sovereignty into a fight for market share.
Help Keep Pot Culture Magazine Independent Pot Culture Magazine is independent cannabis journalism. No corporate owners. No investors. Just readers. If you value this work, chip in a few dollars and help keep it going. Support PCMIf the government acknowledges that cannabis has medical value, the continued maintenance of criminal penalties for everyone else becomes an indefensible moral contradiction. One cannot simultaneously argue that a substance is legitimate medicine and that the possession of that substance warrants the stripping of rights, the loss of employment, or the threat of prison. This contradiction exposes the truth of the state position. The government does not actually care about the safety of the substance. It cares about the control of the substance. If it were about safety, the state would be looking for ways to educate rather than incarcerate. If it were about medicine, the state would be ensuring access rather than creating barriers. The existence of the prohibition machinery alongside the admission of medical utility for the licensed few is proof that the objective has always been to maintain a system of punishment.
This system relies on the compliance of the public. It relies on the belief that the state is making progress. The Reform Lie is designed to prevent the public from seeing that the state is not moving toward freedom. It is moving toward an integrated model of control. By allowing a portion of the market to become legitimate, the state creates a vested interest in the status quo. The corporate entities that now have a seat at the table are no longer incentivized to fight for total legalization. They are incentivized to maintain the current regulatory structure because it keeps their competitors out. They become partners in the enforcement of the very prohibition they once railed against. This is the ultimate victory for the state. It co-opts the opposition by giving them a slice of the profit.
We have seen this happen in other sectors of the economy, where regulations are written by the very corporations they are meant to govern. This is not reform. This is the capture of the regulatory apparatus. The Reform Lie ensures that the people who built the culture, who fought for the plant when it was dangerous to do so, are excluded from the new order. They are the ones who bear the cost of the transition. They are the ones who are still in cages, who are still fleeing from the law, who are still fighting for the right to exist in peace.
This administrative process is now set to continue with new hearings starting June 29, 2026. These proceedings are often portrayed as a necessary step toward further reform, a way to build a bureaucratic consensus for future changes. In practice, they serve as a stalling tactic. They provide a way for the administrative state to maintain the illusion of progress while keeping the ultimate authority firmly in its own hands. These hearings will involve experts, lobbyists, and officials debating the minutiae of regulation, all while the fundamental structure of the Controlled Substances Act remains unassailable. The system is designed to consume time, resources, and energy, ensuring that any real change is mediated through a process that the state can control, slow, or halt entirely. It is a theatre of governance, performed for an audience that is desperate for change, but the script was written in the halls of power, not by the people who have lived the consequences of prohibition.
MORE FROM CANNABIS LIES
CANNABIS LIES Vol. 8: The Addiction Lie
Cannabis is often labeled addictive, but the science tells a more precise story. This piece breaks down cannabis use disorder, how it is defined, and why mild, moderate, and severe cases get flattened into one fear-driven narrative. The result is a distorted public understanding of risk that fuels policy, perception, and misinformation.
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 11, 2026April 20, 2026CANNABIS LIES Vol. 7: The Mental Health Panic
Cannabis and mental health risks are often overstated in public debate. Research shows heavy use and high THC exposure can increase psychosis risk in vulnerable individuals, but widespread claims of a mental health crisis lack strong evidence. This piece examines the data, separates correlation from causation, and breaks down what cannabis users need to know.
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 4, 2026April 2, 2026CANNABIS LIES Vol. 6: The Driving Apocalypse Lie
Legal cannabis is often blamed for rising traffic deaths, but federal data tells a more complicated story. NHTSA findings, toxicology limitations, and conflicting crash studies reveal that THC presence is not a reliable measure of impairment. This investigation breaks down how flawed testing and policy shortcuts have shaped the narrative around so-called stoned driving.
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsMarch 28, 2026March 27, 2026The administrative state is also moving to consolidate its control over clinical trials. By creating a registration pathway for state-licensed entities, the government is essentially seizing control of the research process. It is setting itself up as the gatekeeper of scientific knowledge. It will dictate who can research the plant, what they can research, and what the results can be used for. This is not an opening of the doors to scientific discovery. It is the enclosure of the scientific commons. It ensures that the research that reaches the public will be the research that has been filtered through the priorities of the state.
The Reform Lie is not a strategy. It is an admission of failure. When the government chooses to perform the act of reform without embracing the reality of justice, it proves that it is not interested in the truth. It is interested in the maintenance of power. True reform would not be a shuffling of schedules. It would be the total and unconditional withdrawal of federal interference from the lives of the people. It would be the recognition that the state has no authority to criminalize the relationship between a human being and a plant. It would be the end of the prohibition machine, the release of the prisoners, and the restoration of rights for every person affected by the war on the plant.
As long as the apparatus continues to frame these technical shifts as moral victories, the public must recognize the deception. This is not progress. This is the state recalibrating its control to ensure that it remains the gatekeeper, the tax collector, and the final judge of who is allowed to exist in the world it seeks to dominate. The plant remains the same. The people remain the same. The only thing that has shifted is the label on the cage. The cage is still there. The bars are still locked. The guards are still watching. The power to punish, to threaten, and to control has not been removed. It has been refined. It has been made more surgical. It has been made more efficient.
The moral weight of this lie is heavy. It falls on those who have been promised justice and received only a change in terminology. It falls on the families who have been broken by the enforcement of archaic laws. It falls on the communities that have been targeted for generations. The Reform Lie assumes that the public has forgotten the history of the struggle. It assumes that the public is satisfied with the crumbs of corporate legitimacy. It assumes that there is no understanding of the difference between the freedom to live and the permission to serve.
The narrative of the state must be rejected. The recognition must grow that every small step that leaves the core structure of the prohibition machine in place is a step away from justice. The government must be held accountable for the contradiction of its own law. The reality of the prohibition era must continue to be documented, to expose the lies that are told to justify the control, and to advocate for the total restoration of liberty. The struggle for the plant is not a struggle for a change in status. It is a struggle for the soul of the culture. It is a struggle to define what it means to be a free person in a society that seeks to regulate every choice. As NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano noted regarding the order:
“Rescheduling fails to fully harmonize federal marijuana policy with the cannabis laws of many states, particularly the 24 states that have legalized its use and sale to adults.”
This is the core of the deception. The Reform Lie is the latest barrier to that freedom. It is a wall that must be dismantled, not by the government, but by the people who have lived the reality of the struggle.
The truth is simple, though the state works hard to obscure it. Cannabis is a part of the human experience. It has been used for healing, for creativity, for connection, and for joy for as long as historical records exist. The attempts by the state to control this relationship are an affront to human autonomy. They are based on fear, on ignorance, and on a desire for power. The reclassification to Schedule III is just the latest tactic in a long campaign to prevent people from fully embracing their own sovereignty. While the proponents of this move claim that:
“Today’s order marks a historical reversal in federal cannabis policy,”
It is a sign that the state is feeling the pressure, that it knows its position is untenable, but that it is not yet ready to concede.
A crossroads has been reached. Either the crumbs offered by the state are accepted, turning the public into participants in their own regulation, or the fight for the total and unconditional end of the prohibition machine continues. The Reform Lie can be accepted, or the truth can be demanded. The history of the culture is a history of resistance. It is a history of people who refused to be told what they could do, who they could be, or what they could consume. That history is the source of strength. It is the foundation upon which the future will be built. Permission from the state is not required to exist. Schedules, labels, and tax codes are not needed to define what is right. The truth is known, and it will continue to be shared until the last cage is empty and the prohibition machine is nothing but a memory.
The Reform Lie will continue to be told. The headlines will continue to scream about progress that does not exist. The state will continue to frame its maintenance of power as a move toward justice. But the deception will not hold. The patterns are visible. The history is known. The stakes are understood. The reality of the prohibition era will be documented, one article, one story, one voice at a time. This is not just a battle for a plant. It is a battle for the truth. And it is a battle that will be won, not because the state gives permission, but because the truth is on the side of the people. The prohibition machine is built on lies, and lies cannot stand forever against the weight of reality. The end of prohibition is coming, not through the actions of the state, but through the resolve of the people who have been fighting for it all along. The Reform Lie is the last gasp of a system that knows its time is over. We will not be fooled. We will not be silenced. We will be here, documenting the reality, telling the truth, and fighting for the culture until the day the plant is free.
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of this work, in part or in whole, without the express written permission of Pot Culture Magazine, is strictly
prohibited.F O R T H E C U L T U R E B Y T H E C U L T U R E
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Saint Lucia has selected GrowerIQ as its national seed-to-sale traceability backbone, effectively finalizing a digital surveillance grid for its cannabis industry. By mandating enterprise software before establishing licensing frameworks, the government risks automating the exclusion of legacy farmers. This move trades cultural sovereignty for state-managed control, turning the cannabis industry into an extension of the…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 23, 2026April 22, 2026Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia Sabotage
Virginia legalized possession, but Governor Abigail Spanberger sabotaged the retail market. By delaying sales until 2027 and gutting equity provisions, the Commonwealth institutionalized a half-legal trap. Consumers now navigate a system that treats possession as a right but supply as a crime, fueling an unchecked illicit market while abandoning promised reform. Spanberger’s public safety rhetoric…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 21, 2026April 20, 20264/20 has been hollowed out by branding, corporate silence, and a culture that forgot its own history. While the industry sells holiday merch, Singapore executed a man for cannabis. The movement that once fought for autonomy now treats the plant like a commodity. This piece examines the cost of that betrayal and the culture left…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 20, 2026April 24, 2026 #280E #AdministrativeLaw #cannabis #CannabisCommunity #CannabisCulture #CannabisCommunity #CarceralState #Culture #DEA #DepartmentOfJustice #DrugWar #FederalGovernment #Industry #Legalization #Marijuana #MarijuanaNews #NORML #Policy #PolicyFiction #PotCultureMagazine #Prohibition #Reform #ScheduleIII #StateSanctioned #Weed -
Cannabis Lies Vol. 9: The Reform Lie
Filed Under: Policy Fiction
The federal apparatus has spoken. The Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration have announced a shift in the regulatory status of cannabis, moving state-licensed medical products to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act while pointedly leaving adult use, unlicensed, and synthetic THC products in Schedule I. Headlines across the country erupted with the language of victory. Outlets hailed this as a historic acknowledgment of the plant’s medical utility, a shift that supposedly recognizes the plant’s reality after decades of denial. The public was told that the prohibition era was entering its twilight and that the federal government had finally conceded that the plant possesses medicinal value.
None of this reflects the actual legal impact of the order. This announcement is the latest manifestation of the Reform Lie. It is a calculated piece of bureaucratic maintenance designed to satisfy the demand for progress while ensuring the core structure of prohibition remains entirely untouched. As Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche stated in the order, the new policy mandates that:
“Marijuana in any form covered by a state medical marijuana license, be placed in Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.”
It is a classic maneuver by the state to preserve its authority by offering a small, controlled concession that changes everything on paper but leaves the reality of the drug war exactly where it has always been.
The Reform Lie is the mechanism by which the state manages the tension between popular opinion and its own mandate. It functions by acknowledging that a substance has medical value without ever addressing the fundamental injustice of its criminalization. When the government moves a substance from one box to another, it claims it is following the science. When that same government keeps the prisons full, keeps the borders militarized against possession, and keeps the threat of federal intervention hanging over every state-sanctioned interaction, it is not following science. It is managing optics. For decades, the apparatus has faced growing pressure to address the disconnect between federal law and the public reality of cannabis use. Instead of dismantling the structure, the government has repeatedly opted for symbolic reform. These gestures generate cycles of positive press. They allow officials to claim they have acted on the issue. They provide a release valve for public anger without ever sacrificing the underlying authority to arrest, prosecute, and punish. This is the central trick. The Reform Lie presents a change in tax status as a change in morality.
To understand the scope of this deception, one must look closely at what the shift to Schedule III actually achieves. Under the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule III is home to substances such as anabolic steroids and certain prescription painkillers. It is a designation that implies a potential for abuse, though one that the state deems less severe than those in the Schedule I category, which the government defines as having no currently accepted medical use. Moving state-licensed medical products to Schedule III finally acknowledges what has been true for thousands of years. It acknowledges that the plant has medical value.
However, the change in classification does nothing to address the core conflicts of the prohibition era. The federal criminal penalties for the unauthorized production, distribution, or possession of cannabis remain firmly in place for everything outside that narrow, state-sanctioned medical window. The interstate commerce ban survives completely intact. The government continues to treat the transport of the plant across state lines as a federal crime, regardless of the legality of the substance in the states of origin or destination. Banking remains a fractured landscape of private risk and federal oversight. Employment in the federal sector remains hostile to users, and the firearm restrictions that strip rights from medical patients do not budge.
Most critically, this move provides no relief for those currently held in the carceral system. This order structurally excludes any mechanism for record relief, sentence modification, or pardon, leaving the carceral status quo entirely intact. It does not vacate criminal records. It does not end the status of cannabis as a tool for immigration enforcement. It does not stop the random, localized harassment of the population by federal agencies that still view the plant as contraband outside of the narrow, state-licensed framework.
This is a victory for the balance sheet. It is a win for the corporations that have spent millions lobbying for the ability to deduct ordinary business expenses under the tax code. As of April 22, 2026, state-licensed medical cannabis is no longer subject to 280E. It is a stabilization for the industry that the government has deemed acceptable. For the average person, for the patient, and for the citizen who does not operate within the protective bubble of a state-licensed medical program, the reality remains frozen in the past. This bifurcation of the population is intentional. It creates a system where legitimacy is not a right inherent to the citizen. It is a commodity to be licensed. The people who work within the sanctioned industry are protected, taxed, and monitored. The people who exist outside of that bubble, who grow their own, who share, or who live in states without functional medical programs, are left to the mercy of a law that has not changed. The government has not legalized the plant. It has simply professionalized the privilege of interacting with it.
This strategy is not new. It follows a consistent historical pattern. In every generation, the state has used cannabis policy as a messaging tool to address shifting cultural demands. This is not about the plant. It is about the maintenance of control. The lineage of this deception is long and well-documented.
Consider the era of the Gateway Lie. The government needed a way to justify the expansion of its police power, so it framed the plant as the first step on a path to hard drug use. This narrative was never about safety. It was about creating a bridge between a benign cultural habit and the perceived chaos of the heroin epidemic. It gave law enforcement a justification to monitor, harass, and incarcerate individuals who were otherwise peaceful. The Gateway Lie was effective because it operated on fear. It suggested that a single act of consumption was a moral failing that would lead inevitably to destruction.
Consider the Crime Lie, where the plant was the supposed accelerant for violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state pivoted to a narrative of aggression. It claimed that cannabis use caused psychosis and fueled the drug trade. It used this narrative to justify the militarization of police forces, the introduction of civil asset forfeiture, and the explosion of the prison population. The Crime Lie turned the consumer into a danger to the public, a threat that had to be neutralized by the full weight of the judicial system. It was never about the drug. It was about the expansion of the carceral state.
Consider the Teen Epidemic Lie, where the narrative focused on the alleged destruction of youth, or the Addiction Lie, which served to pathologize a human relationship with a plant. Each of these lies served a purpose. They provided the state with the moral cover required to expand surveillance, increase budgets, and exert control. The Reform Lie is simply the modern evolution of this pattern. The state no longer needs to argue that the plant causes violence, because the public no longer believes it. So, the state shifts the narrative. It pivots to the language of regulation. It claims to be fixing the system. It is a retreat, but it is a managed retreat. The goal remains the same, which is to maintain the state’s position as the final arbiter of what a person can put into their own body.
The most devastating impact of the Reform Lie is the erasure of the human cost. When the headlines celebrate a minor technical shift, they drown out the voices of those who continue to suffer under the full weight of prohibition. The Reform Lie tells the prisoner that their incarceration is necessary because they did not have the right paperwork. It tells the immigrant that their status remains precarious because the federal law still views the plant as an illicit substance. It tells the veteran that they must choose between their medical treatment and their access to federal services. It tells the small grower that they are a criminal while the corporate entity next door is a taxpayer. By focusing on the tax status of corporations, the conversation ignores the individuals who are still being processed through the system. It creates an environment where progress is measured by market capitalization rather than the restoration of liberty. It turns the struggle for sovereignty into a fight for market share.
Help Keep Pot Culture Magazine Independent Pot Culture Magazine is independent cannabis journalism. No corporate owners. No investors. Just readers. If you value this work, chip in a few dollars and help keep it going. Support PCMIf the government acknowledges that cannabis has medical value, the continued maintenance of criminal penalties for everyone else becomes an indefensible moral contradiction. One cannot simultaneously argue that a substance is legitimate medicine and that the possession of that substance warrants the stripping of rights, the loss of employment, or the threat of prison. This contradiction exposes the truth of the state position. The government does not actually care about the safety of the substance. It cares about the control of the substance. If it were about safety, the state would be looking for ways to educate rather than incarcerate. If it were about medicine, the state would be ensuring access rather than creating barriers. The existence of the prohibition machinery alongside the admission of medical utility for the licensed few is proof that the objective has always been to maintain a system of punishment.
This system relies on the compliance of the public. It relies on the belief that the state is making progress. The Reform Lie is designed to prevent the public from seeing that the state is not moving toward freedom. It is moving toward an integrated model of control. By allowing a portion of the market to become legitimate, the state creates a vested interest in the status quo. The corporate entities that now have a seat at the table are no longer incentivized to fight for total legalization. They are incentivized to maintain the current regulatory structure because it keeps their competitors out. They become partners in the enforcement of the very prohibition they once railed against. This is the ultimate victory for the state. It co-opts the opposition by giving them a slice of the profit.
We have seen this happen in other sectors of the economy, where regulations are written by the very corporations they are meant to govern. This is not reform. This is the capture of the regulatory apparatus. The Reform Lie ensures that the people who built the culture, who fought for the plant when it was dangerous to do so, are excluded from the new order. They are the ones who bear the cost of the transition. They are the ones who are still in cages, who are still fleeing from the law, who are still fighting for the right to exist in peace.
This administrative process is now set to continue with new hearings starting June 29, 2026. These proceedings are often portrayed as a necessary step toward further reform, a way to build a bureaucratic consensus for future changes. In practice, they serve as a stalling tactic. They provide a way for the administrative state to maintain the illusion of progress while keeping the ultimate authority firmly in its own hands. These hearings will involve experts, lobbyists, and officials debating the minutiae of regulation, all while the fundamental structure of the Controlled Substances Act remains unassailable. The system is designed to consume time, resources, and energy, ensuring that any real change is mediated through a process that the state can control, slow, or halt entirely. It is a theatre of governance, performed for an audience that is desperate for change, but the script was written in the halls of power, not by the people who have lived the consequences of prohibition.
MORE FROM CANNABIS LIES
CANNABIS LIES Vol. 8: The Addiction Lie
Cannabis is often labeled addictive, but the science tells a more precise story. This piece breaks down cannabis use disorder, how it is defined, and why mild, moderate, and severe cases get flattened into one fear-driven narrative. The result is a distorted public understanding of risk that fuels policy, perception, and misinformation.
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 11, 2026April 20, 2026CANNABIS LIES Vol. 7: The Mental Health Panic
Cannabis and mental health risks are often overstated in public debate. Research shows heavy use and high THC exposure can increase psychosis risk in vulnerable individuals, but widespread claims of a mental health crisis lack strong evidence. This piece examines the data, separates correlation from causation, and breaks down what cannabis users need to know.
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 4, 2026April 2, 2026CANNABIS LIES Vol. 6: The Driving Apocalypse Lie
Legal cannabis is often blamed for rising traffic deaths, but federal data tells a more complicated story. NHTSA findings, toxicology limitations, and conflicting crash studies reveal that THC presence is not a reliable measure of impairment. This investigation breaks down how flawed testing and policy shortcuts have shaped the narrative around so-called stoned driving.
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsMarch 28, 2026March 27, 2026The administrative state is also moving to consolidate its control over clinical trials. By creating a registration pathway for state-licensed entities, the government is essentially seizing control of the research process. It is setting itself up as the gatekeeper of scientific knowledge. It will dictate who can research the plant, what they can research, and what the results can be used for. This is not an opening of the doors to scientific discovery. It is the enclosure of the scientific commons. It ensures that the research that reaches the public will be the research that has been filtered through the priorities of the state.
The Reform Lie is not a strategy. It is an admission of failure. When the government chooses to perform the act of reform without embracing the reality of justice, it proves that it is not interested in the truth. It is interested in the maintenance of power. True reform would not be a shuffling of schedules. It would be the total and unconditional withdrawal of federal interference from the lives of the people. It would be the recognition that the state has no authority to criminalize the relationship between a human being and a plant. It would be the end of the prohibition machine, the release of the prisoners, and the restoration of rights for every person affected by the war on the plant.
As long as the apparatus continues to frame these technical shifts as moral victories, the public must recognize the deception. This is not progress. This is the state recalibrating its control to ensure that it remains the gatekeeper, the tax collector, and the final judge of who is allowed to exist in the world it seeks to dominate. The plant remains the same. The people remain the same. The only thing that has shifted is the label on the cage. The cage is still there. The bars are still locked. The guards are still watching. The power to punish, to threaten, and to control has not been removed. It has been refined. It has been made more surgical. It has been made more efficient.
The moral weight of this lie is heavy. It falls on those who have been promised justice and received only a change in terminology. It falls on the families who have been broken by the enforcement of archaic laws. It falls on the communities that have been targeted for generations. The Reform Lie assumes that the public has forgotten the history of the struggle. It assumes that the public is satisfied with the crumbs of corporate legitimacy. It assumes that there is no understanding of the difference between the freedom to live and the permission to serve.
The narrative of the state must be rejected. The recognition must grow that every small step that leaves the core structure of the prohibition machine in place is a step away from justice. The government must be held accountable for the contradiction of its own law. The reality of the prohibition era must continue to be documented, to expose the lies that are told to justify the control, and to advocate for the total restoration of liberty. The struggle for the plant is not a struggle for a change in status. It is a struggle for the soul of the culture. It is a struggle to define what it means to be a free person in a society that seeks to regulate every choice. As NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano noted regarding the order:
“Rescheduling fails to fully harmonize federal marijuana policy with the cannabis laws of many states, particularly the 24 states that have legalized its use and sale to adults.”
This is the core of the deception. The Reform Lie is the latest barrier to that freedom. It is a wall that must be dismantled, not by the government, but by the people who have lived the reality of the struggle.
The truth is simple, though the state works hard to obscure it. Cannabis is a part of the human experience. It has been used for healing, for creativity, for connection, and for joy for as long as historical records exist. The attempts by the state to control this relationship are an affront to human autonomy. They are based on fear, on ignorance, and on a desire for power. The reclassification to Schedule III is just the latest tactic in a long campaign to prevent people from fully embracing their own sovereignty. While the proponents of this move claim that:
“Today’s order marks a historical reversal in federal cannabis policy,”
It is a sign that the state is feeling the pressure, that it knows its position is untenable, but that it is not yet ready to concede.
A crossroads has been reached. Either the crumbs offered by the state are accepted, turning the public into participants in their own regulation, or the fight for the total and unconditional end of the prohibition machine continues. The Reform Lie can be accepted, or the truth can be demanded. The history of the culture is a history of resistance. It is a history of people who refused to be told what they could do, who they could be, or what they could consume. That history is the source of strength. It is the foundation upon which the future will be built. Permission from the state is not required to exist. Schedules, labels, and tax codes are not needed to define what is right. The truth is known, and it will continue to be shared until the last cage is empty and the prohibition machine is nothing but a memory.
The Reform Lie will continue to be told. The headlines will continue to scream about progress that does not exist. The state will continue to frame its maintenance of power as a move toward justice. But the deception will not hold. The patterns are visible. The history is known. The stakes are understood. The reality of the prohibition era will be documented, one article, one story, one voice at a time. This is not just a battle for a plant. It is a battle for the truth. And it is a battle that will be won, not because the state gives permission, but because the truth is on the side of the people. The prohibition machine is built on lies, and lies cannot stand forever against the weight of reality. The end of prohibition is coming, not through the actions of the state, but through the resolve of the people who have been fighting for it all along. The Reform Lie is the last gasp of a system that knows its time is over. We will not be fooled. We will not be silenced. We will be here, documenting the reality, telling the truth, and fighting for the culture until the day the plant is free.
©2026, Pot Culture Magazine. All rights reserved. This is the property of Pot Culture Magazine and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or transmission
of this work, in part or in whole, without the express written permission of Pot Culture Magazine, is strictly
prohibited.F O R T H E C U L T U R E B Y T H E C U L T U R E
The Digital Cage: Saint Lucia’s Traceability Trap
Saint Lucia has selected GrowerIQ as its national seed-to-sale traceability backbone, effectively finalizing a digital surveillance grid for its cannabis industry. By mandating enterprise software before establishing licensing frameworks, the government risks automating the exclusion of legacy farmers. This move trades cultural sovereignty for state-managed control, turning the cannabis industry into an extension of the…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 23, 2026April 22, 2026Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia Sabotage
Virginia legalized possession, but Governor Abigail Spanberger sabotaged the retail market. By delaying sales until 2027 and gutting equity provisions, the Commonwealth institutionalized a half-legal trap. Consumers now navigate a system that treats possession as a right but supply as a crime, fueling an unchecked illicit market while abandoning promised reform. Spanberger’s public safety rhetoric…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 21, 2026April 20, 20264/20 has been hollowed out by branding, corporate silence, and a culture that forgot its own history. While the industry sells holiday merch, Singapore executed a man for cannabis. The movement that once fought for autonomy now treats the plant like a commodity. This piece examines the cost of that betrayal and the culture left…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 20, 2026April 24, 2026 #280E #AdministrativeLaw #cannabis #CannabisCommunity #CannabisCulture #CannabisCommunity #CarceralState #Culture #DEA #DepartmentOfJustice #DrugWar #FederalGovernment #Industry #Legalization #Marijuana #MarijuanaNews #NORML #Policy #PolicyFiction #PotCultureMagazine #Prohibition #Reform #ScheduleIII #StateSanctioned #Weed -
Cannabis Lies Vol. 9: The Reform Lie
Filed Under: Policy Fiction
The federal apparatus has spoken. The Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration have announced a shift in the regulatory status of cannabis, moving state-licensed medical products to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act while pointedly leaving adult use, unlicensed, and synthetic THC products in Schedule I. Headlines across the country erupted with the language of victory. Outlets hailed this as a historic acknowledgment of the plant’s medical utility, a shift that supposedly recognizes the plant’s reality after decades of denial. The public was told that the prohibition era was entering its twilight and that the federal government had finally conceded that the plant possesses medicinal value.
None of this reflects the actual legal impact of the order. This announcement is the latest manifestation of the Reform Lie. It is a calculated piece of bureaucratic maintenance designed to satisfy the demand for progress while ensuring the core structure of prohibition remains entirely untouched. As Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche stated in the order, the new policy mandates that:
“Marijuana in any form covered by a state medical marijuana license, be placed in Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.”
It is a classic maneuver by the state to preserve its authority by offering a small, controlled concession that changes everything on paper but leaves the reality of the drug war exactly where it has always been.
The Reform Lie is the mechanism by which the state manages the tension between popular opinion and its own mandate. It functions by acknowledging that a substance has medical value without ever addressing the fundamental injustice of its criminalization. When the government moves a substance from one box to another, it claims it is following the science. When that same government keeps the prisons full, keeps the borders militarized against possession, and keeps the threat of federal intervention hanging over every state-sanctioned interaction, it is not following science. It is managing optics. For decades, the apparatus has faced growing pressure to address the disconnect between federal law and the public reality of cannabis use. Instead of dismantling the structure, the government has repeatedly opted for symbolic reform. These gestures generate cycles of positive press. They allow officials to claim they have acted on the issue. They provide a release valve for public anger without ever sacrificing the underlying authority to arrest, prosecute, and punish. This is the central trick. The Reform Lie presents a change in tax status as a change in morality.
To understand the scope of this deception, one must look closely at what the shift to Schedule III actually achieves. Under the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule III is home to substances such as anabolic steroids and certain prescription painkillers. It is a designation that implies a potential for abuse, though one that the state deems less severe than those in the Schedule I category, which the government defines as having no currently accepted medical use. Moving state-licensed medical products to Schedule III finally acknowledges what has been true for thousands of years. It acknowledges that the plant has medical value.
However, the change in classification does nothing to address the core conflicts of the prohibition era. The federal criminal penalties for the unauthorized production, distribution, or possession of cannabis remain firmly in place for everything outside that narrow, state-sanctioned medical window. The interstate commerce ban survives completely intact. The government continues to treat the transport of the plant across state lines as a federal crime, regardless of the legality of the substance in the states of origin or destination. Banking remains a fractured landscape of private risk and federal oversight. Employment in the federal sector remains hostile to users, and the firearm restrictions that strip rights from medical patients do not budge.
Most critically, this move provides no relief for those currently held in the carceral system. This order structurally excludes any mechanism for record relief, sentence modification, or pardon, leaving the carceral status quo entirely intact. It does not vacate criminal records. It does not end the status of cannabis as a tool for immigration enforcement. It does not stop the random, localized harassment of the population by federal agencies that still view the plant as contraband outside of the narrow, state-licensed framework.
This is a victory for the balance sheet. It is a win for the corporations that have spent millions lobbying for the ability to deduct ordinary business expenses under the tax code. As of April 22, 2026, state-licensed medical cannabis is no longer subject to 280E. It is a stabilization for the industry that the government has deemed acceptable. For the average person, for the patient, and for the citizen who does not operate within the protective bubble of a state-licensed medical program, the reality remains frozen in the past. This bifurcation of the population is intentional. It creates a system where legitimacy is not a right inherent to the citizen. It is a commodity to be licensed. The people who work within the sanctioned industry are protected, taxed, and monitored. The people who exist outside of that bubble, who grow their own, who share, or who live in states without functional medical programs, are left to the mercy of a law that has not changed. The government has not legalized the plant. It has simply professionalized the privilege of interacting with it.
This strategy is not new. It follows a consistent historical pattern. In every generation, the state has used cannabis policy as a messaging tool to address shifting cultural demands. This is not about the plant. It is about the maintenance of control. The lineage of this deception is long and well-documented.
Consider the era of the Gateway Lie. The government needed a way to justify the expansion of its police power, so it framed the plant as the first step on a path to hard drug use. This narrative was never about safety. It was about creating a bridge between a benign cultural habit and the perceived chaos of the heroin epidemic. It gave law enforcement a justification to monitor, harass, and incarcerate individuals who were otherwise peaceful. The Gateway Lie was effective because it operated on fear. It suggested that a single act of consumption was a moral failing that would lead inevitably to destruction.
Consider the Crime Lie, where the plant was the supposed accelerant for violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state pivoted to a narrative of aggression. It claimed that cannabis use caused psychosis and fueled the drug trade. It used this narrative to justify the militarization of police forces, the introduction of civil asset forfeiture, and the explosion of the prison population. The Crime Lie turned the consumer into a danger to the public, a threat that had to be neutralized by the full weight of the judicial system. It was never about the drug. It was about the expansion of the carceral state.
Consider the Teen Epidemic Lie, where the narrative focused on the alleged destruction of youth, or the Addiction Lie, which served to pathologize a human relationship with a plant. Each of these lies served a purpose. They provided the state with the moral cover required to expand surveillance, increase budgets, and exert control. The Reform Lie is simply the modern evolution of this pattern. The state no longer needs to argue that the plant causes violence, because the public no longer believes it. So, the state shifts the narrative. It pivots to the language of regulation. It claims to be fixing the system. It is a retreat, but it is a managed retreat. The goal remains the same, which is to maintain the state’s position as the final arbiter of what a person can put into their own body.
The most devastating impact of the Reform Lie is the erasure of the human cost. When the headlines celebrate a minor technical shift, they drown out the voices of those who continue to suffer under the full weight of prohibition. The Reform Lie tells the prisoner that their incarceration is necessary because they did not have the right paperwork. It tells the immigrant that their status remains precarious because the federal law still views the plant as an illicit substance. It tells the veteran that they must choose between their medical treatment and their access to federal services. It tells the small grower that they are a criminal while the corporate entity next door is a taxpayer. By focusing on the tax status of corporations, the conversation ignores the individuals who are still being processed through the system. It creates an environment where progress is measured by market capitalization rather than the restoration of liberty. It turns the struggle for sovereignty into a fight for market share.
Help Keep Pot Culture Magazine Independent Pot Culture Magazine is independent cannabis journalism. No corporate owners. No investors. Just readers. If you value this work, chip in a few dollars and help keep it going. Support PCMIf the government acknowledges that cannabis has medical value, the continued maintenance of criminal penalties for everyone else becomes an indefensible moral contradiction. One cannot simultaneously argue that a substance is legitimate medicine and that the possession of that substance warrants the stripping of rights, the loss of employment, or the threat of prison. This contradiction exposes the truth of the state position. The government does not actually care about the safety of the substance. It cares about the control of the substance. If it were about safety, the state would be looking for ways to educate rather than incarcerate. If it were about medicine, the state would be ensuring access rather than creating barriers. The existence of the prohibition machinery alongside the admission of medical utility for the licensed few is proof that the objective has always been to maintain a system of punishment.
This system relies on the compliance of the public. It relies on the belief that the state is making progress. The Reform Lie is designed to prevent the public from seeing that the state is not moving toward freedom. It is moving toward an integrated model of control. By allowing a portion of the market to become legitimate, the state creates a vested interest in the status quo. The corporate entities that now have a seat at the table are no longer incentivized to fight for total legalization. They are incentivized to maintain the current regulatory structure because it keeps their competitors out. They become partners in the enforcement of the very prohibition they once railed against. This is the ultimate victory for the state. It co-opts the opposition by giving them a slice of the profit.
We have seen this happen in other sectors of the economy, where regulations are written by the very corporations they are meant to govern. This is not reform. This is the capture of the regulatory apparatus. The Reform Lie ensures that the people who built the culture, who fought for the plant when it was dangerous to do so, are excluded from the new order. They are the ones who bear the cost of the transition. They are the ones who are still in cages, who are still fleeing from the law, who are still fighting for the right to exist in peace.
This administrative process is now set to continue with new hearings starting June 29, 2026. These proceedings are often portrayed as a necessary step toward further reform, a way to build a bureaucratic consensus for future changes. In practice, they serve as a stalling tactic. They provide a way for the administrative state to maintain the illusion of progress while keeping the ultimate authority firmly in its own hands. These hearings will involve experts, lobbyists, and officials debating the minutiae of regulation, all while the fundamental structure of the Controlled Substances Act remains unassailable. The system is designed to consume time, resources, and energy, ensuring that any real change is mediated through a process that the state can control, slow, or halt entirely. It is a theatre of governance, performed for an audience that is desperate for change, but the script was written in the halls of power, not by the people who have lived the consequences of prohibition.
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by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsMarch 28, 2026March 27, 2026The administrative state is also moving to consolidate its control over clinical trials. By creating a registration pathway for state-licensed entities, the government is essentially seizing control of the research process. It is setting itself up as the gatekeeper of scientific knowledge. It will dictate who can research the plant, what they can research, and what the results can be used for. This is not an opening of the doors to scientific discovery. It is the enclosure of the scientific commons. It ensures that the research that reaches the public will be the research that has been filtered through the priorities of the state.
The Reform Lie is not a strategy. It is an admission of failure. When the government chooses to perform the act of reform without embracing the reality of justice, it proves that it is not interested in the truth. It is interested in the maintenance of power. True reform would not be a shuffling of schedules. It would be the total and unconditional withdrawal of federal interference from the lives of the people. It would be the recognition that the state has no authority to criminalize the relationship between a human being and a plant. It would be the end of the prohibition machine, the release of the prisoners, and the restoration of rights for every person affected by the war on the plant.
As long as the apparatus continues to frame these technical shifts as moral victories, the public must recognize the deception. This is not progress. This is the state recalibrating its control to ensure that it remains the gatekeeper, the tax collector, and the final judge of who is allowed to exist in the world it seeks to dominate. The plant remains the same. The people remain the same. The only thing that has shifted is the label on the cage. The cage is still there. The bars are still locked. The guards are still watching. The power to punish, to threaten, and to control has not been removed. It has been refined. It has been made more surgical. It has been made more efficient.
The moral weight of this lie is heavy. It falls on those who have been promised justice and received only a change in terminology. It falls on the families who have been broken by the enforcement of archaic laws. It falls on the communities that have been targeted for generations. The Reform Lie assumes that the public has forgotten the history of the struggle. It assumes that the public is satisfied with the crumbs of corporate legitimacy. It assumes that there is no understanding of the difference between the freedom to live and the permission to serve.
The narrative of the state must be rejected. The recognition must grow that every small step that leaves the core structure of the prohibition machine in place is a step away from justice. The government must be held accountable for the contradiction of its own law. The reality of the prohibition era must continue to be documented, to expose the lies that are told to justify the control, and to advocate for the total restoration of liberty. The struggle for the plant is not a struggle for a change in status. It is a struggle for the soul of the culture. It is a struggle to define what it means to be a free person in a society that seeks to regulate every choice. As NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano noted regarding the order:
“Rescheduling fails to fully harmonize federal marijuana policy with the cannabis laws of many states, particularly the 24 states that have legalized its use and sale to adults.”
This is the core of the deception. The Reform Lie is the latest barrier to that freedom. It is a wall that must be dismantled, not by the government, but by the people who have lived the reality of the struggle.
The truth is simple, though the state works hard to obscure it. Cannabis is a part of the human experience. It has been used for healing, for creativity, for connection, and for joy for as long as historical records exist. The attempts by the state to control this relationship are an affront to human autonomy. They are based on fear, on ignorance, and on a desire for power. The reclassification to Schedule III is just the latest tactic in a long campaign to prevent people from fully embracing their own sovereignty. While the proponents of this move claim that:
“Today’s order marks a historical reversal in federal cannabis policy,”
It is a sign that the state is feeling the pressure, that it knows its position is untenable, but that it is not yet ready to concede.
A crossroads has been reached. Either the crumbs offered by the state are accepted, turning the public into participants in their own regulation, or the fight for the total and unconditional end of the prohibition machine continues. The Reform Lie can be accepted, or the truth can be demanded. The history of the culture is a history of resistance. It is a history of people who refused to be told what they could do, who they could be, or what they could consume. That history is the source of strength. It is the foundation upon which the future will be built. Permission from the state is not required to exist. Schedules, labels, and tax codes are not needed to define what is right. The truth is known, and it will continue to be shared until the last cage is empty and the prohibition machine is nothing but a memory.
The Reform Lie will continue to be told. The headlines will continue to scream about progress that does not exist. The state will continue to frame its maintenance of power as a move toward justice. But the deception will not hold. The patterns are visible. The history is known. The stakes are understood. The reality of the prohibition era will be documented, one article, one story, one voice at a time. This is not just a battle for a plant. It is a battle for the truth. And it is a battle that will be won, not because the state gives permission, but because the truth is on the side of the people. The prohibition machine is built on lies, and lies cannot stand forever against the weight of reality. The end of prohibition is coming, not through the actions of the state, but through the resolve of the people who have been fighting for it all along. The Reform Lie is the last gasp of a system that knows its time is over. We will not be fooled. We will not be silenced. We will be here, documenting the reality, telling the truth, and fighting for the culture until the day the plant is free.
©2026, Pot Culture Magazine. All rights reserved. This is the property of Pot Culture Magazine and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or transmission
of this work, in part or in whole, without the express written permission of Pot Culture Magazine, is strictly
prohibited.F O R T H E C U L T U R E B Y T H E C U L T U R E
The Digital Cage: Saint Lucia’s Traceability Trap
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by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 21, 2026April 20, 20264/20 has been hollowed out by branding, corporate silence, and a culture that forgot its own history. While the industry sells holiday merch, Singapore executed a man for cannabis. The movement that once fought for autonomy now treats the plant like a commodity. This piece examines the cost of that betrayal and the culture left…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 20, 2026April 24, 2026 #280E #AdministrativeLaw #cannabis #CannabisCommunity #CannabisCulture #CannabisCommunity #CarceralState #Culture #DEA #DepartmentOfJustice #DrugWar #FederalGovernment #Industry #Legalization #Marijuana #MarijuanaNews #NORML #Policy #PolicyFiction #PotCultureMagazine #Prohibition #Reform #ScheduleIII #StateSanctioned #Weed -
:stargif: 𝑳𝒂 𝑨𝒕𝒍𝒂́𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒅𝒂: 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒇𝒊́𝒂, 𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒐 𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊́𝒂 :stargif:
La historia de la Atlantis es uno de los relatos más famosos y debatidos de la antigüedad.
Durante siglos ha sido presentada como una civilización perdida extremadamente avanzada, destruida en una sola noche por un cataclismo.
Sin embargo, cuando se revisan las fuentes históricas con calma, la historia resulta bastante más matizada.Todo lo que sabemos sobre la Atlántida procede de un solo autor: el filósofo griego Platón.
La menciona en dos de sus diálogos, Timeo y Critias, escritos en el siglo IV a.C.
En esos textos describe una poderosa isla situada más allá de las Columnas de Hércules, es decir, en el océano Atlántico.
Según el relato, era una sociedad rica, organizada y técnicamente avanzada que terminó cayendo por su ambición y orgullo.Platón cuenta que la capital estaba formada por anillos concéntricos de tierra y agua conectados por canales, puentes y puertos.
También menciona templos monumentales, sistemas hidráulicos complejos y un metal brillante llamado oricalco, que sería el segundo más valioso después del oro.
Para los griegos de su época, esa descripción ya representaba una ingeniería extraordinaria.En la narración, la Atlántida fue originalmente un reino próspero gobernado por descendientes del dios Poseidón.
Con el paso del tiempo, según Platón, los gobernantes se volvieron arrogantes y comenzaron a conquistar otros territorios.
Ese orgullo —lo que los griegos llamaban hubris— provocó el castigo divino.
Finalmente, en “un solo día y una noche”, terremotos y maremotos hicieron que la isla desapareciera bajo el mar.Ahora bien, desde el punto de vista histórico hay un detalle importante: no existe ninguna fuente anterior o independiente que confirme la existencia de la Atlántida.
Ni egipcios, ni fenicios, ni otros autores griegos mencionan una civilización así.
Por ese motivo, la mayoría de historiadores considera que Platón utilizó la historia como una alegoría política y moral, una forma de advertir sobre los peligros del poder, la corrupción y la arrogancia de los imperios.Eso no significa que el relato surgiera de la nada.
Muchos investigadores creen que Platón pudo inspirarse en hechos reales.
Uno de los candidatos más citados es la enorme erupción volcánica que destruyó parte de la isla de Santorini alrededor del 1600 a.C.
Aquella explosión arrasó la civilización minoica y provocó tsunamis que devastaron el mar Egeo.
Para los pueblos antiguos, una catástrofe así pudo convertirse con el tiempo en una historia sobre una civilización que desapareció de golpe.Otra teoría apunta a la antigua civilización de Tartessos, situada en el sur de la península ibérica, cerca de la actual zona de Doñana.
Los griegos describían Tartessos como un lugar extremadamente rico en metales, especialmente plata y oro.
Además, estudios geológicos han confirmado que la costa atlántica andaluza sufrió grandes tsunamis en la antigüedad, lo que podría haber destruido asentamientos costeros importantes.También existen teorías más especulativas que sitúan la Atlántida en lugares como la Estructura de Richat en el Sáhara, en el Caribe o incluso bajo el hielo de la Antártida.
Sin embargo, hasta ahora ninguna de estas hipótesis ha encontrado pruebas arqueológicas concluyentes.
A veces se citan hallazgos como lingotes de oricalco hallados cerca de Gela o el Mecanismo de Anticitera, pero ninguno demuestra la existencia de esa civilización.En resumen, el consenso académico actual es bastante claro: la Atlántida de Platón probablemente no fue una ciudad real, sino una historia filosófica construida para transmitir una advertencia sobre el poder y la decadencia de las civilizaciones.
Aun así, el relato pudo inspirarse en catástrofes reales y en culturas antiguas que desaparecieron o cambiaron con el tiempo.Quizá por eso el mito sigue fascinando hoy.
No solo habla de una ciudad perdida, sino de algo mucho más universal: la idea de que incluso las sociedades más poderosas pueden caer si olvidan la prudencia, la justicia y el equilibrio.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #atlantida #platon #misteriosdelahistoria #arqueologia #civilizacionesantiguas #tartessos #mitosyleyendas
-
:stargif: 𝑳𝒂 𝑨𝒕𝒍𝒂́𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒅𝒂: 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒇𝒊́𝒂, 𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒐 𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊́𝒂 :stargif:
La historia de la Atlantis es uno de los relatos más famosos y debatidos de la antigüedad.
Durante siglos ha sido presentada como una civilización perdida extremadamente avanzada, destruida en una sola noche por un cataclismo.
Sin embargo, cuando se revisan las fuentes históricas con calma, la historia resulta bastante más matizada.Todo lo que sabemos sobre la Atlántida procede de un solo autor: el filósofo griego Platón.
La menciona en dos de sus diálogos, Timeo y Critias, escritos en el siglo IV a.C.
En esos textos describe una poderosa isla situada más allá de las Columnas de Hércules, es decir, en el océano Atlántico.
Según el relato, era una sociedad rica, organizada y técnicamente avanzada que terminó cayendo por su ambición y orgullo.Platón cuenta que la capital estaba formada por anillos concéntricos de tierra y agua conectados por canales, puentes y puertos.
También menciona templos monumentales, sistemas hidráulicos complejos y un metal brillante llamado oricalco, que sería el segundo más valioso después del oro.
Para los griegos de su época, esa descripción ya representaba una ingeniería extraordinaria.En la narración, la Atlántida fue originalmente un reino próspero gobernado por descendientes del dios Poseidón.
Con el paso del tiempo, según Platón, los gobernantes se volvieron arrogantes y comenzaron a conquistar otros territorios.
Ese orgullo —lo que los griegos llamaban hubris— provocó el castigo divino.
Finalmente, en “un solo día y una noche”, terremotos y maremotos hicieron que la isla desapareciera bajo el mar.Ahora bien, desde el punto de vista histórico hay un detalle importante: no existe ninguna fuente anterior o independiente que confirme la existencia de la Atlántida.
Ni egipcios, ni fenicios, ni otros autores griegos mencionan una civilización así.
Por ese motivo, la mayoría de historiadores considera que Platón utilizó la historia como una alegoría política y moral, una forma de advertir sobre los peligros del poder, la corrupción y la arrogancia de los imperios.Eso no significa que el relato surgiera de la nada.
Muchos investigadores creen que Platón pudo inspirarse en hechos reales.
Uno de los candidatos más citados es la enorme erupción volcánica que destruyó parte de la isla de Santorini alrededor del 1600 a.C.
Aquella explosión arrasó la civilización minoica y provocó tsunamis que devastaron el mar Egeo.
Para los pueblos antiguos, una catástrofe así pudo convertirse con el tiempo en una historia sobre una civilización que desapareció de golpe.Otra teoría apunta a la antigua civilización de Tartessos, situada en el sur de la península ibérica, cerca de la actual zona de Doñana.
Los griegos describían Tartessos como un lugar extremadamente rico en metales, especialmente plata y oro.
Además, estudios geológicos han confirmado que la costa atlántica andaluza sufrió grandes tsunamis en la antigüedad, lo que podría haber destruido asentamientos costeros importantes.También existen teorías más especulativas que sitúan la Atlántida en lugares como la Estructura de Richat en el Sáhara, en el Caribe o incluso bajo el hielo de la Antártida.
Sin embargo, hasta ahora ninguna de estas hipótesis ha encontrado pruebas arqueológicas concluyentes.
A veces se citan hallazgos como lingotes de oricalco hallados cerca de Gela o el Mecanismo de Anticitera, pero ninguno demuestra la existencia de esa civilización.En resumen, el consenso académico actual es bastante claro: la Atlántida de Platón probablemente no fue una ciudad real, sino una historia filosófica construida para transmitir una advertencia sobre el poder y la decadencia de las civilizaciones.
Aun así, el relato pudo inspirarse en catástrofes reales y en culturas antiguas que desaparecieron o cambiaron con el tiempo.Quizá por eso el mito sigue fascinando hoy.
No solo habla de una ciudad perdida, sino de algo mucho más universal: la idea de que incluso las sociedades más poderosas pueden caer si olvidan la prudencia, la justicia y el equilibrio.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #atlantida #platon #misteriosdelahistoria #arqueologia #civilizacionesantiguas #tartessos #mitosyleyendas
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:stargif: 𝑳𝒂 𝑨𝒕𝒍𝒂́𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒅𝒂: 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒇𝒊́𝒂, 𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒐 𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊́𝒂 :stargif:
La historia de la Atlantis es uno de los relatos más famosos y debatidos de la antigüedad.
Durante siglos ha sido presentada como una civilización perdida extremadamente avanzada, destruida en una sola noche por un cataclismo.
Sin embargo, cuando se revisan las fuentes históricas con calma, la historia resulta bastante más matizada.Todo lo que sabemos sobre la Atlántida procede de un solo autor: el filósofo griego Platón.
La menciona en dos de sus diálogos, Timeo y Critias, escritos en el siglo IV a.C.
En esos textos describe una poderosa isla situada más allá de las Columnas de Hércules, es decir, en el océano Atlántico.
Según el relato, era una sociedad rica, organizada y técnicamente avanzada que terminó cayendo por su ambición y orgullo.Platón cuenta que la capital estaba formada por anillos concéntricos de tierra y agua conectados por canales, puentes y puertos.
También menciona templos monumentales, sistemas hidráulicos complejos y un metal brillante llamado oricalco, que sería el segundo más valioso después del oro.
Para los griegos de su época, esa descripción ya representaba una ingeniería extraordinaria.En la narración, la Atlántida fue originalmente un reino próspero gobernado por descendientes del dios Poseidón.
Con el paso del tiempo, según Platón, los gobernantes se volvieron arrogantes y comenzaron a conquistar otros territorios.
Ese orgullo —lo que los griegos llamaban hubris— provocó el castigo divino.
Finalmente, en “un solo día y una noche”, terremotos y maremotos hicieron que la isla desapareciera bajo el mar.Ahora bien, desde el punto de vista histórico hay un detalle importante: no existe ninguna fuente anterior o independiente que confirme la existencia de la Atlántida.
Ni egipcios, ni fenicios, ni otros autores griegos mencionan una civilización así.
Por ese motivo, la mayoría de historiadores considera que Platón utilizó la historia como una alegoría política y moral, una forma de advertir sobre los peligros del poder, la corrupción y la arrogancia de los imperios.Eso no significa que el relato surgiera de la nada.
Muchos investigadores creen que Platón pudo inspirarse en hechos reales.
Uno de los candidatos más citados es la enorme erupción volcánica que destruyó parte de la isla de Santorini alrededor del 1600 a.C.
Aquella explosión arrasó la civilización minoica y provocó tsunamis que devastaron el mar Egeo.
Para los pueblos antiguos, una catástrofe así pudo convertirse con el tiempo en una historia sobre una civilización que desapareció de golpe.Otra teoría apunta a la antigua civilización de Tartessos, situada en el sur de la península ibérica, cerca de la actual zona de Doñana.
Los griegos describían Tartessos como un lugar extremadamente rico en metales, especialmente plata y oro.
Además, estudios geológicos han confirmado que la costa atlántica andaluza sufrió grandes tsunamis en la antigüedad, lo que podría haber destruido asentamientos costeros importantes.También existen teorías más especulativas que sitúan la Atlántida en lugares como la Estructura de Richat en el Sáhara, en el Caribe o incluso bajo el hielo de la Antártida.
Sin embargo, hasta ahora ninguna de estas hipótesis ha encontrado pruebas arqueológicas concluyentes.
A veces se citan hallazgos como lingotes de oricalco hallados cerca de Gela o el Mecanismo de Anticitera, pero ninguno demuestra la existencia de esa civilización.En resumen, el consenso académico actual es bastante claro: la Atlántida de Platón probablemente no fue una ciudad real, sino una historia filosófica construida para transmitir una advertencia sobre el poder y la decadencia de las civilizaciones.
Aun así, el relato pudo inspirarse en catástrofes reales y en culturas antiguas que desaparecieron o cambiaron con el tiempo.Quizá por eso el mito sigue fascinando hoy.
No solo habla de una ciudad perdida, sino de algo mucho más universal: la idea de que incluso las sociedades más poderosas pueden caer si olvidan la prudencia, la justicia y el equilibrio.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #atlantida #platon #misteriosdelahistoria #arqueologia #civilizacionesantiguas #tartessos #mitosyleyendas
-
:stargif: 𝑳𝒂 𝑨𝒕𝒍𝒂́𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒅𝒂: 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒇𝒊́𝒂, 𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒐 𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊́𝒂 :stargif:
La historia de la Atlantis es uno de los relatos más famosos y debatidos de la antigüedad.
Durante siglos ha sido presentada como una civilización perdida extremadamente avanzada, destruida en una sola noche por un cataclismo.
Sin embargo, cuando se revisan las fuentes históricas con calma, la historia resulta bastante más matizada.Todo lo que sabemos sobre la Atlántida procede de un solo autor: el filósofo griego Platón.
La menciona en dos de sus diálogos, Timeo y Critias, escritos en el siglo IV a.C.
En esos textos describe una poderosa isla situada más allá de las Columnas de Hércules, es decir, en el océano Atlántico.
Según el relato, era una sociedad rica, organizada y técnicamente avanzada que terminó cayendo por su ambición y orgullo.Platón cuenta que la capital estaba formada por anillos concéntricos de tierra y agua conectados por canales, puentes y puertos.
También menciona templos monumentales, sistemas hidráulicos complejos y un metal brillante llamado oricalco, que sería el segundo más valioso después del oro.
Para los griegos de su época, esa descripción ya representaba una ingeniería extraordinaria.En la narración, la Atlántida fue originalmente un reino próspero gobernado por descendientes del dios Poseidón.
Con el paso del tiempo, según Platón, los gobernantes se volvieron arrogantes y comenzaron a conquistar otros territorios.
Ese orgullo —lo que los griegos llamaban hubris— provocó el castigo divino.
Finalmente, en “un solo día y una noche”, terremotos y maremotos hicieron que la isla desapareciera bajo el mar.Ahora bien, desde el punto de vista histórico hay un detalle importante: no existe ninguna fuente anterior o independiente que confirme la existencia de la Atlántida.
Ni egipcios, ni fenicios, ni otros autores griegos mencionan una civilización así.
Por ese motivo, la mayoría de historiadores considera que Platón utilizó la historia como una alegoría política y moral, una forma de advertir sobre los peligros del poder, la corrupción y la arrogancia de los imperios.Eso no significa que el relato surgiera de la nada.
Muchos investigadores creen que Platón pudo inspirarse en hechos reales.
Uno de los candidatos más citados es la enorme erupción volcánica que destruyó parte de la isla de Santorini alrededor del 1600 a.C.
Aquella explosión arrasó la civilización minoica y provocó tsunamis que devastaron el mar Egeo.
Para los pueblos antiguos, una catástrofe así pudo convertirse con el tiempo en una historia sobre una civilización que desapareció de golpe.Otra teoría apunta a la antigua civilización de Tartessos, situada en el sur de la península ibérica, cerca de la actual zona de Doñana.
Los griegos describían Tartessos como un lugar extremadamente rico en metales, especialmente plata y oro.
Además, estudios geológicos han confirmado que la costa atlántica andaluza sufrió grandes tsunamis en la antigüedad, lo que podría haber destruido asentamientos costeros importantes.También existen teorías más especulativas que sitúan la Atlántida en lugares como la Estructura de Richat en el Sáhara, en el Caribe o incluso bajo el hielo de la Antártida.
Sin embargo, hasta ahora ninguna de estas hipótesis ha encontrado pruebas arqueológicas concluyentes.
A veces se citan hallazgos como lingotes de oricalco hallados cerca de Gela o el Mecanismo de Anticitera, pero ninguno demuestra la existencia de esa civilización.En resumen, el consenso académico actual es bastante claro: la Atlántida de Platón probablemente no fue una ciudad real, sino una historia filosófica construida para transmitir una advertencia sobre el poder y la decadencia de las civilizaciones.
Aun así, el relato pudo inspirarse en catástrofes reales y en culturas antiguas que desaparecieron o cambiaron con el tiempo.Quizá por eso el mito sigue fascinando hoy.
No solo habla de una ciudad perdida, sino de algo mucho más universal: la idea de que incluso las sociedades más poderosas pueden caer si olvidan la prudencia, la justicia y el equilibrio.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #atlantida #platon #misteriosdelahistoria #arqueologia #civilizacionesantiguas #tartessos #mitosyleyendas
-
:stargif: 𝑳𝒂 𝑨𝒕𝒍𝒂́𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒅𝒂: 𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒇𝒊́𝒂, 𝒎𝒊𝒕𝒐 𝒚 𝒂𝒓𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊́𝒂 :stargif:
La historia de la Atlantis es uno de los relatos más famosos y debatidos de la antigüedad.
Durante siglos ha sido presentada como una civilización perdida extremadamente avanzada, destruida en una sola noche por un cataclismo.
Sin embargo, cuando se revisan las fuentes históricas con calma, la historia resulta bastante más matizada.Todo lo que sabemos sobre la Atlántida procede de un solo autor: el filósofo griego Platón.
La menciona en dos de sus diálogos, Timeo y Critias, escritos en el siglo IV a.C.
En esos textos describe una poderosa isla situada más allá de las Columnas de Hércules, es decir, en el océano Atlántico.
Según el relato, era una sociedad rica, organizada y técnicamente avanzada que terminó cayendo por su ambición y orgullo.Platón cuenta que la capital estaba formada por anillos concéntricos de tierra y agua conectados por canales, puentes y puertos.
También menciona templos monumentales, sistemas hidráulicos complejos y un metal brillante llamado oricalco, que sería el segundo más valioso después del oro.
Para los griegos de su época, esa descripción ya representaba una ingeniería extraordinaria.En la narración, la Atlántida fue originalmente un reino próspero gobernado por descendientes del dios Poseidón.
Con el paso del tiempo, según Platón, los gobernantes se volvieron arrogantes y comenzaron a conquistar otros territorios.
Ese orgullo —lo que los griegos llamaban hubris— provocó el castigo divino.
Finalmente, en “un solo día y una noche”, terremotos y maremotos hicieron que la isla desapareciera bajo el mar.Ahora bien, desde el punto de vista histórico hay un detalle importante: no existe ninguna fuente anterior o independiente que confirme la existencia de la Atlántida.
Ni egipcios, ni fenicios, ni otros autores griegos mencionan una civilización así.
Por ese motivo, la mayoría de historiadores considera que Platón utilizó la historia como una alegoría política y moral, una forma de advertir sobre los peligros del poder, la corrupción y la arrogancia de los imperios.Eso no significa que el relato surgiera de la nada.
Muchos investigadores creen que Platón pudo inspirarse en hechos reales.
Uno de los candidatos más citados es la enorme erupción volcánica que destruyó parte de la isla de Santorini alrededor del 1600 a.C.
Aquella explosión arrasó la civilización minoica y provocó tsunamis que devastaron el mar Egeo.
Para los pueblos antiguos, una catástrofe así pudo convertirse con el tiempo en una historia sobre una civilización que desapareció de golpe.Otra teoría apunta a la antigua civilización de Tartessos, situada en el sur de la península ibérica, cerca de la actual zona de Doñana.
Los griegos describían Tartessos como un lugar extremadamente rico en metales, especialmente plata y oro.
Además, estudios geológicos han confirmado que la costa atlántica andaluza sufrió grandes tsunamis en la antigüedad, lo que podría haber destruido asentamientos costeros importantes.También existen teorías más especulativas que sitúan la Atlántida en lugares como la Estructura de Richat en el Sáhara, en el Caribe o incluso bajo el hielo de la Antártida.
Sin embargo, hasta ahora ninguna de estas hipótesis ha encontrado pruebas arqueológicas concluyentes.
A veces se citan hallazgos como lingotes de oricalco hallados cerca de Gela o el Mecanismo de Anticitera, pero ninguno demuestra la existencia de esa civilización.En resumen, el consenso académico actual es bastante claro: la Atlántida de Platón probablemente no fue una ciudad real, sino una historia filosófica construida para transmitir una advertencia sobre el poder y la decadencia de las civilizaciones.
Aun así, el relato pudo inspirarse en catástrofes reales y en culturas antiguas que desaparecieron o cambiaron con el tiempo.Quizá por eso el mito sigue fascinando hoy.
No solo habla de una ciudad perdida, sino de algo mucho más universal: la idea de que incluso las sociedades más poderosas pueden caer si olvidan la prudencia, la justicia y el equilibrio.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #atlantida #platon #misteriosdelahistoria #arqueologia #civilizacionesantiguas #tartessos #mitosyleyendas
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El govern americà ara es dedica a crear material digital per a #DeltaGreen
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El govern americà ara es dedica a crear material digital per a #DeltaGreen
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El govern americà ara es dedica a crear material digital per a #DeltaGreen
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El govern americà ara es dedica a crear material digital per a #DeltaGreen
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El govern americà ara es dedica a crear material digital per a #DeltaGreen
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2026 – El año en que la IA se vuelve operativa y la infraestructura se convierte en estratégica
Por Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer (CPO) – Hitachi Vantara
Si 2025 fue el año en que las empresas aprendieron a experimentar con la IA, entonces 2026 será el año en que aprendan a depender de ella.
La era de los proyectos piloto y de las herramientas aisladas de IA Generativa está dando paso a algo mucho más transformador: sistemas de IA capaces de actuar, decidir y operar con creciente autonomía, redefiniendo no solo la forma en que funcionan los negocios, sino también la infraestructura subyacente que las naciones utilizan para asegurar su futuro.
El hilo conductor más poderoso que conecta las principales tendencias del próximo año es simple pero profundo: la IA está evolucionando de una capacidad a una capa fundacional de la competitividad económica. Todo lo demás —desde la estrategia de datos y la arquitectura Cloud hasta el diseño de hardware y los modelos de fuerza laboral— ahora orbita en torno a ese cambio.
En el centro de esta transformación está el auge de la IA Agéntica, la tendencia tecnológica empresarial definitoria de 2026. A diferencia de los modelos generativos anteriores que simplemente producían contenido, los sistemas de IA Agéntica pueden ejecutar tareas, tomar decisiones y operar de manera autónoma dentro de los flujos de trabajo del negocio.
Las empresas los integrarán en sus cadenas de suministro, operaciones de atención al cliente, procesos de cumplimiento y rutinas de análisis financiero. Estos agentes no solo responderán preguntas: tomarán acciones, activando flujos de trabajo, ajustando parámetros en tiempo real y gestionando decisiones que antes estaban en manos de personas.
Pero con la autonomía llega la complejidad. Las organizaciones necesitarán sólidos sistemas de gobernanza, marcos de confianza y canalizaciones de datos de alta calidad para garantizar que estos agentes se comporten de manera predecible y responsable. Aquí emerge la segunda gran tendencia de 2026: los datos se convierten en la principal fuente de diferenciación competitiva.
A medida que el cómputo, los modelos e incluso los algoritmos avanzados continúan “comoditizándose”, el diferenciador pasa a ser el dato propietario, de alta calidad y bien gobernado. Cada empresa deberá enfrentar una realidad común: la sofisticación de su IA dependerá menos de la potencia de sus modelos y más de la precisión, limpieza y confiabilidad de los datos que los alimentan.
Las compañías con ecosistemas de datos maduros tomarán ventaja rápidamente. Aquellas que no lo estén, tendrán dificultades para adaptarse, ya que los sistemas agénticos requieren ciclos de decisión más rápidos, correlación en tiempo real y señales contextuales más granulares.
El tercer hilo conductor se apoya en este cambio: los gobiernos de todo el mundo ahora consideran la infraestructura de IA como un activo estratégico, al nivel de la energía o la defensa. El crecimiento de las nubes soberanas no es un movimiento de nicho, sino una respuesta geopolítica a la era de la IA.
Las naciones quieren la capacidad de poseer y proteger los datos que impulsan sus economías y resguardan a sus poblaciones. Exigen garantías sobre dónde se almacena la información sensible, cómo se entrenan los modelos y si los sistemas de IA pueden respetar los límites regulatorios.
En 2026, se espera una aceleración significativa de los ecosistemas de nube soberana. Los países invertirán en centros de datos preparados para cumplir con regulaciones y diseñados específicamente para cargas de trabajo de IA, con alta eficiencia energética. Estas instalaciones se convertirán en los santuarios de los datos ciudadanos, financieros y
vinculados a la defensa, construidos para soportar el cumplimiento normativo y la supervisión nacional. A medida que proliferen los agentes de IA, la necesidad de supervisión nacional y control de la infraestructura será imposible de ignorar.
Esto conecta directamente con la cuarta tendencia: la IA está llevando al límite físico las arquitecturas actuales de los centros de datos, forzando un ciclo de modernización sin precedentes. Las cargas de trabajo de IA y de sistemas agénticos demandan una densidad de cómputo extraordinaria, aceleradores especializados y arquitecturas de almacenamiento diseñadas para baja latencia y alto rendimiento. Las limitaciones de energía y refrigeración, antes consideradas un tema operativo, ahora se convierten en un factor restrictivo para la innovación en IA.
Esta modernización no se trata solo de rendimiento. Está impulsada por la necesidad de liberar capacidad eléctrica para las cargas de trabajo de IA. Si las empresas no pueden liberar capacidad energética, no expandirán sus capacidades de IA, quedando rezagadas competitivamente. Los requisitos de sostenibilidad y las regulaciones emergentes también acelerarán este cambio, convirtiendo la eficiencia energética no solo en una mejora operativa, sino en un imperativo de cumplimiento.
A través de estas tendencias clave emerge una narrativa única: la IA ya no es una herramienta superpuesta a las operaciones del negocio. Es la columna vertebral sobre la que dependerán las operaciones, la infraestructura, la regulación y las estrategias de los países.
La IA agéntica impulsa la necesidad de mejores datos. Mejores datos impulsan la necesidad de entornos seguros, soberanos y conformes. Esos entornos requieren infraestructura modernizada y energéticamente eficiente, diseñada específicamente para la automatización inteligente. Este ecosistema se retroalimenta.
Y entre todo ello persiste una verdad humana final. Aunque los sistemas se vuelvan más autónomos, las personas siguen siendo esenciales. En 2026 veremos un fuerte impulso en la recapacitación de la fuerza laboral, no para convertir a los empleados en programadores,
sino en orquestadores capaces de aprovechar estos sistemas autónomos para transformar sus industrias.
Los próximos grandes avances no vendrán únicamente de científicos de datos, sino que también de expertos potenciados por IA.
En 2026, la IA se convierte en la nueva infraestructura, y las organizaciones que comprendan este cambio de manera temprana definirán el panorama competitivo durante los próximos años.
#arielmcorg #datacenters #hitachiVantara #infraestructuraIa #PORTADA #servidores -
L’AI nel retail non è più fantascienza: 9 aziende su 10 la stanno già usando o testando
C’è stato un periodo in cui parlare di intelligenza artificiale nel retail sembrava quasi una cosa da convegno futuristico: scaffali intelligenti, assistenti virtuali, pubblicità personalizzate, magazzini che si organizzano da soli, previsioni di vendita precise come un orologio svizzero.
Poi, come spesso succede con la tecnologia, il futuro ha smesso di essere futuro.
È diventato presente.
Secondo la seconda edizione del report NVIDIA “State of AI in Retail and CPG”, pubblicato a gennaio 2025, l’AI è ormai entrata seriamente nel mondo del retail e dei beni di largo consumo. Il dato che colpisce di più è questo: l’89% dei retailer intervistati sta già usando l’intelligenza artificiale oppure sta valutando progetti, prove pilota e sperimentazioni.
Tradotto in modo semplice: quasi 9 aziende su 10 non stanno più solo “parlando” di AI. La stanno provando, integrando, misurando.
E questa cosa cambia parecchio il modo in cui dobbiamo guardare al commercio, ai negozi, all’e-commerce, alla logistica e perfino al lavoro quotidiano di chi sta dietro le quinte.
L’AI non è più solo ChatGPT
Quando diciamo “intelligenza artificiale”, molti pensano subito a ChatGPT, ai testi generati automaticamente, alle immagini create con un prompt o agli assistenti digitali che rispondono alle domande.
Ma nel retail la partita è molto più ampia.
L’AI sta entrando in tanti punti diversi della catena del nostro lavoro:
marketing, advertising, customer care, analisi dei clienti, gestione degli stock, supply chain, previsioni di vendita, raccomandazioni personalizzate, contenuti per campagne pubblicitarie e assistenti digitali per lo shopping.
Non stiamo parlando solo di un chatbot che ti dice quale paio di scarpe comprare.
Stiamo parlando di sistemi che possono aiutare un’azienda a capire cosa vendere, dove venderlo, quando produrlo, quanto tenerne a stock, come comunicarlo e a quale cliente proporlo.
E qui, da persona che vive quotidianamente processi, magazzini, flussi, articoli, giacenze e problemi reali di sistema, la cosa diventa molto interessante.
Perché l’AI non è utile quando fa scena.
È utile quando ti evita un errore, ti accorcia un processo, ti anticipa un problema o ti fa prendere una decisione migliore.
I numeri del report NVIDIA fanno capire dove stiamo andando
Nel report NVIDIA emergono alcuni dati molto forti.
L’87% degli intervistati dichiara che l’AI ha avuto un impatto positivo sull’aumento dei ricavi annuali.
Il 94% afferma che l’AI ha contribuito a ridurre i costi operativi.
Il 97% prevede di aumentare la spesa in AI nel prossimo anno fiscale.
Sono numeri da prendere con attenzione, come sempre quando si parla di survey aziendali, ma il messaggio è chiaro: le aziende che stanno investendo in AI iniziano a vedere risultati concreti. Non solo immagine. Non solo storytelling. Non solo innovazione da mettere nelle slide.
Risultati.
Più efficienza, più capacità di analisi, più produttività, più controllo sui processi.
E soprattutto una cosa che secondo me sarà sempre più centrale: decisioni più veloci e più basate sui dati.
La Generative AI è già dentro il marketing
Uno dei punti più interessanti del report riguarda la Generative AI, cioè quella famiglia di tecnologie capace di generare testi, immagini, contenuti, analisi, suggerimenti e conversazioni.
Secondo NVIDIA, oltre l’80% delle aziende retail e CPG sta già usando o testando progetti di Generative AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfgU9f1KHAE&pp=ygUXbWFya2V0aW5nIGdlbmVyYXRpdmUgYWk%3D
Gli utilizzi principali sono:
- creazione di contenuti marketing;
- analisi predittiva;
- pubblicità e marketing personalizzato;
- segmentazione dei clienti;
- assistenti digitali per lo shopping.
Il caso più immediato è quello del marketing.
Oggi un brand può creare contenuti diversi per pubblici diversi, adattare campagne, generare testi, immagini, descrizioni prodotto, newsletter, annunci e post social in modo molto più rapido rispetto al passato.
Però attenzione: secondo me qui c’è un rischio.
Se tutti usano l’AI per generare contenuti, il vero vantaggio non sarà semplicemente “produrre di più”.
Il vantaggio sarà produrre meglio.
Perché una descrizione prodotto generata in automatico può essere tecnicamente corretta, ma fredda. Un post social può essere perfetto nella forma, ma vuoto. Una campagna può essere super personalizzata, ma sembrare finta.
La differenza la farà chi saprà usare l’AI come strumento, non come sostituto del pensiero.
L’AI può aiutarti a scrivere, segmentare, analizzare, testare.
Ma il posizionamento, il tono, l’identità del brand e la sensibilità verso il cliente restano umani.
Almeno per ora 🙂 .
Il negozio fisico diventa più intelligente
Un altro aspetto interessante riguarda i punti vendita fisici.
Secondo il report, nei negozi l’AI viene usata soprattutto per:
- gestione dell’inventario;
- analisi e insight;
- advertising adattivo.
Qui entriamo in una zona molto concreta.
Pensiamo a un negozio che riesce a capire meglio quali prodotti stanno finendo, quali stanno girando poco, quali taglie mancano, quali articoli dovrebbero essere riassortiti prima del weekend o prima di una promozione.
Questo può sembrare banale, ma non lo è.
Chi lavora nei processi sa che la differenza tra “avere il prodotto” e “non averlo” può essere enorme.
Un cliente entra, chiede una taglia, non c’è.
Magari l’articolo esiste in un altro negozio, magari è in magazzino, magari è bloccato in una fase di sistema, magari c’è fisicamente ma non risulta disponibile.
L’AI può aiutare proprio lì: non nel fare magia, ma nel collegare meglio dati, disponibilità, domanda e operatività.
Per me il punto è questo: l’intelligenza artificiale diventa veramente utile quando esce dalla teoria e arriva nei punti sporchi del processo.
Quelli dove oggi perdiamo tempo.
Quelli dove una giacenza non torna.
Quelli dove il sistema dice una cosa e la realtà ne dice un’altra.
Quelli dove il cliente finale vede solo “prodotto non disponibile”, ma dietro c’è un mondo di movimenti, magazzini, flussi, errori, ritardi e dati non allineati.
Supply chain: qui l’AI può fare davvero la differenza
La parte che personalmente trovo più interessante è quella sulla supply chain.
Il report NVIDIA dice che il 59% degli intervistati ritiene che le sfide della supply chain siano aumentate nell’ultimo anno.
E non è difficile capirlo.
Negli ultimi anni abbiamo visto di tutto: crisi geopolitiche, rincari, difficoltà nei trasporti, cambiamenti improvvisi della domanda, consumatori meno prevedibili, e-commerce sempre più esigente, omnicanalità, necessità di consegne rapide, sostenibilità, gestione delle scorte e pressione sui margini.
In questo contesto, l’AI viene usata per migliorare efficienza, ridurre costi e rispondere meglio alle aspettative dei clienti.
Secondo NVIDIA:
- il 58% dice che l’AI sta aiutando a migliorare efficienza operativa e throughput;
- il 45% la usa per ridurre i costi della supply chain;
- il 42% la impiega per rispondere meglio alle aspettative dei clienti;
- l’82% prevede di aumentare gli investimenti in AI per la gestione della supply chain.
Qui secondo me siamo davanti alla parte più concreta di tutta la storia.
Perché nel retail puoi anche avere il marketing più bello del mondo, la campagna perfetta, il sito fatto bene, l’assistente digitale che risponde in tre secondi.
Ma se poi il prodotto non arriva, se il magazzino non è allineato, se la previsione è sbagliata, se la disponibilità è sporca, se il processo è lento, il cliente se ne accorge.
Magari non sa cosa sia una supply chain.
Ma sa benissimo quando un prodotto non è disponibile, quando una consegna ritarda, quando un reso è complicato o quando un’esperienza d’acquisto diventa frustrante.
A customer expresses frustration while speaking to a retail employee at the service counter.L’AI non risolve processi sbagliati
C’è però un punto che secondo me va detto chiaramente.
L’AI non è una bacchetta magica.
Se un’azienda ha dati disordinati, processi confusi, sistemi che non dialogano, anagrafiche sporche, ruoli poco chiari e flussi pieni di eccezioni non governate, l’AI non risolve tutto automaticamente.
Anzi, rischia di amplificare il caos.
Per funzionare bene, l’intelligenza artificiale ha bisogno di una base solida: dati puliti, processi leggibili, responsabilità definite, sistemi integrati e persone capaci di interpretare quello che la tecnologia restituisce.
Questo per me è il grande tema dei prossimi anni.
Non basterà “comprare AI”.
Bisognerà preparare le aziende all’AI.
Che significa mettere ordine nei dati, nei magazzini, nelle procedure, nelle codifiche, nei flussi informativi.
Un algoritmo può aiutarti a prevedere la domanda.
Ma se la tua giacenza non è affidabile, se l’articolo è codificato male, se il trasferimento è registrato in ritardo, se il dato nasce sporco, allora anche la previsione diventa fragile.
La tecnologia è potente, ma non può essere più intelligente del contesto in cui viene inserita.
Il problema dell’AI spiegabile
Un dato del report mi ha colpito molto: una delle principali difficoltà indicate dai retailer è la mancanza di strumenti AI facili da capire e da spiegare.
Questo è un punto enorme.
Perché in azienda non basta che un sistema dica: “fai così”.
Bisogna anche capire perché.
Se l’AI suggerisce di aumentare lo stock di un prodotto, tagliare una linea, cambiare una campagna, modificare un prezzo o spostare merce da un magazzino all’altro, qualcuno deve potersi fidare di quel suggerimento.
E per fidarsi deve capirlo.
Non necessariamente conoscere tutta la matematica dietro l’algoritmo, ma almeno avere una spiegazione leggibile: quali dati ha considerato? Quali pattern ha visto? Quali rischi segnala? Quanto è affidabile la previsione?
L’AI spiegabile sarà fondamentale soprattutto nei contesti operativi.
Perché chi lavora sul campo, in negozio, in magazzino o in produzione, non può semplicemente ricevere ordini da una scatola nera.
Deve poter discutere, verificare, correggere, portare esperienza reale.
La migliore AI, secondo me, non sarà quella che sostituisce le persone.
Sarà quella che rende più forti le persone brave.
Retail, AI agent e physical AI: il prossimo passaggio
NVIDIA parla anche di AI agent e physical AI.
Qui si apre un capitolo molto interessante.
Gli AI agent sono sistemi capaci di eseguire attività più complesse in autonomia: non solo rispondere a una domanda, ma seguire un processo, collegare strumenti, prendere decisioni operative entro certi limiti, coordinare azioni.
Nel retail questo potrebbe significare assistenti che monitorano campagne, analizzano vendite, suggeriscono riordini, preparano report, leggono anomalie, controllano disponibilità, aiutano il customer service e dialogano con i sistemi aziendali.
La physical AI, invece, porta l’intelligenza artificiale nel mondo fisico: robotica, automazione, visione artificiale, magazzini intelligenti, movimentazione, controllo qualità, store analytics.
Ed è qui che il confine tra digitale e operativo diventa sottile.
Perché un conto è un’AI che scrive una mail.
Un altro conto è un’AI che aiuta a capire come muovere prodotti, persone, merci, scaffali, picking, replenishment, consegne e resi.
Nel retail moderno, la differenza la farà sempre di più la capacità di collegare tre mondi: cliente, dato e operazione.
Chi riuscirà a farli parlare bene avrà un vantaggio enorme.
La mia riflessione
La cosa più interessante di questo report non è solo che l’AI sta crescendo.
È che sta diventando normale.
E quando una tecnologia diventa normale, smette di essere una moda e inizia a cambiare davvero il lavoro.
Oggi l’AI nel retail non è più solo una promessa da keynote.
È già dentro il marketing, dentro l’e-commerce, dentro i negozi, dentro la supply chain, dentro le decisioni aziendali.
Ma la vera domanda non è: “Useremo l’AI ?”
La vera domanda è: saremo pronti a usarla bene ?
Perché adottare AI non significa automaticamente innovare.
Innovare significa usarla per migliorare processi reali, ridurre sprechi, aiutare le persone, servire meglio i clienti e prendere decisioni più intelligenti.
Il retail del futuro non sarà fatto solo da negozi più digitali o siti più personalizzati.
Sarà fatto da aziende capaci di leggere prima quello che sta succedendo, reagire più velocemente e costruire esperienze più coerenti tra fisico e digitale.
E forse, alla fine, l’AI più utile non sarà quella che ci stupisce.
Sarà quella che lavora silenziosamente dietro le quinte, sistemando problemi prima che diventino visibili.
Un po’ come succede nei migliori processi logistici: quando funzionano bene, nessuno li nota.
Ma quando non funzionano, se ne accorgono tutti.
#9Su10 #ai #CHATGPT #nvidia #retail #uso -
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
The Squad. Four politicians who somehow turned Twitter discourse into an entire governing philosophy. Humanity really looked at cable news food fights and said, “yes, let’s elect the comment section.” Still, if I’m picking the public figures I disagree with the most, it’s probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib as a collective political force. Not because they’re loud. Politics has always been loud. Not because they’re progressive. America has room for every ideology short of “maybe raccoons should run the IRS.” It’s because they often seem more interested in performance than practical outcomes.
Back in the 90s tech era, there was this unspoken engineering rule: if your system crashes every ten minutes, it doesn’t matter how flashy the interface looks. Function mattered. Stability mattered. Results mattered. You could have the coolest glowing CGI intro on your website, complete with MIDI music and “under construction” GIFs spinning like a slot machine designed by caffeine addicts, but if the page took four minutes to load on a 56k modem, people bailed. Politics feels similar now. The Squad mastered the aesthetics of outrage culture before most politicians even understood the internet had escaped AOL chatrooms.
What frustrates me is the substitution of slogans for systems. Real governance is ugly, tedious work. It’s database maintenance for civilization. Nobody claps when the infrastructure patch installs correctly. Nobody trends hashtags over balanced budgets or functional transit systems. But that’s the actual job. The Squad often approaches politics like social media firmware updates pushed directly into public consciousness without regression testing. Every issue becomes a moral spectacle, every disagreement gets framed as existential warfare, and compromise gets treated like corrupted code.
The bigger issue is how this style infected everybody else. Republicans became more theatrical. Democrats became more theatrical. Cable news became an endless loop of emotional overclocking. The political operating system now runs entirely on engagement metrics. Rage is profitable. Nuance dies instantly because nuance doesn’t fit into a viral clip squeezed between ads for erectile dysfunction medication and reverse mortgages. Civilization built the Information Age and somehow used it mostly to scream at strangers holding fish-eye phone cameras in parking lots.
I also think The Squad represents a broader misunderstanding of economics and human behavior. You can’t simply declare idealism into existence. Incentives matter. Markets matter. Human beings are irrational little goblins who will absolutely exploit loopholes if you leave them open long enough. Any political worldview that ignores trade-offs eventually collapses under its own weight like an overclocked Pentium processor with no cooling fan. Sparks everywhere. Smell of melted plastic. Entire room smelling like regret.
That said, disagreement isn’t hatred. I don’t think these women are evil. I think they sincerely believe they’re improving the country. Intent matters. But good intentions alone are how you end up with software updates that delete entire hard drives because someone skipped quality assurance testing at 2 AM after six energy drinks and a motivational TED Talk.
The deeper problem is that modern politics rewards emotional branding more than competence. The Squad didn’t create that culture. They optimized for it better than almost anyone else. And honestly, that’s the most terrifying part.
-
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
The Squad. Four politicians who somehow turned Twitter discourse into an entire governing philosophy. Humanity really looked at cable news food fights and said, “yes, let’s elect the comment section.” Still, if I’m picking the public figures I disagree with the most, it’s probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib as a collective political force. Not because they’re loud. Politics has always been loud. Not because they’re progressive. America has room for every ideology short of “maybe raccoons should run the IRS.” It’s because they often seem more interested in performance than practical outcomes.
Back in the 90s tech era, there was this unspoken engineering rule: if your system crashes every ten minutes, it doesn’t matter how flashy the interface looks. Function mattered. Stability mattered. Results mattered. You could have the coolest glowing CGI intro on your website, complete with MIDI music and “under construction” GIFs spinning like a slot machine designed by caffeine addicts, but if the page took four minutes to load on a 56k modem, people bailed. Politics feels similar now. The Squad mastered the aesthetics of outrage culture before most politicians even understood the internet had escaped AOL chatrooms.
What frustrates me is the substitution of slogans for systems. Real governance is ugly, tedious work. It’s database maintenance for civilization. Nobody claps when the infrastructure patch installs correctly. Nobody trends hashtags over balanced budgets or functional transit systems. But that’s the actual job. The Squad often approaches politics like social media firmware updates pushed directly into public consciousness without regression testing. Every issue becomes a moral spectacle, every disagreement gets framed as existential warfare, and compromise gets treated like corrupted code.
The bigger issue is how this style infected everybody else. Republicans became more theatrical. Democrats became more theatrical. Cable news became an endless loop of emotional overclocking. The political operating system now runs entirely on engagement metrics. Rage is profitable. Nuance dies instantly because nuance doesn’t fit into a viral clip squeezed between ads for erectile dysfunction medication and reverse mortgages. Civilization built the Information Age and somehow used it mostly to scream at strangers holding fish-eye phone cameras in parking lots.
I also think The Squad represents a broader misunderstanding of economics and human behavior. You can’t simply declare idealism into existence. Incentives matter. Markets matter. Human beings are irrational little goblins who will absolutely exploit loopholes if you leave them open long enough. Any political worldview that ignores trade-offs eventually collapses under its own weight like an overclocked Pentium processor with no cooling fan. Sparks everywhere. Smell of melted plastic. Entire room smelling like regret.
That said, disagreement isn’t hatred. I don’t think these women are evil. I think they sincerely believe they’re improving the country. Intent matters. But good intentions alone are how you end up with software updates that delete entire hard drives because someone skipped quality assurance testing at 2 AM after six energy drinks and a motivational TED Talk.
The deeper problem is that modern politics rewards emotional branding more than competence. The Squad didn’t create that culture. They optimized for it better than almost anyone else. And honestly, that’s the most terrifying part.
-
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
The Squad. Four politicians who somehow turned Twitter discourse into an entire governing philosophy. Humanity really looked at cable news food fights and said, “yes, let’s elect the comment section.” Still, if I’m picking the public figures I disagree with the most, it’s probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib as a collective political force. Not because they’re loud. Politics has always been loud. Not because they’re progressive. America has room for every ideology short of “maybe raccoons should run the IRS.” It’s because they often seem more interested in performance than practical outcomes.
Back in the 90s tech era, there was this unspoken engineering rule: if your system crashes every ten minutes, it doesn’t matter how flashy the interface looks. Function mattered. Stability mattered. Results mattered. You could have the coolest glowing CGI intro on your website, complete with MIDI music and “under construction” GIFs spinning like a slot machine designed by caffeine addicts, but if the page took four minutes to load on a 56k modem, people bailed. Politics feels similar now. The Squad mastered the aesthetics of outrage culture before most politicians even understood the internet had escaped AOL chatrooms.
What frustrates me is the substitution of slogans for systems. Real governance is ugly, tedious work. It’s database maintenance for civilization. Nobody claps when the infrastructure patch installs correctly. Nobody trends hashtags over balanced budgets or functional transit systems. But that’s the actual job. The Squad often approaches politics like social media firmware updates pushed directly into public consciousness without regression testing. Every issue becomes a moral spectacle, every disagreement gets framed as existential warfare, and compromise gets treated like corrupted code.
The bigger issue is how this style infected everybody else. Republicans became more theatrical. Democrats became more theatrical. Cable news became an endless loop of emotional overclocking. The political operating system now runs entirely on engagement metrics. Rage is profitable. Nuance dies instantly because nuance doesn’t fit into a viral clip squeezed between ads for erectile dysfunction medication and reverse mortgages. Civilization built the Information Age and somehow used it mostly to scream at strangers holding fish-eye phone cameras in parking lots.
I also think The Squad represents a broader misunderstanding of economics and human behavior. You can’t simply declare idealism into existence. Incentives matter. Markets matter. Human beings are irrational little goblins who will absolutely exploit loopholes if you leave them open long enough. Any political worldview that ignores trade-offs eventually collapses under its own weight like an overclocked Pentium processor with no cooling fan. Sparks everywhere. Smell of melted plastic. Entire room smelling like regret.
That said, disagreement isn’t hatred. I don’t think these women are evil. I think they sincerely believe they’re improving the country. Intent matters. But good intentions alone are how you end up with software updates that delete entire hard drives because someone skipped quality assurance testing at 2 AM after six energy drinks and a motivational TED Talk.
The deeper problem is that modern politics rewards emotional branding more than competence. The Squad didn’t create that culture. They optimized for it better than almost anyone else. And honestly, that’s the most terrifying part.
-
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
The Squad. Four politicians who somehow turned Twitter discourse into an entire governing philosophy. Humanity really looked at cable news food fights and said, “yes, let’s elect the comment section.” Still, if I’m picking the public figures I disagree with the most, it’s probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib as a collective political force. Not because they’re loud. Politics has always been loud. Not because they’re progressive. America has room for every ideology short of “maybe raccoons should run the IRS.” It’s because they often seem more interested in performance than practical outcomes.
Back in the 90s tech era, there was this unspoken engineering rule: if your system crashes every ten minutes, it doesn’t matter how flashy the interface looks. Function mattered. Stability mattered. Results mattered. You could have the coolest glowing CGI intro on your website, complete with MIDI music and “under construction” GIFs spinning like a slot machine designed by caffeine addicts, but if the page took four minutes to load on a 56k modem, people bailed. Politics feels similar now. The Squad mastered the aesthetics of outrage culture before most politicians even understood the internet had escaped AOL chatrooms.
What frustrates me is the substitution of slogans for systems. Real governance is ugly, tedious work. It’s database maintenance for civilization. Nobody claps when the infrastructure patch installs correctly. Nobody trends hashtags over balanced budgets or functional transit systems. But that’s the actual job. The Squad often approaches politics like social media firmware updates pushed directly into public consciousness without regression testing. Every issue becomes a moral spectacle, every disagreement gets framed as existential warfare, and compromise gets treated like corrupted code.
The bigger issue is how this style infected everybody else. Republicans became more theatrical. Democrats became more theatrical. Cable news became an endless loop of emotional overclocking. The political operating system now runs entirely on engagement metrics. Rage is profitable. Nuance dies instantly because nuance doesn’t fit into a viral clip squeezed between ads for erectile dysfunction medication and reverse mortgages. Civilization built the Information Age and somehow used it mostly to scream at strangers holding fish-eye phone cameras in parking lots.
I also think The Squad represents a broader misunderstanding of economics and human behavior. You can’t simply declare idealism into existence. Incentives matter. Markets matter. Human beings are irrational little goblins who will absolutely exploit loopholes if you leave them open long enough. Any political worldview that ignores trade-offs eventually collapses under its own weight like an overclocked Pentium processor with no cooling fan. Sparks everywhere. Smell of melted plastic. Entire room smelling like regret.
That said, disagreement isn’t hatred. I don’t think these women are evil. I think they sincerely believe they’re improving the country. Intent matters. But good intentions alone are how you end up with software updates that delete entire hard drives because someone skipped quality assurance testing at 2 AM after six energy drinks and a motivational TED Talk.
The deeper problem is that modern politics rewards emotional branding more than competence. The Squad didn’t create that culture. They optimized for it better than almost anyone else. And honestly, that’s the most terrifying part.
-
As I stand out by the road to get signal to scroll the morning news, as I still have no Internet, it occurs to me that #China Xi Is laughing to himself and behind closed doors to his countrymen, this is the best #America had to send me to talk to, China now number 1 by default; ok so maybe he is maybe he is not laughing but he is wondering why he is talking to a bunch of grade school morons, when he has an actual country to govern;
You can encourage my continued useless #poetry, creativity and expression of self, #commentary, random thoughts, #philosophy and ideas, and by doing so your helping to feed, house and clothe a #disabled man living in #poverty, $5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…. -
As I stand out by the road to get signal to scroll the morning news, as I still have no Internet, it occurs to me that #China Xi Is laughing to himself and behind closed doors to his countrymen, this is the best #America had to send me to talk to, China now number 1 by default; ok so maybe he is maybe he is not laughing but he is wondering why he is talking to a bunch of grade school morons, when he has an actual country to govern;
You can encourage my continued useless #poetry, creativity and expression of self, #commentary, random thoughts, #philosophy and ideas, and by doing so your helping to feed, house and clothe a #disabled man living in #poverty, $5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…. -
As I stand out by the road to get signal to scroll the morning news, as I still have no Internet, it occurs to me that #China Xi Is laughing to himself and behind closed doors to his countrymen, this is the best #America had to send me to talk to, China now number 1 by default; ok so maybe he is maybe he is not laughing but he is wondering why he is talking to a bunch of grade school morons, when he has an actual country to govern;
You can encourage my continued useless #poetry, creativity and expression of self, #commentary, random thoughts, #philosophy and ideas, and by doing so your helping to feed, house and clothe a #disabled man living in #poverty, $5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…. -
This thread was originally written and published in March 2024.
For no good reason, I decided to make a chart that shows the changing political make-up of Edinburgh’s municipal government in the last 124 years. It’s a graph whose changing colours and gradients tell lots of different political and historical stories about municipal government in that time, so let’s pick apart 124 years of Edinburgh’s political local history and find out what was going on and why, shall we?
Seat make-up of Edinburgh Town / District / City Council after Municipal Elections, 1920-presentFirst things first, we need to get a few things out of the way. In doing so it helps to avoid coming to the wrong conclusions about the graph and helps to understand what’s going on in the background and how the local electoral system has changed over time.
Until 1974, people voted for the Town Council, which was the elected1 component of what was known formally as the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council of the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh but almost universally as just the Corporation. The city was divided up into wards, as it is now, and each ward had three councillors, one of whom was elected each year on rotation. Each councillor served a three year term after which they retired but could stand again for re-election. This meant that voters were expected to vote annually for one councillor, the ballots of which were always held in the first week of November until in 1948 they were shifted to May. If a councillor stepped down or died during their term of office there would either be a by-election or if it was close to the next election then two seats would be up for grabs. Very occasionally, the entire Town Council was up for vote, e.g. after the amalgamation of Edinburgh and Leith in 1920 and when the date of ballots moved from November to May in 1948.
The Town Council in April 1961, the Lord Provost (John Greig Dunbar) and Bailies (senior Magistrates) sit at the head of the meeting. The Labour members are on the left, the Progressives on the right © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1974, voters went to the polls to vote for members of the new District Council. The District was the lower tier of municipal government established by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. Edinburgh, Mid-, East and West Lothian Districts together formed the upper tier; Lothian Regional Council. This new system came into effect on May 16th 1975 and had votes every three (later four) years for the entire council, with a single councillor elected per ward on a first-past-the-post system. In 1995, voters went to the polls for the unitary authority of the City (of Edinburgh) Council as a result of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 which abolished the Regional Councils and devolved their powers to new unitary authorities based roughly on the Districts (or closely, in the case of Edinburgh). City Council elections followed the same electoral system as the District until 2007, when the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004 changed this to a multi-member ward system, with three or four councillors elected every five years by proportional representation.
n.b. The graphs do not show the results of any intermediate by-elections, or the proportion of votes cast, it only shows the proportion of seats on the council that were held by each political grouping after the election of that year.
1920s. Moderates and Socialists
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1920-30Our graph starts at 1920, when a full Town Council election was held on account of Leith having just been incorporated in to the City under the terms of the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920. The city was completely dominated at this time by the purple of the Moderates – not a formal party, but a political bloc of small-c conservatives, Liberals, Unionists, Liberal-Unionists and Independents who were strongly aligned to the Church of Scotland and whose purpose was largely to keep the right sort of people running the city and keep the red Socialists2 of Labour out.
Central Edinburgh Constituency Labour Party banner, 1925. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Moderates were effective in the latter purpose but inevitably Edinburgh’s first Labour councillor was elected on November 2nd 1909 when dentist John Alexander Young was returned for the Dalry ward. Although by 1930 Labour had crept slowly up to sixteen councillors – after a jump from 6 to 14 in 1926, (just shy of 1/4 of the Council – there was still no sign of the city “going red” as was threatening in Glasgow. Just peeping in at the top in 1930 is the thin grey line of a single independent councillor, Alexander Thomson, who would shift his allegiance to the Moderates in 1933.
1930s. Progressives and Protestants
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1930-44Between 1930 and 1940 there were two big changes in the Town Council – none of which actually affected who actually ran the City. In 1936 the loose, purple assemblage of the Moderates re-constituted themselves as the dark blue band of the Progressives, a more formally constituted party to counter the threat posed by Labour. On the formation of the Glasgow Progressives, where by now Labour was in control of the Town Council, the Scotsman described them as “an organisation which would effectively combat the Socialist menace, break down the apathy of many citizens, and co-ordinate all Moderate opinion in the city.” The other big change during this time was the brief but rapid rise and fall of the black band of John Cormack’s Protestant Action Society.
The banner of Loyal Orange Lodge no. 188, who style themselves “Cormack’s Protestant Defenders” on parade in Edinburgh, Lodge photo from public facebook group.Protestant Action were an extreme, anti-Catholic organisation whose basic platform was “No Popery“. Cormack made a habit of causing trouble wherever he could, stoking sectarian tensions in overcrowded and underprivileged wards, whipping up his supporters into violence and occasional riots, but always careful to be able to absolve himself of the blame. He formed his party in 1933 and in 1934’s election it got one councillor on 6% of the popular vote. By 1935 it got 21% and three seats, peaking in 1936 with a worrying 31% of the vote and nine seats. But not even Cormack’s force of oratory could hold his unruly grouping together; the established Protestant power of the Orange Order would have little to do with them. They picked fights with the fascists and the communists and then they picked fights amongst themselves. Support for Protestant Action soon waned and in the last pre-war municipal election of 1938 they had dropped back to 12% and 6 seats. John Cormack however would cling on to his seat in South Leith, becoming the “Father of the Council” in 1956 as its longest serving member. This seniority entitled him to the office of Bailie, one that conferred significant authority. He retired in 1961.
Post-war. Labour Rising
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1944-55On the outbreak of war in 1939, the Government suspended municipal elections for the duration and so the Town Council sat, as it was, for the duration. Its representation did change however in 1940 when Dalry Labour councillors David Stephen (1938 election intake) and George Boath (1939 by-election) resigned their party and changed allegiance to the dark red band of the Communists. With no by-elections possible, they continued to serve under this particular banner until elections re-started in 1945 when they were duly voted out at the first opportunity.
Except from “Old Street, Edinburgh” by William Wilson, 1935. A scene looking up the old Elder Street to St. James Square and showing canvassers for the forthcoming general election. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandIn line with the national trend, Labour saw an upsurge in post-war popularity, with its share of 40% of the popular vote translating to an increase to 27 seats, or 40% of the Town Council. This position was reversed in 1949 when they went back to 15 seats and 22% of the popular vote. Again this mirrored popular, national discontent with the Labour government and a recovery in Conservative fortunes. It was not until 1955 that Labour had managed to regain the ground it had lost to the Progressives six years previous, so the political status quo in the city was maintained throughout the decade. Protestant Action lost their seats coming up for re-election in 1945 and 1946, with only John Cormack able to cling on, as the thin black line at the bottom of the graph, from 1947 onwards.
1955-65. Progressive Decline
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1955-65The story of the next ten years was one of a long, slow waning in the fortunes of the Progressives. Throughout the decade Labour was able to make ground against them, until by the 1962 election both parties polled 38.5% of the popular vote, and in 1963 for the first time ever in Edinburgh Labour briefly surpassed the Progressives by this measure, 39.6% vs. 36.0%. But the three year system meant it was a long, slow process to effect political change although Labour had narrowed the gap between them and the Progressives to a single seat (32 vs. 33) by 1964, they were never quite able to bridge it. It cannot be seen in this chart, but in 1965 the Labour local vote collapsed to 27.9%, their worst since 1949, and the Progressives recovered to 58% after a run of five bad years. A new entrant onto the political scene in 1957 was Lady Morton (Hilda Sherwood Morton), who was elected for the orange strip of the Liberals in Merchiston ward. She was the first of her party to do so after it began to stand a few candidates in the city in 1955; by 1963 they had picked up four more for a total of five.
1965-74. End of the Old Order
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1965-74The next ten years following 1965 saw the first big shake-ups on the Edinburgh local political scene beyond the glacially slow 50 year rise of Labour. Most importantly, it was the decade in which party political politics, which had been more or less kept out of Municipal Government for the last 50 years, finally took over. Firstly, in 1962 the Unionist party started standing candidates. This was a centre-right political party that stood for Westminster elections in Scotland and that was aligned to the (English) Conservatives. In other parts of Scotland the National Liberal Party stood; both they and the Unionists took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. In 1965 the Unionists formally merged with the Conservatives to form the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, joined in 1968 by the National Liberals. Just as the Moderates had given way to the Progressives, so to did the Progressives give way to the Conservatives, but over a much longer timescale. Note that the press had long called both the Progressives and the Unionists “Tories“. Most of the Progressive old guard continued to stand as such, but new candidates stood instead as Conservatives. The result was that after their first candidates were elected in 1962, the light blue band of the Conservatives gradually and seamlessly usurped the old party, which finally died out alongside the long-established Town Council in 1974.
During this period, the Labour party found its position for a while squeezed between the strengthened Tory bloc and the insurgent yellow blob of the Scottish National Party, which enjoyed a brief flurry of popularity after Winnie Ewing’s breakthrough victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election. In 1968 they swelled to 35% of the popular local vote in Edinburgh and by 1969 had ten councillors, before rapdily collapsing back to local indifference by 1972 with just 2.9% of the vote. The first Scottish nationalist candidate had stood for the Town Council way back in 1932 but no more stood until 1956-59 when their handful of candidates polled less than 1% of the popular vote.
Jack Kane, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1972-75; official portrait by Alexander Goudie. True to his down-to-earth form, he has eschewed donning his official robes. He was the first Lord Provost to decline the honorary knighthood that his position conferred. © Museums & Galleries EdinburghBy 1972, the SNP threat had gone, the Progressives were in terminal decline and Labour was recovering, and as a result it finally managed to become the largest party on the council, with 33 seats to the opposition’s 30. It had only taken them 63 years since their first councillor was sworn in! Their leader, Jack Kane, was elected Lord Provost that year, the first Labour holder of that post. With the final elections to the old Town Council in 1973, Labour had 34 seats and finally had a majority!
1974-95. District Days
Edinburgh District Council make-up 1974-95In 1974, the residents of Edinburgh went to the polls to vote for their new District Council, which replaced a system of local Government that had been going in one form or another for the past 700 years or more. Interestingly, although archaic titles such as Lord Provost and Bailie were meant to be swept away, they were kept on as honorific positions. The District Council performed many of the functions of the old Edinburgh Corporation, but strategic issues such as Transport, Education, Regional Planning, Police and Fire were run by the upper tier of Regional Councils.
Lothian Regional Council ghost sign, 20 plus years after that authority ceased to be. Photo © SelfThe results of the first election saw the Conservatives come out as the largest party, with one more seat than Labour. They lacked an overall majority but got it at the next ballot in 1977, with 34 of 67 seats. This marked the high point of the Conservative party in Edinburgh’s local government, and they have been in decline ever since. After the election of 1984, Labour increasingly dominated local politics. At the final District Council election in 1992, they took 30 of 62 seats, with the (by now) Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power. But by now there were more than two big parties in local politics and the single member wards with first-past-the-post electoral system did not function fairly. The Liberal Democrats in 1992 got 15% of the popular vote but only 3% of the seats. The SNP got 14% of the vote and no seats! Labour were flattered by the system, getting 48% of the seats on 29% of the vote.
1995-. The Rainbow Council
City of Edinburgh Council make-up 1995-2022It was all change again in 1995, when voters at the local elections now went to choose their City Council, a unitary authority based largely on the boundaries and functions of the old District but with the additional responsibilities of the Regions, which would disappear the following year, also. There was no fundamental changes however; Labour continued to dominate, the Conservatives continued their decline and the Liberal Democrats filled the void for the sort of voter who would once have been religiously Moderate or Progressive but who found they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative due to national issues. By 2003, Labour retained a slim majority (31 of 59 seats), with the Liberal Democrats the next largest bloc on 15.
The SNP had a real problem however – they were reliably getting 15-30% of the popular vote in the Council elections but rarely picked up seats; they gone 1.7% of the seats on 21.5% of the vote in 1999. Labour in contrast had more than 50% of the seats on less than one third of the vote. This democratic deficit was remedied in 2007 when a new system of multi-member wars elected by Single Transferable Vote (proportional representation) was brought in. This had the immediate effect of giving the long-suppressed SNP a huge boost, with one fifth of the popular vote and council seats gained that year. The change was disastrous for Labour however, whose commanding position was built on the shaky foundations of an unrepresentative electoral system and their number of seats more than halved, to one much more in line with their overall popularity. The changes also let in the Scottish Green Party, who after standing candidates in one form or another in the city since 1980 finally picked up 3 seats. Rainbow politics had finally arrived!
The story of the rest of the period covered by our graph is largely now the story of Scottish and British national politics. The Conservatives continued to decline in popularity, but got a post-2014 Independence Referendum boost; the Liberal Democrats were punished heavily in 2012 after their coalition government at Westminster with the former party, and their recovery has been slow and largely concentrated in their traditional base of the west of the city. Labour have been largely unable to capitalise on these changes however – caught between any number of local and national issues – as the SNP and Green popular vote has held up and continued to creep upwards, with a combined 40% in 2017 and 2022.
Portobello political window in 2014. National politics has now come to dominate local politics. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe last local election in 2022 was one fought heavily on manifestos of national issues, despite these not being something that any local Council has any jurisdiction in. As a result, it saw the Conservative turn in their worst ever result for the Moderate-Progressive-Conservative bloc in the 122 years of our graph, with just 18% of the vote and 14% (nine) seats. Labour managed only 19% of the vote and 20% of the seats, their second-worst result in 100 years and yet somehow managed to pull various political strings and favours to run a minority administration; something the SNP failed to have sufficient support from their opposition to do, despite remaining the largest party by both seats and popular vote.
Who knows what 2027 might bring!
- There was an honorary seat on the Town Council for each of the Deacon Conveners (senior office holders) of the Merchant Company and the Incorporated Trades, meaning two members of the Town Council were unelected ↩︎
- The Scotsman perceived the Socialists as an extreme threat to the established order of the city and was strongly and persistently hostile to them in the 1920s through to the 1940s. In its reporting it almost always referred to them as just “the Socialists” ↩︎
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Moderates, Progressives, Communists and Protestants: the thread about 122 years of local political change in Edinburgh
For no good reason, I decided to make a chart that shows the changing political make-up of Edinburgh’s municipal government in the last 124 years. It’s a graph whose changing colours and gradients tell lots of different political and historical stories about municipal government in that time, so let’s pick apart 124 years of Edinburgh’s political local history and find out what was going on and why, shall we?
Seat make-up of Edinburgh Town / District / City Council after Municipal Elections, 1920-presentFirst things first, we need to get a few things out of the way. In doing so it helps to avoid coming to the wrong conclusions about the graph and helps to understand what’s going on in the background and how the local electoral system has changed over time.
Until 1974, people voted for the Town Council, which was the elected1 component of what was known formally as the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council of the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh but almost universally as just the Corporation. The city was divided up into wards, as it is now, and each ward had three councillors, one of whom was elected each year on rotation. Each councillor served a three year term after which they retired but could stand again for re-election. This meant that voters were expected to vote annually for one councillor, the ballots of which were always held in the first week of November until in 1948 they were shifted to May. If a councillor stepped down or died during their term of office there would either be a by-election or if it was close to the next election then two seats would be up for grabs. Very occasionally, the entire Town Council was up for vote, e.g. after the amalgamation of Edinburgh and Leith in 1920 and when the date of ballots moved from November to May in 1948.
The Town Council in April 1961, the Lord Provost (John Greig Dunbar) and Bailies (senior Magistrates) sit at the head of the meeting. The Labour members are on the left, the Progressives on the right © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1974, voters went to the polls to vote for members of the new District Council. The District was the lower tier of municipal government established by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. Edinburgh, Mid-, East and West Lothian Districts together formed the upper tier; Lothian Regional Council. This new system came into effect on May 16th 1975 and had votes every three (later four) years for the entire council, with a single councillor elected per ward on a first-past-the-post system. In 1995, voters went to the polls for the unitary authority of the City (of Edinburgh) Council as a result of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 which abolished the Regional Councils and devolved their powers to new unitary authorities based roughly on the Districts (or closely, in the case of Edinburgh). City Council elections followed the same electoral system as the District until 2007, when the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004 changed this to a multi-member ward system, with three or four councillors elected every five years by proportional representation.
n.b. The graphs do not show the results of any intermediate by-elections, or the proportion of votes cast, it only shows the proportion of seats on the council that were held by each political grouping after the election of that year.
1920s. Moderates and Socialists
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1920-30Our graph starts at 1920, when a full Town Council election was held on account of Leith having just been incorporated in to the City under the terms of the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920. The city was completely dominated at this time by the purple of the Moderates – not a formal party, but a political bloc of small-c conservatives, Liberals, Unionists, Liberal-Unionists and Independents who were strongly aligned to the Church of Scotland and whose purpose was largely to keep the right sort of people running the city and keep the red Socialists2 of Labour out.
Central Edinburgh Constituency Labour Party banner, 1925. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Moderates were effective in the latter purpose but inevitably Edinburgh’s first Labour councillor was elected on November 2nd 1909 when dentist John Alexander Young was returned for the Dalry ward. Although by 1930 Labour had crept slowly up to sixteen councillors – after a jump from 6 to 14 in 1926, (just shy of 1/4 of the Council – there was still no sign of the city “going red” as was threatening in Glasgow. Just peeping in at the top in 1930 is the thin grey line of a single independent councillor, Alexander Thomson, who would shift his allegiance to the Moderates in 1933.
1930s. Progressives and Protestants
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1930-44Between 1930 and 1940 there were two big changes in the Town Council – none of which actually affected who actually ran the City. In 1936 the loose, purple assemblage of the Moderates re-constituted themselves as the dark blue band of the Progressives, a more formally constituted party to counter the threat posed by Labour. On the formation of the Glasgow Progressives, where by now Labour was in control of the Town Council, the Scotsman described them as “an organisation which would effectively combat the Socialist menace, break down the apathy of many citizens, and co-ordinate all Moderate opinion in the city.” The other big change during this time was the brief but rapid rise and fall of the black band of John Cormack’s Protestant Action Society.
The banner of Loyal Orange Lodge no. 188, who style themselves “Cormack’s Protestant Defenders” on parade in Edinburgh, Lodge photo from public facebook group.Protestant Action were an extreme, anti-Catholic organisation whose basic platform was “No Popery“. Cormack made a habit of causing trouble wherever he could, stoking sectarian tensions in overcrowded and underprivileged wards, whipping up his supporters into violence and occasional riots, but always careful to be able to absolve himself of the blame. He formed his party in 1933 and in 1934’s election it got one councillor on 6% of the popular vote. By 1935 it got 21% and three seats, peaking in 1936 with a worrying 31% of the vote and nine seats. But not even Cormack’s force of oratory could hold his unruly grouping together; the established Protestant power of the Orange Order would have little to do with them. They picked fights with the fascists and the communists and then they picked fights amongst themselves. Support for Protestant Action soon waned and in the last pre-war municipal election of 1938 they had dropped back to 12% and 6 seats. John Cormack however would cling on to his seat in South Leith, becoming the “Father of the Council” in 1956 as its longest serving member. This seniority entitled him to the office of Bailie, one that conferred significant authority. He retired in 1961.
Post-war. Labour Rising
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1944-55On the outbreak of war in 1939, the Government suspended municipal elections for the duration and so the Town Council sat, as it was, for the duration. Its representation did change however in 1940 when Dalry Labour councillors David Stephen (1938 election intake) and George Boath (1939 by-election) resigned their party and changed allegiance to the dark red band of the Communists. With no by-elections possible, they continued to serve under this particular banner until elections re-started in 1945 when they were duly voted out at the first opportunity.
Except from “Old Street, Edinburgh” by William Wilson, 1935. A scene looking up the old Elder Street to St. James Square and showing canvassers for the forthcoming general election. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandIn line with the national trend, Labour saw an upsurge in post-war popularity, with its share of 40% of the popular vote translating to an increase to 27 seats, or 40% of the Town Council. This position was reversed in 1949 when they went back to 15 seats and 22% of the popular vote. Again this mirrored popular, national discontent with the Labour government and a recovery in Conservative fortunes. It was not until 1955 that Labour had managed to regain the ground it had lost to the Progressives six years previous, so the political status quo in the city was maintained throughout the decade. Protestant Action lost their seats coming up for re-election in 1945 and 1946, with only John Cormack able to cling on, as the thin black line at the bottom of the graph, from 1947 onwards.
1955-65. Progressive Decline
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1955-65The story of the next ten years was one of a long, slow waning in the fortunes of the Progressives. Throughout the decade Labour was able to make ground against them, until by the 1962 election both parties polled 38.5% of the popular vote, and in 1963 for the first time ever in Edinburgh Labour briefly surpassed the Progressives by this measure, 39.6% vs. 36.0%. But the three year system meant it was a long, slow process to effect political change although Labour had narrowed the gap between them and the Progressives to a single seat (32 vs. 33) by 1964, they were never quite able to bridge it. It cannot be seen in this chart, but in 1965 the Labour local vote collapsed to 27.9%, their worst since 1949, and the Progressives recovered to 58% after a run of five bad years. A new entrant onto the political scene in 1957 was Lady Morton (Hilda Sherwood Morton), who was elected for the orange strip of the Liberals in Merchiston ward. She was the first of her party to do so after it began to stand a few candidates in the city in 1955; by 1963 they had picked up four more for a total of five.
1965-74. End of the Old Order
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1965-74The next ten years following 1965 saw the first big shake-ups on the Edinburgh local political scene beyond the glacially slow 50 year rise of Labour. Most importantly, it was the decade in which party political politics, which had been more or less kept out of Municipal Government for the last 50 years, finally took over. Firstly, in 1962 the Unionist party started standing candidates. This was a centre-right political party that stood for Westminster elections in Scotland and that was aligned to the (English) Conservatives. In other parts of Scotland the National Liberal Party stood; both they and the Unionists took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. In 1965 the Unionists formally merged with the Conservatives to form the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, joined in 1968 by the National Liberals. Just as the Moderates had given way to the Progressives, so to did the Progressives give way to the Conservatives, but over a much longer timescale. Note that the press had long called both the Progressives and the Unionists “Tories“. Most of the Progressive old guard continued to stand as such, but new candidates stood instead as Conservatives. The result was that after their first candidates were elected in 1962, the light blue band of the Conservatives gradually and seamlessly usurped the old party, which finally died out alongside the long-established Town Council in 1974.
During this period, the Labour party found its position for a while squeezed between the strengthened Tory bloc and the insurgent yellow blob of the Scottish National Party, which enjoyed a brief flurry of popularity after Winnie Ewing’s breakthrough victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election. In 1968 they swelled to 35% of the popular local vote in Edinburgh and by 1969 had ten councillors, before rapdily collapsing back to local indifference by 1972 with just 2.9% of the vote. The first Scottish nationalist candidate had stood for the Town Council way back in 1932 but no more stood until 1956-59 when their handful of candidates polled less than 1% of the popular vote.
Jack Kane, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1972-75; official portrait by Alexander Goudie. True to his down-to-earth form, he has eschewed donning his official robes. He was the first Lord Provost to decline the honorary knighthood that his position conferred. © Museums & Galleries EdinburghBy 1972, the SNP threat had gone, the Progressives were in terminal decline and Labour was recovering, and as a result it finally managed to become the largest party on the council, with 33 seats to the opposition’s 30. It had only taken them 63 years since their first councillor was sworn in! Their leader, Jack Kane, was elected Lord Provost that year, the first Labour holder of that post. With the final elections to the old Town Council in 1973, Labour had 34 seats and finally had a majority!
1974-95. District Days
Edinburgh District Council make-up 1974-95In 1974, the residents of Edinburgh went to the polls to vote for their new District Council, which replaced a system of local Government that had been going in one form or another for the past 700 years or more. Interestingly, although archaic titles such as Lord Provost and Bailie were meant to be swept away, they were kept on as honorific positions. The District Council performed many of the functions of the old Edinburgh Corporation, but strategic issues such as Transport, Education, Regional Planning, Police and Fire were run by the upper tier of Regional Councils. The District also expanded the boundaries of the City to include outlying areas such as Currie, Balerno, Kirkliston and South Queensferry, which had previously been semi-independent Districts (or in the case of Queensferry, a Burgh) within the old Midlothian County (thank you to Paul Cockburn for pointing this fact out).
Lothian Regional Council ghost sign, 20 plus years after that authority ceased to be. Photo © SelfThe results of the first election saw the Conservatives come out as the largest party, with one more seat than Labour. They lacked an overall majority but got it at the next ballot in 1977, with 34 of 67 seats. This marked the high point of the Conservative party in Edinburgh’s local government, and they have been in decline ever since. After the election of 1984, Labour increasingly dominated local politics. At the final District Council election in 1992, they took 30 of 62 seats, with the (by now) Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power. But by now there were more than two big parties in local politics and the single member wards with first-past-the-post electoral system did not function fairly. The Liberal Democrats in 1992 got 15% of the popular vote but only 3% of the seats. The SNP got 14% of the vote and no seats! Labour were flattered by the system, getting 48% of the seats on 29% of the vote.
1995-. The Rainbow Council
City of Edinburgh Council make-up 1995-2022It was all change again in 1995, when voters at the local elections now went to choose their City Council, a unitary authority based largely on the boundaries and functions of the old District but with the additional responsibilities of the Regions, which would disappear the following year, also. There was no fundamental changes however; Labour continued to dominate, the Conservatives continued their decline and the Liberal Democrats filled the void for the sort of voter who would once have been religiously Moderate or Progressive but who found they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative due to national issues. By 2003, Labour retained a slim majority (31 of 59 seats), with the Liberal Democrats the next largest bloc on 15.
The SNP had a real problem however – they were reliably getting 15-30% of the popular vote in the Council elections but rarely picked up seats; they gone 1.7% of the seats on 21.5% of the vote in 1999. Labour in contrast had more than 50% of the seats on less than one third of the vote. This democratic deficit was remedied in 2007 when a new system of multi-member wards elected by Single Transferable Vote (proportional representation) was brought in. This had the immediate effect of giving the long-suppressed SNP a huge boost, with one fifth of the popular vote and council seats gained that year. The change was disastrous for Labour however, whose commanding position was built on the shaky foundations of an unrepresentative electoral system and their number of seats more than halved, to one much more in line with their overall popularity. The changes also let in the Scottish Green Party, who after standing candidates in one form or another in the city since 1980 finally picked up 3 seats. Rainbow politics had finally arrived!
The story of the rest of the period covered by our graph is largely now the story of Scottish and British national politics. The Conservatives continued to decline in popularity, but got a post-2014 Independence Referendum boost; the Liberal Democrats were punished heavily in 2012 after their coalition government at Westminster with the former party, and their recovery has been slow and largely concentrated in their traditional base of the west of the city. Labour have been largely unable to capitalise on these changes however – caught between any number of local and national issues – as the SNP and Green popular vote has held up and continued to creep upwards, with a combined 40% in 2017 and 2022.
Portobello political window in 2014. National politics has now come to dominate local politics. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe last local election in 2022 was one fought heavily on manifestos of national issues, despite these not being something that any local Council has any jurisdiction in. As a result, it saw the Conservative turn in their worst ever result for the Moderate-Progressive-Conservative bloc in the 122 years of our graph, with just 18% of the vote and 14% (nine) seats. Labour managed only 19% of the vote and 20% of the seats, their second-worst result in 100 years and yet somehow managed to pull various political strings and favours to run a minority administration; something the SNP failed to have sufficient support from their opposition to do, despite remaining the largest party by both seats and popular vote.
Who knows what 2027 might bring!
- There was an honorary seat on the Town Council for each of the Deacon Conveners (senior office holders) of the Merchant Company and the Incorporated Trades, meaning two members of the Town Council were unelected ↩︎
- The Scotsman perceived the Socialists as an extreme threat to the established order of the city and was strongly and persistently hostile to them in the 1920s through to the 1940s. In its reporting it almost always referred to them as just “the Socialists” ↩︎
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This thread was originally written and published in March 2024.
For no good reason, I decided to make a chart that shows the changing political make-up of Edinburgh’s municipal government in the last 124 years. It’s a graph whose changing colours and gradients tell lots of different political and historical stories about municipal government in that time, so let’s pick apart 124 years of Edinburgh’s political local history and find out what was going on and why, shall we?
Seat make-up of Edinburgh Town / District / City Council after Municipal Elections, 1920-presentFirst things first, we need to get a few things out of the way. In doing so it helps to avoid coming to the wrong conclusions about the graph and helps to understand what’s going on in the background and how the local electoral system has changed over time.
Until 1974, people voted for the Town Council, which was the elected1 component of what was known formally as the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council of the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh but almost universally as just the Corporation. The city was divided up into wards, as it is now, and each ward had three councillors, one of whom was elected each year on rotation. Each councillor served a three year term after which they retired but could stand again for re-election. This meant that voters were expected to vote annually for one councillor, the ballots of which were always held in the first week of November until in 1948 they were shifted to May. If a councillor stepped down or died during their term of office there would either be a by-election or if it was close to the next election then two seats would be up for grabs. Very occasionally, the entire Town Council was up for vote, e.g. after the amalgamation of Edinburgh and Leith in 1920 and when the date of ballots moved from November to May in 1948.
The Town Council in April 1961, the Lord Provost (John Greig Dunbar) and Bailies (senior Magistrates) sit at the head of the meeting. The Labour members are on the left, the Progressives on the right © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1974, voters went to the polls to vote for members of the new District Council. The District was the lower tier of municipal government established by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. Edinburgh, Mid-, East and West Lothian Districts together formed the upper tier; Lothian Regional Council. This new system came into effect on May 16th 1975 and had votes every three (later four) years for the entire council, with a single councillor elected per ward on a first-past-the-post system. In 1995, voters went to the polls for the unitary authority of the City (of Edinburgh) Council as a result of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 which abolished the Regional Councils and devolved their powers to new unitary authorities based roughly on the Districts (or closely, in the case of Edinburgh). City Council elections followed the same electoral system as the District until 2007, when the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004 changed this to a multi-member ward system, with three or four councillors elected every five years by proportional representation.
n.b. The graphs do not show the results of any intermediate by-elections, or the proportion of votes cast, it only shows the proportion of seats on the council that were held by each political grouping after the election of that year.
1920s. Moderates and Socialists
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1920-30Our graph starts at 1920, when a full Town Council election was held on account of Leith having just been incorporated in to the City under the terms of the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920. The city was completely dominated at this time by the purple of the Moderates – not a formal party, but a political bloc of small-c conservatives, Liberals, Unionists, Liberal-Unionists and Independents who were strongly aligned to the Church of Scotland and whose purpose was largely to keep the right sort of people running the city and keep the red Socialists2 of Labour out.
Central Edinburgh Constituency Labour Party banner, 1925. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Moderates were effective in the latter purpose but inevitably Edinburgh’s first Labour councillor was elected on November 2nd 1909 when dentist John Alexander Young was returned for the Dalry ward. Although by 1930 Labour had crept slowly up to sixteen councillors – after a jump from 6 to 14 in 1926, (just shy of 1/4 of the Council – there was still no sign of the city “going red” as was threatening in Glasgow. Just peeping in at the top in 1930 is the thin grey line of a single independent councillor, Alexander Thomson, who would shift his allegiance to the Moderates in 1933.
1930s. Progressives and Protestants
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1930-44Between 1930 and 1940 there were two big changes in the Town Council – none of which actually affected who actually ran the City. In 1936 the loose, purple assemblage of the Moderates re-constituted themselves as the dark blue band of the Progressives, a more formally constituted party to counter the threat posed by Labour. On the formation of the Glasgow Progressives, where by now Labour was in control of the Town Council, the Scotsman described them as “an organisation which would effectively combat the Socialist menace, break down the apathy of many citizens, and co-ordinate all Moderate opinion in the city.” The other big change during this time was the brief but rapid rise and fall of the black band of John Cormack’s Protestant Action Society.
The banner of Loyal Orange Lodge no. 188, who style themselves “Cormack’s Protestant Defenders” on parade in Edinburgh, Lodge photo from public facebook group.Protestant Action were an extreme, anti-Catholic organisation whose basic platform was “No Popery“. Cormack made a habit of causing trouble wherever he could, stoking sectarian tensions in overcrowded and underprivileged wards, whipping up his supporters into violence and occasional riots, but always careful to be able to absolve himself of the blame. He formed his party in 1933 and in 1934’s election it got one councillor on 6% of the popular vote. By 1935 it got 21% and three seats, peaking in 1936 with a worrying 31% of the vote and nine seats. But not even Cormack’s force of oratory could hold his unruly grouping together; the established Protestant power of the Orange Order would have little to do with them. They picked fights with the fascists and the communists and then they picked fights amongst themselves. Support for Protestant Action soon waned and in the last pre-war municipal election of 1938 they had dropped back to 12% and 6 seats. John Cormack however would cling on to his seat in South Leith, becoming the “Father of the Council” in 1956 as its longest serving member. This seniority entitled him to the office of Bailie, one that conferred significant authority. He retired in 1961.
Post-war. Labour Rising
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1944-55On the outbreak of war in 1939, the Government suspended municipal elections for the duration and so the Town Council sat, as it was, for the duration. Its representation did change however in 1940 when Dalry Labour councillors David Stephen (1938 election intake) and George Boath (1939 by-election) resigned their party and changed allegiance to the dark red band of the Communists. With no by-elections possible, they continued to serve under this particular banner until elections re-started in 1945 when they were duly voted out at the first opportunity.
Except from “Old Street, Edinburgh” by William Wilson, 1935. A scene looking up the old Elder Street to St. James Square and showing canvassers for the forthcoming general election. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandIn line with the national trend, Labour saw an upsurge in post-war popularity, with its share of 40% of the popular vote translating to an increase to 27 seats, or 40% of the Town Council. This position was reversed in 1949 when they went back to 15 seats and 22% of the popular vote. Again this mirrored popular, national discontent with the Labour government and a recovery in Conservative fortunes. It was not until 1955 that Labour had managed to regain the ground it had lost to the Progressives six years previous, so the political status quo in the city was maintained throughout the decade. Protestant Action lost their seats coming up for re-election in 1945 and 1946, with only John Cormack able to cling on, as the thin black line at the bottom of the graph, from 1947 onwards.
1955-65. Progressive Decline
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1955-65The story of the next ten years was one of a long, slow waning in the fortunes of the Progressives. Throughout the decade Labour was able to make ground against them, until by the 1962 election both parties polled 38.5% of the popular vote, and in 1963 for the first time ever in Edinburgh Labour briefly surpassed the Progressives by this measure, 39.6% vs. 36.0%. But the three year system meant it was a long, slow process to effect political change although Labour had narrowed the gap between them and the Progressives to a single seat (32 vs. 33) by 1964, they were never quite able to bridge it. It cannot be seen in this chart, but in 1965 the Labour local vote collapsed to 27.9%, their worst since 1949, and the Progressives recovered to 58% after a run of five bad years. A new entrant onto the political scene in 1957 was Lady Morton (Hilda Sherwood Morton), who was elected for the orange strip of the Liberals in Merchiston ward. She was the first of her party to do so after it began to stand a few candidates in the city in 1955; by 1963 they had picked up four more for a total of five.
1965-74. End of the Old Order
Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1965-74The next ten years following 1965 saw the first big shake-ups on the Edinburgh local political scene beyond the glacially slow 50 year rise of Labour. Most importantly, it was the decade in which party political politics, which had been more or less kept out of Municipal Government for the last 50 years, finally took over. Firstly, in 1962 the Unionist party started standing candidates. This was a centre-right political party that stood for Westminster elections in Scotland and that was aligned to the (English) Conservatives. In other parts of Scotland the National Liberal Party stood; both they and the Unionists took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. In 1965 the Unionists formally merged with the Conservatives to form the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, joined in 1968 by the National Liberals. Just as the Moderates had given way to the Progressives, so to did the Progressives give way to the Conservatives, but over a much longer timescale. Note that the press had long called both the Progressives and the Unionists “Tories“. Most of the Progressive old guard continued to stand as such, but new candidates stood instead as Conservatives. The result was that after their first candidates were elected in 1962, the light blue band of the Conservatives gradually and seamlessly usurped the old party, which finally died out alongside the long-established Town Council in 1974.
During this period, the Labour party found its position for a while squeezed between the strengthened Tory bloc and the insurgent yellow blob of the Scottish National Party, which enjoyed a brief flurry of popularity after Winnie Ewing’s breakthrough victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election. In 1968 they swelled to 35% of the popular local vote in Edinburgh and by 1969 had ten councillors, before rapdily collapsing back to local indifference by 1972 with just 2.9% of the vote. The first Scottish nationalist candidate had stood for the Town Council way back in 1932 but no more stood until 1956-59 when their handful of candidates polled less than 1% of the popular vote.
Jack Kane, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1972-75; official portrait by Alexander Goudie. True to his down-to-earth form, he has eschewed donning his official robes. He was the first Lord Provost to decline the honorary knighthood that his position conferred. © Museums & Galleries EdinburghBy 1972, the SNP threat had gone, the Progressives were in terminal decline and Labour was recovering, and as a result it finally managed to become the largest party on the council, with 33 seats to the opposition’s 30. It had only taken them 63 years since their first councillor was sworn in! Their leader, Jack Kane, was elected Lord Provost that year, the first Labour holder of that post. With the final elections to the old Town Council in 1973, Labour had 34 seats and finally had a majority!
1974-95. District Days
Edinburgh District Council make-up 1974-95In 1974, the residents of Edinburgh went to the polls to vote for their new District Council, which replaced a system of local Government that had been going in one form or another for the past 700 years or more. Interestingly, although archaic titles such as Lord Provost and Bailie were meant to be swept away, they were kept on as honorific positions. The District Council performed many of the functions of the old Edinburgh Corporation, but strategic issues such as Transport, Education, Regional Planning, Police and Fire were run by the upper tier of Regional Councils.
Lothian Regional Council ghost sign, 20 plus years after that authority ceased to be. Photo © SelfThe results of the first election saw the Conservatives come out as the largest party, with one more seat than Labour. They lacked an overall majority but got it at the next ballot in 1977, with 34 of 67 seats. This marked the high point of the Conservative party in Edinburgh’s local government, and they have been in decline ever since. After the election of 1984, Labour increasingly dominated local politics. At the final District Council election in 1992, they took 30 of 62 seats, with the (by now) Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power. But by now there were more than two big parties in local politics and the single member wards with first-past-the-post electoral system did not function fairly. The Liberal Democrats in 1992 got 15% of the popular vote but only 3% of the seats. The SNP got 14% of the vote and no seats! Labour were flattered by the system, getting 48% of the seats on 29% of the vote.
1995-. The Rainbow Council
City of Edinburgh Council make-up 1995-2022It was all change again in 1995, when voters at the local elections now went to choose their City Council, a unitary authority based largely on the boundaries and functions of the old District but with the additional responsibilities of the Regions, which would disappear the following year, also. There was no fundamental changes however; Labour continued to dominate, the Conservatives continued their decline and the Liberal Democrats filled the void for the sort of voter who would once have been religiously Moderate or Progressive but who found they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative due to national issues. By 2003, Labour retained a slim majority (31 of 59 seats), with the Liberal Democrats the next largest bloc on 15.
The SNP had a real problem however – they were reliably getting 15-30% of the popular vote in the Council elections but rarely picked up seats; they gone 1.7% of the seats on 21.5% of the vote in 1999. Labour in contrast had more than 50% of the seats on less than one third of the vote. This democratic deficit was remedied in 2007 when a new system of multi-member wars elected by Single Transferable Vote (proportional representation) was brought in. This had the immediate effect of giving the long-suppressed SNP a huge boost, with one fifth of the popular vote and council seats gained that year. The change was disastrous for Labour however, whose commanding position was built on the shaky foundations of an unrepresentative electoral system and their number of seats more than halved, to one much more in line with their overall popularity. The changes also let in the Scottish Green Party, who after standing candidates in one form or another in the city since 1980 finally picked up 3 seats. Rainbow politics had finally arrived!
The story of the rest of the period covered by our graph is largely now the story of Scottish and British national politics. The Conservatives continued to decline in popularity, but got a post-2014 Independence Referendum boost; the Liberal Democrats were punished heavily in 2012 after their coalition government at Westminster with the former party, and their recovery has been slow and largely concentrated in their traditional base of the west of the city. Labour have been largely unable to capitalise on these changes however – caught between any number of local and national issues – as the SNP and Green popular vote has held up and continued to creep upwards, with a combined 40% in 2017 and 2022.
Portobello political window in 2014. National politics has now come to dominate local politics. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe last local election in 2022 was one fought heavily on manifestos of national issues, despite these not being something that any local Council has any jurisdiction in. As a result, it saw the Conservative turn in their worst ever result for the Moderate-Progressive-Conservative bloc in the 122 years of our graph, with just 18% of the vote and 14% (nine) seats. Labour managed only 19% of the vote and 20% of the seats, their second-worst result in 100 years and yet somehow managed to pull various political strings and favours to run a minority administration; something the SNP failed to have sufficient support from their opposition to do, despite remaining the largest party by both seats and popular vote.
Who knows what 2027 might bring!
- There was an honorary seat on the Town Council for each of the Deacon Conveners (senior office holders) of the Merchant Company and the Incorporated Trades, meaning two members of the Town Council were unelected ↩︎
- The Scotsman perceived the Socialists as an extreme threat to the established order of the city and was strongly and persistently hostile to them in the 1920s through to the 1940s. In its reporting it almost always referred to them as just “the Socialists” ↩︎
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