In November 2022, Meta fell like a knife.
Most analysts were asking whether the advertising slowdown was cyclical or structural, whether the metaverse bet was visionary or delusional, whether Mark Zuckerberg would right the ship. These are reasonable questions. They are also, I think, the wrong ones.
I was asking something different.
I was asking whether a company that had hired psychiatrists to engineer youth addiction into its core product — and knew it — could ever become something coherent. Whether a platform whose business model required harvesting and monetizing the most intimate details of billions of lives could genuinely change without dismantling the very flywheel that made it valuable. Whether the governance structure, the culture, the DNA of the thing was fixable — or whether the rot was foundational.
I was asking, in other words, about coherence. Not earnings. Not multiples. Not whether the stock was cheap.
Those questions felt fringe in 2022. Meta was rallying by 2023, cutting costs dramatically, riding the AI advertising wave. Conventional analysts were largely right on the near-term trade. The stock recovered. The numbers looked good.
And then, in the span of 48 hours in late March 2026, two juries handed down verdicts that said what the coherence lens had been showing for years: this company knowingly harmed children and prioritized profit over safety. The first verdicts in what may become a wave.
I am not saying I predicted the exact timing of jury verdicts. I didn’t. What I am saying is that the fractures were visible long before the legal system caught up — visible if you were asking the right questions, looking through the right lens.
Now there is genuine excitement about Meta’s ocular push. Smart glasses. Augmented reality. Ocular technologies are genuinely thrilling — the medical applications alone are extraordinary, and autonomous systems will depend on them. I find this space fascinating.
But I keep thinking about Dave Eggers’ The Circle — the novel and film about a tech company that builds a seamless, total-surveillance world and calls it connection, transparency, community. Eggers was writing fiction. Zuckerberg seems to be treating it as a roadmap.
The same company that engineered addiction loops for teenagers, that coordinated with government agencies to shape what information billions of people could see, that internal documents show was knowingly running billions of higher-risk ads daily — this is the company now asking you to put their hardware on your face and let it see what you see.
The coherence question isn’t whether the glasses are good technology. It’s whether this particular company, with this particular culture and this particular track record, can be trusted with this particular category of intimate access.
I don’t think conventional analysis can answer that question. I think the lens of living systems can.
This is what The Pythia Scrolls are built to do.
Most investing trend research gives you snapshots — isolated data points, short-term forecasts, confident conclusions. The Scrolls are something else. They are living records of recursive layering: taking signals from many directions and many timelines — early seeds planted years ago, fresh developments today, hidden incoherences, and emergent possibilities — and allowing them to interact until clearer patterns emerge.
This is how my mind naturally works. I don’t force ideas into neat categories. I let them loop, connect, and reveal what purely linear analysis often misses: the mustard-seed insights that shift how edge founders and investors understand value, resilience, and the next cycle of coherent systems.
The Meta questions I was asking in 2022 were not hot takes. They were the beginning of a thread I have been pulling for years — one that now connects to natural cycles, to how power concentrates and fractures, to what genuine digital sovereignty might look like as an alternative. That thread is still live. The 2026 verdicts are not the end of the story. They are a signal mid-arc.
The Scrolls are where I work through these threads systematically — with a framework grounded in living systems principles, permaculture’s wisdom, and decades of investment pattern recognition across small and large cap markets. Not just intuition. A repeatable process for finding coherence and incoherence before the market does.
You won’t find hot takes or quick predictions there. You’ll find synthesis that respects complexity and long timelines — the kind of thinking that feels obvious once you see it, yet rarely appears in conventional research.
The Scrolls are written for minds that can hold layers and appreciate the difference between surface trends and true coherence. If that way of seeing resonates with you, they are designed as a quiet space for exactly that kind of exploration.
This essay is an excerpt from my ongoing Liminal Space Investing Scroll which is an LSI (Living Systems Investing) trends series exploring structural inversions in once-dominant systems and the coherent alternatives that may emerge. We do not have to wait for the old system to completely collapse before we begin building coherent alternatives.
The full recursive version, along with the broader scrolls series, lives in my new service called The Pythia Scrolls.
Full research available in The Pythia Scrolls service filed under: Liminal Space Investing: Corporate Corruption and Safety Risks