The Blind Spot is relaunching with a streamlined structure and renewed focus on its core mission of providing contrarian, politically aware financial journalism through what it calls “journalistic cartography.” Moving away from overextension, it will now prioritize big-picture analysis and frameworks to help readers navigate the shifting world order.
Central to its outlook is the idea that we are entering a new Romantic era, where passion, identity, and self-reliance increasingly outweigh cold rationalism, shaping both society and markets in unpredictable ways. To meet this challenge, the publication is consolidating subscription tiers, gradually migrating to Substack for better functionality, and launching Cash Equivalence to cover stablecoins and CBDCs, all while staying true to its mission of amplifying contrarian perspectives and challenging mainstream orthodoxies.
Welcome to the new look Blind Spot,
In this week’s edition, we’re getting back to basics, but also announcing our big restructuring. Hence, the suspension of newsletters the past few weeks. Apologies.
We’ve listened to all the reader feedback, and we think it’s time to make some changes. And admissions!
But first, some context.
As our earliest subscribers will remember, we launched the Blind Spot in 2022 in the hope of creating an “off the books” Alphaville-esque service focused on stories that my old parish, the FT, seemed to be dodging. From our point of view, growing internal sensitivities related to politics and culture were forcing us into an ever-narrower lane just as finance was becoming increasingly politicized. The Blind Spot was intended to be an antidote to that.
And well, three years on, not much has changed.
I continue to believe that providing actionable market insight requires reporters and agenda-setters to consider alternative perspectives (from all political vantage points). Mainstream journalists, unfortunately, are still floundering on this front due to the way partisan thinking has afflicted supposedly objective news operations.
Too often, stories that confirm establishment thinking sail through internal editorial processes unimpeded. Checks and balances (and critical judgment) are suspended in favor of speed and urgency. This allows stories like Henry Foy’s erroneous account of Von Der Leyen’s flight from Bulgaria to get out and cause havoc.
On the other hand, if a story challenges the party line, the proverbial rulebook is thrown at the author, requiring about 10x the effort and sourcing to get the story out. The result is an obvious imbalance in the volume of stories that support the party line versus those that do not, simply because one type faces resistance and the other one doesn’t.
That is not to say that editors should never challenge or spike stories that fail to make the grade, or demand higher standards more generally. Doing so is absolutely essential for maintaining quality control. Indeed, if I had a penny for every time an editor has saved me from making a stupid mistake, I’d likely have enough to buy a couple of Mars bars.
But it becomes a problem when there is an inconsistency in terms of how that quality control is applied.
To be clear, I retain the greatest respect for my former FT colleagues. And I think they continue to do an amazing job in so many areas, especially when it comes to hard-graft financial stories that are isolated from politics. But the FT is no longer the place for contrarianism or insightful critique.
It’s no secret I struggled with the groupthink at the paper surrounding Covid lockdowns, Covid origins, and even Biden’s senility. But more recently, I’ve also been disappointed in the paper’s one-track-minded approach to Liz Truss’ mini-budget fiasco (a dead horse they continue to flog), the Trumpian tariffs, and even core finance stories like the basis trade. Rarely is the other perspective presented.
Yet, if investors are to navigate the growing political and economic storm ahead, they need to take efforts to understand how the other side is thinking. If they do not, such “unconscious bias” will cost them money.
Recently, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and my former colleague Tracy Alloway got shamed and lambasted by the serious people of Fintwit for daring to platform Liz Truss on Odd Lots. This is further evidence that the nomenklatura cannot handle discourse, critique, challenge, or self-reflection.
If a singular human were to display such traits, they’d immediately be classified as a narcissist.
A narcissistic media complex?
For those not versed in psychology, the narcissistic phenotype is primarily driven by a need to control and dominate. Such individuals do not seek equality or mutual respect, but rather strive for the upper hand in every interaction. They find it particularly hard to admit they are wrong, and would rather go down with the ship than admit defeat. Empathy is also not their strong point.
Another key trait is the tendency to distort reality to make it fit with an inflated sense of self, something that results in a phenomenon known as blame-shifting as well as revisionism when things don’t go as expected.
The Blind Spot seeks to be the opposite of that. We are empaths. And as empaths, we believe it is important to review other perspectives and give them a chance to make their case. This is especially the case if the standard view of the world is increasingly being caught out by reality. We try not to dismiss such alternative views just because they threaten to reframe our worldview. We embrace growth. And we embrace the opportunity to engage with those we don’t see eye to eye with.
That doesn’t mean we agree with all the alternative perspectives we present, or that we aren’t susceptible to our own innate biases. Rather, it means we are interested in how others who think so differently from ourselves rationalise those beliefs. Sometimes the logic makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t. But the exercise of figuring this out is valuable in its own right.
Presenting that counter perspective in a realistic, well-argued, and well-researched manner is thus a key mission of our publication (alongside the general amplification of critical stories that might otherwise be drowned out by pack journalistic practices).
Overly ambitious
Separately, back in 2022, we had hoped to use The Blind Spot as a springboard to eventually launch an independent publishing platform, upon which writers and journalists could compete in terms of values, transparently and honestly. The objective there was to cut through double standards. And then, finally, to hold publications accountable to their values.
The platform we envisioned (a model we still believe works and is gravely needed) would lean on market mechanics to help empower readers and journalists themselves to call out a publication that marketed itself as non-partisan if it was drifting towards partisan thinking.
Alas, journalists are not business people. And our mission faltered. There were many reasons for this.
An obvious one was that hustling for investment while maintaining the profile of a journalist is conflicting. Also, I’m not a natural salesperson. I hate the idea of hard selling and over-prompting myself.
But it’s also the case that early on, we spread ourselves too thin. We tried to exercise too many ideas too quickly. Podcasts. Spot markets live. Long-form analyses. Collabs with other podcasts. Micro events. These were all on the menu, but proved too much to maintain without significant investment.
Critically, while I believed in the project and continued to plough my personal savings into scaling things up, just as we were gaining traction and figuring out what we needed to refine to make things work, my family suffered a significant financial setback. That’s why, when Politico sought me out to come in as senior finance editor, it was an offer too good to refuse.
This, unfortunately, impeded my capacity to maintain this service to the level I had originally envisioned. The nature of my agreement with Politico is private, and I can’t go into details here. Suffice to say, doing two jobs in the resulting hybrid arrangement proved very challenging.
Perhaps one day I can explain to readers the broader limitations I was faced with, and to what degree having two paymasters (my readers here, and Politico over there) became highly conflicting. That day is not today. I’m doing my best to adhere to my commitments to both sides.
What I can say is that what it means to be a journalist (but also an analyst) in the modern digital/AI world is shifting in a major way. Part of the problem is that the deluge of information is more than most journalists or even journalistic organizations can handle (even major ones). The TMI problem affects even strict beat reporters, as they see their beats impacted by all sorts of broader variables. Particularly, in finance.
Whereas once you could shut yourself off from too much political newsflow or cultural drama (beyond what impacted your sector), and still make sense of things, these days you have to be an armchair expert in almost everything. And you might still fall short on sense-making.
The antidote to this problem should be a return to localism and specialism. Yet, until investors stop putting what goes on in international markets or at Davos before simply making money in local markets, that environment won’t change. On the contrary, an extremely narrow journalistic focus can be taken advantage of by powerful interests, with journalists missing the wood for the trees in terms of what’s going on at a higher level.
The cartography journalism principle
We believe most people can sense that a global paradigm shift and/or revolution is underway, that is already visibly rupturing the old post-1970s “non-system”. As a result, in the short to medium term, there will be no escape from the relentless news cycle and the need to become an expert in ever more domains just to keep up. Everything will continue to happen as if all at once.
What’s more, if you miss the newsflow, you’ll be sure that someone else hasn’t.
But this won’t be forever. One day, when the tectonic shifts settle, something will snap. Journalism and analysis will become compartmentalized once again. And, once again, we will learn to pick our battles and not have to worry about the relentless news flow from absolutely everywhere.
That time, however, is not now.
That’s why, during this disruptive period, what’s required is a publication that acknowledges that the relentless reactionary news cycle is too much for any one brain to handle. can still address where the broader “big story” is headed. That’s why we will step aside from overloading readers with too many quick contrarian takes. For that we have Discord (which works amazingly well).
What readers really need is journalistic cartography that can create a compendium of maps and mental models to filter world events through in a way that allows for a reality check about the bigger picture.
We are wading into uncharted territory where the old rules no longer apply and where even small actions or missteps can have disproportional effects on portfolios.
Our restructuring will be centered on this cartography principle. We will seek to evaluate the newsflow through the lens of competing and often lesser-appreciated world views, dispatching advance parties to test the robustness of those maps, and what they predict. If the maps are proven unreliable, we will feed that back. If they’re right, we will keep the marker. And so on.
In practice, this will sometimes take the form of big picture analysis (a description of the state of the map and its interconnections). Other times, it will take the form of deep dive expeditions into lesser trodden paths. Other times still, we will dive deep into a newly discovered territory to better familiarize ourselves with it, focusing on colourful stories about our experiences there, and how things work there. Macro vs micro. Big picture analysis vs basic reporting.
But to do this well, especially in the age of AI, we will have to quit the simulcrum of the internet as much as possible. That means more direct reader engagement. More interaction with sources. More Blind Spot meet-ups. And more reflection.
While we will aim to send out at least one newsletter a week, this will now be focused on distilling the noise of the week and framing it within this big picture cartography framework. The micro content will flow on a merit-based basis as and when.
Details about the new packages are below.
As ever, send tips to [email protected] and [email protected]
The Romantic revolutionary era is here
We’ve spent the past three weeks thinking long and hard about the direction of the Blind Spot, so analysis is short this week. But we didn’t want to leave you with absolutely nothing. Areas we considered writing about included why Trump’s acquisition of a 10 percent stake in Intel does not represent “socialism”, and why a $200m valuation for Bari Weiss’ Free Press says more about how wealthy Jewish money is seeking out new philanthropic causes on the back of the Israel/Gaza conflict than the viability of Substack. We also considered spending some time looking at what the concept of “involution” was coming to mean in China.
While we may return to these topics, for now, we’ve decided to direct readers to an old newsletter of ours where we originally suggested that the Western system was on the verge of rejecting cold, hard rationalism ( represented today by technocratic supremacy) and replacing it with a new era of Romanticism.
That Romantic spirit is now making itself felt in weird and unexpected ways. From the meme culture surrounding the “raising of the colours” movement, to the “Free Palestine” crusades that are gripping streets across Western capitals. Everything thing feels revolutionary.
Yet, we predict, Romanticism will soon hit the economic realm too. If we’re right, that could manifest in a Gandhi-like self-reliance movement, akin to a digital Satyagraha.
Understanding the transition to the Romantic era will be critical for investors. If they fail to study up, they may find themselves lost in a world where nothing makes sense. This is because romanticism isn’t logical. It comes from the heart. It sees people putting passion before profit. And that is hard to model.
Romanticism famously emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the industrial order, emphasizing emotion, imagination, and the organic ties of community over abstract reason and mechanistic systems. Politically, it often manifested as a celebration of national identity, cultural tradition, and the “spirit” of a people, while resisting the universalizing tendencies of liberal rationalism or the cold utilitarianism of bureaucratic governance. Romantic political thought prized authenticity, individuality, and the sublime experience of belonging, which made it a fertile ground for both progressive movements seeking liberation through self-expression and conservative projects rooting legitimacy in history, heritage, and the ineffable bonds of nationhood.
In many respects, Wokeism and ESG (Extinction Rebellion, etc) were the first hint that a new Romanticist force was taking hold of the Western world.
But the romanticism heading our way now is likely to be very different from that initial iteration. Those movements were ultimately the product of hyper-rationalism running into its own contradictions, notably via the convergence of free-market globalism and radical Western individualism.
They were the natural outcome of what happens when you pit what’s good for the individual against what’s good for the world. That tension can only be reconciled by the submission of one to the other. The result is either a world that submits to the tyranny of the individual — eliminating shared norms within geographic boundaries — or a world where the individual is entirely subsumed by the global collective. Both outcomes are extreme and opposite to each other. Western society managed the contradiction via a romanticist narrative centered on the idea that self-loathing, self-harm, and sacrifice for the larger collective was not just noble but a mechanism for expressing your individualism.
In this context, individualism gradually cultivated a rhetoric of victimhood, recasting itself not as an assertion of independence but as a perpetual claim to injury. To be an “individual” meant to be oppressed by the weight of tradition, community, or any shared obligation, and thus entitled to demand sacrifices from others in the name of one’s personal authenticity. What began as a demand for freedom from constraint inverted into a demand that others bear the costs of one’s chosen identity or moral stance. Norms were upended: responsibility was no longer measured by contribution to a common good, but by the degree to which others could be compelled to recognize and atone for one’s grievances. Entitlement became indistinguishable from justice, and sacrifice — once the highest expression of duty — was redefined as something owed to the individual rather than by the individual.
Thus, wokeism became driven by the fear of tomorrow, risk aversion, shame, and burden-shifting. Fear of climate change, shame of Western tradition and heritage, and the burdening of society with individuals’ demands for recognition, accommodation, and endless atonement.
Sacrifice, yes — but not out of love for country, culture, God, family, identity, or the love of your life. It represented sacrifice for other people’s nations, other people’s traditions, other people’s gods and families, and even genders.
The counter-Romanticism now emerging is rooted less in self-denial for others and more in sacrifice for the sake of self-reliance and the right to fight for a hopeful tomorrow — not only for oneself, but for one’s family and one’s people. And I doubt it is a passing moment; it is already fueling a remarkable resurgence of Catholicism among Generation Z.
You can see the vibe shift in the imagery and the memes. From the popularisation of “I vow to thee my country” to the use of uplifting songs and music to boost morale to encourage social change.
This isn’t rage against the machine. It’s chivalric. It is Chopin. Wind of Change. Lee Greenwood.
We’ll be back with more focused coverage next week. But Dario’s newsletter is incoming shortly.
And in finance, it manifests most obviously, of course, in crypto and memestocks.
Platform improvement!
If there’s one bit of feedback we continuously receive, it’s that our website is, for lack of a better word, shit. We do NOT disagree.
The underinvestment is the result of the complicated deal we have had with Politico the past two years, which left us in limbo. Our intention was to bring in professional developers within two years of launch. Alas, this was not to be.
Many people ask us, why are we not on Substack?
For the record, we did have an extensive dialogue with some of Substack’s founders about what they could offer us if we launched on their platform. In the end, we opted against it for, in retrospect, silly reasons: we had wanted to differentiate ourselves at a time when every man and his dog was starting a Substack. Furthermore, the margins they took from authors were high, and we feared that the shakiness of the Substack business model risked those margins only getting higher. Plus, the platform’s design functionality was limited (all substacks look the same). And there was no white labeling.
Since then, of course, much has changed. Not least Bari Weiss has made $200m from the platform, and the whole thing is heading to IPO.
As a result, we’ve decided that a slow migration to Substack makes sense, even if it’s an admin headache.
To make things as simple as possible, we’ve decided to rejig our pricing plan and offering.
1. Since our spotlight features have become too few and far between to justify the higher tier, we’ve decided to shift the whole publication to one single tier.
2. If you are happy to stay on this platform and retain a basic subscription, fear not. Nothing will change. It will still be priced at £20 per month. From now on, you will get all the content the Blind Spot produces.
3. If you would rather migrate to Substack for functionality purposes, please cancel your subscription on this site, and sign up to the new Substack here. Since we haven’t changed our prices since 2022, and Substack takes a larger margin, the new price per month on the Substack platform will be £24.99, but you will be able to benefit from a discounted annual sub at £249.99.
4. If you have a £50 monthly subscription, we advise you to cancel this immediately (go to the Accounts tab under the Subscription button on the website to do so). If you have a £500 subscription, please cancel this so that it does not auto-renew. By September next year, all our premium subs will, that way, have expired. Ideally, resubscribe at the £24.99 price on Substack or on this site at £20, if you prefer it or want to maintain access to the archive.
5. If you have just recently taken on a £500 subscription, fear not. You will maintain access to all content on this site. But to make the extra price worthwhile in the face of our tier consolidation, we will give you a free 12-month sub to our new specialist offering, which is called Cash Equivalence. This, unlike the new Blind Spot, will be dedicated to coverage of stablecoins and CBDCs and will operate primarily on Substack. Any content produced there will be replicated under our premium tier here until September 2026. [More about Cash Equivalence below.]
6. If you access our content via the £5 “you can read” option, this will continue to be operational until at least September 2026. By then we will have migrated entirely to Substack. Unfortunately, Substack does not offer such a pricing plan so we doubt we will be able to replicate it there. Our archive will continue to be available on the original url for the £5 access fee.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch on [email protected] or [email protected].
Leaning into our stablecoin obsession
A new financial territory that needs significant charting, including exploration of all its linkages to the core system, is that of stablecoins. To do that job properly, we have decided to start a dedicated service that tracks stablecoin news and developments in a comprehensive way.
If you are a premium subscriber, chances are, our premium content would have tended in that direction anyway. The vision of Cash Equivalence is set out here. The associated X account is here.
During the bootstrapping phase, we are committing to no more than a weekly digest, with some original takes and insider intel. But the vision is much bigger in the long run. It will not detract from the Blind Spot, which remains focused on broader themes and analysis.
If you have an annual £500 subscription, you will receive the content here until September 2026 anyway. But, if you prefer to consume your content on Substack, you can also email me directly, and I will provide you with a free duplicate subscription on Substack.
While we experiment with the formatting and build up the service, we are pricing ourselves at £10 per month and £100 per year. Once we know what demand is like, and how quickly we can expand, we may hike our prices (depending on how much analysis and long-form content we are doing).
If you currently pay £50 per month, you will also receive our Cash Equivalence content here. But, if you are interested in stablecoins and CBDCs, it will be cheaper for you to downgrade to the £20 per month option on this site or take out a £24.99 on Substack and also sign up to Cash Equivalence separately.
We hope this works for most people.
Splitting the realms helps us appeal to the two different types of readers we have far more effectively. And fear not, Blind Spot readers, we will still inform you about stablecoin matters here, albeit only when they’re Blind Spotty.
