The Dot-Com Reckoning Rewrote Risk Pricing
The crash was read as excess; it installed a new skepticism toward growth without revenue.
Morgan Calloway·Mar 15, 2000·6 min read
Flagship series
Century Signals
Duck Times’ flagship archive of structural turning points since 2000 — not every headline, but the moments that reorganized power, work, technology, and trust. Each piece names what really changed, and what still governs the present.
100 curated entries · 2000–2026 · mechanisms that still govern the present
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Three recent entries — same editorial standard as the full archive: what changed, what mechanism remains.
2026 · Commentary
Provenance Became Infrastructure Once No One Could Trust a Clip on Sight
By mid-2026, institutions from newsrooms to camera manufacturers had built cryptographic provenance directly into their capture and publishing workflows, treating verifiable origin — not just detection of fakes — as the durable response to a media environment where synthetic content had become cheap and credible.
2026 · Near Future
AI Data Centers Turned Utility Rate Cases Into a Political Battlefield
By 2026, AI data center electricity demand had reshaped utility capacity planning across the U.S., driving up regional wholesale power prices, reviving mothballed nuclear plants like Three Mile Island, and pushing the cost of new grid infrastructure onto ratepayer bills contested in state utility commissions.
2025 · Commentary
AI Governance Multiplied Faster Than Anyone Agreed on What It Meant
Through 2025, NIST, ISO, the EU, and individual U.S. states each advanced AI governance frameworks on different timelines and philosophies, while a change in U.S. administration reversed the prior White House's AI executive order entirely — leaving compliance a fragmented, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction exercise.
2000s
33 signals
2000 · Intelligence
2010s
37 signals
2013 · Intelligence
The Snowden Revelations
A contractor's leak turned the internet's hidden architecture into a public argument.
Priya Sekharan·Jun 15, 2013·6 min read
2014 · Intelligence
Crimea's Annexation
Unmarked soldiers and a rushed referendum showed how a border could be redrawn without a declared war.
Anya Volkov·Mar 15, 2014·6 min read
2020s
30 signals
Century Signals is Duck Times’ long archive of structural turning points — editorial synthesis of the public record, not an encyclopedia. Each piece argues for a durable mechanism still visible in markets, institutions, or daily life.
For emerging signals still forming, see Signals. For how we write, see the newsroom.