I anticipated these developments earlier this year when I wrote a short story entitled "The Peculiar Death of Mr. Garcia." That the latest rogue AI agent incident is called the Hugging Face Breach invites a moment of reflection: not just about the trajectory revealed by the breach, but the absurdity that the phrase "hugging face" is repeated with a straight face. What comes to mind when we combine…
While the Everything Bubble has soared to new heights, consumer confidence has fallen to new lows. For your consideration, four charts that tell a single story: while those Americans who have benefited so immensely from the Everything Bubble in stocks, housing, crypto, bat guano, etc.--every asset under the sun--have spent lavishly on fripperies, the foundations of everyday life for the bottom 90%…
Most of AI isn't productive, it's just another form of consumption. Like GDP (Gross Domestic Product), economic Productivity is an unquenchable spring of delusions , delusions being pushed to new heights of delirium by promises of endless leaps of productivity as AI is deployed in every nook and cranny of the global economy. Let's start with what Productivity measures. Like GDP, Productivity…
Of Two Minds serves this purpose: taking control of and improving our own quality of life and security. Once a year I ask you to support my work. In the past, I've struck a humorous note-- rattling the begging bowl. This year feels different. The veneer of normalcy is peeling off faster than it can be glued back on, and this decoherence is accelerating, which is why I'm writing a series for…
The joyless pantomime of optimizing our alienation is not a substitute for authentic fulfillment. We all know that geopolitics, the stock market, AI, the unemployment rate and all the rest of what's presented as "explaining" everything is "important," but all these analytic abstractions ignore what we actually experience. This divide between what we're told we should be experiencing and what we…
Our naivete is being exploited so ruthlessly and with such abandon that the golden age of the Big Con is consuming itself. Naivete is interesting because it's so easily confused with confidence, native optimism, youthful enthusiasm, and a host of delusions, including mistaking idealized fantasies and fairy tales as templates for the real world. In a culture that prides itself on not being a chump,…
The government gets the privately collected data and in return dismantles or disables the guardrails that once protected the public from state and private-sector encroachments on privacy. One of the core traits of a 1984 -type totalitarian dystopia is 24/7 surveillance of every prisoner, oops, I mean citizen. Surveillance collects the data that leverages the tools of control: without surveillance,…
Big Brother is now slouching in the passenger seat, making a mockery of ownership, right to repair and our agency. Buyers of new vehicles have an odious passenger they are powerless to eject: Big Brother is now slouching in the passenger seat, making a mockery of ownership, right to repair and our agency--control of our lives and what we nominally own. This is of a piece with the global emergence…
So who will solve our real problem: the centralization of wealth and power in a Neofeudal Autocracy? My essay on America's ten social classes was the appetizer to the main course: beneath the purposefully distracting PR of "democracy" and "free markets," America is a Neofeudal Autocracy, i.e. a system in which real power, control and wealth are concentrated in the hands of the few at the top of a…
What we do know is that things have internal structures with dynamics that operate whether we "like" them or not. Correspondent Manoj S. recommended an essay from the always-insightful John Michael Greer on the dissolution of unproductive classes behind the smokescreen of AI : A Game of Musical Chairs "You can sell Americans on anything, no matter how wretchedly unsatisfactory it is, by labeling…
We are Superman strapped to a carefully machined chunk of Kryptonite we can no longer detach. I wrote Ultra-Processed Life to describe a peculiarly perverse structure of control that now dominates our entire culture and way of life: what's presented as marvelously beneficial to both sellers and buyers / leaders and the citizenry is actually only beneficial to the sellers / leaders while it…
The underlying story of the past 50 years has been the offloading of risk onto workers and consumers. On my map of how the world works , we start with structures of control that distribute the good stuff--resources, assets, income and power--and the bad stuff: costs, losses and risks. As I explained in The US Economy In a Nutshell: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs , the current arrangement…