mastodon 4.7.3California native, chronic night owl, and writer managing a whole mess of personal projects (plus a sprawling homelab). Currently building https://misaligned.markets to discuss modern political economy. Previously ran a blog called Philosimplicity.
#capitalism is fundamentally a game over asymmetric enforcement of property rights. Nowhere is that clearer than with digital goods, where rights holders control what counts as “access” to the digital products and services we buy.
This isn't unlike the brutal fights over land and personhood fought earlier in capitalism's history. This keeps happening because capitalism is a political governance system.
https://misaligned.markets/21st-century-property-rights-conflicts/
#righttorepair #DRM #enclosure #enshittification #tech #bigtech
@pluralistic@mamot.fr the “revealed preference” of capitalists is that they hate markets. Political economy starts to make more sense when you cleave markets from capitalism and understand that capitalism is a gameable governance structure that supervenes on markets.
When we allow capitalists to intentionally conflate capitalism and markets, they're able to use the merits of markets to justify this enshittified billionaire oligarchy.
(1/12) The 'AI bubble' is a political economy story I've spent over 20k words unraveling. LLMs aren't just a technology; they're a mirror of the same delusions that drive market fundamentalism: a naive understanding of innovation, deference to capital, and the denigration of human labor.
Our debates are implicitly about all of these and more. A thread 🧵:
@pluralistic@mamot.fr wrote a great post on the AI bubble, and this is a standout section.
As critical as I've been about the tech in my blog posts, I've tried to make space for people who have/will find useful, scoped applications.
Doesn't make any of this worth it. Also, this way of financing creates terrible path-dependencies.
But our goal, as I see it now, is to educate and steer society towards better use cases after the bubble, to prevent Big Tech from reasserting their agenda.
I wrote a thread about this! Markets under capitalism are interfaces where capitalists get to control the inputs.
Should we keep using the computer metaphor?
Maybe. So long as we recognize this has less to do with computation and more to do with rules.
