Every day we’re told that AI, digital tech, automation and cashless society represent progress, and that they’re leading humankind to an ever higher score in the great game of history. In this video I’ll explain how this ‘high score’ mentality works, why it benefits Big Tech, and how to free your mind from it.

Share

Leave a comment

The term Black Friday originally referred to a financial crash in 1869, in which a scheme run by some politically-connected robber-barons caused the US gold markets to crash. In the 1950s, though, some academics started using the term to describe the day after Thanksgiving, when many people would feign illness to skip work and get a long weekend. Certain police departments in US cities also started using it in the 1960s to refer to the beginning of the congested weekend at the start of the Christmas shopping period.

In all of these cases, the phrase was applied from the perspective of an outside observer, a bit like an ecologist might describe the annual migration of gazelle. Picture David Attenborough watching shoppers in US cities and saying, “And here we have the annual Black Friday migration of the consumer class.”

In subsequent decades, though, this term ‘Black Friday’ was slowly hijacked by a class of corporate marketers who gradually got the gazelle to include it into their own internal self-identity. Rather than using this term as an after-the-fact description of observed behaviour, it became a before-the-fact prescription, a call to action that you were supposed to go shopping. The term ceased to be a description of herding behaviour and morphed into an instruction to stampede the shops.

Naming into existence

Many philosophers and mystics have long sensed that the act of naming can create reality. In academic circles they discuss this in speech act theory, and through concepts like performativity, but my favourite book about this is actually Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy masterpiece, A Wizard of Earthsea - based on Taoism - where the wizards specialise in knowing the names of things to manipulate the fabric of reality.

In fact, some scholars even argue that the magical term ‘abracadabra’ comes from an Aramaic phrase that means ‘I create like the word’, again pointing to this idea that language can create reality and bring things into existence.

Modern masters of this ‘speaking into existence’, however, are corporate marketing teams. By repeatedly naming Black Friday, and announcing its arrival, it was turned from a passive descriptive phrase denoting some loose behaviour into an actively charged cultural object that could pull people in like a magnet.

This process began in the US, but in the era of digital globalization, this exploded mimetically through the marketing departments of all corporations globally. Now this dark cultural object is locked in place in every country and probably won’t be dislodged until we see the fall of capitalism or the heat death of the universe.

Black Friday is now a top-down order to behave in a certain way rather than a description of some real bottom-up cultural phenomenon. In this sense, it shares common ground with things like Christmas, which have also been co-opted as a symbol of, and instruction to, engage in mass consumerism.

Christmas nevertheless does hold on to some shreds of an actual religious holiday that once did exist. If we imagine a spectrum between the purely sacred on the one hand, and the purely commercial on the other, it’s obvious that Christmas has been pulled further and further away from the sacred end of the spectrum over the years.

This reflects a broader process - many human celebrations, from Valentines Day to Mothers Day, have some anchoring in some old sacred practice, but have been slowly degraded into artificial engineered ‘Hallmark Holidays’. This is a term derived from the American company Hallmark, which makes a killing off selling cards to celebrate these supposedly organic festivals.

Something really becomes a Hallmark Holiday when its sacred meaning cannot be realized without also simultaneously buying something. Black Friday, though, is the ultimate culmination of this. It’s a festival with no meaning beyond buying. It’s like Christmas stripped of any illusion of cultural depth, a pure celebration of commercialism presented as a sacred act in itself.

Interpellation

When I’m encountering all the Black Friday ads, I’m always reminded of Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation. It refers to a method of programming ideas into people’s minds by addressing them as if they already agree with what you’re saying. To understand this, let’s look at one of the purest examples of this phenomenon, which is Black Friday’s sister festival, Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday was written into existence by a 2005 press release from the National Retail Federation (the biggest retail trade association in the US), which read:

Cyber Monday quickly becoming one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

All the subsequent commercial slogans like “Cyber Monday is here” and “Are you ready for Cyber Monday?” speak at you (or, in the language of Althusser, ‘hail you’) as if you’re already a person who agrees that this thing is a reality.

These acts of hailing begin to construct you. Picture an old-school grandparent saying to their grandchild, “When are you going to get married?” It seems like a question, but embedded in it is the assumption that the person will get married. The act of asking it, then, is simultaneously the act of telling the grandchild how to behave, and if the grandchild answers the question, they’re implicitly accepting this.

Similarly, when companies say, “Are you ready for Cyber Monday?”, they’re not asking you whether you think it’s real or not. They’re telling you that it’s real and then asking you what you’re going to do about it. This generates a sense in your mind that a whole mass of people somewhere - presumably - already know about this thing that you’re only catching on to now.

Of course, before 2005, nobody had ever seen anyone else ever celebrate Cyber Monday, because in reality it has no organic existence. Like the current version of Black Friday, it was genetically reverse-engineered by companies that spoke about it as if it really were a reality, and thereby conjured it into existence.

Once you become aware of this phenomenon, you’ll see it everywhere. For example, during the rise of digital payments companies in London, they kept on putting up signs saying, “Contactless is here,” addressing you as a person who was expecting this thing to arrive, as if a delivery man turned up at your door saying, “I have brought you this thing that you asked for. It has arrived. It is here.”

For example, here’s an internal pitch deck from the card payments company Amex. In this playbook, they’re trying to explain to their clients how to convince customers to switch to contactless payments. They instruct their clients to loudly and clearly say contactless is here, noting that this kind of language will present the company as being a hero who has arrived to meet the needs of these customers, needs they previously didn’t actually realize that they had.

This is a classic example of interpellation - speaking at people as if they already agree with you. It Trojan-horses the idea into the person’s mind that there’s something obvious that’s being said by the corporate marketer, and that everybody else around them already thinks this thing’s a reality.

Perhaps the saddest new example of this interpellation is Black Friday Week. It’s not like there was some global democratic convention during which we all collectively decided that this week existed. No, the decision was made through tacit agreement between all the corporates, who realised that it was in their collective interest to copy each other and speak about this thing as if it existed. As it is written in the Bible, In the beginning was the word, and the word was Amazon, and Amazon said ‘let there be Black Friday Week, and Amazon saw it and was pleased.

Black Friday Week is not some organic human celebration like a harvest festival. It’s a top-down corporate order to behave in a certain way.

But hey, maybe we should also start to co-opt this process of interpellation to create new days that we want to see in the world. So here’s my wish for this Black Friday. Give it a new name and then speak to people as if it’s a reality. Maybe you can start the process by dropping it into the comments.

Leave a comment

To all those building AI in 2025,

I understand that human beings have a natural tendency to create things, and that this creativity extends back tens of thousands of years. You, as a tool-builder, continue this ancient tradition. I congratulate you on that, and offer my respect for the hard work and passion you’ve put into building your skills.

I also understand that as we create new tools, the world shifts, because the new tools unlock new affordances, capabilities we previously didn’t imagine possible.

I also understand, however, that this process doesn’t make us fundamentally happy. We continue to build tools, and our generation has more technology than any other in human history, and yet we continue to suffer from deep anxiety, stress, burnout, depression, war, and - increasingly - a crisis of meaninglessness.

It seems unlikely that any tool will ever solve that. If anything, the proliferation of tech seems to contribute to a modern epidemic of confusion, surveillance, propaganda, disassociation and polarisation.

Furthermore, our technology doesn’t fundamentally make our lives easier from an economic standpoint. Rather, it mostly just makes our lives faster. Technology is an accelerant, not a relaxant. That’s because, whenever a new affordance is unlocked, we are pushed into weaponising it within the competitive landscape of capitalism. The new tool doesn’t bring new leisure. Rather, it simply becomes a new thing that each of us must now have to continue surviving in a - now intensified - market struggle against others.

Long gone are the days when the Internet was a fun novelty that we could choose to use or not. We don’t experience childlike joy each morning when we see it up and running, but we certainly panic if it’s down. That’s because the Internet has sunk into the foundations of our life as infrastructure, without which we are now disabled. It doesn’t guarantee security, or - in itself - make any of us joyful or empowered. Having the Internet, or electricity, or a smartphone, simply means each of us gets to fight another day, and to not be left behind by all the others trying to claw their way to illusory security in an ever-changing market.

All our technology doesn’t make us collectively thrive, relax, or live in abundance. If that were the case, we’d be the most peaceful and chilled out generation in history, without poverty or stress. But we all know that’s not the case.

Of course, mega-firms do like to spin a rosy tale about the new tools they sell. They say that each new round of technology brings us closer to utopia. Remember what they said about the Internet in the nineties? It was going to be like a giant popular uprising against the feudal lords of big business, a place where we could collectively make a peer-to-peer ‘global village’, fostering connection and so on.

That sounds so quaint now.

We've ended up with an inescapable complex of colossal Big Tech firms, with a revolving door between inhumanly rich founders and a self-congratulatory class of venture capitalists. They’re now fusing with the giants of Big Finance, the investment banks, private equity firms and mega-funds. They’re looked at with deep suspicion by the majority of the world’s population, but within their own bubble they see themselves as an inspiring class of doers who take the world forward, whether it wants to go or not.

Many within the tech sector live under a mythology that says their actions will liberate the world from toil through automation. Not only is that an illusion, but Big Tech business models are extractive towards humanity. Several years ago there were lively debates about the dangers of surveillance capitalism, the fact that the firms were creating honeypots to get people to hand over data. Now, in the all out arms-race to AI, those concerns are being pushed aside. The firms have hoarded data on thousands of years of human creativity - in the form of art, writing, film, invention, music, strategy, and so on - and handed it over to the software engineering class to use as raw material to build new AIs that will displace the creators of the raw material.

That’s where you come in.

I don’t doubt for a moment that working in an AI division right now is an exciting, even exhilarating, role. It’s probably like being an investment banker in the 1980s, with a wide set of creative possibilities before yourself to create new and exotic products within a heady, dynamic atmosphere. Perhaps you have strong connections with your colleagues, and feel that your skills are valued. You feel seen. You love going for drinks after work to talk about the latest NVIDIA gossip. You’re all in the same boat, working for firms that encourage you to think of yourselves as heroic agents leading humanity on a great adventure. Maybe you think you’re helping us all to get to the next level in the great game of human history.

In this, I am happy for you. Everyone has gifts which are meaningful to them, and which they use to form their identity and to express their creativity. You, as a tool-builder, are working with your gifts, and nobody can blame you for that.

But, I just want you to be aware that - in the context of our current world - your gifts will be weaponised, and you have a moral responsibility to not be naive about your own position in that great game of human history.

If you’re an AI engineer, people like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman or Larry Ellison will want you to think that you’re part of some great tradition of unstoppable ‘creative destruction’, like the periodic wildfire that burns down a landscape to allow for new growth. Zuck wants you to move fast and break things, but in the end the fundamental purpose of AI is to serve the needs of capitalism in three ways:

1. Firstly, to give bosses and shareholders new automation technology that can be used to weaken the political power of their workforces by making labour increasingly redundant

2. Secondly, to give military generals new capabilities to fight over and secure territory for further commodification

3. Thirdly, to help numb out the broader population with streaming entertainment media, like AI-generated cat reels

The prime tendency of our economic system is growth and acceleration, and - within the mainstream - innovation is only allowed insofar as it furthers those primary goals. Put differently, if your innovation goes against growth and acceleration, it will be filtered out, or choked through lack of funding, which means it won’t get expressed. In short, you get to be creative, but only if you push your creativity into serving the interests of the billionaire class.

This is not a judgement of anyone who works in the tech sector. I understand that we’re all pushed towards selling ourselves within this competitive system, and a person entering the job market in 2025 must play the AI game to try to survive, because they see everyone else doing it. I also understand that you want to feel positive about what you’re doing when you do this.

But, I’d like you to not fall into the trap of those people who pioneered the Internet. They were full of optimism, but later cried tears at the fact that it’s now used for massive surveillance, data extraction and centralisation of power. So many of them are now very wealthy from those very processes, but still tell stories about how they naively hoped that somehow the tech wouldn’t be enlisted to enrich small groups of elites while empowering increasingly authoritarian regimes.

Those people were, in the nineties, in the same situation that you find yourself in now. You’re having fun developing AI, and you’re probably getting very rich off it, and you want to tell yourself, and others, some feel-good story about this.

Here’s a request. Please don’t.

Please don’t spin your fairytales about the wondrous things AI will do in future. Rather, it would be really refreshing if you’d just start from the assumption that by far the most likely outcome is for the tech to be used for massive enrichment and centralisation of power into an even smaller elite than before, with even more terrifying mechanisms of control at their disposal.

We don’t want to see you in some future Netflix documentary talking about how the promise of AI was betrayed blah blah. If you don’t start with an unrealistic perspective, you won’t be disillusioned when the obvious thing happens.

It’s not impossible for forms of good to come out of new technology, but your mantra should be: I assume this thing will turn out bad, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t.

That might sound bleak, but at least it puts you in a more realistic frame of mind, and a more authentic moral position, so that the rest of us won’t have to be subjected to your crocodile tears in future.

Yours sincerely,

Brett

Add your name to this letter by giving it a like or leaving a comment

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this article here

Every day, a tsunami of anger and despair rises up in millions of people who’re being screwed by some form of corporate shittery.

Maybe it’s a health insurance claim that’s been arbitrarily refused, or a rental contract that’s increased without explanation. Perhaps it’s a crucial account that’s randomly been shut down by some automated bot.

The negative emotions build up in people’s bodies like a giant charge. If these feelings can’t be released, they’ll have to be suppressed, but suppressing them is like pushing a dark spirit down into the depths. The emotions want to come out, but where can they be discharged?

The most obvious target is customer service staff. The angry customer picks up the phone, or bashes away on the help chat, or storms up to the counter of a branch. The job of the employees behind those counters is to get punched by that dark spirit - the rage, confusion, or desolate sense of injustice welling up in the customer - and to absorb it, so that big bosses, far from the frontlines, can go about their day without feeling the consequences of their decisions.

Those frontline employees occupy a realm I call Bufferland. It’s called Bufferland because its purpose is to act as a buffer, insulating the elites that sit within the high citadels of capitalism.

Bufferland is distributed all over the earth. It takes the form of call centres, shop frontages, cashier points, info desks, online forms and any other interface that stands between you and the management layer of our global economy.

Bufferland is often a warzone. For example, I’m in Bufferland right now, in London’s Gatwick airport at a boarding gate. I’m facing an easyJet employee behind the desk. He seems to hate me, and I’m being pushed towards hating him too. I can see the strain on his face that comes with being cannon-fodder for distant bosses, sent out to fuck over the customers.

I’m going to tell you what this showdown is about, but let’s first take a step back to explore the connection between this man and the big boss that he’s protecting.

The Citadel

Big bosses reside in a citadel, far from customers, and far from service staff.

Like Bufferland, the Citadel isn’t a single place, but rather a distributed collection of skyscrapers, boardrooms, elite holiday homes, convention centres, five star hotels, business class lounges, and mobile phone contact lists between powerful people.

For our purposes, let’s focus in on Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who is the biggest boss being served by our humble easyJet employee. Sir Stelios is easyJet’s founder. He doesn’t actually run the corporation day-to-day any more, but he’s the largest shareholder, owning 15% of the company. That means 15% of all profits accrue to him and his family.

Stelios is a classic capitalist, born into a mega-rich Greek shipping family. He worked for his dad until age 25, after which his father gave him £30 million to set up his own shipping company. By age 28 he used the profits of that to found easyJet.

Capitalism is called capitalism because it involves capitalising on previous power to get more, and Stelios is good at that.

When I call Stelios a capitalist, I’m simply describing his position in our economic structure. I’m not making a moral judgement on his character. I’m not saying he doesn’t feel emotions, or bleed like anyone else. If you watch him in interviews, he can be charming and well-spoken, and he has a philanthropic streak. I’m sure he’s a delight to have as a dinner guest, and I’m sure he can tell a lot of fascinating stories, about the time he was knighted by the Queen, for example. I’m sure he can be warm-hearted to his friends and family, and I’m sure he probably offers kind words of encouragement to students and so on.

But, in the end, he’s a person in a position of extreme power, and he always has been. That warps his sense of normality.

For example, Stelios talks proudly about how he took ‘outrageous risks’ when founding the company in 1995, but it’s of course much easier to take outrageous risks when you control outrageous amounts of money. In reality, his major risks involved daring to bypass the travel agencies, and daring to sell coffee on flights, and daring to cut deals with smaller airports. These are not insignificant innovations, but it’s not like he faced starvation, destitution or deportation if they didn’t work out.

Nevertheless, through methods like these, easyJet could tout itself as democratising travel. It, like other low-cost airlines, has always imagined itself as a great champion of the working man and woman, who can’t afford the premium airlines that target the upper middle-class.

The catch, however, is that people who want to go on cheap holidays tend to also be people with low wages, and people with low wages tend to be the kind of people who are subordinated under the rich - i.e. under people like Stelios.

We don’t live in a utopia, where cheap travel springs out of the ground fully-formed. No, cheap travel is wrested from the earth and its people by using low-paid labour, dirty fossil fuels, automation, and other cost-cutting tactics that make everything feel kinda shitty. It just so happens that it’s the powerful in our society who - on average - control those very processes.

We live in a tiered economic system, with multiple layers, each with a different living standard. People like Stelios occupy the highest rungs. They own large concentrations of stuff - built by other people - and then get other people to operate that stuff for them so that they can make more money to buy up more stuff.

For example, Stelios didn’t build the aircraft that easyJet owns, and he doesn’t extract the fuels required to fire them up. He doesn’t fly them, or load them with baggage, or do any of the ground-level tasks that make low-cost air travel possible.

Rather, his primary role was to have the money - the capital - to command other people to do those things, and thereby make easyJet a reality.

His secondary contribution was strategy and management. In particular, he set about designing cost-cutting processes to make the aforementioned conglomeration of inputs (workers, aircraft and other assets) relatively cheap, such that the output (budget air travel) could be sold to all the people on the lower rungs of society.

The people on the lower rungs of society, however, tend to also be the people who are weakened by cost-cutting processes on the production side of our economy - this is the squeezed working class - so selling them cost-cut goods on the consumption side is a very dubious means of salvation.

Unfortunately, if you cannot see the circuitry of capitalism, it’s easy to be confused by this. To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them.

One of the most perverse elements of our economic system, then, is that people like Stelios will often be seen as liberation figures, fighting for the weak. In fact, Stelios even sees himself as the ‘Robin Hood of the airline industry’, and a ‘consumer champion’…

But, whenever a company is claiming to ‘democratise’ something, they’re basically saying that they will drive down costs on the production side of the equation to get the consumption side hooked on the resultant cheap thing, after which they will be in a position to extract.

Put bluntly, for Stelios to give the rabble cheap travel, he must squeeze the rabble in the process, and in exchange for his capital and decisions, he gets to own large amounts of shares to accumulate the profits that emerge from that.

With this in mind, let’s return to Gatwick airport, to the queue at the boarding gate.

Skirmish in Bufferland

It sometimes feels like easyJet’s management presents customers with a devil’s bargain: we’ll give you cheap travel if you agree to hand over your dignity and be treated like the crap you are. They don’t say that, of course, but it’s implied in the way we’re pushed through their systems like a herd of cattle, and milked at every possible opportunity.

Getting people to fight each other is a core part of the business model. For example, the company wages psychological warfare on their own customers, getting them to battle one another for overhead bag space in order to push them into paying extra for Speedy Boarding. They then let the cabin staff deal with the fallout of that, as upset customers who board later complain of having no space for their bag.

When the core of your business model involves squeezing both customers and employees, it means that relations between those two camps very quickly get frayed. The stressed employee and the stressed customer are both being played by the senior management, but they often end up facing each other as mortal enemies in different parts of the system.

That’s how I’ve ended up facing this guy at Gatwick airport. Here’s the story.

I was allowed to enter the aircraft in Berlin with a medium-sized travel bag, and fly to London with my friend Julio for some meetings. We came back to the airport last night to check in for our return flight to Berlin. We waited for four hours as the flight was repeatedly delayed. Then it was cancelled, late at night, and we were told that a replacement flight would leave early the next morning. The boarding staff instructed us to download an easyJet app to get a hotel, but it repeatedly failed, flashing up an error notification. So, just before midnight, we trudged into the cheapest Gatwick hotel and had to lay out a couple hundred pounds each for a room. We then had to go onto another online site to put in an expense claim for that, and were told it would be repaid in 28 days, if the claim was accepted.

All of this was annoying, but we were stoical about it. Such is life. These things happen.

This morning we got up and passed through security again, and checked in again, and then waited in a line with all the other bleary-eyed people to finally board.

But then something weird happened. As I got close to the boarding point, I noticed them forcing an elderly woman to pay extra for her bag, despite letting others with bigger bags through without penalty. That was dickish of them.

Then they did it to me too.

So, here I am, facing the man. Rather than the airline saying we are sorry for messing up all your travel plans and making you spend lots of money on hotels and overpriced airport food, he’s trying to tell me that I’ve been arbitrarily selected to pay an extra £50 to enter the massively delayed flight.

Imagine if a small business owner did something like this. Let’s imagine a removal guy with a van. Let’s say I booked him one evening to help me move house, but he keeps delaying, and then finally cancels late at night, telling me that actually he underestimated the time it would take to finish another job, and that he can only turn up the next morning. In a situation like that, he’d be deeply apologetic when he arrived the next day. He wouldn’t start to quibble about me having an extra box, and would probably throw in some freebies.

This is because a small business owner experiences human emotion directly. When dealing with a mass scale corporate operation, however, the act of screwing me is treated by the management as a cost of doing business, and the job of dealing with the rage that emerges from that is outsourced to Bufferland. Let the customer service staff get shouted at, and then direct the angry man to a compensation form, or just ignore him.

Bufferland exists to provide a shallow layer of human care within an otherwise bureaucratic profit machine, but today easyJet is also using it to recoup its losses from yesterday’s cancelled flight. The employee clearly has a quota to fulfil and as he tries to avoid making eye contact with me, I complain about the unequal treatment. They’d let me onto the plane from Berlin to London with this same bag. They’d cost us money by cancelling the flight. They’d let others through with bigger bags. WTF is this?

In the end, the choice I have is this: accept the fact that I’m a sacrifice to the shareholders of easyJet, or be the arsehole who kicks up a fuss and complains about the fact that most others aren’t being punished. It’s like a banal, low-level version of the Hunger Games: be noble and sacrifice yourself for the elites, so that everyone else, including this staff member, can be let off.

So, I suck it up and accept the fate, but I can’t help but make a few existential comments about the random bureaucratic violence of corporate capitalism. This is too much for the employee. He scowls and says ‘I can’t do anything! Speak to the management.’

Economies of Silence

Bufferland does have secret pathways that allow certain people to bypass it. You can ‘speak to the management’ if you have enough power.

For example, I was once invited by some businessmen to Kazakhstan. They wanted me there in three days, but as I stood in a queue to get a visa I was told it would take eleven days at minimum. The businessmen thought otherwise. They made a phone call. The next day I had a visa. It was like Jesus parting the waters to allow me to walk straight through the apparent obstacle. A miracle!

Yes, Bufferland can be breached, but only if you’re part of the inside club. If you’re a person of enough power, you do in fact get to make a phone call to Sir Stelios.

If you’re not, you get to do nothing. What does ‘speaking to the management’ mean in the case of 99.999% of easyJet customers? It means you get to go onto an online portal to write out some complaint in a box and then push send. You get to shout into the digital void. In this system of ‘democratised’ air travel, you get to direct your voice towards a hybrid digital-human layer, that will send it to a place where it’ll never be heard by anyone truly benefiting from the system.

Companies like easyJet drive down prices through so-called ‘economies of scale’, but they also make heavy use of Economies of Silence: the frontline employees act as punching bags for customers, like an emotional shock-absorber, but this also serves as a system of noise-cancellation for management, freeing them from the emotional responses that would come from actually hearing the customers’ voices.

But, all that emotional noise and energy that gets absorbed by the service staff must surely take its toll, seeping into their bodies. As they take the night-bus home from Gatwick airport, the boarding gate official might mindlessly watch YouTube, trying to disassociate from a day of being insulted, glared at, screamed at, and cried at by angry or desperate people.

Sitting on the plane, Julio notes to me that companies like easyJet blend Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with Orwell and Kafka. We’re drawn in by the cheap goods like a drug, while the systems extract our data and spy on us. When we complain, we’re pushed into an unaccountable bureaucratic maze.

I wonder whether Stelios has himself ever experienced this cocktail. I’m sure he’s done publicity stunts where he lines up with the customers, or inspects the staff, but he’s always going to get five-star treatment. He’s getting 15% of the profits, but there’s no chance in hell that he’s ever going to experience even 0.1% of the emotional consequences that come with his own business model.

In fact, I’m sure he, and his family, use those profits to fly first class on premium airlines to luxury resorts with incredibly high standards of living. At those resorts, he’ll be served by people lower down the chain, who’ll leave work in the evening and head home to places with much lower living standards. As he watches these people cook the omelette behind the hotel breakfast buffet, he might feel a warm sense of pride that they can buy easyJet flights.

But, I also wonder if he, or anyone else in his position, ever gets confronted at elite parties by a waiter, or doorman, or receptionist who’s had a terrible experience with the company. I doubt it, because I guess the offending employee would get fired by their own bosses if they took that outrageous risk and dared to insult a high-profile business baron.

But even if that person did brave that, I’m not sure it would have much affect. I’ve spent time with a lot of corporate elites, and one thing that I know about them is that they’re trained to appear reasonable, and they’re also trained to suppress their own doubts about their own position. They’re very good at telling themselves that they’re good people, giving Britain cheap air travel, or securing America through surveillance software, or pushing forward humanity with humanoid robots.

You see, Bufferland exists inside a person too, in their own head. They can use it to push those nasty emotions away from their inner citadel, and to protect that sense that they’re doing god’s work as they kneel to get knighted for their service to humanity.

Leave a comment

Dearest readers. I took a few months off Substack, but now I’m back. I will be reopening paid subscriptions, which have been on pause while I’ve been away. I’m happy to be back.

In 2022 I disappeared from Substack for nine months. Nominally, it was because my book Cloudmoney was released, but the true cause was that I’d had an emotional breakdown. It was initially triggered by a runaway obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) outbreak, which itself started when I was on the former Twitter. It escalated into a raging inferno of anxiety attacks. In the cold wreckage of burned out depression that followed, I was left unable to work for months.

OCD is a complex thing to describe, and it manifests in different ways in different people. One common thread, however, is that people with OCD tend to be prone to anxiety-inducing thought loops. We design rituals to try to calm those down, hence the disorder being associated in the public imagination with obsessive repeated actions.

For a person with OCD, though, the Internet can be a source of all manner of triggering debris - stuff that can set off attacks - and in the run-up to my breakdown I was heavily immersed in the sewers of social media. My job as a commentator on global finance and tech often required me to wade into the digital world for up to several hours a day, and all sorts of shit would float into my consciousness.

In the heyday of Twitter, for example, I’d be swarmed by Bitcoin maximalists who hated my takes on the industry they loved. After bruising rounds of flame-wars online, I’d have to retreat. As I lay in a candlelit bath, I’d continue to have the arguments going on in my head, as if fighting the ghosts of digital avatars. It sometimes felt like a cyberspace symbiont had crawled into my mind while online, and left its tendrils in there. I’d literally visualise myself pulling those threads of toxicity out of my head.

Let’s face it. A social media site is a network of millions of distant people all tethered to a corporate server, delivered to you via an interface. That interface is like a portal between you and this abstract collective, but each member of that collective is experiencing this portal from their own subjective reality, sitting at their desk, or staring at the screen of their phone on a train.

Social media is a realm of perpetual unfinished business, where the arguments will rage on indefinitely. Each person experiences this seeping into their physical environment, creating a superimposed layer of digital interactions mixing with those in the real world. I, for example, would find myself at the urinal of a Berlin bar, taking a piss while checking replies, or seeing how many likes my latest tweet got. I’m sure you’ve all experienced this too. The fragmentation of consciousness between our immediate reality and the one delivered to you via the portals is now all pervasive.

The fact that portals are dangerous is a classic sci-fi theme. For example, the cult 1994 film Stargate features a portal - discovered in the ruins of ancient Egypt - that serves to create a bridge between earth and a distant planet. In the Netflix hit series Stranger Things, a US government secret program accidentally opens a portal into a nightmare underworld, allowing ghoulish creatures in. The moral is always the same: If you open portals, and are unable to close them, stuff starts to seep through.

Many of us now experience a layer of ambient digital pollution that leaks into all aspects of our life, but the stuff that’s leaking isn’t fully chosen by us. There are overlords who curate the portals - the big tech companies - and they like to keep you addicted by pushing triggering stuff at you, or showing you stuff you’ve previously responded to. They want the ambient digital layer to surround you at all times, because their business models are built upon your reactions to it.

Big tech companies have a strong business incentive to literally fuck with your mind, constantly, and are in a strong position to now do it. Like all good capitalists, they also believe they have no choice but to do this, because if they don’t they will be outcompeted by someone else who will. It’s become like a turf war between digital crack dealers, to get you ever more deeply dependent on those dopamine hits your nervous system has begun to crave.

Once you’re hooked on this stuff, it opens the way for what Cory Doctorow refers to as the ‘enshittification’ of the Internet, the situation where the dealers begin to more blatantly manipulate and squeeze you. More generally, the portals are now conduits for all sorts of new toxicity to slosh through, from fake news bot armies to AI slop.

Physicalizing the digital

Now, I’m not the kind of person who advocates for individual ‘life-hacks’ to solve systemic problems that really need collective political action. Sometimes, though, in the absence of collective resistance, you need these little hacks as a tactical measure.

This is why, over the years, I’ve tried to design many personal systems to deal with the sheer overload of digital life. For example, I had a system that represented the Internet as a physical city I’d ride around. At one point I would use a pile of coins to represent the emails I had to answer. I even briefly had a notebook in which I’d write down when I entered the web. That was way too exhausting, but it shows that my brain was seeking out some kind of physicality. My intuition was that the wraith-like nature of the Internet needed to somehow be mediated through physical forms.

This idea of creating a physical double of cyberspace makes sense, given that we are, above all, tactile beings. Despite all the Silicon Valley ideology that imagines us as pure minds that could exist apart from our bodies, the reality is that manipulating physical objects and moving through physical space as babies is by far our most primal experience, without which your mind would pretty much be useless.

In fact, within anthropology we see many examples of how humans try to grapple with ephemeral phenomena - such as shifting social relations and perceptions of the supernatural - by manipulating physical objects. This sometimes gets filed under the catch-all phrase ‘fetishism’. For example, a peace treaty is a shaky relationship between a whole range of potentially flaky people, but you can give it more ‘solidity’ by representing it as, for example, an elaborately constructed belt made out of whelk shells. This is what’s called Wampum among native Americans. The wampum belt pictured below was given to William Penn by the Lenape people in 1682, to mark a treaty.

In Papua New Guinea, similar shell trinkets called Tabu get passed over during marriage ceremonies. This is sometimes called ‘shell money’, and it requires a lot of labour to produce. This symbolically gives weight to the newly forged social relationship between two people coming from two clans.

Physical objects - especially those that require definite energy to produce - can be used as a means to give a more concrete feeling to otherwise ephemeral stuff, or to put a lid on the more chaotic elements of social life. Consider, for example, an engagement ring. It’s a piece of forged metal that supposedly ‘contains’ a relationship between two people. Somehow, the presence of the ring makes this relationship seem more real than if it were not present. To take the ring off, and cast it into the ocean, is to symbolically break that relationship, something that will then be mirrored in the real world between the two people (who are, after all, not pieces of forged metal).

Could we draw upon these ancient traditions of ritualistic fetishism to mediate our engagement with the digital world? Could it be used as a way to improve the nature of the relationship? Well yes. Let me introduce you to my latest, and most effective, system yet. I call it the Portals Protocol.

The Portals Protocol

There are three steps to setting up your own portals protocol. Firstly, you map the networks you are part of. Secondly, you map the portals that connect into them. Thirdly, you develop physical rituals, with fetishistic objects, to open the portals and enter them, and to later close them. These rituals can be calibrated to do something useful that would otherwise be negated by digital life. In my case, I use them for physical exercise. Let me explain the three steps.

Step 1: Understand your networks

Human society is interdependent, but that operates at multiple scales. For example, we begin life surrounded by the protective network of the family, set within the contours of our community, and as kids we build networks of friends. As we get older we begin to integrate into the larger, more diffuse network of the nation, and the global economy.

All of these are different networks that we can plug into, and we all have to juggle them. Some people keep the balance towards the local or the close - connecting most readily with family and friends - while others are heavily weighted to the distant and cold, with hours of their day taken up in interactions with strangers.

Step 2: Mapping the portals into them

Each of these networks can enter your life through portals. These include your WhatsApp messages, which might project your mother into your midst while you’re at the gym, or your email system that portals a scammer into your office, or your Spotify algorithm that projects the labour of a Jamaican musician into your ears as you jog. Youtube connects you to ‘content creators’ and Reddit ports you into specialist debates in subreddits. SMS, Telegram, landlines, and the postal system are all forms of portals.

Social media originally operated as a portal connecting you into vast networks of distant strangers, whose only real claim on you might be that they share some common nationality, or are part of the same global economic system. X is a realm of generic chaos, while Substack tends to port you into a more specialist, slightly more sophisticated network. For me, social media type portals are the most tricky to handle, so I focus my protocol on them.

Step 3: Build rituals for opening and closing portals, and tie them to fetishistic objects

The old landline telephone would have a physical ritual for opening the portal. You’d key in the number, connect to the distant person, have your conversation, and then break it off by putting the phone down. You were left with the feeling that there was a beginning and an end, and that the line was now broken. The portal was closed.

What we tend to have nowadays, though, is the digital equivalent of a countless open telephone lines. So, you need to develop a new physical ritual to both ‘type in the number’, and to ‘hang up’.

Here’s what I do. When I want to enter Substack, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Facebook, I get onto the floor and I do fifteen reps of some exercise, such as pushups. I imagine this physical action as generating energy that enables me to open a small box next to my computer. Inside that box is an old bracelet. I slip it on, and as I fasten it, the portal is opened.

You could do something similar with a ring, or necklace. The point is that the physical object represents your engagement to those you are exposing yourself to via the portal. While you’re wearing it, you are free to jam with them, fight with them, or do whatever it is you want to do.

Once done, I take off the bracelet, put it back in the box and close the lid. That’s not the end, though. I have to then get back on the floor and do another fifteen pushups. That generates energy to close the portal properly. I’ve hung up.

Hedging toxicity

That’s my version of the ritual, but you could of course adapt it to your needs. The primary idea is to create an association in your brain between some solid physical act and the ever-changing fragmentary world of social media.

Ideally, you want the former to be something fundamentally life sustaining, like keeping fit, or practing scales on a piano, or doing a stretching exercise. Basically, choose anything that involves a short-term struggle that culminates in long-term gains.

You then use that to enter the world of short-term dopamine hits that culminate in long-term depression. Essentially, you create an association between something long-term positive, and something fundamentally life draining, like feeding the monster of Big Tech.

By fusing these together, you are - to use financial sector jargon - creating a hedge, or an offset. I’m free to indulge in my social media addiction, but only if I’m prepared to do loads of exercise. If I wish to enter those portals many times a day, I have to do a couple hundred reps.

This creates a much more deliberate way of interacting with the portals. Now, when I’m taking a piss in the Berlin bar, I feel little desire to look at my X notifications, simply because I have a bodily association that the portal is closed, and that it needs to be physically reopened before I can go on again. Unless I’m prepared to get on the floor and push out fifteen more, I ain’t going to be checking social media at the pub.

This feeling of doing something positive to mediate access to something potentially negative can help you to make the latter less toxic. It means that when you actually go onto social media, you’ll be more mindful about what you’re doing.

Indeed, when a line is left open, the sense of constant connection eventually gives way into a feeling of disconnection. Humanity is increasingly just disorientated and isolated by the sea of open portals that surround us, and people are feeling more lonely than ever. Ironically, having definitive ways of closing the portals gives you the ability to feel more connected to others. To feel connection you have to ration it.

Finally, I do know that addiction is a slippery customer, and that it will try to coopt my ritual. I have already found myself at certain moments trying to find ways to get around this new barrier I’ve created, maybe allowing myself little exceptions, which in turn can slowly erode the ritual. That’s something I’m mindful about, and it takes me back to my earlier point about life hacks: in the end, we really need some lasting systemic solution that holds the toxicity of the portals at bay. Until that happens, though, I’d love to hear your adaptations of the protocol. Use yours to open a line to me, and others, in the comments section. Send your ideas. Then close it again.

Share

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can access the audio version here! (16 minutes). Also, I’m going to be pushing pause on payments at the end of today, so your paid subscriptions will be frozen in time until I return to full-time Substacking in a few weeks (for those on annual subscriptions, this time doesn’t count towards the year, so your subscription extends)

The Attention Economy is also a Gig Economy, and for all of us who operate within it, this has serious implications for our ability to take holidays. I’d like to offer an explanation, and one solution. Firstly, some definitions:

1. The Attention Economy: a sector of the economy in which media is produced by ‘content creators’ to absorb peoples’ finite attention. There’s only so many hours in a day, and only so much capacity in each person’s mind and body to take in this ‘content’

2. The Gig Economy: this isn’t really an economic sector, so much as a new labour contracting model, in which workers are attached to firms by easily breakable, short-term fluid contracts rather than longer-term fixed ones

The attention economy is run on a gig economy labour model, in the sense that the workers - content creators - aren’t given fixed or secure contracts by the major sellers (or monetizers) of the final product, which are the platforms like Meta, X, Google, and smaller players like Substack. Let’s look a little deeper into the key dynamics of the gig economy.

Gig Economy 101

To understand the gig economy, imagine your head being detached from your body.

Traditional corporations integrated heady stuff - the senior and middle management who did strategy and coordination - with bodily stuff, the lower-level workers who did most of the ground-level production. All were held together as a complete organism through fixed contracts (see my Lego Model of Corporate Capitalism).

Gig economy corporations, by contrast, sever the management layer from the worker layer, creating a disembodied Head that relies on a churning pool of workers - the Body - to connect into their platform to do the ground-level production. Without that ‘body’, the head is but a hollow IT infrastructure.

The Faustian bargain of the gig economy model is that workers technically get more flexibility, but lose perks and protections. Let’s go to the transport sector, for example. The self-employed Uber driver is called an ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘contractor’ by Uber. The driver supposedly ‘runs their own business’ and ‘works for themselves’.

From an economic power perspective, though, the line between an Uber driver and an employee of a taxi firm is very very thin. They’re basically the same person under a slightly different labour contracting regime, with the added element that they’re now responsible for financing smaller assets that firms previously would have financed themselves, like individual cars. If you zoom out and look at it from a birds-eye-view, Uber is a giant taxi firm that gets its workers to bring their own capital assets to work (imagine a white-collar firm asking its employees to haul in their own computers and stationery into the office each day).

If you’re zoomed into the micro ground level view - the fact that the driver is technically self-employed - you can easily miss this macro level picture. At a macro level, the main distinction in our economy is between those who own large concentrations of assets and those who don’t. Both an Uber driver and an employed taxi driver of a taxi firm are in that latter category. In relative terms, they’re not major owners of capital in our society, while the platforms like Uber are.

Similarly, a Dickensian cloth factory owner in the 19th century was a relatively large owner of capital, while his individual workers were not. In power terms, then, a 19th century factory lord and an Uber exec are in a similar position, and their respective ground-level workers are in a similar position too, but the nature of each firm’s assets are slightly different.

The factory lord works with the original business model of capitalism, which was to accumulate concentrations of tools, machines and materials - the proverbial factory - and to get workers to operate them for him. This is what old Marxists would call ‘owning the Means of Production’.

The Gig Economy platforms, by contrast, run a lean version of this. A company like Uber knows that it doesn’t actually need to own tens of thousands of cars - the Means of Production - provided that it owns an information and management architecture that stands between those productive assets and society: Uber owns the Means of Connecting, rather than the Means of Production, which means they can still be a gatekeeper between workers and consumers, while outsourcing finance costs to the individual workers.

The fact that Uber drivers finance and provide their own low-level capital assets - cars - is one reason why they end up getting called ‘entrepreneurs’ (or ‘micro-entrepreneurs’), but again - in power terms - they really aren’t in such a different position to a factory worker. After all, a Dickensian factory lord could also choose to label each of his workers as a ‘micro-entrepreneur’, independently selling a ‘service’ - their labour - to operate his factory. Is that really so different to the driver, who gets up every day to sell their labour to Uber?

Uber will claim that it’s a mere middle-man, and that the drivers are in fact selling their labour to you, the customer, but the old factory owner could claim exactly the same thing: isn’t he just a ‘middle-man’ between workers who sew the cloth and the consumers who will buy the stuff? In both cases, the owners of the firms make zero revenue unless workers turn up: you will not find the factory owner threading needles to stitch corsets for Victorian England, any more than you’d find Uber execs ferrying drunk people around a city. There’s no coal without low-level workers getting dirty at the coal face.

Concessions on the coal face of content production

YouTube, much like Uber or a 19th century factory owner, makes no revenue without workers. They sell no advertising to their advertiser customers unless YouTubers turn up to produce the content that will attract the eyeballs. A platform like Substack has a different business model to YouTube, but is the same position vis-a-vis content-creators: they rely upon us writers to produce the articles that’ll give rise to subscription revenue. All attention economy platforms, from X to TikTok, are powered by their content-creators, but right now the managers of these platforms get holidays and sick leave, while the workers at the coalface don’t.

Remember that concessions and perks like sick leave, maternity leave, holidays and the two-day weekend didn’t used to exist. Workers had to fight for them. Some of these concessions were made by the proverbial Dickensian factory owners to prevent socialist uprisings and revolutions. At other times they realised they got more out of their workers if they gave them time to rest. In the case of the weekend, they also realised that it gave workers more time to consume, which was required for the overall system to clear and sell all the goods that workers produced during the week.

If you look at the rise of the gig economy model through cynical eyes, it does look a lot like a backdoor way to dissolve those protections. It is, however, a sophisticated way to do so, because gig economy corporations swap one set of concessions for another: you lose the holidays, sick leave and protection, but do get marginal flexibility. This is why gig economy platforms thrive in areas where workers are relatively interchangeable - the platforms are indifferent to workers leaving, provided that new ones are connecting in to replace them (and connecting in at a faster rate than they’re leaving). They want workers to fire and hire themselves, rather than managers having to do it.

So, each time a worker takes a break from a gig economy platform, they’re basically firing themselves. In the realm of the attention economy, though, this model eventually starts to harm the actual quality of work. Without any official holiday periods, the content creators must often push themselves to work all year without breaks, and this is heavily exacerbated by the algorithmic curation models of these platforms.

Long gone are the days in which platforms merely offered a centralised place to distribute content in chronological order. Now they curate it, selectively filtering it, and pushing it to selective people via algorithmic feeds.

As an attention economy producer, then, you have a real-time reward and punishment system: the more you clock in to work, the more you might be promoted, but - unlike a promotion in a traditional company - that promotion is temporary rather than permanent. You can spend years building up a higher profile by producing endless content in a particular niche, but the platforms are often designed to demote you as soon as you attempt to take a break.

You can literally see this in the eyes of burned out YouTubers, as they apologise to their audience about why they haven’t been producing content at a regular enough pace. What they’re trying to say is ‘I’m fucking exhausted, but if I stop producing at the same rate, the YouTube algorithm will start pushing my content down the rankings’.

This problem is well known, and I - as a Substack writer and ‘content creator’ on other historic platforms like Twitter - know it very well. I had a very serious breakdown-burnout in 2022, in which I couldn’t write for over six months. At that time I had a book coming out, so I had an alternative means of income for a bit, but it was pretty damn terrifying to sense the platforms retreating from me as soon as tried to temporarily retreat from them.

Even people who are doing well on these platforms face serious insecurity if they had to clock off for a couple months. Imagine, for example, if they’re suffering bereavement, or depression, or a divorce, or have to help out a parent who is ill. There’s no ‘compassionate leave’ option on these platforms, and there’s a generalised sense that if you take a break, others might be immediately promoted in your place.

Something isn’t right about that. It’s wack that mid-level Instagrammers trying to take a holiday will have to take their camera along with them to produce monetized content about the holiday they’re trying to take. It’s also wack that some of that revenue being generated by them on their half-holidays will be passed on to fund the fully-paid full-holidays of Meta bosses.

An imperfect solution

Substack allows writers like me to push pause on subscription payments, and the wording they use for it reveals the point I’m making. Sitting alongside the Pause button is the line, “take a break from writing by pausing all paid subscriptions and preventing new ones”.

I understand why they have this - if subscribers keep paying me while I don’t produce, they start getting annoyed, so it’s the business equivalent of an unpaid holiday.

There’s some complex psychology to this: as your finger hovers over the Pause button, you’re imagining the income being turned off, but you’re also imagining the possibility of your visibility being turned off, and your ranking being reduced - if you’re temporarily not open to paid subscriptions, perhaps the system isn’t going to showcase your work. Maybe whatever secret algorithm is being used will demote you and you’ll have to fight your way back up when you return. Who knows?

Substack has released a little bit about how their curation algos work, and their main claim is that they have a better model than advertising-driven platforms (who try to get users to drift endlessly through feeds to maximise exposure to advertising). I support the Substack mission, but while they talk about how their curation broadly works in matching writers with readers, there’s nothing on what happens if writers take a break.

In the gig economy world, it’s typical for platforms to maintain that they’re mere middle-men for self-employed people, but the reality is that they simultaneously present themselves as being more than mere middle-men. Much like traditional corporations will try to boast about how good they are to their employees, gig economy platforms will try to attract workers by offering better services and to present themselves as compassionate partners serving our needs.

Well, writers and content-creators need holidays, and I truly believe that Substack, YouTube, Instagram and all the others could get a lot of goodwill if they start pioneering new gig economy protections. I know they’re not going to offer paid holidays to us, but the least they can do is guarantee that we won’t be punished for taking leave.

So here’s my request to Substack, and all the other attention economy platforms. Your mid-level programmers get to relax on holiday, knowing that they can return to their same position when they get back. In that spirit, get these engineers to design for us content-creators a big button that says ‘Take Holiday’. Program it so that when we push it, our current algorithmic ranking is fixed in place and protected while we take a rest. Creators who have put in thousands of hours to rise up the ranks shouldn’t return to find themselves at the bottom of the ladder again.

I’m pushing pause

I hate to say it, but current gig economy platforms aren’t actually that different to our aforementioned 19th century factory owner, who offered no guarantee of repeat work to labourers who lined up each morning trying to win a daily wage. Those workers also felt they couldn’t take holidays, and those workers also worked on the weekends, because - well - weekends hadn’t been invented yet.

Like thousands of other content creators, I finished this piece on the weekend, justifying to everyone why I’m going to take a couple weeks off by producing content about the difficulties that come with being a content-creator.

I haven’t taken a holiday for a year, so with that, I’ll be pushing pause on payments for my dear paying subscribers, and I’ll be hoping that I don’t get demoted down the rankings by Substack’s managers and their algorithm while I do that. I do know though, that both of those parties - readers and managers - benefit from good content, and I do know that content benefits from good breaks.

I’ve just pushed pause on paid subscriptions for a couple weeks, which also prevents new sign-ups, so if you want to upgrade to a paid subscription to support ASOMOCO, leave me your details on this form, and I’ll contact you when I re-open the paid option. Cheers!

Share

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this essay here

AI is a machine, and it’s trained on millennia of human creativity.

I know that our datasets don’t go back millennia, but nobody grows up in a vacuum, and every creative soul develops their craft in the context of previous creative souls, and this chain stretches back to the beginning of humanity. So, embedded in every work – whether it be a text, song, artwork, invention or idea – are traces of all its predecessors.

Take, for example, language itself. We use this substrate of meaning to creatively express things, but every word was developed and shaped by countless generations of people we’ll never meet. While it’s true that I just created this paragraph, the various inflections and turns of phrase within it (such as, ‘for example’ and ‘turns of phrase’) were developed by others.

The word choices in my articles come from me developing my craft for over fifteen years, and doing so in the context of millennia of human word choices. I spend days editing my pieces, which is why I got so angry when someone recently suggested that my article Surveillance Capitalism 2024, Wrapped had been edited using AI. According to them, my word choices and turns of phrase revealed the presence of an automated editor.

The idea that I edited an article about surveillance capitalism with generative AI - a machine developed through surveillance capitalism - was outrageous to me, especially because I’m a proud Neo-Luddite. Much like callisthenics athletes work out naturally using only their own bodyweight, while avoiding steroids and gym machines, so Neo-Luddites like me believe that arduously editing your own work, or crafting something slowly, creates stuff that’s not only higher quality, but is also good for the soul of the creator.

Neo-Luddites do not reject the use of technology. We reject the cult of technology. Remember folks, tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff that we previously didn’t experience as a need, and this is driven by systemic factors beyond anyone’s individual control. ‘Choosing’ to use a smartphone, for example, is much like choosing to continue running on an accelerating treadmill that you’re required to run on to survive. If you fail to make that choice you’ll be dumped off the edge of society into the economic periphery, which for most people isn’t an option, which means there isn’t really a choice. There’s a reason why it’s called the ‘rat race’ - you gotta keep running or you’re screwed.

So, I understand that I’m supposed to ‘keep up’ with tech (aka. run on the treadmill), but I do refuse to indulge the Silicon Valley stories about tech liberation, and I do my utmost to resist the latest waves of acceleration.

This is why there was something so jarring about realising there are people out there who can’t accurately detect the absence of AI in my articles. That’s why I created an AI-free sticker to put up on ASOMOCO: the content on this website is not factory-farmed.

I’ve been sensing we need a movement to promote an ‘AI-Free’ label, much like the movements that promoted the Fair Trade label on bananas. After all, many of us are now struggling to detect AI, which means we’re also struggling to detect its absence. I’ve always known that adverts are trying to manipulate me, but now I find myself looking at them even more suspiciously: is that woman in the toothpaste ad a machine output? Is that dancer in the car commercial real? Those are now valid suspicions, but they’re going to be hurtful if there is an actual dancer. How dare you say my moves are AI-generated!

One sad victim of this is DeviantArt. Ten years ago I loved browsing this website, where graphic artists could post their surrealistic works. I’d use it to find potential illustrators for my articles. Now, though, audiences will assume that any image with a fantasy edge could be AI-generated, even when it’s not, so do I really want to commission an illustrator with that style?

This points to an emergent injustice. Generative AI is trained on the work of generations of artists and designers (which I’m sure includes the 20 years of AI-free material on DeviantArt), but then goes on to not only create career insecurity for those artists, but also to erode the sense of authenticity that previously surrounded their real work. Imagine being a graphic novel illustrator working for two years on a project, and then overhearing a reader say ‘oh these images are clearly AI-generated’. The tech is taking credit for work it hasn’t even done.

Automated aura has no aura at all

I noted earlier that all creative works contain traces of everything that came before – the graphic novelist is drawing on traditions of storytelling and visual layout that extend back thousands of years, and the feeling of authenticity comes from them adding something of themselves to that chain of creativity.

This applies in all fields: Jackson Pollock paintings aren’t merely spatters of paint. They’re evidence of a feeling person who engaged with a canvas, reacting to previous generations of canvases. It’s entirely possible to replicate the surface appearance of that - for example, with a machine designed in a corporate lab that randomly spits out paint - but that will never feel the same.

This is picked up by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 classic The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. A McDonald’s restaurant feels less ‘authentic’ than an old family-run BBQ house, because the latter only exists in one place in one time with one eccentric cook and one backstory, and if you try to replicate this in a cookie-cutter fashion you destroy the ‘aura’ that surrounds the unique thing. Similarly, creating the surface appearance of a Pollock artwork without the backstory feels empty.

Technology doesn’t always destroy aura, but it often displaces it. For example, electronic music DJs use shit-tonnes of automation tech, and we’re not going to sense a particular ‘aura’ about the individual drum loops they use. Nevertheless, people can get very passionate about DJs because we can see the craft and intention they pour into the curation of sounds, and the manipulation of the equipment (against the backdrop of previous generations of music). In fact, genres like techno use technology to capture the grind of life in industrial society, and to turn it towards creating emotional release on the weekend.

In a typical aura-displacement sequence, though, the old aura remains intact in its original context. For example, house music DJs might use vocal samples from sixties soul singers, but nobody feels like those old time crooners are being degraded in the process. Generative AI, by contrast, opens up new realms of creativity only by impersonating entire generations of previous creativity. It doesn’t try to remix something. It tries to copy something, attacking that thing’s aura in its own context - in other words, you’re listening to the house music DJ and you suddenly think, wait a moment, are those sixties vocal samples actually real?

We will of course see people who, like a DJ, try to generate new forms of aura through the creative manipulation of AI, but as the power of the automation tech increases, the ability to do this gets more tenuous. The techno producer can still spend months fine-tuning tracks, and that’s different to pushing a button to generate a hybrid sixties-meets-house-music album in 30 milliseconds.

You might say well, what’s wrong with expanding our canvas of possibilities? Surely, it’s always good to have a new tool? Surely, it’s good if a person can splice together a ten-hour meta-album using 100 auto-generated sub-albums as raw material?

Well, there’s diminishing returns to automation like this, partly because there’s limits to how much people can actually absorb, but the reason that generative AI gets funded isn’t to allow one cutting-edge AI artist to build a ten-hour album. Rather, it’s to allow for a tenth of a person to build a one-hour album, so that a corporate hotel chain can pay less for their elevator music. Let’s explore this.

The Masterless Piece

Clicking a button that says create instantaneous renaissance masterpiece will not create a masterpiece. This is because the term masterpiece comes from the age of guilds, where you had to show mastery of your craft to enter the guild. No artists will get into any artist guild by using generative AI, but the engineers that built the machine can certainly impress the proverbial Guild of Toolbuilders to say ‘look at my masterpiece of invention. It’s a machine that can replicate the surface appearance of any point in the millennia of human creativity’.

Who might fund such a machine though? As I discussed in The Emptiness Machine, the people who fund the commercial application of generative AI are – primarily – capitalists. Why do they fund it? Well, the evolutionary logic of a capitalist system tilts towards a narrow range of creative endeavours like make something faster, make something bigger, and make something sell more, so entrepreneurs will generally only be funded by venture-capitalists if they lean in that direction too (aka. if your creative impulse is to slow something down, make it smaller, more unique, and less addictive, you probably won’t be funded, and your creativity won’t turn up in the mainstream market).

Historically, firms would hire different creative classes - like artists, copywriters and photographers - and would channel those people’s broad creativity into the narrow pursuit of profit-optimization: for example, they might create adverts. The creative class firms love most, though, are those tool-builders, the engineers. In the case of generative AI, engineers were commissioned by capitalists - either directly or indirectly (via university funding etc) - to take those thousands of years of human invention, and turn it towards building a machine that could generate the surface appearance of a renaissance artwork. Why? Well, venture capitalists know every corporate boss will reach for this new tool in place of hiring the photographers and artists they used to rely on. Generate me an advert for razor blades in the style of Da Vinci sketches.

This is why we now have this system of automated faux-creativity, which is causing people to doubt the veracity of actual creative output, but this phenomenon in which automation increases societal doubt in creativity and diminishes ‘aura’, isn’t new.

For example, most people know that Ikea furniture is pumped out by computer-guided lathes, rather than artisan carpenters. It’s pretty low-aura furniture, but it’s still possible to feel some warmth towards it, especially in situations where it carries class aspirations. In fact, class politics and industrial processes lie at the ambiguous heart of mass consumer culture.

Historically, mass-manufacture facilities – factories – were used by economic elites to get rich while claiming they were liberating everyone. Henry Ford used automation alongside production lines to increase scale and drive down unit costs, which meant the workers of his factories could afford the cars they were building.

But who were those workers? They were people with lower levels of power who sold their labour to Ford, who owned a concentration of productive assets. At an individual firm level, it looks like a capitalist is paying workers to operate assets – Ford is offering employment – but when you zoom out to a systemic level the picture changes: when you look at workers-in-general as a collective class, you’ll see they all turn up in the morning to thousands of different factories, where they will operate the assets owned by bosses-in-general. They then leave work, and enter the market as consumers to buy those things using the wages they were paid to build them. On net, what’s happening is that the ownership class as a whole is renting out the assets to the working class as a whole, taking a big cut in the middle while saying ‘we took risk’, or ‘we gave you jobs’, or ‘we directed you’ (psst, wanna know the other little systemic secret? Previous generations of workers built the assets that are now being rented out to the current generation).

Regardless of whether you believe this arrangement is fair or not, one thing is certain: the rentier classes make nothing unless the workers turn up, just like beekeepers make no honey without bees.

This, though, leads to class gradations in consumer behaviour. The elites take that rent (the difference between what they pay their workers, and what workers will pay back to them to buy goods), and use it to buy more expensive stuff that working class people won’t have access to. Think, for example, of those ‘brick’ mobile phones used by yuppie professionals in the 1980s.

What’s happening here is that dual, out-of-sync, layers are forming within a single economic system. The mismatch in the layers, however, creates an opportunity for a new class of capitalists to turn luxury goods into mass consumer goods. They’ll say stuff like ‘we want to democratise the mobile phone market’, but to drive down the costs of producing phones, they’ll buy machines (from other groups of capitalists), and insert those machines into the production process in place of the workers who were previously there. This lowers the labour required to create a phone, boosting productivity on the production side of the circuit, which means the product appears on the consumption side in a cheaper form.

‘Democratisation’ of goods in this context happened by paying one class of people – capitalists who hire machine-builders – for tech to replace another class of people: artisan workers. Those latter people are told to find a new job, and accept the consolation prize, which is that society now has cheaper mobile phones (which they need, because they’re now making less money in wages).

The net result is that phones are ‘democratised’. Theoretically, this would be good if we were able to turn this higher standard of living into more leisure time and relaxation, but that won’t happen. In reality, what happens now is that the economic system will reset to a state of higher acceleration in which the new technology – which used to be ‘luxury’ – now becomes the mandatory baseline required for survival.

Against the new baseline, new management teams will continue the circuit. They’ll extract rent for the elite strata, who will again buy stuff that isn’t available to the lower strata. Perhaps this now includes organic wine, or meat from a farmer’s market. Those goods never used to be ‘luxury’ - in the 17th century they were a normal baseline for the average person – but in the context of mass automation they’re relatively more expensive in labour terms, so it becomes a mark of status to buy them. This is why fancy supermarkets like Waitrose in the UK are frequented by managerial elites, while working classes go to Aldi (Aldi executives, however, will shop at Waitrose).

These out-of-sync layers will have the technological salvation narrative embedded in them: old farm workers who previously tended chickens by hand might now be pushing the buttons on machines that automatically harvest eggs, but while the executives of these factory farms will buy organic in Waitrose, they’ll defend industrial farming as a salvation for the poor: like Henry Ford’s workers, their workers can buy cheap eggs, which they need, because… well… we live in an unequal society where some people get a much higher cut of the societal product by relying on others getting a much lower cut.

Those rich people will also use their profits to patronise ‘uneconomic’ things like fine art, which gains its luxury status partly because of it’s disdain for mass industrial economic efficiency, and lack of immediate utility. Predictably, though, this opens an opportunity for a new wave of ‘democratisation’. The world’s most powerful venture capitalists come in and say, ‘we’re removing fine art from the hands of the elites!’ and voila, there’s Generative AI. Of course, in the background their actual customers are going to be those firms who want to fire their designers and copywriters, or the corporate hotel chains that previously bought elevator music from actual musicians.

The degenerating tape

This process of being terrorised as an employee while being patronised as a consumer has no end. It’s like a ceaseless game of cat and mouse – cat takes your job, but run like mice to the next station to get another job, catch your breath and buy the cheaper stuff, until you have to run again. As you flip burgers in McDonalds, waiting for Andreesen Horowitz and the other VC companies to fund the tool-builders to build a burger-flipping robot, you’re told that a product utopia awaits you at the end of this all, a mystical land of rest where you have abundant goods and no precarity.

But, that’s a mirage. There is no true rest point in this system. All we do is endlessly adapt to its endless change. A new generation of kids will try to use generative AI to make films or music, but there’s no ‘pause’ button we can push to say ‘ok, we have enough productive power now, so let’s just chill and focus on how to use and distribute it properly’. No. Generative AI will just becomes the new baseline from which the various warring sectors of elites will try to push the next frontier of systemic acceleration and expansion.

There was a time in human history when technology had an aura. But, if technology is an art-form, it’s creation is now on auto-pilot, reproduced through the mechanical logic of profit-maximization. This is why an existential emptiness starts to surround it. It’s one thing to dazzle 19th century rural folk with new industrial gadgets, but a modern person might be bored to hell with virtual reality in about 20 minutes. That’s because we’re almost entirely saturated by automation technology, like being surrounded by 40,000 photographs of the Mona Lisa.

So, even if it was true that somehow this tech made our lives easier rather than faster, we experience a growing distance between ourselves and the raw creative material of the world. In techno-utopian circles they spin this into a story of transcendence – they imagine a ‘transhuman’ ‘singularity’ where we detach from our environment like gods, so numbed and bored of the earth that we can only gain excitement by looking to space.

But, this is just a weird religious spin on the actual thing that awaits us at the end of capitalism, which is the fact that… well.. there is no end. It’s like a tape that loops while being constantly overdubbed until it eventually degenerates into noise, and you’re left standing there on a planet that’s been turned into a giant mall surrounded by a giant waste-heap, and you’re thinking ‘now what?’

Now what?

We do not factory farm to help the working class. We factory farm because we are stuck in a systemic loop that always defaults towards scale and speed regardless of whether it actually helps people. It’s not like there’s actually a real utopia waiting at the end of this, so why don’t we just cut the farce? Why don’t we just call out this version of ‘progress’ for what it is. A tape stuck on loop. A treadmill.

I know that I can’t push pause on the grinding cogs of capitalism by myself, but I can cultivate a callisthenic way of being and to ask you to do so too. Fuck the treadmill. Fuck the factory-farmed creativity. Don’t get me wrong. I know we’re all stuck in this, so I don’t judge anyone who finds themselves pushed to use AI – if that’s what you’ve got to do to economically survive, then do what you have to do – but I’m pledging that ASOMOCO is 100% AI-free in all aspects, and always will be.

And yes, I know that this is forming the seeds for a new dual layer in the economy, and I know, like the organic farmers before me, that a bunch of elites will use their automation profits to patronise AI-free long-form writing like a ‘luxury’. And yes, I know that Andreesen Horowitz will also be trying a fund a robot to automate long-form writing that critiques automation. But screw it. Let’s embrace our roles in the grand farce, and build the digital organic movement anyway. Let’s give it some aura.

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this essay here (19 minutes)

When I was in my early teens, I discovered that I loved birdwatching. I was something of a social outsider, so wilderness spaces became like sanctuaries for me. I would disappear into the forests, mountains and coastal estuaries to search for feathered friends like the starred robin, Narina trogon or buff-spotted flufftail. South Africa has almost 900 species of these birds, so seeking them out in the canopies, thickets and water edges was like playing a long and rewarding real-world game of Pokémon GO (except that birdwatchers don’t try to imprison the birds in a Pokéball).

The most captivating moments for a birdwatcher are hearing the call of a rare bird, or catching a brief glimpse of movement in the undergrowth. Perhaps you follow it and discover small traces of the creature: droppings, footprints, or soil scratched up in the search for grubs. Everything revolves around trying to get an elusive glimpse of it through the binoculars, while excitedly paging through a bird identification book.

When a solid identification happens it can be magical. I still remember the time I finally saw the buff-spotted flufftail, a rare and secretive bird, creeping through a clearing in a small forest…

That was a special moment for me, but what did the moment mean for the flufftail? Well, very little. Through their eyes, I was just some figure hiding behind a tree that they’d tolerate for a while. They might see me scribbling something down in my notebook - when and where I saw them - but that data meant nothing to them. It wasn’t used to alter their environment. It didn’t determine what fruit or grubs appeared before them. It had no bearing on their chances of mating.

In fact, birdwatching has very little impact on birds. It doesn’t change their migration patterns or their sense of themselves. Of course, systematic scientific observation can be turned towards making interventions into their world - from conservation efforts to eradication attempts - but in general, the hundreds of thousands of observations written in the notebooks of countless birdwatchers throughout history stays with the observers alone. There are no debates about who creates or owns the data, because it’s obvious. The birdwatcher creates the data through the act of surveillance, and they own it, and the birds don’t care.

The People-Watchers

Unlike birdwatching, the largest-scale forms of modern people-watching have a very big impact on our lives, and you should care. As you stare at your smartphone or laptop screen, looking at whatever’s on it, there’s a legion of automated observers looking back at you with digital binoculars and recording devices, with trackers sniffing out your cyber footprint, and AI models analyzing the disturbances you leave in the digital record as you scratch around for grubs.

Big Tech companies (or companies using their services) use the data derived from this observation to affect your life, to curate your world, and to steer you down paths you otherwise might have not gone down. They’re not doing passive observation. They’re doing observation with intent to influence, to manipulate, to convince, to induce. This active attempt to affect gets projected back at you via interfaces that look public, but are actually privately targeted at you.

The original Big Tech Faustian bargain goes like this: you’re offered free entry to a digital infrastructure, with little breadcrumbs to entice you in. The companies run at a loss while doing this, long enough to get you accustomed and hooked to a platform. Once dependence sets in for a large enough number of people, the network effects start to ripple out and gently coerce everyone else into becoming dependent too. This is because our economy is an interconnected whole, and it’s wired such that you will be excluded if others are using something that you’re not.

Spotify is a good example of this. It started as a fun and optional service, but as it undermined the alternatives and the network effects kicked in, it started getting oligopoly power. All your friends would start sending you stuff on it, which means you’d get excluded if you hadn’t signed up. Humans are social animals, so exclusion is a serious business that we want to avoid at all costs. That fear of exclusion drives us to a central point: for example, musicians started gearing themselves around the Spotify platform as they realised they would be excluded from listeners if they didn’t.

The end result is predictable. We’ve ended up socially dependent on an oligopoly of streaming music giants. Maybe you can switch from Spotify to Apple Music, but you’re captured no matter what you do. If you’re a lone-wolf outsider type, you can of course channel your inner anarchist hacker and try to live totally outside the system, but for most people that takes energy, and they’re already using most of their energy just trying to survive in their own jobs while looking after family and loved ones.

So, when the smarmy corporate apologists turn up and say that we ‘choose’ to use Microsoft, or Google Search or Spotify playlists, and that we can just as easily leave, they’re being heavily disingenuous and euphemistic. We’re locked in to those platforms, and they’re now basic mandatory infrastructure. And, once a Big Tech player becomes infrastructure, then ‘enshittification’ ensues. This term was coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how the owners of these infrastructures start to squeeze you for profit while degrading their services.

Want to learn more about enshittification and Cory Doctorow, while listening to relaxing music? Check out my new podcast! It also covers Karmic reciprocity, our inner civil war, Mastodon, Bitcoin wrestling and the Mononoke Wolf Choir!

Three ways of selling surveillance-as-a-service

One of the primary methods for squeezing profit is through spying on users, but historically people get weird about being spied on. So, to engineer consent for this, the platforms started spinning surveillance as a service for your own good.

The first wave of this was cringe. Remember when all those internet companies started saying they collected data to ‘improve your ad experience’, as if they were helpful attendants doing their best to find you ‘relevant ads’? Well, the ‘irrelevant ad’ or the ‘bad ad experience’ really wasn’t a problem for you, but it was a problem for advertisers. What the tech companies were really saying to you was ‘our advertisers want us to find the people who are most likely to be influenced by their messaging’.

Deep down everyone knows that receiving advertising isn’t a ‘service’, but a more advanced way of selling you on surveillance was to present it as something that gave a personal touch to your experience of an otherwise inhuman infrastructure. You might be one tiny account among billions in Amazon’s vast servers, but they’d reflect your data back at you via personal pronouns like ‘my’ - My Amazon - as if you were in your own personal shop. When combined with AI ‘chatbots’ - automated answering machines constructed from your data, which speak in the first person as ‘I’ - it’s as if you had a personal assistant in your personal shop. For more on that see:

These first two waves of consent-engineering justified surveillance as useful while disguising it in personalised terms. The newest phase, however, is to brand this personalised surveillance as something fun, interactive and social. The idea is to offer a person snapshots of their own surveillance, bundled together - or wrapped - with commentary.

Spotify is a pioneer in this. Their Spotify Wrapped is a yearly ‘wrap-up’ of your most listened songs and favourite genres. They gamify it with achievements and special persona badges that you might unlock through your behaviour. Oh, you’re The Adventurer.

Spotify Wrapped got pushed at me hard via the app last year, and I made the mistake of clicking on it. An interactive spectacle unfolded on my phone that was both interesting and creepy. Supposedly I share tastes with people in Asheville, North Carolina. They even had a morose video message from Alt-J - apparently my most listened-to band - who’d been roped by Spotify into recording a thank-you for their fans.

Spotify Wrapped was like a curated exhibition of their observations of my life. It was as if I were a buff-spotted flufftail that had walked into a clearing and found that a zealous birdwatcher had rigged up a curated showcase of my year for me to observe. Here’s a video of you eating a caterpillar.

You can alter the metaphor to suit your tastes, but the basic gist is this: rather than hiding their data extraction, they push it at us, like a CIA agent mailing some photocopied highlights from their log-book to their targets, along with a message that says ‘your year in review!’

Of course, if a CIA agent actually did that, it might spook you and make you self-conscious. That’s what happened to me with Spotify Wrapped. The observation comes from an external watcher who is trying to appear familiar by using second-person pronouns like ‘you’ and ‘your’ (‘Your year’, ‘you are…’), so I suddenly started thinking of myself through second-person eyes: If I listen to this meditation music as a backdrop to working, will it show up in my most-listened songs, and what will that say about me? I’m really more of a rock and psychedelic folk person.

Of course, if you become accustomed to these annual surveillance exhibitions, there’s the possibility that you start to change your behaviour in anticipation of their presentation back at you. That taps into an older trend from platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where people’s lives start to reflect what images they want projected out, rather than the images reflecting what people’s lives actually are. Spotify Wrapped is becoming more like this, precisely because it’s also designed to be social - you can share your surveillance package with others.

The social element is important, because the ultimate victory for these platforms will be to normalise surveillance capitalism as something we not only expect, but look forward to, and even demand, and making it social can solidify that. The ideal for them is for your family and friends to start requesting your Wrapped self - show me what the CIA agent sent! - and for you to experience rewards, pride and praise for that. The goal for all corporates is to become an unquestioned part of our cultural fabric, something that friends, family, media and political leaders push you into regardless of whether you want it, like eating Kentucky Fried Chicken as a tradition on Christmas day in Japan, the result of a 1974 ad campaign by the corporation.

The Wrapping Revolution unfolds

Corporate bosses are herd animals. They see one company doing something and they all follow. So, while Spotify was among the pioneers of ‘wrapping’, every company with user data now tries to do some version of it. For example, my phone provider GiffGaff is - like many UK companies - an egregious pusher of ‘wackaging’: wacky, infantilizing packaging designed to present themselves not as a legal entity that optimizes shareholder profit, but as my chummy friend, like a guy at the pub. So here’s my friend at the pub presenting me with a list of heart-warming things they’ve noted down about me during the year.

I get the sense that I’m supposed to say ‘thanks’ for this automated simulacrum of friendship, but they’re not alone. All the companies are there trying to paw off their disingenuous scrapbooks of memories at you. Even my phone photo gallery does it: last week I got a notification about my ‘best moments’ in 2024, headlined by an image of me drinking red wine alone in my lounge. Look at this nice thing we did for you my friend. It’s a testament to… our relationship.

This ‘relationship’ is non-existent, because to Samsung or Android I’m just one node, constructed from ones and zeroes, among billions of others, each with data attached to them. Some of these companies, though, are now talking about the relationship they have with those billions, with society, the world. They approach us as a whole and tell us to look at our 2024 Wrapped.

The pioneer in this is Google Trends, which now presents a giant global wrap-up of what the world, and entire regions searched for. The individual countries can even get social about it - ha ha, look at you Kenya, searching for chicken curry recipes while India searched for porn star Martinis. Google released a YouTube video about the 2024 trends 10 days ago. It currently has 200 million views, with people in the comments getting all weepy about how the epic scale surveillance now allows society to experience itself as a collective.

As much as I’d like to get caught up in the euphoria of that, I’d like to note that this actually falls under the broader category of cultural hegemony, the process by which powerful interest groups - like Google - create the illusion that their narrow interests are the broader interests of society as a whole: they are on the same side as us, a collaborator with the public in the great adventure of life, merely helping us along and reflecting what we want. They will make presentations to this effect: look what you all did. I was there with you. We were there together.

The other corporate bosses, naturally, follow suit. The global payments processor, Stripe, for example, emailed me in November telling me that I could watch the global extravaganza of Black Friday payments in real time, as if ‘consumer spending’ was a new live-streamed sport.

You’ve probably noticed by now that corporate marketing teams have turned Black Friday into a whole week, but this was never decided by ‘us’, or by ‘society’. It was engineered through the process of ‘interpellation’, which is a very useful concept developed by Louis Althusser. In simple terms, if a person is addressed as if they already are something, or already believe in something, it pushes them towards being that thing and believing that thing. In There is no Black Friday, I showed how this was used to create the non-existent ‘day’, Cyber Monday:

Cyber Monday was written into existence by a press release from the National Retail Federation (the biggest retail trade association in the world), which said: ‘Cyber Monday Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year’.

All the subsequent commercial slogans, like ‘Cyber Monday is Here’, and ‘Are you ready for Cyber Monday?’, speak at you as if you’re already a person who agrees this thing is a reality. This generates a feeling of a movement, of a whole mass of people somewhere - presumably - who already know about this thing that you’re only catching onto now.

Corporations know that the secret to good interpellation is to phrase stuff as if they’re responding to a request, because in doing this they address you as someone who has asked for something. I pay Spotify, and my phone company, but I’ve never asked for their ‘wrapped’ review packages, and yet over the last years they’ve started turning up with messages like ‘Here is Your Year in 2024’. I am being spoken at like someone who has opened the door for a deliveryman who says ‘I have your package’. This carries that embedded message of you asked for this and we delivered. The interpellated payload is clear: you want your own surveillance. You expect it. We did this for you.

The flufftail in captivity

This process of getting us to expect and call for our own surveillance is a process of domestication. It’s like getting that buff-spotted flufftail to enter an enclosure and become like a domesticated chicken that waits to be fed (or, like enticing a Pokémon into a Pokéball).

Of course, actual birdwatchers aren’t interested in watching chickens. There’s no point taking your binoculars and notebook to record chicken sightings, because the behaviour of the chicken is constrained and steered by chicken farmers who shape the data by shaping the world of those birds.

So, when Big Tech companies, and corporations in general, cultivate a domesticated population that responds to whatever cues are given them, surely the data is polluted by the fact that we’re no longer ‘in the wild’. In fact, the ‘wrapped’ snapshots of us are increasingly taken in captivity, which means they do not necessarily reflect our will - or the ‘will of the people’ in the case of collectives. After all, do you really think that what we searched for on Google was unaffected by algorithmically curated feeds? Was it really driven purely by independent thought rather than the artificial herd behaviour induced by social media platforms with profit motives? Yeah. Trends might roughly represent The Collective Consciousness, but it’s not a consciousness solely of our own making.

So here’s the final wrap about our, and your, 2024 in data extraction. Your inner buff-spotted flufftail is being flushed out of the woods, and you are being wrapped in paternalistic cling-film, like a Christmas turkey in a supermarket. Share that with your friends and family. Make it social.

Share

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can find the audio edition here (30 minutes)

19th century Marxists had one thing in their favour. The battle lines in an economy were clearly marked, so they could speak about a simple clash of classes. After European feudalism disintegrated, dispossessed peasants had drifted to the cities to become the urban ‘working class’, a group of people who owned nothing, and who often had few other options but to sell their labour to an ownership class - rich people who controlled factories.

In my Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires, I expanded upon these basic battle lines, showing a more modern version. If we had take every single activity in the global economy, squash it together, and imagine the entire thing as one giant process of people collectively making a huge ‘soup’, we could split the whole enterprise into five basic classes:

1. There are those who own the pot - shareholders

2. There are those who direct the cooking - managers

3. There are those who bring the ingredients and make the soup - workers

4. And, finally, there are those who eat it - consumers

5. We can also add in the state, which underpins the entire legal and contracting structure of the enterprise

This is of course an abstraction. It’s not like we literally have a single giant pot and it’s not like we’re literally making a single soup in a single state. Rather we have hundreds of thousands of smaller ‘pots’ - productive units we call companies, spread across the world - and we are producing many different types of things against the backdrop of a mish-mash of different state regimes. To gain clarity on the overall structure, though, it’s helpful for us to imagine those combined into a single pot with a single soup and single classes of people revolving around it.

That last class - ‘consumers’ - is the most all-encompassing, because it’s made up of all the other classes. In the end, if you don’t eat, you die, but some get to eat a lot more than others. Shareholders, managers and workers will all be consumers, but they don’t consume the same amounts.

Actually, that term ‘consume’ is a little misleading here. In reality, the biggest inequality that builds up in our system isn’t so much consumption, as it is the right to consume. We have people with vastly unequal amounts of claims upon the soup.

This is a tricky concept to initially understand, but in my Stone Soup article I explained it through the metaphor of soup vouchers. When you zoom out to the most meta level, you can observe a basic three-part circuit in a capitalist economy that repeats itself:

1. The financial sector as a class - in conjunction with the state and central banks - creates (and accumulates, via step 3 below) ‘soup vouchers’ - rights to eat soup

2. It entrusts these to the managerial class, who will hand out some portion of those to the working class - hiring them - in exchange for those workers making the soup

3. Anyone who eats the soup - whether they be shareholders, managers, or workers - will hand in vouchers to get it, which will get passed back via the manager class to the financial sector

I’m obviously simplifying the picture, but what do the vouchers in this metaphor stand for? Yes, you got it: money!

The reason why Jeff Bezos gets $7.9 million an hour - regardless of whether he’s playing golf, or meditating, or in a meeting - is because Amazon workers are ‘producing soup’ - delivering packages etc. - for people who are ‘consuming soup’ - those who are handing over ‘soup vouchers’ for packages - meaning that the residual is accruing to the owners of the pot: e.g. Bezos.

In reality, Bezos does not have the physical ability to actually cash in his soup vouchers. After all, if you made $7.9 million an hour, would you be able to spend it? Maybe you could manage for the first couple days, but soon it would become an exhausting activity. Even if Bezos had an entire team dedicated to spending his money on a 24-hour basis, they’d probably only get through a small fraction of it. So, he just lets the vouchers roll in, accumulating a vast war-chest of claims upon the collective soup. This is how they become billionaires.

There’s a whole class of people - in think-tanks, economics departments etc - who dedicate themselves to building ideology for people like this. For the last couple hundred years they’ve created a whole series of justifications for why shareholding and managerial classes accumulate so much. We know these stories well. The billionaire, or the titan of industry, or the highly paid hedge fund manager, is just someone who is more talented, more hard-working, more visionary, or more risk-taking than anyone else. Apparently, they create jobs, and apparently without them we’d all be lost. This was at the core of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Her famous book is called Atlas Shrugged, in reference to brilliant individuals who supposedly the world up on their shoulders.

These stories get passed around as common sense in any kind of mainstream entrepreneurial, financial or business executive scene. They draw upon the moral concept of just desserts: in these accounts, the sheer amount of claims on soup that are controlled by the wealthy is due to their enormous contribution to society, and critiques of this wealth are just the result of jealousy, or envy, coming from undeserving lay-abouts.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, this ‘enormous contribution’ is a bit like the contribution a beekeeper makes in the creation of honey. A beekeeper doesn’t actually make honey - bees and flowers do - but the beekeeper can say ‘I instigated this’ or ‘I inspired the bees’, or ‘without me the bees would be directionless’, or ‘my particular hive structure brings out the best in the bees’ and so on.

We can debate the relative merits of these arguments - some beekeepers are definitely talented, and do find ways to get more honey out of the bees, and the bees might even be grateful for a particular hive, but in the case of capitalism this situation has historically been volatile. That’s because the bees might develop some kind of swarm consciousness in which they decide they no longer need the beekeepers.

In other words, if workers could form a sense of themselves as a single class with a single set of interests, they might band together and threaten the overall structure. This was the ‘Communist Threat’, the potential for a rising swarm of workers who could overthrow the hive owners (or alternatively, in the case of the cooperatives movement, just form their own hives). This is why Dickensian capitalists would hire thugs - like the Pinkertons - to root out ‘agitators’, who might try to… well… agitate the bees into action.

In places like the UK and US, those swarm formations were spearheaded by the unions. To get a quick feeling for union life, listen to Part of the Union (1973) by the Strawbs. The video is accompanied by imagery from the 1984 Miner’s Strike in the UK, where agitated workers faced up against the authorities.

The classic union weapon is strikes, but that in turn attracts the classic beekeeper counter-attack, which is to turn the public against the strikers by presenting them as selfish disruptors who are harming all the other hard-working bees in different parts of the system, who just want to make and consume honey with their families (or, if we pivoted back to our soup metaphor, imagine them saying “you’re ruining the soup for everyone else!”)

So, in the 1980s we saw the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to break the union threat once and for all. Thatcher used a combination of violence and enticement to do that. The violent side was getting the cops and the law to forcible crush the unions, but the more subtle side was ingenious. Thatcher knew that the best way to fight resistance to the structure of capitalist relations was to spread a person across the battle lines. As long as workers were united as a group, and had a coherent personal identity as a worker, they would be able to identify each other, come together and cause shit for the ownership class.

If, however, their inner identity was slowly warped to have conflicting parts, then their ability to unite would be damaged, and resistance would be diluted. The key was to introduce an inner capitalist into their being that would fight or suppress their inner worker. And, the key to doing this was to encourage them to get little slices of ownership in assets - whether that be a house, or shares in the stock market as retail investors.

Small-scale asset ownership like this is a key feature of what’s called the middle class, a kind of buffer zone between capitalists and workers. If you want a gamified experience of this, I recommend playing Hegemony, an (admittedly complex) four-player board game released last year, in which different players take on the role of capitalists, workers, the middle class and the state, each with its own objectives.

A key feature of the game is the political voting system: players have the ability to fight for favour from the state and introduce legislation to enhance their class interests. The strategies for the capitalists and workers are quite straightforward - it’s a well-rehearsed battle between old rivals - but the middle class is the most conflicted, constantly trying to hedge their bets.

In fact, in the case of the middle class, the battle increasingly takes place within. A person occupying that hybrid position - or seeking to occupy it - can come to have a fragmented series of internal personas get played off against each other.

For example, perhaps you’re paid too little at work, and are worried about the cost of living, so you seek to compensate by making money in the stock markets. Rather than ‘handing in soup vouchers for soup’ - paying for goods - you recycle money back through the financial sector to buy shares in companies that are run by managers that believe they must boost profits by paying workers less while charging consumers more.

See what just happened there? One part of yourself seeks to benefit from the suppression of two other parts of yourself.

This system of inner conflict has spread everywhere now, even to working classes. After all, with unions broken, and workers often fragmented via gig economy systems, it’s hard for them to imagine collective action. In that context, gambling your way out via stock markets - or crypto for that matter - starts to look like liberation. If everyone else is trying to do it, you might be a sucker if you don’t.

To understand this more deeply, though, we also need to recognise that our system is so large that a person often cannot see how the parts relate. As I noted in Coming of Age in Corporate Capitalism:

… if you’re just a tiny node in this system, it’s like being subsumed within a vast maze where all you can see is the immediate surface in front of you

Like a maze, the economic system is a single system, but it looks different depending on where within it you’re standing at any particular moment. So, let’s take a high-level flyover through four of its classic viewpoints, and see what each does to you.

1) The view from the financial sector

As I noted in my Lego Model of Financial Capitalism, shareholders and creditors are different classes of investors who hand over money in exchange for contracts (shares, bonds etc) that promise them future money. Large institutional investors might do this directly, but our smaller ‘retail’ investors often go through an intermediary like a mutual fund.

Retail investors hand over small amounts of money for small cuts of financial instruments, and may do this to save up for their future retirement, or perhaps because times are tough and they’re choosing to save instead of spend. Regardless of motivation, many small investors imagine that investment is the act of ‘making money from money’. They might have been told that they can earn a ‘passive income’ without working by getting their money to ‘work for them’, but these phrases are euphemisms. What they’re really trying to do is get a cut of the profits derived from people’s labour (including, potentially, their own).

There are, however, many different routes to doing this. They may open a savings account with a large bank, or buy units in a mutual fund that buys bonds, or buy into a package of shares of different corporations through an index fund or ETF.

Alternatively, they may directly buy individual shares through a retail stockbroker. Perhaps they buy shares in the oil giant BP.

It’s possible that the person above could be a loyal long-term holder of the shares, but shareholders can also be fickle and short-term, in which case they’re called traders. Traders might repeatedly buy and sell shares as they try to guess the future trajectory of different companies. Buying shares technically makes you a part-owner of these companies, but sometimes traders don’t even look at the firms. Instead, they might make their decisions by watching what other traders are doing, as represented by abstractions on charts:

Smaller-scale retail traders are often called day-traders. Some of them sense that capitalism is a dog-eats-dog or eat-or-be-eaten world. Rather than fight that, they embrace that persona and build a heroic view of themselves as seeking to beat the market. The short video below captures this mentality perfectly.

Day-traders are often people who want to transition away from working day jobs, and you’ll note that the video is created by a company called OpenTrader, which is a training platform that tries to convince people to ‘join the movement’ to become like this. Of course, if everyone actually did become a full-time day-trader, there would be nothing produced in an economy, so all share prices would go to zero.

This idea of small-scale financial trading being a source of economic liberation is very common (in fact, it extends back a few hundred years), but in reality small traders are tiny parts of the broader finance ecosystem. The platforms they use will be run by much bigger players that benefit heavily from the day-trader’s (often futile) attempts to beat the market. I know this, because I actually once worked in a spreadbetting company (after working in large-scale derivatives markets), and the marketing team would explicitly attempt to cultivate this mythology of the day-trader to scrape fees from them. Most vulnerable were mid-level professionals, who had both savings and the hubris to believe they could outgun the world’s most powerful financial institutions.

Many large-scale institutional traders have a self-image of being engaged in productive activity, and frequently assert that the economy would fall apart if they weren’t there to ‘provide liquidity’ (aka. move soup vouchers around). That said, there are new generations of small-scale day-traders who have a more nihilistic streak, aware that the financial system is largely an unproductive extraction game, and who seek to get a slice of that. If you’d like to watch a great documentary about day-traders attempting to temporarily reverse the power hierarchy like this, I recommend watching Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga.

Despite the David vs. Goliath swagger of the meme-stock activists above, these small-scale investors have very little power relative to the world’s largest financial institutions, like commercial banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, pension funds, insurance funds, and sovereign wealth funds. For example, the documentary above looks at Citadel LLC, a hedge fund which manages almost $60 billion on behalf of rich people.

Major funds like this are in symbiosis with major investment banks, which deal in ‘wholesale’ chunks of corporations, rather than the small retail slivers that day-traders work with. Despite these differences in power, investors share some common viewpoints. They’re betting on a whole range of unpredictable interactions in the different parts of our ‘soup-making’ picture, but care about it only from the perspective of how many ‘soup vouchers’ roll back to them relative to how much was put in.

This means, through their eyes the world is often rendered as a series of price charts and graphs, and within this schema, workers are just numbers that appear on a company income statement as expenses that detract from profits. Minimizing these expenses is seen as positive, which means driving down wages, automating away jobs, and cutting corners with suppliers can implicitly be seen as positive too. Furthermore, in the finance worldview, consumers are not seen as individual people, but rather as an abstract collective that will give rise to future revenue.

When deciding whether to invest, the investor might create a thought experiment in which they guess how much the consumers will buy in future, and set that against the expected expenses of workers and suppliers. They can put the result through a ‘discounted cash flow analysis’ to give them a theoretical price for the shares. They can then compare that to the actual current share price to see if the shares are ‘good value’ or ‘overvalued’.

When making these projections, investors are not only imagining what returns they may get in future. They’re also setting that against potential risks. This leads to a risk-return mentality: If they back a risky venture, they want a higher return. Through this lens, they’ll get agitated if they’re not making enough profit relative to the risk they’re taking on. They’ll also get agitated if they’re making less profit than they could get somewhere else for the same amount of risk, or if they sense distant threats like future government regulations, worker activism or consumer boycotts. Of course, they can also make absolute losses when things go badly at a company, but also if there’s simply a change in sentiment in the financial markets that drives down share prices that were previously based on unrealistic projections.

This gives a peculiar quality to the relationship that shareholders end up having with senior corporate managers. While major shareholders are supposed to keep an eye on managers, they also don’t want managers to disrupt any unrealistic dreams that might be upholding a particular share price. This pressure to keep stock prices up can lead managers into short-termism, where they try to boost the profits of a company by cutting corners, ignoring environmental damages, doing dubious financial engineering or resorting to accounting fraud. Let’s now turn to this managerial class.

2) The view from the managerial sector

CEOs and other senior managers share various aspects of the financial world-view, because they’re technically hired by the shareholders of firms, and also because they often hold shares themselves (e.g. as part of their compensation package). This means, they always have one eye on the broader financial markets while they try to manoeuvre the workers and assets of the firm, seeking to maximize shareholder returns while minimizing risks. In my Lego Model of Capitalist Central Planning, I delve deeper into this.

The CEO delegates the different moving parts of a firm to different C-suite sub-managers, who might specialize in securing finance, hiring people, dealing with supply chains, buying up assets, making strategic decisions and targeting new consumer markets. All these senior managers share certain common stresses and tendencies. Most notably, they’re sandwiched between shareholders and workers, but are contractually required to prioritize the interests of the former.

Profit emerges if input costs are lower than output revenues, (aka. if they hand out less soup vouchers than they get back), so to reduce the former managers might seek to drive down worker wages and dominate over suppliers, but their workers might be scattered across the globe in distant operations in Nigeria or Australia. Each country they operate in might have separate union laws, environmental regulations (or lack thereof) and labour conditions. So, being a senior manager in a transnational corporation is inherently geopolitical. They might be cutting tax deals with different governments, or lobbying against new policies that may affect them, all while trying to suppress worker unions. Here’s a consulting company that literally offers services to do that:

Another way to discipline workers is to replace (or threaten to replace) them with machines that managers can buy from external suppliers (automation). At the same time, managers might face pressures to keep stability, and that may involve trying to reward loyal workers. It doesn’t always pay to fuck over your workforce, especially because cutting input costs isn’t the only way to increase profits. They can also boost output revenues by trying to break into new markets or to capture more consumers via marketing (hence our world being saturated with corporate messaging).

Above all, managers will often become paranoid about fending off other managers who coordinate other companies. After all, they face humiliation if they lose market share, and may even face getting fired by the shareholders for failing at their task. We seldom feel sorry for these senior managers, especially because they get paid millions, but they often project their own stress downwards to more subordinate middle-managers.

To this day, one of the most entertaining series that covers middle-management life is The Office (US). The series follows Michael Scott, the hapless branch manager of a regional paper corporation, as he tries to be a nice guy that keeps his workers happy while he faces top-down pressure from ‘corporate’ (the name he gives to the distant senior management).

3) The world through the eyes of workers

The big shareholders and senior managers of companies often like to claim that they create jobs, as if they were handing out some kind of charity, but they create jobs in the same way that a beekeeper does. The people sitting around the boardroom make nothing unless workers actually operate their assets, but many workers don’t think like this. They’re often in a weaker economic position, lacking access to capital and having smaller buffers of money to survive on. That means they indeed may feel grateful if they can secure a job operating corporate assets.

This is especially the case when there’s a limited number of possible ‘hives’ (after all, not every bee can run its own hive, or if they did, they’d be tiny, lonely, ones). This means the workers have to often compete against each other for limited slots. They may become fearful of other workers who are competing for positions to work the same assets, and this can bleed into xenophobic fears around immigration, or fears of foreign outsourcing. In the 90s there was a major wave of globalization, in which big corporates started firing local workers and delegating their roles to foreign suppliers.

External suppliers also bring another source of anxiety: they can sell automated machines to the managers, leading to fears of machines, or robots, ‘taking jobs’.

Many of us know what it’s like to be in this situation. Workers face pressure from bosses telling them what to do, and hear whispers about elusive shareholders who don’t directly speak to them. They’re often the ones that actually make the things that consumers will be buying (or the ones who serve those customers), but will often also sense that their bosses have more allegiance to those consumers than to them. For example, in the service industry they may find themselves reprimanded by a middle-manager who tells them ‘the customer is always right’.

As mentioned earlier, workers often find themselves pitted against consumers if they demand more from their company. Given that the managers and shareholders are often not prepared to lower their own cut, any increase in worker wages will be presented as ‘driving up the cost of living’ because it’s being ‘passed on to the consumer’. This of course would be solved if managers and shareholders just took a lower cut, but short-termist managers are scared that if they reduced the shareholder returns the fickle investors would back away.

4) The world through the eyes of ‘the consumer’

The world of the consumer is the world of commodity fetishism, where products appear before us on shelves, or Amazon.com pages, divorced from their underlying origins and contexts. The man below will not be aware of the transnational labour networks behind the oil that his fuel is derived from. He also won’t know that the same oil company - BP - might supply the oil used for the plastics in the lid of his takeaway coffee. He certainly won’t think about the fact that hedge fund analysts once probably estimated his behaviour and inputted it as an assumption on a discounted cash flow analysis.

If this man is also a small-scale shareholder, he may feel happy at a booming stock market, but the pressure to generate the profits that might have led to that boom might also translate into increased stress on his life as an employee, as he find himself driven into burnout to achieve those returns for a boss who is trying to please the shareholders.

That’s why he may get irritated if there are minor disruptions to fuel through strikes, but even if he recognizes worker struggles he probably won’t feel like he can do anything about it. After all, his own survival in the economy requires him to continue using coffee, cars and other common inputs that are required to ‘keep up’ with everyone else. He may be feeling the pinch of the cost of living, and even if he’s aware that - somewhere down the line - a community in the Niger delta is rising up against an oil giant that’s polluting the environment, he’s probably just going to default to doing what he has to do. Buy the fuel and don’t think about it.

The civil war

These are the basic battle lines of our inner civil war. It goes without saying that they’re exploited by political leaders. Like any war, there are ways to make peace between the different sides, and like any war there are ways for one side to win out over others. Unlike a normal war, however, the sides are all within ourselves, so that latter scenario might involve the destruction of some element of yourself. Whether or not you experience that destruction as liberation, really depends on who you are.

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can find the audio edition here

In recent years there’s been a strong outbreak of the Great Man Theory of History. This is the idea that single powerful or inspired people create history and should be adored, or, on the flip side, reviled. Trump is obviously one of these people, but so too is Musk, Bezos, Putin, and so on. Regardless of whether they’re imagined as superheroes or supervillains, they’re often spoken about as if the future springs fully-formed out of them.

When you imagine that the course of history uniquely resides in single individuals like this, you also imagine that slight shifts in their decisions affect everything for the rest of time. They’re like the star characters in a great global soap opera, but one in which nobody else has any role but to watch them, and either praise or condemn their actions.

This same style of thinking is often applied to their wealth. The Great Man Theory of Wealth assumes that extreme riches are the result of inspired work that the person undertakes. If Bezos had not got up one morning in 1994 and had an idea for Amazon.com, we’d never have a global e-commerce platform. I mean, there are only 8.2 billion of us on the planet. Surely, the chances of a second person working out that you could match buyers and sellers on the Internet is incredibly small!

It’s always imagined that the Great Man builds something. He built a nation. He built a company. This isn’t the full reality. Here’s what actually happens: other people mostly build the thing, and the role of the Great Man is to be the focal point around which it’s built. To understand this, let’s turn to the parable of the Stone Soup.

Great Man and His Stone Soup

The old parable of the Stone Soup goes like this. A guy walks into a village and proclaims that he can make soup out of stones. The villagers are skeptical, but he has a pot, and tells them to light a fire underneath it, and to fill it with water. He chucks some pebbles and assorted stones in, while the villagers stand around waiting for the mystical soup to emerge.

After five minutes of boiling, he strokes his chin and says ‘you know, this soup would be even better with some onions… does anyone have any?’ A villager wanders off to find some, and returns, tossing them in. Then the man says ‘what would really add a kick is some garlic, ginger and salt’. Other villagers trundle off to go find those. He continues to make these suggestions, enlisting the villagers to contribute tomatoes, spices, soy sauce and duck breasts, until the soup looks like a delicious Tom Yum.

As more people are attracted to the circle forming around the Stone Soup, the more ingredients go in, and the more the adulation for the Stone Souper rises. By the end, he’s transformed into a kind of idol. Apparently, he created the soup.

The reality is far simpler. The villagers built the soup, while he just stood there acting as a central attractor around which they arranged themselves. Alone, he’s just a guy with water and stones in a pot.

Alone, Jeff Bezos is just some guy in a garage. By himself, Musk is just another wounded nerd who wants to be praised, and Trump is just a slightly outrageous old man, the kind of guy you bring to a dinner for kicks. In the end, through the eyes of the great universe, they’re fragile carbon-based life forms like any other. What they’re good at, though, is putting stones into boiling water, and asking people to gather around and stare into that.

That process of instigation is not the same as building. There’s not one line in the Amazon code-base written by Jeff Bezos. There’s not one iota of iron-phosphate in Tesla batteries mined by Elon. Hell, he didn’t even dream up the idea for that company. Another guy did, but Elon nudged him aside and got the villagers to focus on him instead. Similarly, Trump didn’t lay one brick in the Trump Tower. Thousands of workers did, like they’ve done throughout history.

This practice of ignoring the actual builders of things is common. Even the esteemed National Geographic claims that a single guy built a whole pyramid…

So, what does someone really mean when they say ‘Jeff Bezos built Amazon’? After all, Amazon.com is a sprawling infrastructure and it’s physically impossible for one man to ‘build’ that. What we’re really saying is ‘Jeff Bezos instigated an initial instantiation of the idea of Amazon, which others then built over time’. His true skill was having the right personality to walk into the village square and instigate the process. That might come from a degree of personal bravery and brilliance, but it could also equally come from narcissism, trauma, family expectations, training, or just plain random happenstance. Becoming a focal point isn’t an insignificant achievement, but it’s not an impossibly difficult one either.

It’s also a skill that works better when you have an existing support structure around you. For example, right now there are 6.6 million people living in refugee camps, and I’d bet that at least 100,000 of them have stone-souping skills, but don’t find themselves in the right situation to deploy them. By contrast, someone like Elon - who is from a wealthy South African business family - always had a reasonably high chance of getting traction on stone soup.

Regardless of whether you think being a Stone-Souper is a highly rare and brilliant skill, we can say one thing for sure: the idea that the power to create the soup resides inside the single Great Man is, frankly, ridiculous. What happens is that other people’s power channels through them. Let’s delve deeper.

The Primordial Soup of the Economy

In the parable, people are coming together to make a collective soup, and presumably they get to eat it afterwards. In many ways, this serves as a basic metaphor for economic production and consumption more generally. At its most primordial, an ‘economy’ is simply a mesh of people who - when viewed as a whole - come together to survive. For example, you may have orange juice in your fridge right now. The oranges, plastic bottle, and fridge components were not produced by you, and yet you draw upon them. And, somewhere else far from you, someone may be drawing upon things you’ve produced.

In fact, there’s no such thing as a person who survives alone. Even the most hardcore wilderness survival guy on YouTube is still using steel knives and basic clothing that was produced by massive supply chains involving tens of thousands of other people.

This basic principle - that we come together to survive - was true in the age of hunter-gatherers, and it’s true now. That said, while we are part of a transnational mesh of people coming together, it doesn’t mean you directly depend on every single one of them. Rather, you only draw on a small subset of them, but they in turn draw on other subsets who draw on other subsets, and so on. If you zoom out, and look at every chain of interdependence, you’ll see an enormous web of extraordinarily complex connections, with no beginning or end. All these ‘supply chains’ will entangle and double-back on each other.

That sounds very complex, but - when you pierce through the complexity - it can be boiled down to a simple fact: You provide things to a collective whole, and get to claim things back from a collective whole.

The Moral Logic of Reciprocity

One of our most primordial moral concepts is: if you contribute you can receive. This is the concept of Reciprocity. It isn’t the only moral principle we have in an economic system, but it’s one of the top three (see here for the other two).

In a hunter-gatherer setting, the reciprocity principle might be ‘you contributed to the hunt, so you get a portion of the meat’. In a soup setting, this would be ‘you brought some tomatoes, so you get some of the soup’.

Let’s imagine two people making soup together. We can represent the reciprocity principle through measuring scales. Let’s say one person brings tomatoes and garlic and then sets about making the soup, expending energy in the process. The metaphorical scales start tilting towards them, in recognition of the energy and resources they’re contributing.

If the other person was to just sit there and contribute nothing, and yet expect to eat the whole of the resulting soup, we might say that’s unfair. If, however, the other person does their side of the work, contributing ginger and potatoes and helping with the stirring, we say they’re pulling their weight. This causes the scales to revert back to balance.

Notice how, as the scales balance, the collective resources and effort that has gone into the soup has also increased, making it bigger and thicker because both contributed. This collaborative production gives rise to a fuller whole, which is better than its individual parts.

This now feeds into the concept of just desserts: how much of this whole does each person deserve? Well, each person contributed equally, so they rightfully get to claim half of this improved soup. In informal contexts, we normally don’t measure stuff like this - it’s tacit and in the background - but the moral principle remains.

In the kitchen setting above, tracing ‘just desserts’ is easy. Similarly, in a hunter-gatherer setting, it’s simple to see who is contributing. Furthermore, the sense of how much each can claim back is held in the collective memory. If someone has taken a lead role in taking down a big antelope, for example, the others might grant them the first pick of meat. They don’t get to take everything though.

These are small-scale settings, but even in a huge-scale market economy we find a similar basic moral logic in the mix. People contribute labour and goods to a collective whole, and get to claim labour and goods back from a collective whole.

A large-scale market system, though, has one major difference to a hunter-gatherer economy. Rather than claims upon the collective output being encoded in collective memory, they get encoded in money credits. If you have a lot of money, you get to claim a lot back from the collective sum product of everyone else. At some highly theoretical and idealized level, then, the amount of money you earn should reflect your overall contribution, and - therefore - how much you get to claim back from the collective ‘soup’ of the economy.

Indeed, this is what evangelists for billionaires will always claim: the reason he’s a billionaire is that he contributes so much to the collective soup. In essence, they imagine a vast set of scales, with people like Musk and Bezos contributing an enormous amount of ingredients, brilliance and labour, with this contribution being recorded as positive money credits in their account, which they can rightfully take back to the rest of society in order to demand vast goods and services back from us - in essence, claiming huge quantities of the collective soup.

This story sounds superficially plausible, doesn’t it? Their enormous bank balances must surely mean they’ve contributed enormously, and surely that means they deserve to consume enormously? Ah, but there’s a catch. We live under capitalism.

Financing stone soup in the capitalist ecosystem

What we call ‘capitalism’ introduces a little glitch to the reciprocity matrix, but understanding it requires a couple conceptual building blocks. Firstly, remember that, at a primordial level, an economy is a group of people coming together to survive. Secondly, any economy is always limited by how many people there are and how much stuff, or assets, there are to work with.

In a large-scale market economy like ours, which has specialised divisions of labour and property ownership regimes, certain ecosystem-like qualities emerge. Here are three of them

1. There are only limited slots for particular roles. If everyone tried to be Bezos, what would happen? Well, Bezos makes decisions and tells other people what to do, so if everyone was him, you’d just have billions of people trying to tell billions of other people what to do. That would just cancel itself out, with everyone standing around shouting at each other. Much like a natural ecosystem only so many spaces for apex predators, an economic system like ours has systemic limits on how many large-scale directors there can be

2. We only need so much of certain things, but those things require other things. Our specialist roles fall under ‘industries’, but all of these are interlinked. If everyone tried to start making jumbo jets there would not only be a massive oversupply of useless jets that won’t get used, but all the components for the jets that come from other industries would fail to materialize - i.e. if everyone is making jets, nobody is making steel for jets

3. There’s a finite number of productive assets in the world, and finite ways to own them. What we call ‘productive assets’ are things used to make jumbo jets and so on, and there are two possible extremes in terms of how they are owned. At one extreme there are large numbers of us owning small amounts of the assets equally. At the other extreme there are small numbers of us owning large amounts of the assets unequally. So, there are systemic limits to how many large-scale owners of assets there can be

If there are any forces in your system that allow for gradual concentration of ownership, your system will move towards that latter situation. You can read more about how that happens here, but the net result of these factors is: we have finite numbers of leadership roles in finite numbers of industries with finite potential for expansion and finite numbers of ownable assets used in the process, and we have moved to a situation in which certain people in leadership roles in each industry also own the most.

Those people are the big Stone Soupers, and the not-so-secret secret to becoming like them is to own large amounts of shares in productive assets (e.g. the pot) that others require to make the collective soup. If you can do this, you can get extraordinarily wealthy, because you control an underlying infrastructure - or ‘means of production’ - that everyone else in the interdependent system is using to survive.

There are various ways to get into this position. Outright violent expropriation was a classic of the early capitalist era, but one of the biggest ways to do it nowadays involves having access to money from the financial sector.

Here’s how that works. The financial sector operates alongside Stone Soupers, and other senior managers of firms, to raise money. That money is used to mobilise workers and suppliers to produce things. The end result is pushed out to consumers. The surplus money goes back to the instigators (see my Lego Model of Corporate Capitalism).

If you want to render this in Stone Soup form, here’s how it looks.

Access to finance is what enables big Stone Soupers to get workers to ‘put something into the pot’. To understand this, you need to recognise the crucial distinction between:

• Soup ingredients - which are represented above with the orange lines that says ‘labour’ and ‘goods and services’

• Rights to claim soup, which are represented with those green lines that say money

This is conceptually tricky for many people, because we’ve often internalised dodgy mainstream economic understandings of money, in which money is spoken of as a kind of substance - or soup-in-itself. You need to deprogram yourself from this belief.

Let’s alter the original parable to try make this slightly clearer: Imagine that the stone-souper hands out vouchers to eat soup to anyone who sources the ingredients and chucks them in. That’s kinda what managers are doing when they pay workers to produce stuff that workers will later buy and consume. After all, who are the ‘consumers’ in the image above? Well, a significant chunk of them are people who earn income by working. At a meta-level, they are buying the soup they were paid to produce, cashing in their vouchers to eat it.

To see the full picture of this we need to zoom out from the single corporation, which is but one slice of a colossal web of relations that makes up a much larger economic structure.

We’re used to imagining separate ‘companies’ as discrete entities, but every corporation is tied to many other corporate structures, each of which has its own ‘pot’ of stone soup. In reality, a corporation is a subsystem within a much larger system, and even these subsystems have subsystems within them.

For example, Amazon.com is an e-commerce business, but it’s also a provider of datacentre hosting. That’s actually just two companies glommed into one, and there’s no reason why we can’t - at a conceptual level - just glom all companies together and imagine them as one giant meta-company. In fact, we have a name for that meta-company. It’s called The Economy.

If we were to take every single company like this, and meld every one of their stone soup pots together into a single mega-pot, we’d see the entire world rendered in classes of people. There’s the shareholder class, the creditor class, the various subsections of the working class and managerial class. In the end, all those classes are also consumers - the ones who will eventually eat the collective soup that everyone produces. Let’s visualise these groups somewhat like this…

What really matters in this overall picture are questions like who owns the pot, who calls the shots, who provides the ingredients, and who gets to consume the outcome?

Remember that ‘consumers’ are just people using their ‘vouchers’ - gained either as a worker or as a manager or financier - to claim the soup. What happens in our system, though, is that corporate structures create very specific relations of production, in which one class of people - who collectively own the pot - essentially gets paid rent by workers who operate it in order to survive.

This rent isn’t a literal payment from workers. Rather, it’s in the form of the differential between how much workers get paid to produce everything in total, and how much it gets sold for to everyone in total. If you want to put this back into ‘soup voucher’ terms, it’s the difference between vouchers given to workers to produce soup, and how many total vouchers there are.

In some geeky circles, this is known as the difference between returns to labour and returns to capital, but one thing you can be sure of is that our collective output - the soup that society makes - always comes along with the message that it’s provided courtesy of big daddy Bezos, Musk, Zuck, Trump, or whoever. That’s ideologically how they end up justifying why they get to claim so much, but is this really a fair distribution?

Jobs create billionaires

We’ve already seen that apologists for extreme wealth try to claim that billionaires do lots more than everyone else, but this is empirically incorrect. Billionaires are finite beings like anyone else, and they can only do finite things. A fall-back position, though, is to claim that the billionaires, alongside the financial sector, ‘create jobs’ for everyone else - in other words, they give everyone a role and direction.

In a technical sense this is true, just like the Stone Souper in the village square ‘creates jobs’ for the villagers who go off to get the vegetables. But those jobs are not like charity handed out to the poor villagers. No, the villagers are doing the work that results not only in the soup, but also in the adulation and enrichment of the instigator.

Put differently, if you’re going to accept the line that billionaires 'create jobs for workers', then you must also accept its mirror image, which is that workers create billionaires. Jeff Bezos hasn't delivered a single package in his life. Without the deliverers Amazon.com is but a fantasy in his head.

Consider what happens if the Stone Souper just stands there with no villagers. All he has is a pot with stones in it. Similarly, consider what happens to Amazon’s income if all those delivery people and warehouse workers don’t turn up to work for two weeks. You just have the management team standing around twiddling their thumbs, hoping that the packages arrange and deliver themselves. That’s obviously not going to happen, so a strike like that has a massive impact on the company. Now consider what happens to the company if Bezos goes on strike for two weeks. Nothing. Everything keeps going.

So, how is it that Bezos will earn $26 million a day regardless of whether he turns up? Well, he owns the shares, which is like controlling the pot that others cook in. It’s physically impossible for a single person to do actual labour that would earn $26 million per day through a salary. A major percentage of billionaire wealth is just rent scraped from workers via share ownership structures.

This is how we end up with this class of chronic stone soupers - the 1% - who control wealth far beyond any natural contribution to society. Going back to our scales of reciprocity then, in which you get back what you put in, are there still ways to argue that billionaires ‘deserve’ what they’re getting back? Well, let’s close by looking at two last arguments.

The Great Men take risk, and uplift everyone else, right?

One classic argument is that big owners of capital absorb risk for everyone else. After all, as a shareholder in a company, your payout can wildly fluctuate, while as a worker it stays fixed. Perhaps big shareholders are doing workers a favour, shielding them from the chaos of the market and taking a bigger cut in return.

This idea that the collective owners of our collective productive assets take risk - and do us a favour by merely getting us to operate those assets for a fixed reward - is an old idea, but it largely operates as an after-the-fact argument. After all, what risk was ever taken in the early stages by the Stone Soupers? In reality, someone like Zuckerberg was just a college student who gradually got people to build out his idea while he retained share ownership. Was that more risky, than, for example, being a migrant labourer from West Africa who spends all their small savings to cross stormy seas to find wage labour in France?

In fact, true success under capitalism isn’t about hard work and simple just desserts. It’s about leveraging power to accumulate productive assets that will draw more power to you over time. Actually, looking at the Zuck example, we can alter the parable. His early seed investors enabled him to hand out vouchers to workers to build the goddamn pot, never mind the soup, which he could then use to attract others. Now he finds himself at the helm of a giant asset built by countless unnamed engineers and grad students.

While it’s true that the assets owned by Zuck are subject to uncertainty - aka. the broader public might lose interest in this particular batch of soup from this particular pot - on average, the rewards of share ownership are far in excess of any risk absorption service Zuck ever offered to his workers.

I’m happy to give credit to Stone Soupers for their initial vision, their drive, their instigator role, their willingness to act as a focal point, and - to a small extent - some risk they take on, but none of this truly accounts for how much they get paid. After all, they’d get nothing if other people didn’t do the work.

But this leads us to the final line of defence for billionaire-worshippers, who say without the inspired leader, nobody would do the work. Without the billionaire, everyone else would just stand around useless, slowly starving for lack of coordination, leadership, creativity and vision. This belief lies at the core of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. In her novel, Atlas Shrugged, this is represented by the character of John Galt, a lone heroic inventor who - feeling under-appreciated - organizes a strike of all the creative entrepreneurs, supposedly leaving all the ungrateful normies to wallow in mediocrity.

This returns us to our Great Man Theory, but Great Man Theory is a load of crap. No person stands alone in production, whether that be in the production of goods or ideas. Not only would Bezos’s neurons not fire unless workers in Guatemala gave him his coffee, but he’d never have thought of Amazon.com if tens of millions of other humans throughout history had not thought of every other innovation that leads up to the Internet. Furthermore, none of those people would have thought anything at all if they weren’t birthed, cared for and fed by mothers, and those mothers wouldn’t have done that if many others hadn’t gone out and found food, and that food wouldn’t exist if it were not for the sun doing most of the work. In reality, Amazon.com originates in the sun - not in Jeff Bezos - but the sun isn’t claiming anything.

This belief that ideas literally originate in a single person’s mind, and that they should be paid by the rest of humanity for the rest of time is fucking ridiculous. Ideas do not reside inside self-contained people - they reside in a network of interdependent and interconnected people - but the fact that Bezos, or Musk, or whoever, was an early-mover in articulating a particular idea means they get locked in as somewhat arbitrary figureheads, and the fact that they’re billionaires simply reflects the legal reality of share ownership. They are products of our system, not creators of our system. If they didn’t exist, others would take their place.

So, when someone says something like ‘without Bezos we wouldn’t have Amazon’, it’s much like someone saying ‘without John at the party last night we wouldn’t have had that conga-line’. Maybe so, but you might have had Judith starting a breakdancing session instead.

In the final analysis, we can agree that neither John nor Judith will make any dance formation happen without others. Ayn Rand may believe that we’d all be lost if we didn’t have John, but Galt would also be lost without the rest of the world. He’d be walking around with his stones banging in his battered old cauldron. The inventor does contribute, of course, but they contribute as part of an ongoing collective that stretches back 200,000 years.

This applies to everyone. In fact, it even applies to this argument I’m making. Imagine if I, Brett Scott, claimed that every idea, concept, and word that is arranged here, uniquely emerged from me, without assistance from tens of thousands of years of human language and concept formation, developed organically by millions of people of all genders who’ll never be recognised as ‘Great Men’. It may be the case that I, like Bezos, introduce some new angles on old themes, around which new formations might emerge, but with us alone they’re just fragments of stone.

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can find the audio version here

I’ve played instruments since I was eight, but it’s only in the last year that I’ve been teaching myself how to mix tracks. The history of recorded music is pretty fascinating, and one of its breakthrough technologies was the multi-track tape recorder. For example, a 4-track recorder enabled a musician or band to record four different tracks in parallel, set each to its own level, and then output them as a single master track. Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 Nebraska album was recorded on 4-track, giving it that lo-fi sparse sound.

A more complex song like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, by contrast, used a 24-track system, allowing for all those layered harmonies. Here’s a breakdown of the track structure…

Each of those tracks was separately recorded, but you can’t just squash them all into a big bundle and hope they all sound good together. To make the song shine, you have to mix the separate tracks, so that they complement each other to create a symbiotic whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. Nowadays most people use digital programmes (like Ableton and Pro Tools) for mixing, but in Queen’s case they would have used a 24-track mixing console. Here’s a modern version.

This console looks very complex, but if you count from the left, you’ll find there are 24 vertical strips of identical knobs, with each strip dedicated to a track. These allow you to adjust the parameters of each track - how loud it is, the balance between bass, treble and mid frequencies, and the stereo panning - before sending them to the right side of the board to get compiled into a master track which can then be tweaked with finishing touches, or mastered. So, in 2011, when Queen released a ‘remastered’ version of Bohemian Rhapsody, it means they took the original mix, but re-polished the master.

So, what does this have to do with capitalism?

Mixing and mastering are art-forms dedicated to bringing separate things into a whole, and this provides us with a new metaphor for thinking about how our economic system brings together different parts of our being. When listening to a song, we experience it as a whole, and we seldom think about the many alternative ways it could have been mixed. Similarly, each of us experiences ourselves as a whole as we navigate corporate capitalism, but we seldom think about the many alternative ways we could have turned out if we were living under a different system. The system we’re in will amplify certain values, beliefs or ‘natures’ within us, while filtering others out.

This is a theme that I’ve been exploring in other pieces too, using different metaphors. For example, in my piece Socializing Homo Economicus, I noted that economists often fixate upon one particular view of human nature called ‘Homo Economicus’, which was popularized from the 18th century onwards. Economists noticed that we have an accumulative and a competitive streak, but rather than seeing that as but one element of our being, they fixated and zoomed in on it, presenting it as our defining feature. They created a world-view in which

… all humans are solo ‘agents’ out for themselves. We are presented as ‘rational’ and narrowly self-interested, always wanting to maximize - to accumulate more - as well as to optimize and seek efficiency to reduce loss. In the Homo Economicus model, we are calculating machines weighing up costs and benefits, pros and cons, to our individual selves.

In that essay, I used the metaphor of a prism to help break us out of the economist view. Just like a beam of light contains multiple spectral wavelengths that can be seen by passing it through a prism, so Homo Sapiens contains multiple ‘human natures’, of which Homo Economicus is but one.

This gives rise to the question of what our other natures are. There’s no perfect way to answer this, but I went on to give examples of many other possible ‘natures’ within us, which come together to form our full selves. Homo Economicus is still in there, but it has to coexist with these others, sometimes in contradiction and sometimes in harmony.

I expand upon these natures in the aforementioned piece, but, as an example, I describe Homo Absurdum as that part of us that loves playing jokes and being silly, and Homo Ecologicus as that part that feels awe at the natural world and wants to stare at the moon. Homo Meditari is that part of us that seeks stillness and emptiness, while Homo Cogitans is that part driven to understand the world, to build theories and thought structures. Homo Communis is that part of you that wants to be cuddled, while Homo Dominandi is that part of you that seeks to control.

You can invent your own names for the different parts of your being, but the main point here is that we contain multitudes, and there are different ways to label them. That said, we don’t experience ourselves as separate pieces, but rather as a single whole, a continuum with fluctuations, ebbs and flows of our different spirits, and we don’t always know which parts of our being are calling the shots.

In the prism metaphor, those different parts have different wavelengths, but come together to form a single beam, but this opened the question of whether our current economic system might amplify, or filter out, particular parts of our inner spectrum.

So, let’s approach this question by doing a metaphoric pivot. Rather than imagining our different parts as different colours of the light spectrum, let’s imagine them as different tracks on a multi-track recorder, coming together to form the final master track which we call ourselves.

Mixing, and mastering, the self under capitalism

Before we explore this metaphor further, let’s clear some definitional hurdles. When I say ‘capitalism’, I don’t mean commerce, or trade. I come from an anthropology background, and within that discipline we’re well aware that forms of human commerce extend back tens of thousands of years. Tit-for-tat reciprocal exchange has always been one element of how goods are distributed in human society, but that has always coexisted with other modes of distribution, such as communistic sharing and hierarchical patronage. What marks out different moments in economic history is the balance of power between those different moral logics, and the hybrid blends they form.

For example, during the early medieval period you certainly find commerce and trade, but the central organising logic of the society revolves around caste systems that operate through patronage and tribute. The medieval market is found on the periphery of the society, rather than the centre, and if you were to partake in one of those markets you’d find the relationships within them to be far more fixed, and the movements of goods and their prices to be far more governed by tradition and convention than what you’re used to.

‘Capitalism’ is the name given to the situation in which all that begins to liquefy. For example, feudal peasants, who were previously fixed to the land, begin to drift and transform into an urban working class that must sell their labour to powerful owners of factories and technology, who can cut them adrift at a moment’s notice, or move somewhere else.

There are various historical factors behind this - including the rise of private property systems protected by large states - but the important point is that what we call ‘capitalism’ isn’t merely the presence of market trading or exchange. It’s the particular historical situation in which markets move from the outskirts of human activity to the centre. This means the values associated with market trading slowly begin to dominate over all other aspects of society. Once that process hits a certain threshold, the market centre of society starts to become like a vortex, sucking everything in as commodities to be traded.

In the 19th century that commodification might look like forests being reduced to logs which are sucked into industrial zones to be transformed into planks that get sucked deeper into the vortex to form the desk of a merchant, who is importing goods from plantations into which human beings are being sucked from West Africa as commodified slaves.

The market vortex has of course shifted its appearance over time - and it’s always fascinating to see its latest incarnation - but its basic processes, such as commodification, dislocation, liquification, and accumulation continue.

Its official ideology also stays relatively constant. The story, especially as told by the elites of the system, is that capitalism is like a big version of the old homely farmers markets, a realm of tit-for-tat commerce between mom-and-pop entrepreneurs. In reality, the system is rife with inequalities. It retains - and even amplifies - many elements of the hierarchical feudalism it grew out of. To see this just look at the corporations, those vast entities that cluster at the centre of the system, and which loom over us constantly.

We’re born into this (see Coming of Age in Corporate Capitalism), and this way of being is now so deeply ingrained in us that we can barely imagine anything else, but how does this affect the balance of ‘tracks’ within us? If we were to imagine ourselves as a composition, how would we differ from, say, an ancient Indonesian hunter-gather, or a 12th century Kazakh tribal pastoralist, or a 15th century Portuguese feudal tenant?

We might have an individual self, but there are systemic constraints that limit how much of that self we can express, or place conditions for how our different elements are to be expressed if they are to survive. Let’s turn to our mixing desk metaphor, and explore three different approaches for how a capitalist system affects our being.

Approach 1: Capitalism adjusts the mix

Life under capitalism amplifies certain tracks within you, such as your inner Homo Economicus. When 19th and 20th century economists started speaking about people as self-interested calculating machines, they imagined they were describing a universal and timeless reality. They tried to use that to explain the presence of markets, but - as Erich Fromm notes in To Have or To Be - traits like heightened egotism and selfishness are outcomes of that society, not causes of it. In reality, economists were simply noticing an aspect of human nature that starts to bloom when people find themselves totally immersed in - and dependent on - the insecure and fluid flux of a market vortex.

There are different mechanisms via which this may happen. On the one hand, within a large-scale market structure, certain groups get rewarded for leaning into their self-interested and calculating sides, and to place positive values on those. For example, I used to work in the financial sector, where many people would become ideologically attached to their Homo Economicus and Homo Dominandi tracks. They would over-identify with those, wearing them like a badge, even though they had many other aspects to their being. The film Wall Street is supposed to be a cautionary tale about ruthless financial warlords, but I distinctly recall it being held up as a kind of heroic ideal in the financial workplace. I even remember the first time I acted that out, shouting at a rival broker over the phone, telling him to get fucked. There was a strange exhilaration at letting this arsehole side of me emerge in that setting.

In the financial sector, the Homo Economicus track dominates, but that doesn’t mean the other tracks aren’t present in the background. While many financiers behave like narcissistic egotists at work, when they leave they can revert to a different mix. For example, they may reset into a caring parent (Homo Protectoris) playing imaginary pirate games (Homo Absurdum) with their kid in a garden with plants they care for like good friends (Homo Ecologicus). What’s important, though, is that those caring, playful, ecological parts of themselves struggle to express themselves in the market setting, and are pushed to the periphery in that context.

This has ideological implications, because Homo Economicus, as a central archetype in the system, also becomes a kind of Ideal that’s deployed by elites to justify and describe why they do the things they do. We’re not arseholes. We’re just doing what humans do, and should do.

Every person is multifaceted, but every person also has this ability to focus their awareness on a single facet of themselves and to politically identify with it. For example, one defining feature of conservative libertarian philosophy is a positive value placed on Homo Economicus (sometimes re-coded under new names like ‘the sovereign individual’), even though every self-described libertarian will also have socialistic and communistic traits within themselves.

But, even those who do not identify with the dominant values of capitalism - such as a self-described socialist - will nevertheless often be forced into bringing out their Economicus side. That’s because, regardless of your political ideology, you still have to survive through the capitalist market, and if you act against its prevailing tendencies you’ll quickly find yourself marginalised. We often live amidst a kind of evolutionary race-to-the-bottom, where if you don’t push the slider up on your dickish traits you get trodden on.

Approach 2: Capitalism as a harmonic filter and EQ

In Approach 1, I suggest that life under capitalism ups the volume of your Homo Economicus track, making it stand out more in your overall mix, but that metaphor assumes the other tracks remain untainted. They might be quieter than they should be, but they keep their integrity.

Our predicament gets deeper though, if we take a different metaphoric route, and start looking at the filtering and EQ controls found on a mixing desk - those knobs that can change the character of each track by shifting the balance between its frequencies. What if, under capitalism, there’s certain filters, or generic EQ settings, that start to get applied over each of our tracks? This is an imaginative exercise limited by the scope of our metaphor, but let’s explore it.

When someone says that something is starting to feel ‘commercialised’, what are they really saying? In a city like London, for example, there have been merchants selling coffee for hundreds of years, but why is it that a huge modern branch of the Starbucks chain in central London’s Oxford Street feels particularly ‘commercial’? Well, in an old-school market, there are many parallel vibes existing simultaneously. There’s trading going on, but there’s also gossip, friendship, lounging around, side deals, favours, communalism, and storytelling. In musical terms, there are a lot of harmonics, additional frequencies that resonate around the official main note. This is what makes a place feel soulful, edgy, informal and human.

A Starbucks does not feel like any of those things because, like any chain, they attempt to remove anything that isn’t dedicated to pure throughput of commercial trade at scale. This standardisation and formalisation is akin to the removal of harmonics. The store layout might look aesthetically pleasing, but it feels flat, as if all rogue frequencies have been pacified. In fact, if I was to say there’s a tinge of something inhuman about the chain, many people might agree.

In reality, those ‘rogue frequencies’ are often just other aspects of our being bleeding into spaces that might be the primary domain of one aspect of our being. The process of trying to purify a space of unsanctioned frequencies will always feel oppressive - whether it be a Starbucks enforcing an ideal of consumer optimization, or an overly zealous spiritual commune trying to enforce enlightenment - but the reality under capitalism is that the stripping out of non-commercial vibes is our most prevalent form of filtering.

In the case of a Starbucks, this stripping out of soulfulness is actually being applied to our Homo Economicus track, because - despite what economists say - our commercial trading side always contains harmonic traces of all our other sides. The inverse of this, though, is the process by which a capitalist system always attempts to boost the Homo Economicus harmonics in all non-commercial tracks. When a yogi starts to sense that there’s something empty about spiritual posturing on Instagram, or a punk complains that their countercultural neighborhood is getting ‘gentrified’, they’re both sensing that some previously non-commodified realm is being infused with added commercial vibes. The Homo Shamanicus track starts finding itself with a new shimmer of Homo Economicus harmonics.

Representing ‘commercial vibes’ in EQ format is an interesting metaphorical challenge, and I’m not sure I’ve yet fully worked out how to do it. Capitalism often promotes a seemingly contradictory mix of militaristic discipline in the workplace alongside undisciplined consumption in the marketplace, so as those values start to be overlaid over all our tracks, my intuition is that it boosts the aggressive mids of competition, and the tinny analytical treble of data-driven optimisation, all while cutting soulful bass. Feel free to share your own take on a capitalist EQ in the comments.

Leave a comment

Approach 3: Homo Economicus as an Effects Unit

On a typical mixing console, you have the option to route each track through an external effects unit, which might be set up to - for example - add reverb to the track before bringing it into the final master.

This adds some new possibilities to our metaphor set. For example, rather than solely imagining Homo Economicus as an individual track among many, or as a harmonic added to other tracks, we might see it as an effects unit that all the other tracks must pass through before they can express themselves. This raises the question of what exact ‘effect’ it has. Is it a flanger unit, a compressor, or an overdrive, perhaps?

I think this metaphoric route works best when thinking about the struggles a person faces when trying to survive economically by doing something they believe in. For example, let’s take someone with a strong Homo Ecologicus track. Perhaps, in order to be able to make a living while pursuing this track under our system, they must route it through an effects unit - let’s name it the Marketizer 2000 - which is some kind of tone-shaping, frequency-sculpting limiter that will cut out any element of Homo Ecologicus which isn’t marketable, while boosting the elements that are.

Homo Ecologicus might enter the Marketizer 2000 as a feeling of connection to the natural world, but it might be forced to exit as a project plan to put a price on ecosystems in order to make them marketable. Homo Meditari might enter as a feeling that the world is crammed with excess, and exit as an online mindfulness app competing to sell itself on the Play Store as one product among tens of thousands of others. Homo Adventurous enters as a swashbuckling traveler, but exits as a lifestyle vlog on Youtube interspersed with adverts for AG1 supplements.

This version of the metaphor also provides us with a good way of critiquing some of the core ideological claims made by, for example, the tech industry. That industry always claims to be a bastion of creativity and innovation, and yet - under capitalism - the human spirit of innovation (which might be, for example, a mix of Homo Cogitans and Homo Expressio) is only allowed passage insofar as it molds itself to the requirements of the dominant track. Forms of creativity and innovation that don’t aim to extend commodification, accumulation, acceleration and expansion get muted, limited and marginalised. Big business doesn’t support creativity and innovation in general. It supports a very limited subset of that.

Mastering, and Remastering

The components of our metaphor can be combined. We might imagine life under capitalism as a situation in which we’re all tied together in a vast system in which almost evolutionary pressures start to emerge. They push up the volume slider on your Homo Economicus track while affecting the frequency of all your others. Making a living in that situation while remaining true to yourself is hampered by the fact that the dominant tendencies of the system stand like a bridge between you and your survival, forcing you to submit your dreams and authentic self to systemic restrictions. If you want to be an artist, learn to make it comply with the strictures of the market (or find a rich philanthropist who’ll insulate you from it).

All of this affects the master track of our being. That said, all of us will also attempt to alter this by adding in our own external effects units. For example, some might turn to religion, radical politics, underground grime music or meditation to provide some counterbalance to the dominant setup, while the dominant setup will try to re-route those very same impulses back through the capitalist mixing desk.

In some ways that sounds bleak, but this metaphor also provides us with some ways to think about creatively altering our system. How would you go about remixing your track levels? How would you boost the bass? How would you remaster the economy around you?

Paying subscribers can access the audio version here (17 minutes)

Quick note: my book Cloudmoney is now also out in Portuguese and Polish (woop!), taking the total number of languages to twelve. Message me if you’d like to be directed to a copy in your own language.

There are an estimated 1.5 billion computers that run Microsoft Windows, and each day a team at Microsoft gets to decide what topic they’ll push into the world’s consciousness via the search bar on the bottom of a Windows screen. Last week I got a parrot wearing a pirate hat.

It turns out that this parrot represents International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Well, me maties, the question I be interested in is this: what percentage of ye knew of International Talk like a Pirate Day before this?

I’m interested, because over the last months I’ve become aware of two things about the Microsoft search bar. Firstly, it showcases topics that have zero connection to each other, and which fluctuate seemingly at random. Secondly, it projects these onto me and a couple billion other people.

This plays into my general morbid fascination at how arbitrary decisions made by a handful of people can get amplified, embedded into our culture and stuck there for good. For example, I’m struck by the fact that two billion people on WhatsApp have to look at the same colour scheme every day when messaging.

People of radically different political stripes send radically different messages on WhatsApp, and yet everyone is united in recognising this colour combo as a backdrop to their culture. In fact, it’s part of our culture, but none of us ever had any role in deciding upon it. The team at Meta could just flick a switch and change it. Sometimes they do. Their UX changes send shock waves around the world, as everyone scrambles to readjust their perceptions.

These top-down projections don’t only occur in digital space. As noted in my piece The War on Informality, I get weirded out by the fact that millions of people who take the shuttle between the south and north terminals of London’s Gatwick airport are subjected to the same dull advert for EasyJet packaged holidays for the last couple years. Much like a dog learns that certain areas of the house mean certain things, Londoners learn that the geographic space between the terminals is inseparable from that airline’s slogan.

In fact, I sometimes try to put faces to the people who create these cultural artifacts. For example, in the image below, we find Tim, who - according to his bio - enjoys driving tractors, and Hugo, who likes watching Nordic noir, and Duncan, who is fond of wood-fire cooking.

Most Londoners don’t know these people, but they do know the incessant notification this team designed, because See It, Say It, Sorted is broadcast out of loudspeakers in London train stations ever ten minutes.

When I hear ‘See it, Say it, Sorted’, I picture the banality of the meetings that gave rise to this paranoid catchphrase, which is designed to get people to rat on each other. I picture Hugo talking to Tim about dropping his kids off at school while a nervous intern waits to take notes. I imagine the British Transport Police team giving them the contract, and how they maybe went out for dinner and cocktails afterwards, having laid out a phrase that literally millions of people will have to hear every day for the next, maybe, twenty years.

The world’s media fixates upon the Trump vs Harris presidential race because decisions made by the US leader can affect the lives of everyone globally. I think, though, that decisions made by corporate operatives make much more immediate impacts into the texture of our everyday life. There should be a Time Magazine profile about the person who composed the default text message sound on Samsung phones. There should be global debate about whether we like ‘spaceline’ or not. After all, we’re going to hear it regardless of whether we use the phone.

This is why I’m interested in International Talk Like a Pirate Day being projected into my world via Microsoft. How and why did this decision get made, and why do I have to deal with it? Why must I talk like a pirate now?

Global Village Life

I understand that most people don’t have this fascination. In fact, maybe you’re thinking, ‘hey chill Brett, it’s just a bit of light-hearted fun that we enjoy’, but here’s my issue. I’m increasingly convinced that there is no ‘we’. Rather, ‘we’ increasingly experience the world as isolated and alienated people who are mostly stuck in urban environments dominated by physical corporate and state interfaces (billboards, store-fronts, infrastructure etc) whilst also being stuck behind computers and smartphones dominated by Big Tech, which tries to feed us that illusion that the Internet is a ‘global village’.

‘Global village’ is now an old-school term, associated with the optimistic early years of cyberspace, because where’s the village now? In reality, it’s Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform data centres, towering like digital skyscrapers from where the highest bidder gets to project themselves onto everyone.

Let’s talk about an actual village. Picture a group of people in rural Ireland slowly forming a tradition of harvest festivals during the 15th century, drawn together by some shared common context of being agrarian peasants. There’s a rootedness, or shall we say authenticity to a harvest festival. It has some chance of organically emerging without top-down pressure.

Similarly, the original global village of the Internet did give some scope for organic upwellings, the digital equivalent of peasant festivals. So, in 1995 some people did use the Internet to send out messages to get people to talk like a pirate on a particular day, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day was born.

But, me choosing to shout ‘ahoy there maties!’ upon receiving an email through an old nineties peer-to-peer mailing list is a fundamentally different act to me shouting it out last week at Microsoft’s instruction. The latter is like a feudal lord instructing villagers to turn up at a festival.

Ok, it’s not like top-down projection of culture hasn’t been happening in other forms for a long time. For example, the big record companies have a strong pedigree in manufacturing mass culture - like boy bands - and force-feeding it to us from above while presenting it as our own bottom-up desire. But, in the early days of the Internet, there really was a sense that we could skirt past these behemoths. The whole Napster generation had that feeling of a digital Robin Hood movement, peasant outlaws operating in the thick forests of the web. In fact, even when the platforms like Google started getting powerful in the early 2000s, they seemed to be, well, platforms that could serve as a substrate upon which an organic bottom-up culture could take root.

Over the last decade we’ve shed much of that vision, and ended up in a weird cognitive twilight zone. On the one hand, we’ve slid like slow-boiled frogs into a gradual acceptance that the tech platforms are now not only mandatory infrastructure for economic life, but are also top-down gatekeepers of culture, whose algorithms, feeds and interfaces becomes the mainline via which it gets propagated.

This has led to a lot of angst in recent years, but much of that has been focused on content moderation and censorship issues in the context of the ‘culture wars’. Conservatives are convinced that Big Tech forces everyone into ‘wokeism’, but it’s just as apparent that the platform algos will amplify all sorts of memetic viruses, from Bitcoin speculation to far-right radicalisation. Twitter was at the centre of this for some time. In its early years it felt healthy, like a heady and chaotic ‘global village square’ where people would get on soapboxes and shout stuff out, but that vibe shifted with the arrival of the algorithmically-weighted feeds, which began to place top-down pressure to make you see more of what you’d already seen, to inflame you, to get you hooked, and to keep you there.

We of course also saw the concurrent rise of the crypto-token movements, which ostensibly tried to reinvent the peer-to-peer Internet, but much of that has been captured by its own excesses, turned into bloated VC-funded parodies of rebellion or fantasy ‘network states’ funded by billionaires. In fact, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey used his platform to sell people on Bitcoin, as did Elon, who also claimed to be a liberation fighter when he bought Twitter to free the platform from nefarious censorship.

Rather than being a bastion of free speech, though, Elon’s X has degenerated into a private receptacle for him, like a village square with a giant screen rigged up to broadcast regular wisdom and sayings from Chairman Musk. How I’d love to discover which obedient X engineers were given the humiliating task of programming the lines of code that would insert their boss’s ego into everyone’s feed. Maybe they too like wood-fired cooking, or Scandanavian crime dramas.

With the crumbling of Twitter, there has also been a crumbling in the old belief in a single Internet. The fact that Elon will now spam the village square has led to people drifting off in different directions. That’s one reason why we’re here on Substack, because it’s one place enthusiastically taking in refugees (something I welcome).

But, this focus on whether our voice and content is being constrained, censored or amplified by X, Y or Z platform obscures the fact that in the background, the giants of tech infrastructure continue to make more subtle - and often more impactful - cultural decisions on our behalf regardless. For example, have you noticed how literally every single tech company has started shoving AI tools at you over the last several months, pushing them into your feeds or into the boxes on their interfaces? Have you found yourself building a gradual sense that everyone must be using it, and that this is what we do now? Have you noticed that in that time your perception of the twinkle emoji solidified into a symbol for that? That wasn’t us who decided upon this. It was the marketing departments of the platforms.

In fact, while it’s possible that X will die a slow death as people get bored of Elon’s cult of personality, operating systems like Windows are pretty damn entrenched. Elon only has 198 million followers on X, but an anonymous team at Microsoft can project anything they want onto ten times as many people, whether that be their Copilot AI tool, or International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In fact, for all we know, the search bar topic could be a running joke among employees. They could piss themselves with laughter as they say ‘let’s make a billion people say arggg today’.

The parrot icon on my screen was ostensibly there to describe something, but it equally functioned as a prescription that I should care. It was selected for me, and this top-downess makes a difference. It becomes like cultural puppetry, and yes, I do get irritated by being puppeted. But, if I briefly get off my high-horse, I suppose Talk like a Pirate day is relatively benign. Perhaps the 1995 founders are happy to see a techno-feudal overlord instructing everyone to take part. It gets worse, though, when the lords just invent new days for their own cynical purposes, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Avast lubbers! Hear my Black Tale of Cyber Monday

The term ‘Black Friday’ originally referred to various disastrous days, including a financial crash in 1869. In the early 1950s, a couple academics used the term as a description to refer to the day after Thanksgiving, because people would feign illness to skip work and get a long weekend. Certain police departments in US cities also started using it at that time to refer to the beginning of the congested weekend at the start of the Christmas shopping period. In all these cases, the phrase was applied from the perspective of outside observers, in the way ecologists might have a term to describe the annual migration of gazelle.

In subsequent decades, though, the name ‘Black Friday’ was slowly hijacked by a narrow class of corporate marketers, who tried to get the gazelle to include it into their own self-identity. Rather than using it as an after-the-fact description of observed behaviour, it became a before-the-fact prescription, a call-to-action that you were supposed to go shopping. In our ecologist metaphor, the term ceased to be a description of herding behaviour, and morphed into an instruction to stampede the shops.

Many philosophers and mystics have long sensed that the act of naming can create reality (my favourite book about this is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Taoism-inspired masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea), but the modern masters of this ‘speaking into existence’ are corporate marketing teams. By repeatedly naming Black Friday, it was turned from a passive phrase denoting some loose behaviour into an actively charged cultural object that could pull people in like a magnet. In the era of digital globalization, this object, which was built by the US capitalist class, exploded mimetically through the marketing departments of all the other corporations globally. It’s now locked into place in every country and will not be dislodged, unless we see the fall of capitalism or the heat death of the universe.

Black Friday is as much a top-down order to behave in a certain way, as it is a description of a real bottom-up cultural phenomenon. In this sense it shares some common ground with Christmas, which has also been co-opted as a symbol of, and instruction to, engage in mass consumerism. Christmas, however, still holds onto some shreds of an actual religious holiday that once did exist, while Black Friday is like Christmas stripped of any illusion of cultural depth. It’s foisted at us every year, like the clickings of a corrupt ecologist who needs to remind the herd to make that migration.

When encountering all the top-down Black Friday ads, I’m always reminded of Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation. It refers to the method of programming ideas into people’s minds by addressing them as if they already agree with what you’re saying. To understand this, let’s look at one of the purest examples of this phenomenon: Black Friday’s sister festival, Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday was written into existence by a press release from the National Retail Federation (the biggest retail trade association in the world), which said: ‘Cyber Monday Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year’.

All the subsequent commercial slogans, like ‘Cyber Monday is Here’, and ‘Are you ready for Cyber Monday?’, speak at you as if you’re already a person who agrees this thing is a reality. This generates a feeling of a movement, of a whole mass of people somewhere - presumably - who already know about this thing that you’re only catching onto now.

Of course, nobody has ever seen anyone else celebrate Cyber Monday, because in reality it has no organic existence. Like the current version of Black Friday, it was genetically reverse-engineered by companies that spoke of it as if it were a reality.

This power to speak-into-existence has escalated as our economic survival has become tied to an Internet controlled by a small number of players. Let’s face it. There aren’t that many on-ramps into the ‘global village’. Rather, there are a handful of operating systems, the makers of which also own the gigantic search engines. They, and a few others, collectively form a meta-interface that gets to tint and filter the world we see, to foreground things, and push others back, often guided by nothing more than the profit motive.

As I discuss in The Three-Faced Interface, these top-down interfaces increasingly give themselves first-person pronouns, and cloak themselves in your own image, appearing as your, well, co-pilot to life.

Before people say I’m being doomerist, I’m not saying that we don’t still have any organic, bottom-up culture anymore, or that platforms are unable to do anything good. We do, however, need to be vigilant about these incursions from above. We need to consider whether AI hype, Cyber Monday and any other supposedly ‘bottom-up’ upwelling might in fact just be pieces of cultural malware downloaded into our minds from the curators of a holographic mock-up of a global village. We visit, and find this spam projected into us - the stories that are supposedly important, the mood, the next new thing. Today ‘we’ all celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, but what will we be instructed to care about tomorrow?

Well, it’s tomorrow now, and the curators have decided that today I must care about - wait for it - edible flowers. I do happen to care about edible flowers, and I applaud my M’lord’s decision to remind me of this.

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can access the audio edition here (14 minutes)

Tech isn’t a relaxant. It’s an accelerant. Automation technologies, whether they take the form of AI, digital payments or Uber, primarily make our lives faster, rather than easier, but we’re flooded with stories that present this acceleration as unstoppable progress. To survive this propaganda without losing our bearings, we need to start studying the tech accelerationist playbook, the stories and background mental models used by mainstream progress junkies to sell their techno-utopian visions. In this piece, I’ll show you four core moves made by garden-variety tech optimists, and two techniques to disrupt them.

Move 1: They use the high score model of history

In a typical video game, a player starts with a score of zero and then accumulates a higher score as they move up levels. They also build an inventory of items, and constantly upgrade that inventory as they reach higher levels and scores.

Mainstream stories about technological progress are based on the same framework. We start with a background image of humans as prehistoric beings with a score of zero, and then proceed to describe history as a long march in which we go up levels, moving in a general trajectory towards every higher technology, speed, accumulation, complexity and scale.

Within a high score ideology like this, innovations (such as the aforementioned AI, smartphone apps or digital money) are seen as moving us to a new ‘level’. Not only are they perceived as increasing our score and capacity, but they’re seen as upgrading a previous inventory. Through this lens, something like physical cash belongs to an older inventory, so must inevitably be discarded.

There are two crucial features of this worldview to be aware of. Firstly, in a video game, you always retain your score as you go up levels. You never reset, or rebase, to zero as you start a new level. Similarly, high score visions of history assume that human society carries over all the gains - or ‘points’ - it picks up over time.

Secondly, a character in a video game only has a single track and single score, and a single throughline that connects the beginning of the game to the end. Likewise, high score history has a sense of a singular path from the past to the future, rather than simultaneous parallel paths.

Move 2: They cast the single path as a ‘race’

When looked at from the perspective of the present, the singular path of increasing score going into the future is imagined as a race. For example, it’s extremely common for business journalists, conferences, innovation pundits, think-tanks and political leaders to talk about a ‘race to cashlessness’.

This isn’t unique to the payments sector. It applies everywhere that an automation process is occurring. For example, there’s supposedly a ‘race to AI’ occurring.

Racing metaphors naturally create imagery of those who lead, follow, and lag, and so break down into three sub-narratives, each starring a particular group:

1. The Leaders: the digital tech industry is imagined out in front, ‘leading the way’ towards this future. Tech magazines run stories about inspiring, trailblazing and heroic entrepreneurs daring to do this, funded by visionary VCs

2. The Followers: society more broadly is imagined as muddling along in the middle of the race. The small business section of a general newspaper might run stories about the need for readers to ‘keep up’ with new trends. This follow-the-leader mentality is reinforced by politicians, who position themselves on the proverbial sidelines, encouraging us to stay up-to-speed with the transition

3. The Laggards: If you’re not leading the way, and not keeping up, then you’re languishing at the back of the race. In the case of AI, this turns up in the form of stories about future technological unemployment, or the poor sods who may be outcompeted after failing to adopt it. Similarly, in the case of digital payments we see a spate of stories about those who may be left behind.

This messaging is also found in the political realm. For example, the UK Labour politician Alex Davies-Jones writes: “While the trends seem to suggest that we are moving towards a more cashless society, it is really important that we make sure we do this in a managed, careful way, making sure that nobody is left behind”. The title of her article is ‘Access to cash is still crucial’. Notice that word ‘still’. It generates the idea of a temporary situation. She’s not challenging the idea of the Race. Rather, her plea is to slow it down slightly, to give people time to ‘catch up’.

Move 3: They use the race to generate a salvation story

If we agree that people are at risk of being left behind, then it must follow that they need rescuing. Those at the front of the imagined race are often the loudest in promoting this rescue. In the payments sector, this takes the form of VISA, Mastercard and fintech firms presenting themselves as eager to help through ‘digital financial inclusion’ programmes.

For these firms, ‘inclusion’ simply means onboarding new customers and increasing profits, but the sector is ideologically primed to view its own interests as being in the interests of society more broadly. After all, they imagine themselves to be leading the way into the future, and thereby perceive a responsibility to bring everyone along with them.

This progress narrative, and the inexorable feeling that accompanies it, becomes entrenched as a paradigm. A paradigm is a subterranean framework for thinking, so deep that it goes unnoticed, which governs what questions are considered valid to be asked about any particular issue. So, rather than reflecting seriously on the question of whether people might reject the direction of travel, reject the race or reject the vision of the destination, well-meaning research communities will channel the paradigm through questions like ‘how can we enable an inclusive digital transition?’

This is how even well-meaning social workers with no commercial interest in digitization can become champions for large financial and technology companies. For example, a whole range of civil society groups and NGOs have joined the Better than Cash Alliance, which describes itself as a “partnership of governments, companies, and international organizations that accelerates the transition from cash to responsible digital payments to advance the Sustainable Development Goals”. The Alliance is hosted within the UN Capital Development Fund, and was funded by VISA, among others. Here’s the Visa press release about this in 2012:

Move 4: They cast anxiety as a conservative reaction

The mainstream story coming out of tech startups, the corporate sector and government is that we should all experience a desire for these ‘transitions’, but many people feel anxious and threatened by them instead. Within a high score vision of history, this anxiety will be cast as conservative, in the small-c sense of being frightened of change, and refusing to progress to a new ‘level’.

This creates inner conflict in those anxious people, because they’ve often also absorbed the race narrative by osmosis, sensing that new tech is ‘coming’ whether they like it or not. When their anxiety collides with this sense of impending inevitability, they’ll start to feel like an old horse-cart driver shaking their fists at passing cars. This also makes them vulnerable to the so-called ‘populist right’, because one strategy used by the latter is to prey upon fear of looming digital overlords, and to channel that valid anxiety through simplistic conspiracy stories that get laughed at in mainstream circles.

Populist movements not only feed on fear, but will attach it to nostalgia, encouraging a person to imagine themselves as part of a movement, like an uprising of horse-cart drivers facing off against the auto industry. Perversely, this strengthens the apparently ‘progressive’ credentials of the tech accelerationists. After all, if you’re against them, you must be with the crazies. This is how liberal urban professionals might end up seeing the Better than Cash Alliance, or corporate behemoths like PayPal, as representing progressive values rather than capitalistic power grabs.

Breaking the chains of digital ideology

There are many more moves in the tech accelerationist playbook (see my Big Techtonic and Cashback series for more), but let’s start deconstructing the ones we have. A good starting point is to reject two assumptions found within the standard high score vision:

1. The first is that idea that we retain high scores. Learning to deconstruct this takes practice, but here’s the short version: in actual human society, we not only psychologically and culturally adapt to changes, thereby neutralizing them, but we also recalibrate the entire economy to incorporate the new things as new baseline inputs to survival. Put differently, we only start to ‘need’ the new things after they’ve been introduced, and once this happens, the removal of those things takes you negative, because we’ve moved the ‘zero line’ upwards. To understand this rebasing process, check out my piece Money as Addiction. Interested readers might also see my recent If Everyone was a Billionaire, which hints at this zero line from a slightly different angle.

2. The second assumption is that there’s a single track into the future, rather than parallel tracks. In a standard high score ideology, older things are always lower and being left behind in the rear-view mirror, but in a parallel track world they can coexist simultaneously, like things moving in different lanes.

The easiest way to grasp this is through the examples of bicycles and stairs. Is it reactionary to call for bicycle lanes in a world dominated by cars? No, that’s considered progressive. Is it outrageous that we ‘still’ use stairs? No, that’s entirely normal, and important.

Bicycles and stairs don’t merely represent older ways of being. They’re parallel ways of being that draw upon a different concept of progress, one of diversity, balance, autonomy and resilience, rather than acceleration and expansion. In this sense, they’re just as modern as escalators and Uber. In fact, a world in which we were only able to use the latter would be a nightmare. We want balanced systems, rather than narrowly ‘efficient’ or ‘convenient’ ones.

From the parallel track perspective, the ‘upgrade’ or ‘level up’ viewpoint starts to crumble. Nobody is going around running research projects into how to help us all make the ‘transition’ from cycling to Uber, and there’s no ‘Better than Bicycles Alliance’ (in fact, if there was it would be seen as an obvious front for industry).

So, what happens when we take things demonized within the single track vision of history, and recast them in a parallel track world? What if we called cash the bicycle of payments, and ApplePay the Uber? What if we called writing an essay that comes from your own mind with a pen the bicycle of thought, and the generative AI one as the Uber of thought?

Well, the first consequence is that the imagined polarity between progressive and reactionary inverts. The conservatism switches to the digital accelerationist side, because the true thing that’s being held onto in the mainstream is digital progress ideology, the unchanging idea that the only thing that human society should optimize for is ever increasing speed, automation and corporate intermediation. From a parallel track perspective, digital ideology is a form of economic conservatism that favours a concentration of power into particular industries - Big Tech, Big Finance, and so on.

Secondly, the paradigm shift rearranges what research questions are considered to be valid. Rather than asking ‘how will we help people adapt to the digital transition’, we might ask ‘how can we keep a good balance of power between parallel tracks’. Asking that question is a good step towards true progress.

Share

Leave a comment

Want to listen to this article? Paying subscribers can find the audio edition here

As an economic anthropologist, I don’t get romantic about the so-called Age of Enlightenment. The Age, which starts from the 17th century onwards, is given star treatment in many conventional accounts of Western civilization. We associate it with the ascendency of reason, science, mathematical breakthroughs and theoretical advancements that produce wondrous new gadgets. No doubt it was a heady time for certain narrow classes of people, but anthropologists know its shadow. The pretence of bringing reason to a dark world often rode alongside violent expropriations and colonialism, which were further justified through wack dualisms like Man vs. Nature and Mind vs. Body. If I was to rewrite the Wikipedia summary of the Enlightenment, my cynical side might just edit it to: An Age in which European men developed a high opinion of themselves as transcendent rational beings steering the chaos of irrational nature, women and the body.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is often attributed as the one who blessed us with the dubious vision of mind-body dualism, but he was just playing into an emergent spirit of the times that was beginning to view rational thought as the true essence of humanity. For a long time before him, people believed in another floaty entity that surged around in the vessel of our bodies - the soul. Sometimes that was imagined as a warm vapour or fiery tempest hanging out around in the chest area, but Descartes felt the soul was rational, and was residing in the head, and was pretty much the same as the Mind.

This attempt to push the soul into the head doesn’t go unchallenged. While the Enlightenment gets called the Age of Reason, we also associate it with Expression: great artists, composers and writers harnessing the new technologies to give colour to the reason. The artistic movement called Romanticism is often described as a reaction to the Enlightenment, but it’s kinda like its angsty, more soulful twin that grows up alongside it. Listen to Beethoven summon emotions in the great concert halls amidst the industrial revolution. Look at Turner channelling the turbulence of colonialism with his moody pictures of slave ships on rolling oceans.

‘Soulful’, in this context, denotes a return to the heart area, a pulling away from rationality, the overlooked twin reasserting itself. This desire to give the mechanical march of the scientific-industrial juggernaut a heart and soul is a trope that has remained popular into the modern era. It was picked up in The Wizard of Oz (1900), with the Tin Man who wanted a heart. It’s also a central theme of the groundbreaking Metropolis (1927). The film begins with Cartesian Mind-Body Dualism, with a capitalist elite represented as The Mind, controlling a body of workers, represented as The Hands, in a soulless, mechanical world of industrial grind. The resolution is the Heart, which joins Head and Hands together.

One of my favourite board games is 7 Wonders Duel, a civilizational game that you can win through three primary methods:

1. Military victory, where you crush your opponent

2. Scientific supremacy, where you out-invent them

3. Civilian victory, where you shame them through your balanced accumulation of science, military defence capacities, commerce and great works of culture and art

Duel’s civilian victory path seeks to balance violent militarism and analytical rationalism with a touch of the beautiful and artistic, and this need to fill in the emptiness of domination with soul permeates modern capitalism. For example, when I worked in high finance, the senior bankers felt it very important to be able to discuss the latest science, tech and business trends with clients, but equally important to display their knowledge of fine art, music, and philosophy.

It’s common for financiers to collect art as a form of conspicuous consumption, but hanging those pieces on the wall of their penthouse suites also represents a desire to balance out the ruthless job of extracting profit. The fear of being a mere capitalist or mere dominator is common in elite circles, which is partly why they crowd the operas and get weepy about the great paintings, but we find versions of this throughout society more broadly. The cool urban middle classes love to be at the forefront of new tech, but also want to be seen at the art gallery.

In modern pop psychology terms we might view this through a ‘left brain vs. right brain’ framing. Regardless of how accurate the neuroscience of that is, we understand what the distinction is trying to get at. The ‘left brain’ is that more heady, tightly-wound, trebly buzz some people get from technical or analytical problem-solving. The ‘right-brain’ is that more chesty, holistic, looser, bass-heavy frequency of creative expression.

Solving problems can certainly be creative, but it often involves a form of domination. You fix a problem, destroying some chaos to set something in place, to create completion and stable order. Other forms of creativity are more open-ended, less about fixing-in-place and more about releasing, destabilizing and freeing up. These twin poles of creativity do segue into each other, and can even co-exist in single acts of creation, but have a tense relationship. The Enlightenment is often imagined a time that freed people from religion, and yet - when push comes to shove - it has a distinct fixing vibe, a desire to use rational thought to impose order, to steer Creation and make us masters of our destiny. So, when Enlightenment thinkers referred to multi-gendered humans as Man, they were not talking about actual humans, but rather about their one-sided ideal of a rational problem-fixer. It is Man at the helm of the juggernaut of industrial progress, with its militaristic states and megacorporations.

It’s probably no coincidence then that we talk about The Man to refer to capitalist elites and authorities. In a sense, The Man is Man viewed through the eyes of the tormented twin. As (The) Man tries to control destiny, the twin tries to loosen it up, two intertwined spirits fighting to exorcize each other. Each era brings its own unique combinations of this. Look at 60s rock using electricity-powered tech to amplify the spirit of romanticism and the sexual revolution, before that innocence is shredded in the hard-edged 70s, and then gutted by record companies in the 80s with kitsch glam metal, which collapses under its hairspray as underground rap bubbles up through the streets. Watch Nirvana emerge from the wreckage in the 90s with their fuzz pedals, screaming fuck you to The Man. Watch The Man screaming fuck you back at them via derivative jock-rock and commercial rap by the 2000s. Capitalism is constantly trying to appropriate and eat the very angst it generates.

Man, and His Creativity Machines

Last year was a big moment for Man, because a new subset of automation that could deal a blow to His romantic twin was popularized. Generative AI is a scientific-industrial tool built for the automation of creativity, the automation of moody landscapes, the automation of angsty rebellion, the automation of pretty much any creative expression we’ve previously expressed. It can even automate critique of automation, and then automate that again. It might even use this article to do that.

In mythic terms, generative AI is The Mind creating a mechanical replica of Heart and Soul to give to the Tin Man. I’m sure the people at ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and all the other generative AI companies are very talented and well-meaning, but they are very much on the tool-building, problem-solving, rational transcendence side of the Enlightenment. They’re not artists, and they mostly work for capitalists, or venture capitalists, who pay them to lose themselves in the stimulating task of building wondrous machines. They seldom think about how their machines will be weaponized, and disassociate themselves from responsibility.

I remember visiting Facebook’s London offices. It was one giant model of faux playfulness, with foosball tables set on AstroTurf, life-sized Ninja Turtles, meditation chambers, and meeting rooms with names like ‘Excessively Loud Tutting’ and ‘Needless Pleasantries’.

The offices were explicitly designed to be a play-pen for geeky adults, but this is the company whose various products lie behind vast political disorientation, teenage cyber-bullying, body-shaming, and far-right radicalization with real-world violent effects for actual communities. I found myself weirdly longing for the steel-and-glass skyscrapers of high finance. At least the finance sector doesn’t pretend to be saving the world, and doesn’t cloak itself in a childish image of wacky creativity. Financiers have a certain grim authenticity about their narrow interests.

When pursuing those narrow interests, financiers do put money into those funds run by the venture capitalists, and those are used to mobilize the tool-building-problem-solving impulse of the tech class, but that narrow form of creativity is narrowed even further through the evolutionary processes of this financing. Financiers will avoid, and thereby screen out, any firm that actually proposes anything authentically radical, so the startups only get to express creativity insofar as it aligns with the conservative requirements of corporate profit-seeking. That’s because, in the final analysis, the corporates are the apex power-players in the ecosystem of corporate capitalism.

When we zoom out, mega-corporations are like undead programmes that default towards optimizing profit. They’re drawn towards other profit-optimizing machines, which is why they default towards seeking out automation, and why the venture capital class defaults to funding new forms of automation. So, how does generative AI fit into this schema?

Well, the productive foundations of capitalism lie very much on the side of quasi-militaristic industrial science, but to sell the results, firms also need to mobilize that romantic part of ourselves. They have to make you feel things, and traditionally they would have enlisted musicians, artists and writers for these public-facing heart offensives. This is also a historic source of inner conflict for those artists, who fret over whether they really should be selling out to The Man. Here, for example, is Justin Hawkins of The Darkness discussing his music being used in awful commercials.

Often these artists channel a form of creativity that comes from the body. Musicians feel the music they play, and artists feel the act of creation, much like a child feels the joy of pushing a crayon over paper. The actual end product is only one part of the process, but it’s imbued with feeling and makes us feel. This creation takes energy and time, though, and hiring people like Justin Hawkins to go through that process is far more expensive than simply generating an automated replica of the results.

So, venture capitalists fund the geeky tool-builder class to build creativity machines that can be used to cut costs. Generative AI is the spirit of industrialism attacking the spirit of romanticism, a machine to mimic the creativity of the twin, but stripped of the cultural substance. 2023 was the year it hit the big time, and along with it came all the media hype that presented it as One Giant Leap for Man. Deep down, though, we all know it’s one giant leap for The Man.

The scream

Much has been made of Marc Andreesen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, in which the venture capitalist rails against ‘pessimists’ who doubt the Enlightenment dream. But why did he decide to rehash this old ‘technology and markets will lead us to utopia’ line in 2023?

Here’s why. The 20th century version of the Enlightenment story told us that automation would release us from toil - destroy all the chaos of nature, blah blah - and leave us to relax doing poetry, music and philosophy. 2023 was the year capitalism called that off, saying actually our engineers have poetry, music and philosophy covered too. They even went back on the story of our Mind being ever-so valuable. Rather than thinking, we’re now we’re told to learn prompt-engineering, and to be a grateful consumer of the result. 2023 was the year when the emptiness of the automation vision started to creep into our souls. We feel an inner scream somewhere, coming from that romantic part of our being.

Marc’s VC industry heavily pushed the automation vision, but is now threatened by public and regulatory blowback, so he wants to pre-emptively shame anyone who starts to have doubts about his progress narrative. That’s why he published his manifesto. That’s why he, and others, will spin that story of automation technology as representing epic creativity, and of creative young people embracing AI.

Of course we still have a creative spirit, and of course we all still live in a vast interdependent market economy which requires us to constantly compete, which means all of us get pulled into using the same machines out of fear of being ‘left behind’. So yes, he is right that there will be a generation of young people trying to ‘move with the times’ by using AI for new things, but make no mistake: the generative AI moment is the first time we have seen such a full-frontal assault on the romantic twin of the Enlightenment. It’s a definitive statement that scientific tool-builders are on top and creatives below, mechanical form over emotional substance. The crayon in a child’s hand is now Craiyon, generating simulations of Turner’s turbulent feelings.

Marc doesn’t want us to have doubts about the Enlightenment story, but anyone who doesn’t have doubts isn’t paying attention. Simulacra machines are spreading everywhere, while ChatGPT founder Sam Altman now feeds you half-arsed stories about his Worldcoin programme that’s supposed to solve technological unemployment through crypto UBI, provided you submit yourself to eyeball scanning. Worldcoin is backed by Andreessen’s venture capital fund, and now they’re running guerilla marketing campaigns on the streets of Berlin, where I live. I’m forced to walk over their simulations of urban creativity stencilled on the pavement, and when I look at their slogan - you must be human - I can feel the heart of emptiness beating in the VC-funded soul of techno-capitalism.

Leave a comment

Share

Paid subscribers can access the audio version here.

An interface is a surface that stands between you and a system. It hides the background circuitry, rendering it in a simplified form that enables you to interact with the system without understanding it. For example, the black screen is an interface between you and the underlying hardware of your smartphone.

Similarly, a web browser displayed on that screen is an interface between you and the Internet, a network of computers and data-centres connected together via telecommunications equipment.

A bank account page displayed on that browser is an interface between you and the transnational financial system.

We live with interfaces within interfaces, but some are harder to recognize that others. For example, a shelf in a supermarket is an interface between you and thousands of supply chains connected by planet-spanning logistics systems. The simple electricity plug point on your wall is an interface between you and the global energy complex. You don’t have to see or understand the messy geopolitics of coal, oil and gas to make your toaster fire up. You just need to plug in to the interface.

We didn’t always have interfaces like this. For much of human history, life was far more un-intermediated. 50,000 years ago we were locked into tangible and visceral direct engagement with environments, objects and communities. You could smell the antelope in the hide that covered you, and see the skeleton of the creature that provided it. Even 500 years ago life remained very direct. Walking into a city, you’d get an intense feeling of being in a very specific place in a very specific time. You might inhale smoke, released from the direct burning of charcoal to cook meals, while you navigated through informal markets displaying unpackaged goods from nearby localities.

As you moved through cities, you’d see the local owners of stores, inns and stalls, and notice idiosyncratic signage that changed by locality. There were no chain stores owned by faceless institutional shareholders with common branding and common interfaces. There was no overlay of an omnipresent Google Maps that positioned you as a constant blue dot in the centre of a two-dimensional rectangle. Your attention wasn’t being drawn to a different locality through the ping of a WhatsApp notification. If you were in a place, you were intensely there, and nowhere else.

The trend over time, however, has been formalization and standardization. Informal peer-to-peer systems slowly get dissolved and replaced by large-scale formal bureaucratized systems that stretch across time and space. This gradually pries us away from direct experience. You don’t see your neighbour cutting the throat of a goat any more. You see them with a bag of groceries containing plastic-wrapped, industrially-farmed beef cutlets. This increased indirectness dilutes the intensity of day-to-day life.

This disassociation from directness has accelerated under modern capitalism. The romantic image of the ‘free market’ is one of face-to-face street bazaars, but the core feature of actual modern capitalism is that firms get bigger and bigger, a process mirrored in us gradually being pulled ever further from the underlying people, ecosystems and resources that underpin any economy. Corporations wage war on direct informal systems (see The War on Informality), which are imagined to be slow and inefficient. They seek to replace them with central systems that we indirectly interact with via interfaces.

This formalization is one key feature of ‘economic development’. If you visit a so-called developing country, you’ll immediately notice diverse veins of informal markets that draw from regional supply chains. A developed country, by contrast, is dominated by formal supermarkets that act a standardized conduits for transnational corporate supply chains. This formalization extends across industries. For example, in 15th century Europe there were cross-country branches of powerful banking families, but financial markets included spidery networks of relationship-based trade credit and informal moneylending. By the 19th century those webs of credit were getting formalized into corporate banks with standard branches replicated across cities and countries. 20th century corporate capitalism is the result.

Get a free taster of my 10-part Intro to Economic Life course here:

The pronouns of corporate personhood (and its interfaces)

In my Lego Model of Corporate Capitalism, I created a simplified representation of the different groups that come together to bring a corporation to life:

This entity is a conglomeration of thousands of disparate individuals who are trying to work together, normally under a central hierarchical command structure. From a legal perspective, however, this conglomeration is a single ‘thing’. In the centre of the image above there’s a blue circle. This is a hollow legal shell created through an act of incorporation. It’s given a name - such as ‘BP’ - and this named entity is granted legal personhood, the legal right to act as if ‘it’ were a natural person (i.e. a biological human being). ‘It’ can enter into contracts, hire people, sell things, sue people, issue statements, and so on. It’s a creature given life through law (and capitalization), but it can also die its own death without bringing its humans down with it: this is the concept of limited liability.

Linguistically, when we’re referring to this creature of law - the legal person - we use the company’s name. For example, ‘BP hired 5000 new workers’, or ‘BP is investing into renewables’, or ‘BP issued a statement about climate change’. In reality, BP is a legal construct that cannot do anything unless actual people do the things for it. This is why there’s a taboo against using personal pronouns when speaking about the legal person. We’d never say, ‘BP is investing into renewables because she is concerned about climate change’. We’d either say ‘it is’, or we’d refer to the underlying people by saying ‘they are’. A BP press release is not going to say ‘Hi, this is BP here. Climate change concerns me, and I pledge to do something about it’. No, the PR team will write, ‘climate change concerns us here at BP, and we pledge…’

Nevertheless, because a corporation is an artificial legal person operated by real people, we always have two separate ways we can experience it. We can experience the real people, for example, by chatting to the clerk at Walmart. Alternatively, we can experience the legal person, by noticing that the clerk has a branded uniform over her real body, and that this specific building is arranged in a particular way that represents a universal Walmart-ness that transcends this specific place. We might notice the decals on the delivery van that tell us this specific Toyota isn’t just any Toyota, but rather a Walmart van. The branding overpowers the Toyota-ness - owned by another undead legal construct called Toyota - that previously lingered around that vehicle.

All of these things - brands, colours, catch-phrases, signature arrangements - are merged with the service staff to form the outward-facing physical interface for the corporation. For much of the 20th century, these physical interfaces were the primary way the public interacted with these legal persons, and the taboo of not referring to the latter with personal pronouns was passed on. The Walmart cashier would never say ‘How may I, Walmart, help you’. Rather, she’d refer to the staff by saying ‘how may we help you’, or to herself with, ‘Hi, I’m Sandy, how may I help you’. The Barclays Bank branch might have a poster urging you to ‘speak to one of our staff about our new mortgages’, but would never say, ‘speak to me about my new mortgages’.

The thickening, and the stickening

By the mid-20th century, people in urban areas were interacting with physical corporate interfaces in almost every industry. These not only distanced them from the underlying reality of how they survived (aka. global food, commodity and energy supply chains), but could be used to steer their understanding of that reality. Nevertheless, the interfaces were still only a mottled patchwork. Informality, non-standardized practices and smaller-scale local systems still thrived in the urban underground, immigrant neighbourhoods, smaller towns, and in rural areas.

Then came the explosion of the Internet. One of the Internet’s original features was to enable digital ‘store-fronts’ - a website - to be built in one computer in one place, and then ported via telecommunications infrastructure and common protocols to another computer in another place. In this way, a carpenter in Manchester could port their store-front into your living room in London. By the 1990s, this had created a utopian peer-to-peer vision for the Internet. It was imagined that small-scale operators could set up their storefronts on each other’s computers, weaving together a distributed digital equivalent of an informal market.

In reality, though, we live under capitalism, and the romantic vision of the bazaar-like horizontal market is just an ideological cloak for a much darker reality. A large-scale capitalist system always defaults to expansion and acceleration, and if you attempt to go against this trajectory you eventually get shafted. Predictably then, the original horizontal Internet got shafted by the expansionary, accelerationist version. Billions of people were slowly nudged by the systemic default towards massive datacentres owned by big corporates. Rather than dealing with each other, we’d all go via the corporations.

This not only replicates the same formalization and standardization processes that occurred in the physical world, but actually supercharges them. Note, for example, that 6000 bank branches have been shut down in the last 9 years in the UK, creating much angst. In the 1800s, bank branches were the face of corporate centralization, but nowadays they supposedly represent localization, because the new normal is for the corporate to get rid of its branch network and replace it with standardized apps that directly tether tens of millions of individuals into their centrally-controlled datacentres. The real breakthrough for the corporates was the smartphone, a device that not only allows a store-front to be ported into someone’s world from a distance, but which follows them everywhere they go. The corporate interfaces now literally stick to us now like an inescapable coating.

Old corporations would normally start by building their supply chains, and would then output their products via a physical interface, such as a store staffed by uniformed service staff. Those legacy corporations are now trying to replace their physical interfaces with self-service apps, but new corporations without legacy customers frequently now start as digital interfaces, and then slowly reverse-engineer all the supply chains required in the background. Many tech startups are just interface-builders. For example, Pets.com tried a slide a digital interface between pet food supply chains and us. Spotify slides an interface between us and music catalogs. Uber slides one between us and physical taxis, and between taxi drivers and their customers.

The biggest development in our world, though, isn’t just this new breed of corporates obscuring physical supply chains with digital interfaces. Rather, it’s those companies that provide interfaces into the interfaces, the platform corporations that act as infrastructure for all the others. This is Big Tech, and it’s their interfaces that have become the most pervasive, iconic, and inescapable. They stick to us everywhere we move, and colour our entire reality. You cannot turn on a computer without experiencing the Microsoft or Apple interface, or a phone without experiencing the Apple or Google interface. You increasingly cannot communicate without seeing the green of WhatsApp, or travel without picturing your destination as a red pin on Google Maps. You cannot experience diverse images and videos without them being framed by the unchanging interface of YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, Google Images or TikTok. Goods made by diverse people in diverse places get pushed into standardized boxes under a search bar on Amazon.com or JD.com.

For the first time in history, then, the entire planet is almost fully covered in a thick layer of intermediary interfaces-of-interfaces. These do vary across regions - China has a different set - but they’re beginning to blend into a collective collage as one ports into another - a Maps location is shared via WhatsApp, or an Instagram image links to Amazon.com. This collage is becoming a meta-interface that covers the world like a membrane between us and everything. The membrane functions like contact lenses, rendering every city layout or image in the same format. It affects other senses too. Every song is subject to same algorithmic curation, while ideas for what food you will taste are constructed in your mind via Instagram and YouTube interfaces.

It goes without saying that this profoundly affects the very way we both perceive and experience the world, but we’re also fed a story that says this membrane belongs to us. We’ve all been enlisted into thickening it by contributing images, videos and text to what superficially appear as common frames. But we do not control these frames. They’re corporate assets, owned by hollow legal entities accountable only to execs, creditors and shareholders. Critics of capitalism have long lamented how the profit-motive distorts our perspective on the world, but they originally meant this somewhat figuratively. Nowadays, however, the profit-motive will literally shift your perceptions via the curation of the meta-interface. Your small business store-front might physically exist, but if it’s not prioritized by Google Maps people might walk right past it as they follow the algorithmically-mapped path on their screen towards a different pin.

Would you like to syndicate this essay? Contact me here

The three new faces of corporate personhood

Corporations are operated by humans, but the corporation itself is an undead entity with a default setting to maximize profit. This poses a problem. There’s something fundamentally gross about the way the legal person - the hollow shell - always appeals to warm-blooded things like friendship, solidarity, adventure, family and love in its sterile pursuit. No matter how hard the legal person tries to pretend to be a natural person, ‘its’ messages always reek of inauthenticity. The predictable move for an entity that that, then, is to try change its interfaces into a human face, to cloak the legal person in the literal image of a natural person. This new attempt to ‘personify’ the corporate mask has three faces.

Face 1: Your face

Old corporate interfaces presented a relatively common front to all who approached. The Barclays or Walmart staff might have adapted their behaviour depending on who they were speaking to, but there was some attempt at common treatment for all customers. The new digital interfaces, by contrast, don’t present a common view. They shapeshift. They build a wire model of you from webs of collective and personal data, and then try to mirror that via the interface. The YouTube you see has the same colours and layout as the one I see, and yet we’re not present in each other’s space like two customers browsing through the same record collection at a music store. The Internet is seldom used to ‘connect us together’ any more. No, we’re each in a private bubble.

In a sense, the new digital interfaces are like a reflective store-front made of one-way glass. Whoever approaches will see an image of themselves, reflected in what products turn up, and what messages they receive. The corporate can see them, but the person is encouraged to imagine themselves as walking through an uninhabited room with shelves that belong to them: my shelf, my basket, my account, my list, my favourites, my Amazon, my Google etc. In the 1980s there was no ‘my Walmart’, but now your data is reflected back to you as your own store with that possessive pronoun. In doing that, they get to present themselves as you.

In recent years this mirroring sometimes turns in ‘your year in review’ summaries, like Spotify Wrapped. Strangely, this is the only time you can detect the one-way glass. In so overtly saying here’s a packaged image of you, you sense the presence of a watcher. “We’ve been watching your every move around our music store… sorry, your music store”.

Face 2: I, AI-bot

Traditionally, if Bank of America contacted me, they might send a letter saying 'We are writing to inform you...' Their chatbot Erica, by contrast, uses the personal pronoun ‘I’. I noticed that your Joe’s Gym recurring charge was higher than usual.

Who is this ‘I’? The bot is just lines of code hosted in computers within a data centre. The code gets triggered when you connect to that via your phone. It outputs text that is ported into your world through the digital interface. It functions as an automated answering machine, like a dynamic FAQ that rearranges itself after the Bank of America IT system interprets your words.

This combination of code and computers will be found on Bank of America’s balance sheet under its fixed assets. ‘Erica’ is legally in the same category as the bank’s supply of staples or fleet of vehicles, but they don’t give human names to their water coolers or keyboards. They only grant that to assets that form part of the new outward-facing interface. They encourage us to get on first-name terms with this combination of code and hardware, and by now all of us have experienced the proliferation of these named interfaces like Alexa, Bard, Claude, or Jasper.

These chatbot interfaces are now being integrated with pipelines that send your requests into AI systems that will offer forms of ‘companionship’. Microsoft’s Co-Pilot overtly invokes the idea of a helper sitting beside you, while the Zoom interface now includes a new ‘companion’.

These AI prompts are now imparting a certain animate feeling to previously inert-looking interfaces. We’re supposed to imagine these corporate assets experiencing the same natural personhood as we do, as we ask ‘them’ for help, but these processes are just data centre operations. The silicon chips feel nothing of the emotions you feel, don’t share your goals, and cannot experience the meaningful distinctions you might make between, say, processing information for nuclear warfare or for humanitarian aid.

The animist in me respects the idea that the components of a computer might experience their own form of personhood, but if I do that I must also respect the personhood of a piece of granite in a garden tile, or a dust particle floating in the air. These forms of personhood might exist, but they’re not personhoods we have access to. So, it’s arbitrary when a corporation encourages us to say ‘thank you’ to its bot, but not to a plastic wrapper in a bin. That wrapper experiences the same personhood that Erica does, but we’re supposed to speak to the latter, and ChatGPT, and all other AI interfaces, as if they were discrete beings, rather than networks of disparate components.

This is narcissistic, because it’s only objects designed to mimic human responses that get given this pseudo natural-personhood status. So, if the first phase of ‘personified’ corporate personhood looks like our own face reflected back to us, the second phase involves channelling that reflection through a machine system designed to mirror the image of another human. Put differently, AI chatbots give the one-way mirror a human name that’s different to your own. “I’m having a conversation with Erica”, you think to yourself as you transmit information to the (largely male) engineers of Bank of America. “She knows me so well”.

Face 3: The tech baron

How many Big Pharma CEOs can you picture in your mind? Do you know the names of the Big Oil execs? Who leads BHP Billiton, or Wells Fargo?

Unless you’re in elite business circles, it’s unlikely that these names and faces will easily come to mind. A reasonable chunk of society might know some of the finance bosses like Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan, but almost everyone knows the tech billionaires. It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t heard of, and seen images of, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates.

A tech startup is like a nascent speck in the universe until the systemic forces of capitalism decide to channel through it and it explode it outwards into a mega-star in a matter of months. As the company turns into a ‘unicorn’, their hapless, and often clueless, founders are taken along for the ride. The sheer speed at which they become billionaires creates an aura of mystique, and they ascend to a panoply of business demi-gods that hover above us. Witness, for example, the recent meteoric rise of Sam Altman.

The tech billionaires are our most visible class of capitalists, and they have certain skills and talents, but given that they’re fallible humans like anyone else, we have to also deal with their often banal visions and arbitrary decisions - like Zuckerberg’s cringe vision of the Metaverse, Altman’s shallow vision of Worldcoin, and Elon’s random perspectives on immigration (or gym routines, or whatever).

We return to the interaction between the legal person and the real people. With most old companies this distinction was fairly clear, but tech founders often retain controlling stakes of their startups, and when those startups explode the founder ends up with outsized control. A banking CEO like Jamie Dimon only holds about 0.02% of J.P. Morgan’s shares, while Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta, Thiel 10% of Palantir, Bezos 9% of Amazon, and Musk 80% of X.com.

The CEO of BP - Murray Auchincloss - is hired by BP shareholders, and they will fire him if he fails to serve them. Tech billionaires, by contrast, are like barons that control a fief. They’ll allow outside investors to join them, but won’t cede control. In a traditional shareholder-dominated corporation, the comparative ‘facelessness’ of the shareholders means the interfaces stand in as the dominant face of the company. Big Tech interfaces, by contrast, stand alongside literal images of their barons. In fact, it’s those interfaces that serve us the pervasive images of them, as Elon is constantly forced into your X feed. Their image is slowly built in the back of your mind as you stare into the one-way named glass.

Subscribe now

Facing AI-nxiety

The GoogleMetaAmazonMicrosoftAppleNetflixSpotifyLinkedInEtc meta-interface is stuck to us now. It tints and curates our world, but provides no comfort. In fact, it gives us anxiety. Historically people felt this emotion at the prospect of looming economic downturns or geopolitical instability, but now minor shifts in the Google algorithm can make tens of thousands of businesses literally disappear from view. Small UX changes on WhatsApp can make or break your romantic relationship.

The collective meta-interface is subject to unaccountable changes that affect the very colour and texture of the everyday, but this sense that we’re no longer in control of own view on the world gets even more edgy with AI. Our fear at this new technology goes beyond our jobs being at risk. AI is a way to make corporate interfaces ever more invasive and dominating. That’s why every tech company is pushing us to use it, like digital meth dealers. Here, we’ve integrated your new AI assistant into every interface box that your career depends on. There’s no opt-out.

Look at all the tech barons, clawing for processing power to run the new face of corporate personhood. Their desperate race has pushed Nvidia’s stock up hundreds of percentage points within a few short years, launching the GPU-maker’s founders into demi-god status. The progress narrative that accompanies this says that this arms-race empowers us, furnishing us all with endless convenience (see Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes them Faster), but this sits uneasily alongside the overwhelming feeling of paternalistic control that surrounds these platforms.

To ease our fears, we get told that tech overlords are swept to power by us. It’s consumer desire that explodes their platforms into all-encompassing environments. The reality is far simpler, and darker. Just like Microsoft Windows is a default that loads without anyone choosing it, corporate capitalism is an operating system that loads up every morning. You don’t have to choose to expand, automate and accelerate. Those are default processes that play out regardless of your desire. The role of the tech CEO is to extend the systemic default, cheered on from behind by a sycophantic class of institutional shareholders.

But, while there’s a real person called Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, experiencing real human emotions, hopes and fears, their grinning faces are also inhabited by artificial legal persons. After all, corporate capitalism is a circular system, with all the nodes in it eventually touching all the other nodes. We’ve been discussing the interface between the corporate and customers, but there are other interfaces too, between corporates and workers, supply chains, the finance sector, and state. These are all interlocking sub-systems interfacing with each other…

Crucially, every one of these interfaces, eventually, go both ways. Zuckerberg’s image might be projected outwards, but from his human vantage point, we are the faceless systemic tsunami that gives him power. In fact, without that tsunami, his face is not known at all. As his image is constructed in the public imagination, he becomes an avatar, an artificial picture of a natural person, pasted over the face of capitalism.

Share

Leave a comment

Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this as an audio essay here

We have far more technology than any other generation in human history, and it allows us to do things in a fraction of the time that our ancient ancestors did. It must surely follow that we’re the most relaxed generation of all time. Agree?

You might find that claim dubious, but if adverts are to be believed, AI, digital payments, self-driving cars and automation in general is only there to make our lives easier. We carry in our pockets a powerful computer that can take on the role of your personal navigator, translator, matchmaker, meditation teacher, and banker. With so many of our tasks automated, our leisure time must have expanded greatly. Right?

It matters how we frame this question. If you ask ‘are we working less than before’, research is ambiguous. In rich countries people work less than labourers who toiled during the 19th century industrial revolution, but more than our ancient ancestors. If you ask ‘are our lives more leisurely than ever’, the answer is less ambiguous. Many people feel their lives are frenetic. We’re not only expected to work a lot. We’re expected to consume a lot. Ask ‘are we more chilled out than ever?’ and the answer is no. People are strung out, stressed out, and burned out.

There’s more to work than the amount of time spent doing it. Carving a wooden door frame for ten hours in the 1600s is a very different emotional experience to jumping between a hundred emails, meetings and micro-tasks for four hours in 2023. Levels of workplace burnout have skyrocketed. We might think we’ve escaped Charles Dickens’ 19^th century sweatshop dystopia, but our global economy now apportions drudge-work to labourers in the Global South while middle-class workers plug into an attention-burning digital matrix that yokes us far beyond ordinary work hours. There’s all sorts of ‘half-work’ going on, such as checking emails while eating breakfast, and promoting yourself via Instagram while on holiday. Even our consumption has become unpaid work: every act of buying something with a card, watching a streaming show, or using Google Maps to get to a concert produces data that will train AIs for big tech.

It’s easy to brush these off as unintended by-products of digital life, a necessary downside to the great benefits brought to us by tech. To truly understand our predicament, however, requires us to look at this systemically. We don’t just live in any economy. We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn't make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.

Subscribe now

Let’s look at an example. Imagine it’s the mid-1700s and you live three miles from the meadow where you work the soil. It takes you an hour to walk there along a rough path. Now fast-forward two hundred years. The rough path has been replaced with a smooth highway, and now it takes only ten minutes to drive to the same point by car. Surely you’ve saved 50 minutes? Maybe you can relax in that time, read poetry and smell flowers.

But that’s not what happens. In our actual system the technology will be enlisted to expand and accelerate everything. Your meadow will be paved over and replaced with a mall, and you’ll now live in the suburbs of a metropolis. You’re still going to travel for an hour to work, but you’ll now drive at 30mph for 30 miles, instead of walking at 3mph for three. You don’t get to liberate time for yourself by holding your geographic scale constant while your speed increases. No, your geographic scale will expand as your speed does, and this is how mega-cities like Los Angeles develop. They’re catalyzed, or unleashed, by cars.

This principle applies far beyond cars. Our modern lives are built from globe-spanning supply chains that require vast logistics systems and incredible communication speed to make sense. Each technology not only unlocks a new state of expanded acceleration (that will be hardcoded into our lives as the new basis for our survival), but will also be used as the basis for new technologies to continue that process. The vast majority of people do not experience this technology as ‘liberating’ them. Rather, they experience it as something that propagates itself around them, and something they must race to keep up with in order to not be ‘left behind’.

Consider the current AI hype. Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the entire economy to a state of higher acceleration where you’ll be expected to do far more, at much greater scale, in the same amount of time. At that point, if you’re not using it you’ll feel like a 19th century villager who finds themselves trying to walk to work in the middle of modern Los Angeles.

Share

This is why the stories we hear about tech are so rife with cognitive dissonance. Marketers and futurists first place themselves in the position of our proverbial villager - hyping the convenience of AI - but if you say you don’t need it they fast-forward their minds into the future and issue dire warnings that if don’t adopt it you’ll be left behind. What they’re trying to say, in their convoluted and euphemistic way, is this: the global capitalist system doesn’t care whether or not you want to use the technology, or whether you believe it should be used to save your time. You will have to use it, and you’re not in charge of how it will be used systemically. In fact, nobody is really in charge. Our personal desires will always play second fiddle to the systemic logic of a large-scale economy that is blind to anything except the profit motive. In the absence of us being able to get together and demand something different, our system will always just default towards increasingly speed and growth. It only has one gear.

This is why innovation futurists get stuck in doublethink. They tell you technological change is ‘inevitable’, and that you better sync up, but soften the blow by telling you it’s all happening because you desire it and will benefit. We have to emotionally cope with the state of inertia we’re in, so we accept this circular reasoning.

Let’s illustrate this by returning to the Los Angeles example. L.A. only exists in its current form because of cars, which means life will be difficult there if you don’t have one. In this scenario you’re essentially held hostage by the auto industry, whose products are the very thing that have catalysed our dependence on giant megacities. Rather than acknowledge that, we lapse into a type of Stockholm Syndrome where we choose to imagine the car as a saviour that grants us our independence in that context. In reality, the car is just a minimum requirement to scrape by in a car-catalysed environment (to explore this, check out this piece about navigating LA by foot). Certainly, there are many people in LA who have cars, but who struggle just as much as our ancient ancestors did. There are also many without cars, who struggle far more.

Convenience as a mirage

This topic is close to my heart, because I campaign to protect physical cash in places where ‘cashless’ digital payments are spreading. I characterise cash as the bicycle of payments, but the conventional story is that it’s the horse-cart, and that digital payments are rising because they’re more efficient. In the standard view, all the downsides of digital payment (like surveillance, cyber-hacking and centralization of power into Big Finance and Tech) are just manageable by-products of our desire for convenience. Whole sections of London are now cashless (aka. serfdoms of the banking sector), and when asked why, many Londoners do say it’s because cash is ‘inconvenient’, parroting a story that’s also told by the businesses that refuse cash.

What’s fascinating, however, is that these very same people didn’t experience this inconvenience ten years ago, when it felt totally normal to use cash in the UK. If I hop across to Germany, people of exactly the same social class don’t experience this inconvenience even now. In fact, there are hundreds of millions of people across the world who view the cash system as easy to use. So, why do perceptions of inconvenience change depending on where you go and when?

Convenience and inconvenience are not absolute properties that can be universally measured or experienced. In my birth country of South Africa, where the pace of life and expectations are different, cash feels totally normal, but in London it doesn’t. That’s because the city is moving into a state of higher automation-acceleration. In the early phases of their London takeover, digital payments companies invested hugely into nudging people towards the belief that cash was inconvenient (through marketing campaigns, and so on), but it’s only when the vortex of automation reorganized the environment that it started to feel like that. If you’re trying to use cash in Sweden, where many service jobs have been replaced by cash-refusing machines plugged directly into the banking sector (via Visa and Mastercard), it’s going to feel like you’re swimming against the tide. It literally will start to feel arduous to use cash, because the ATMs have been shut down, the branches won’t take it, and you keep getting refused when you try use it. What’s actually happening is that digital payments are being used to accelerate everything, but if you’re a person trying to live a slower life amidst all the others who are trying to keep up, you’ll find yourself out of sync. You’ll not only be culturally shamed for not adopting the new thing, but at some point you’ll simply be blocked, because the foundations of your existence - like the London train system - will force you down the automated path.

Because we’re social animals we tend to go along with the trend, and because we live under capitalist acceleration the trend is always one way, because our system only has one gear. We also have the ability to edit our memories, so can find ways to convince ourselves that this was all our own choice. That very same adaptability, though, prevents us from using the new tech to save time, because – under a system with a growth fetish – we’ll be expected to adapt to a new normal in which we have to do more stuff and get more stuff in the same amount of time.

The dark irony then, is that it is the introduction of the new tech that inspires the subsequent irritation at its absence. Twenty years ago nobody fidgeted in agitation if they had to wait ten minutes for a taxi. Now you’ll check your phone incessantly if the Uber is running three minutes later than you expected. And god forbid the driver cancels, because you’ve probably algorithmically planned everything down to the last minute. We increasingly live a ‘just in time’ life because, at a systemic level, there’s pressure to pack in as much stuff as possible at both a consumption and production level. We’re just as dissatisfied, only busier.

We face the same issue with the cashless ‘Uberfication’ of payments, but also with AI. The latter will just increase systemic acceleration, after which any situation in which the tech is not available will be perceived as ‘inconvenient’. This – in true Stockholm Syndrome style – will be transformed into a belief that AI is a saviour that helps us survive in a frenetic world (cue all the adverts that start with ‘In today’s fast-paced business environment, AI is more vital than ever…”). In reality, we’ll just be more burned out, which in turn will be weaponised to sell us more acceleration tech. Feeling burned out? Why not automate more?

Systemic overflow

When trying to defend this, economists typically claim that we have unlimited desire for new stuff. Apparently, rather than dedicating the time gains from technology to leisure, we pour it into making more stuff for ourselves. This is bogus. People do have a limited desire for new things, because dedicating yourself to endless production (and consumption) comes at the expense of hanging out with your family, friends and pets, or doing stuff like walking in the wilderness or surfing the waves. What people actually desire is a balance of many things, but the system we’re stuck in has unlimited desire for one direction only. That’s because it’s a vortex unleashed by humans who no longer know how to stop it.

In the mythology of Silicon Valley, and in corporate capitalism more generally, it’s believed that we expand alongside our system, and that new products are turning us into fuller expressions of ourselves. In reality, we’re biological beings with finite capacities ensnared within an economy with an acceleration drive, and its constant attempt to expand just crowds out other stuff in our lives. It’s like opening the tap in a bath that’s already full, and then watching the new water push other water into the overflow. Beyond the ‘overflow’ point, all the happens is that we become more confused, bloated and strung out. The requirement to pack more into the same time just fragments our attention and erodes our patience, which again will be weaponised: feeling impatient? Why not speed things up?

The problem goes deeper than this. Increasingly our tech also opens us up to new vectors of anxiety. Regardless of whether you’re working more or less, your nervous system is now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness. Perversely, this information obesity actually makes us feel more sluggish. We might be moving faster, but everything starts to blend into one. The whole point of digital detoxes isn’t only to slow down, but also to make you feel more in control of your life, rather than just drifting with the inertia.

Given that most people don’t have the spare time to overthrow corporate capitalism (or its geopolitical foundations), is there any way to break out of this? A good starting point is to go down the Zen path and to realise that all these things we’re told we need are just illusions generated by the numb logic of a system that cannot value anything except accumulation and profit. From that point we can strive to build balances of power to prevent the worst excesses of the situation coming out. That’s why I do stuff like defending physical cash. If cash is the bicycle of payments, we have to fight for bicycle lanes. Remember, the only point at which new technology will be used to make our lives easier is at the point where we have a steady-state economy where leisure is valued, rather than a growth-based one. Until that happens, let’s stop deluding ourselves.

Leave a comment

If you liked this piece, you’ll probably also like: