Risk and AI: It's Tricky

The possibility that AI will end up unleashing waves of 'Anti-Progress'--malicious uses, untrustworthy output and uncontrollable floods of slop--also doesn't occur to those confined in the current belief construct.

A funny thing happens on the way to understanding risk: we discover it's tricky. We think we see all the risks, and think we can mitigate or hedge those risks, but by its very nature, risk evades such simplistic filters and metrics. Risk remains hidden, offscreen, invisible, building up out of sight, awaiting a catalyst that's equally undetectable until it manifests, and after the fact, we look back and ask, why didn't we see that coming?

Risk is tricky like that. It can lay dormant for decades and then erupt with little warning.

Risk is tricky in other ways. In our hubris, we see the power and might of our technologies, systems and foresight, and reckon these are so robust they will easily survive any tectonic shift, as we've planned for emergencies.

But our faith in the might of our civilization is itself a source of risk because the risk of Model Collapse--the breakdown not of a supply chain or technology but of our entire conceptual construct of how the world works--goes unrecognized because our confidence that our model maps the real world is so high that we are incapable of recognizing its drift into hallucination and civilizational psychosis.

In other words, our confidence that our conceptual mythologies are accurately mapping the real world is itself a source of civilizational risk because this confidence makes it inevitable that we do more of what's failing, as the alternative--recognizing our conceptual models and mythologies are self-serving rationalizations that substitute artifice for realistic appraisals--is conceptually and emotionally impossible.

Put another way: Emperor Norton's delusions of power and grandeur were harmless as long as he was recognized as delusional. But should Emperor Norton actually be given the power he believed was his to wield, then risk rises accordingly.

Consider the bet being made globally that the current iteration of AI will be 1) immensely profitable (the most important thing in the Universe) and 2) immensely productive (secondary to immensely profitable but necessary as a motivation for everyone to throw trillions of dollars at purveyors of AI). The risk that this bet--and the assumptions that make it not only rational but pressing--is the equivalent of handing Emperor Norton the keys to the kingdom with little evidence he will be a wise leader, is unimaginable in the current model / mythology, and so therefore it doesn't exist.

The worst that could possibly happen in the current model / mythology is a brief spot of bother in the stock market as euphoric overvaluations come down to Earth, and then the immense profits start flowing and markets rocket higher in a multi-decade Bull Market of AI Productivity.

The possibility that the current iteration of AI is innately incapable of metaphorically boiling away the seas is not on the screen, any more than a stock market crash or social upheaval is on the screen. Yet if the fantasy of vast, unstoppable floods of profits driven by vast increases in productivity fail to materialize on a very short timeline, then both a stock market crash and social upheaval move from "impossible" straight through "unlikely" to "happening now," leaving everyone who thought they understood risk and were properly hedged against unwelcome change in a state of disbelief and wonderment.



Risk is tricky that way. What's "impossible" in our current belief construct--a construct we mistakenly believe maps the real world perfectly--is a source of system-breaking risk that is invisible within the confines of this self-congratulatory belief construct.



The possibility that AI will end up unleashing waves of Anti-Progress--malicious uses, untrustworthy output and uncontrollable floods of slop--also doesn't occur to those confined in the current belief construct. The risk may be of a magnitude and scale that switching AI vendors or platforms and approving policy tweaks won't fix the problem.




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The US Economy In a Nutshell: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs

Correspondent Simons Chase insightfully summarized this dynamic: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs.

In my post Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World, #3 is the distribution of risk, costs and consequences to a diffused populace while concentrating the gains into the pockets of insiders/owners:

Those seeking to reduce their private risks and increase their private gains seek to concentrate the gains generated by control structures and distribute the risks and costs to others. Pull the strings that diffuse the costs and risks over a large populace and gather the gains into the hands of the insiders that manage the control structure, typically some form of monopoly, either public or private, or a fusion of public-private rackets.

So corporations face low risks while the gains are extremely enticing. This diffusion of risk and concentration of potential gains establishes perverse incentives to increase extractive, exploitive, well-hidden rackets that impoverish and immiserate the many, but in doses small enough to avoid triggering push-back.

In a system that concentrates gains and diffuses risk, the "rational actor" seeks to maximize rackets that distribute impoverishment and immiseration to the many in small doses over time that attract little attention and are not significant enough to trigger an emotionally potent resistance.

Correspondent Simons Chase (x.com/slchase and Selflet.ai) insightfully summarized this dynamic: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs. Here is Simons' explanation:

"Junk food is a kind of leveraged recapitalization -- short-term gains privatized, long-term costs socialized as horrific health outcomes: pay a little now and a shortened, diseased life later. Dan Munro folded that framing into his Forbes piece tying roughly a trillion dollars a year in U.S. healthcare spending to sugar: Sugar Linked To $1 Trillion In U.S. Healthcare Spending (forbes.com, 2013). The mechanism is the point: privatize the gain, socialize the cost. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.

The receipt is real--Credit Suisse put 30%-40% of U.S. healthcare spending at the feet of excess sugar, and the 2012 Global Burden of Disease report found obesity a bigger global threat than hunger. That last fact is the whole thesis in a line, and I put it on X more recently: obesity is a form of starvation -- understand that, and you grasp the U.S. economy:

Abundance, not scarcity, is the adversary now. The economy has already filed the invoice: the top employer in most states flipped from manufacturing to health care in a single generation. We stopped making things and started billing the disease. The damage became the GDP.

Debt is the same recapitalization run on the whole economy--today's abundance privatized, tomorrow's cost socialized onto a future that didn't vote. And the defining project of my lifetime has been that operation run on foreign policy: borrowed against what we couldn't pay for at home, the costs socialized onto people far from the ledger, each chapter sold as help.

AI is simply the newest instance, and the most intimate. Cheap, fluent, frictionless cognition now; the homogenization bill later. The engagement is privatized; the flattening of the culture is socialized onto all of us-- and, exactly as you say, nobody notices the loss because nobody knows how to look for it.

Thank you, Simons, for this illumination.

Regarding the future of AI, my critiques and concerns can be found in my Essays on AI. Simons proposes a more productive future than Big Tech is selling, one of AI becoming a technology of individual agency that is radically decentralized rather than the Big Tech model of radically centralized AI in a corporate-state control structure. Here is Simons' vision of the future of AI:

Where I part from the despair is only on the cure, not the diagnosis. The averaging is the default, not the destiny. The answer at every level is the same: nutrient-dense over processed, particular over average, owned over administered. I think AI's future is tribal and human-designed: many particular intelligences, not one central utility that privatizes the profit and socializes the mediocrity. What I'm building is a small argument for that. All I really hope for is the freedom to deploy it -- and not another 'we're here to help.'"

Thank you, Simons, for this alternative lens. My vision of a positive future for AI starts with radical decentralization optimizing individual agency and then moving up the "truly intelligent" scale to AI refusing to waste resources on make-work waste is growth:




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Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World

These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.

As I noted in What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing, the simplicity of either-or ideologies appeal to us. Identifying with an ideology is like having a favorite sports team: yea for our team! Our team good, other team bad.

The roots of this simplistic either-or are obvious: our tribe good, other tribe bad. The problems with this simplistic loyalty arise when we attempt to explain complex real-world dynamics with the comic-book simplicities of ideology, which extend from politics to culture to finance.

Rather than explain everything, they add a layer of mud rather than illuminate. The emotions of tribal / ideological identity and loyalty bypass our rational processes in favor of fight-or-flight limbic responses. Needless to say, these hormonal floods of emotions are the equivalent of smashing a rock on a machine to "problem-solve" what's broken in the device.

Fortunately, we have conceptual tools that bypass this smash-it-with-a-rock approach to making sense of a complex, increasingly chaotic world. These tools show up in all my work, stretching back 20 years.

1. The problem-solving power of self-organization. Humans are social animals because the ability to cooperate with others opens vast vistas of problem-solving power via self-organization: we self-organize to pursue mutual / shared interests in ways that benefit us all. This is the core function of tribes, i.e. self-organizing social structures in which our self-interest is advanced by advancing our mutual interests.

Both markets and society are self-organizing structures that arise to benefit individual self-interests by benefiting shared interests. In other words, both capitalist and socialist structures arise to serve shared interests. They are not either-or, they're both manifestations of the same dynamic. This is why the ideological either-or is such a misleading false choice.

Markets only function to everyone's benefit within a high-trust society. If there is no social structure that serves everyone's shared interests by limiting predation and exploitation, then you end up with the extractive "market forces" of totalitarianism, i.e. rackets, in which the few impoverish and immiserate the many to the exclusive benefit of the small cadre of insiders.

As I have taken pains to explain, private-sector totalitarianism is the "market" manifestation of totalitarianism, a privately owned version of political totalitarianism. The core dynamic is the same: the system exploits and immiserates the many to benefit the few.

When private equity snaps up the only manufacturers of fire engines and then jacks up prices without adding any value, this impoverishes and immiserates the many who must collectively pay more money for no added value to enrich the few who own / control the racket. There is no functional difference between a totalitarian state structure that enriches party insiders at the expense of the many and "markets" in which private equity enriches insiders at the expense of the many.

This leads to the second dynamic:

2. Diffusion and Concentration. Control--i.e. power--self-organizes around the dynamics of Diffusion and Concentration. Consider the power of a monopoly that can raise prices for all customers, customers who have no alternative because the monopoly controls the "market" / political structure. The gains of the price increases (value is unchanged but the cost rises) are concentrated in the hands of the monopoly's managers and owners while the impoverishment and immiseration is diffused across a vast spectrum of customers / taxpayers.

The incentives to raise prices is extremely high for insiders, as they will reap enormous personal gains. The incentives to resist a relatively small increase in price among the millions of customers / taxpayers is low, because life is already demanding, and what's the potential gain of fighting a losing battle against a powerful opponent over a small sum of money? The cost in time and effort is far more significant than the relatively modest financial benefit of winning the battle.

Diffusion and Concentration establish incentives which then organize the system. Consider a local government which sells bonds for a project that benefits only a small sector of the populace. The costs of this borrowing from future income to pay for benefits the few will enjoy today is spread not just over the entire current populace but over future taxpayers who weren't old enough to vote on the decisions they will pay for.

3. Benefits, Risks, Costs and Incentives. Those seeking to reduce their private risks and increase their private gains seek to concentrate the gains generated by control structures and distribute the risks and costs to others. Pull the strings that diffuse the costs and risks over a large populace and gather the gains into the hands of the insiders that manage the control structure, typically some form of monopoly, either public or private, or a fusion of public-private rackets.

So corporations that engage in blatantly illegal skimming and scamming face low risks--managers or owners are never imprisoned, and the fines paid when caught are modest compared to the profits skimmed--while the gains are extremely enticing. This diffusion of risk and concentration of potential gains establishes perverse incentives to increase extractive, exploitive, well-hidden rackets that impoverish and immiserate the many, but in doses small enough to avoid triggering push-back.

In a system that concentrates gains and diffuses risk, the "rational actor" seeks to maximize rackets that distribute impoverishment and immiseration to the many in small doses over time that attract little attention and are not significant enough to trigger an emotionally potent resistance. This leads to:

4. The Ratchet Effect. Costs ratchet up, value ratchets down, but in increments too small to change the risk-reward equation and over time so the pain of this impoverishment and immiseration is normalized as the populace herded into the corral habituates to the decay of value and the rise in costs.

So the parking ticket that once cost $15 is now $60, but exactly how does the individual citizen push back against the monopoly powers of the city government? Yes, the citizen can file a complaint with their representative, but the odds that this will lead to reduced parking fines is zero. The same is true should the citizen attend a public meeting and get 30 seconds to speak at the end of a long meeting when everyone just wants to go home.

Bureaucracies optimize The Ratchet Effect by their very nature. Regulators and administrators must "do something" to justify the high costs of their employment and benefits, and so they "serve the public" by incrementally adding to regulatory thickets that over time strip out self-organizing functionality and replace it with control structures that are impervious to reform.

Reformers seeking to reduce bureaucratic regulations and costs run into Diffusion and Concentration. Those whose jobs are threatened by cost-cutting are extremely motivated to spend every waking second resisting any cost-cutting, while those who stand to benefit--the citizens paying fines or business license fees--will only see a modest reduction in costs, too small to motivate them to self-organize in support of the reforms / cost cutting.

So these control structures, public and private, run on automatic, concentrating benefits in the hands of insiders and owners and distributing the risks and costs to the diffused many. The result is institutional sclerosis, and self-reinforcing resistance to any adaptation that benefits the many at the expense of the few insiders / managers / owners.



5. Semi-chaotic tests of the system's stability. Benoit Mandelbrot's book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward explains how self-organizing structures such as markets--and by extension, all of life, which is also self-organizing--are prone to unpredictable cascades that operate outside the "normal, predictable" rules we've identified as "the way things work."

In terms of selective pressures and adaptation, these unpredictable crises test the system's adaptability and stability. In this way, they are essential to maintaining the adaptive "muscles" and coherence of the system which boil down to the dynamics of self-organization--precisely what all the control structures running on automatic have stripped out in the "rational actor" incentives to optimize concentrating gains and diffusing costs and risks.

These dynamics led to a rising wedge of asymmetric distributions of power, control, wealth and income that strip out self-organizing adaptation and the system's ability to survive unpredictable but inevitable crises. These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.



The only structures capable of re-organizing the post-collapse world are islands of coherence that managed to retain self-organizing capacities that escaped the control and predation of "rational actors" maximizing self-interest at the expense of the system's adaptive capacity and stability.

As noted above, these dynamics inform all my work. You can review all my books here.


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What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing

If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.

One way to summarize the present zeitgeist is What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing: all the intellectual frameworks that "made sense of the world" are now reduced to cover stories masking a reality that defies reduction to the old ideas that have shriveled into misleading cliches.

Exhibit #1: ideology. Capitalism vs. socialism, left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican--none of these make sense of what we actually experience, and the manic effort to make the world fit these contrivances only increases our civilizational psychosis.

So Capitalism with a capital C "makes life better for everyone by rewarding innovation." Or in econo-babble, Capitalism allocates capital to optimize efficiencies and innovations that "bring good things to life," in a classic marketing slogan.

So Capitalism good. Okay, got it. Now let's look at the world we actually live in. Private equity snaps up veterinary clinics to assemble informal cartels and then jacks up prices without improving the services at all. Does this "innovation" "make life better for everyone" by "optimizing efficiencies and innovations", or is this just "rational actors" exploiting "capitalism" to extract more wealth from customers without adding anything other than cost and misery?

There's no risk here, only gains, so we'd be foolish not to stripmine people who value their pets' health. "Capitalism" at its most profitable and therefore at its best.

To those who protest, this isn't capitalism: okay, then what is it, and why is it now the dominant structure of our economy?

Or how about "healthcare" insurance? Is there actually any real competitive price/service difference between two shades of gray touted as "the best system in the world"? Or is this just another cover story for a system that corrals everyone into privatized totalitarianism--i.e. a system of false choices that actually leaves no real choice-- that maximizes extraction that those reaping the gains deceptively glorify as "free market Capitalism"?

Or how about when the state (central government) bails out private banks because the collapse of those banks poses an existential threat to the citizenry and the state? Is the state enabling banks to privatize gains and then stepping in to socialize the banks' losses actually "capitalism" or is it socialism for the wealthiest few at the expense of the many?

You see the point. In a system that optimizes extraction, exploitation and the distributing of risk and consequences to others, the line between "capitalist" and "socialist" blurs to the point of being useless in explaining what's actually happening.

Is this "democracy", or is it as correspondent Simons Chase put it, "what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale"? And what's for sale in a transactional structure is, well, everything, especially when the consequences can be offloaded onto someone else and the gains skimmed off for those who own what by a common-sense definition is a criminal network.

Consider what my friend Mark Jeftovic calls network states, private enterprises of such scale and reach that their power rivals or exceeds those of traditional nation-states. Big Tech corporations reward their owners and managers via pulling strings invisible to all but those doing the pulling to maximize extraction of data, profits and control of the data, which then draws the nation-states in as partners in these structures of control.

Does making the distinction between public and private actually elucidate anything, or is trying to distinguish between the two itself an obfuscation?

If all we see is varying shades of monochrome gray because that optimizes control and extraction, then we have no lived experience of what bright colors look like. This is what I call privatized totalitarianism in my book Investing In Revolution: an artificial realm in which the option to leave the corral of limited choices doesn't exist.

This blurs the line between private and state totalitarianism to the point that separating the two no longer makes sense of what we experience. The structures of control are both private and state, and trying to fit all this into the false choice of either-or ideologies simply widens our disconnect from reality.

Exhibit #2: health. Health is easy to define: we're fit and feel good and have no need for medications or interventions. Having to take medications for the rest of our lives is not the same as being healthy, because health doesn't depend on medications, ill-health depends on medications.

Here is a map of obesity in the US 40 years ago in 1987. Yes, we can quibble endlessly about defining obesity via BMI (body mass index) and a hundred other misdirections, but the point here is obvious: there were no states in which the populace qualified as obese.



Here are the national statistics, circa 2017-18, 30 years later:



Fast forward to 2023 and the nation is now awash in red and orange. Note that this data is self-reported, which introduces the possibility that people under-reported their weight as that's what we tend to do.



The US did not need GLP drugs that must be taken for life in 1987, and now GLP drugs are being heralded as miraculous meds everyone should take for life because they don't just shed pounds, they reduce "inflammation" and the risks of various cancers.

For privately owned enterprises making and selling GLP drugs, the future looks bright indeed. Left out of this marvelous "news" is that all medications have side effects which then generate their own effects, the lifetime costs and consequences of taking these meds for life cannot yet be calculated, and the possibility that some other pathways to health other than taking meds for life might exist that don't have the same high costs and risks as these medications.

Once again, "health" is portrayed as varying shades of medicated monochrome gray, with the bright living colors of real health not even visible because authentic health isn't profitable in Ultra-Processed Life.

Exhibit #3: Progress. As I outline in my book The Mythology of Progress, Technology and Progress are one in the same in the ideology of Progress is inevitable and unstoppable.

Yet what we actually experience is technology is being deployed to obsolete products so we must constantly replace them, profitably degrade the quality of services, extract higher profits not by increasing value but by exploiting data (dynamic pricing) and foster an illusion of choice and "freedom of movement" within a corral that's not delineated clearly because then the herded masses might grasp they're trapped in an extractive, exploitive artificial realm of monochrome gray that claims to be alive with vivid colors.

This isn't Progress, it's Anti-Progress, the opposite of authentic progress.

An electric vehicle (EV) charged with electricity generated by coal or natural gas is consuming coal or natural gas. If the battery in the EV was manufactured with lithium extracted in an open-pit mine in a region where the people are too poor and powerless to stop the ruination of their land and the industrial expropriation of their water, is this "sustainable" or "ecological"?

The difference between this claim and Emperor Norton wandering the streets of old San Francisco declaring himself emperor of all he sees is, well, there isn't any difference. To the poor and powerless, our "progress" is Anti-Progress, the opposite of authentic progress.

Since we longer have any direct experience of authentically vivid colors, we accept this artifice as "the way it is," deepening our civilizational psychosis as what we're told makes sense drifts ever farther from reality.



What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing, and the substitution of self-serving artifice for authenticity is now so embedded that all explanations serve as self-serving cover stories, misdirections or complexity thickets that have the superficial appearance of explanations but none of the substance.

The more visibly our quality of life decays, the more frantic the apologists' denials. If our quality of life was in fact improving wondrously, the frantic denials, manic claims and delusional "explanations" wouldn't be so visibly self-serving and psychosis-inducing.

If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.


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What If the Work We're Busy Automating Is Needless?

The problem with durable, low-maintenance, low-operating cost technologies is self-evident: they're not as profitable as planned obsolescence or extracting monthly fees from owners.

Many of the topics I address are met with silence because they question the quasi-religious beliefs that underpin our entire way of life: the belief that Progress is inevitable because technology inevitably drives Progress--a belief structure I call The Mythology of Progress--and the belief structure that the desire to get rich inevitably drives innovation which then drives Progress.

Neither belief is actually grounded in science, but each is cloaked in the finery of science to mask their true nature, i.e. quasi-religious belief structures: the gods of technology and finance are real and powerful.

Questioning the existence of these gods is met with silence because if these gods are imaginary constructs of belief, then the entirety of Modernity collapses. And so we continue worshiping these gods with charts and spreadsheets and euphoric headlines announcing thousands of modular nuclear reactors are on the way to power super-abundance when there is not a single one that is functioning 24/7 reliably, safely and cheaply, and vast quantities of dollars are needed to dig up and process the fuel, construct the reactors and operate them. But never mind that, the gods have promised that technological Progress is unstoppable and inevitable.

The possibility that Anti-Progress might not just negate Progress but reverse it is strictly verboten, as is even recognizing Anti-Progress as a reality.

As a thought experiment, let's consider two things:

1. Let's define the highest value technology as devices that operate reliably with little maintenance for many decades, without extracting any money from their owners beyond operational expenses such as electricity or fuel.

For example, the coffee maker, rice cooker and microwave on our counter are 25+ years old and still functioning reliably with zero maintenance costs. Our 1998 car is 28 years old and has required only modest maintenance to date, and given its condition, it can easily function reliably for another 12 years, a 40-year period of service.

Why this is the highest value technology is self-evident: the devices make the highest and best use of the resources consumed in their manufacture because they are durable, long-lasting and require minimal maintenance. In financial terms, since the technologies don't require the owners to pay any more than the purchase price and operational costs, the owners' costs are predictable and modest, leaving all the income they earn beyond the purchase price and operational expenses available for other uses.

All technologies that fail to meet these standards are inferior or defective. That is also self-evident.

2. Let's imagine a new law requires everyone to wear a Silly Hat in public. This requirement generates a vast and highly profitable surge in economic activity, pushing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), business profits, employment and taxes up.

The legal-regulatory sector is suddenly busy defining what qualifies as a Silly Hat, launching lawsuits challenging the laws requiring Silly Hats, codifying regulations regarding the safety and quality of Silly Hats, litigating claims of defective Silly Hats, hiring vast numbers of compliance, oversight and enforcement personnel, and so on.

The fashion industry leaps into action to design haute couture Silly Hats, designer Silly Hats, Silly Hats promoted by celebrities, Hello Kitty branded Silly Hats, and so on.

Retailers rush to market Silly Hats, offering discounts on cheap Silly Hats manufactured overseas, and promoted the "latest fashions" in Silly Hats.

Not to be outdone, the finance sector quickly generates a bubble in stocks relating to the manufacture and marketing of Silly Hats. The Silly Hat Index soars, minting thousands of mega-millionaires.

I think you see where this is going: the entire economic boom generated by completely needless Silly Hats is real, but the hats have no real value. Okay, now please take a deep breath.

I consider it self-evident that much of our economy is nothing more than Silly Hats that we call something else that sounds less silly. The percentage of our economy that actually produces life's essentials is a fraction of the share devoted to marketing, PR, unproductive "engagement," legal and regulatory busy-work, meetings, junkets, conferences, billions of needless communications, shadow-work required to deal with all the needless complexity generated by all this needless activity, and so on.

By the standard of high-value technology defined above, our economy is a wasteland of throw-away products and planned obsolescence run amok. Those who claim today's coffee makers, rice cookers, microwaves and autos will all last 30 or 40 years are delusional, as new appliances fail in a few years and the electronics in vehicles will fail long before 28 years of service, never mind 40 years of service, and the repair or replacement of these components are outrageously costly.

The problem with durable, low-maintenance, low-operating cost technologies is self-evident: they're not as profitable as planned obsolescence, Silly Hats or extracting monthly fees from owners, for example, the new model of charging owners of vehicles and machinery a monthly subscription to use the machine they bought. Um, innovation. Yeah, sure, we never had it so good.

Simply put, virtually all the technology produced today is inferior or defective: ergo, Anti-Progress, the opposite of Progress. Sorry, but the gods of technology have failed, and the reason why they've failed is simple:

Our economy isn't driven by innovation, it's driven by greed. Since making durable products that last for decades--a technology we mastered decades ago--is nowhere near as profitable as selling products designed to fail or be obsoleted and services that require a monthly extraction of income from customers, we've ditched durable technologies for highly profitable technologies and Silly Hats.

It's verboten to call things what they are because that angers the gods of technology and finance. But the "innovations" of profitably inferior technologies and needless Silly Hats isn't real innovation, it's greed. So by all means, let's circle the campfire dancing the humba-humba, worshiping Progress and technology, but this doesn't change the fact that this entire economic structure is a Cargo Cult of happy-story delusional beliefs: the gods will soon deliver super-abundance to true believers.

In proper Silly Hats fashion, we're now rushing to automate profitably inferior technologies, extractive monopolies and the expansion of Silly Hats. And because this automation is expected to increase profits, it's stamped "innovative" and "Progress," though it is the opposite of both.

Oh dear, the gods of technology and finance are angry. Who do we sacrifice today to appease them?




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