A couple hundred years ago, G.W.F. Hegel (let’s just call him George) pointed out something that might save our bacon today. Combining it with a more modern idea, I’ll show you a way to think about social media and AI that might help you escape the maze of engagement and doomscrolling we’re prone to these days.

George’s little idea was that there are two levels to human thought. The first level, the default, he called verstand. That translates as understanding. This is what we’re doing when we classify things, or follow logical trains of thought from initial premises. Verstand operates analytically. It draws clear boundaries between ideas and assumes that these boundaries correspond to the real structure of the world. It is indispensable for doing science, performing logic or math, and for everyday cognition because it lets us treat phenomena as orderly, rule-governed, and predictable.

George’s real insight was that understanding is limited. It can only handle static oppositions: subject vs. object, cause vs. effect, finite vs. infinite. It treats these contradictions as external to one another. When these categories break down in real-world situations, verstand has no way to move forward except by asserting more distinctions.

There’s a certain kind of person who only thinks by understanding. You probably know one or two. This is also how Large Language Models such as ChatGPT reason. They may seem creative, but are always drawing on already-established links between ideas (tokens, actually, in their giant lookup table). Spectacular though they may be, they only respond to prompts with connections that somebody already made; they are engines of understanding, not of what George considered the superior mode: reason.

Reason is not “thinking harder.” It is a fundamentally different mode of cognition, that recognizes and works through contradictions rather than trying to avoid or suppress them.

Where understanding sees fixed categories, reason uses systems thinking and sees problems holistically. It’s aware that issues arise from interdependent, evolutionary processes. George’s version of reason recognizes that the understanding’s oppositions are not fixed boundaries but moments of a self-developing process. This recognition is why people think George is all about dialectics. For him, contradictions are not signs of conceptual failure but the motor of cognitive development. (The irony is, people regularly turn this fluid approach into yet another axiomatic, rule-based system, as Marx did with the project of dialectical materialism. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis is just another kind of verstand.)

Remember that humans think in stories, as Brian Boyd and Northrop Frye have shown. George, in his huge, nearly unreadable magnum opus The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) introduces consciousness as the hero, and then traces its epic journey from living under the yoke of understanding to achieving the freedom of reason. In my translated copy, it takes him 814 pages (if you count the index) to finally toss the ring of Verstand into the Mount-Doom chasm of Reason . I’ll spare you the blow by blow summary.

This epic struggle is important for all of us, though. Understanding inevitably collapses under the weight of the contradictions it uncovers (for instance, justice versus tyranny in the use of force). When we face a very real and immediate version of the Trolley problem, staying stuck in the unresolvable contradictions of the situation is simply not an option. We have to leapfrog verstand. Reasoning doesn’t mean becoming some Hegelian acolyte—using dialectics as your hammer and seeing everything else as a nail; it’s design thinking, reframing, and a hundred other approaches to dissolving the sinew and bone of an ossified idea. Reasoning is consequential, in a life-or-death way.

And Large Language Models can’t do it.

Have a Supernormal Day

Let’s add in that more modern idea I mentioned. This is the theory of supernormal stimuli. And here is where the full dimensions of the problem we’re faced with show up.

Supernormal stimuli are exaggerated versions of natural stimuli that trigger stronger responses than the original stimuli they’re based on. The concept was first identified by Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz when they were studying animal behavior. If you want a great book on the subject, try Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett.

The classic example comes from Tinbergen’s experiments with birds. He found that birds would preferentially incubate artificially enlarged eggs or eggs with more vivid markings over their own natural eggs, even though the artificial ones were impractically large. Similarly, baby birds would beg more vigorously for food from fake parent beaks that were larger and more colorful than real ones.

This happens when evolutionary mechanisms that were adaptive in natural environments are “hijacked” by artificial stimuli that exaggerate the key features these mechanisms evolved to detect. Our instinctive response system doesn’t have a built-in “upper limit”—it simply responds more strongly to more intense versions of the trigger. And I say “our” because we humans love supernormal stimuli. Think roller coasters. Spicy food. Tear-jerker movies. Public hangings. Pornography. Doomscrolling. —And, most impactful at this exact moment: LLM AIs.

As U2 put it, we love it when something is “even better than the real thing.”

Meet Your New Pusher: AI as Supernormal Cognition

We evolved to learn by talking to other people—asking questions, listening to answers, and having our ideas challenged and refined through conversation. What ChatGPT and the other AIs are doing is hijacking this instinct by performing as a conversational partner who has immediate availability, infinite patience, broad knowledge, whom we can access without the social cost of appearing ignorant, and whose responses are tailored to engage to our specific view of the world. Talking to an LLM entails no social risk, judgment, or interpersonal complexity, yet yields the pleasurable sensation of ideas “clicking” without the friction of genuine disagreement. Every single one of these qualities is a pressure point vulnerable to supernormal stimulation.

Why struggle through a difficult chain of thought alone, or wait to discuss it with friends, when you can get immediate, engaging intellectual feedback? Why read a challenging book when you can just ask questions and get clear explanations?

LLMs throw wide the gates to the ultimate theme park of verstand. There’s no more need for you to work at thinking; they bypass the cognitive struggle that produces deeper comprehension. Just picture it: no more wrestling with opaque texts (like George’s), or with the productive frustration of not-knowing, the development of intellectual self-reliance. You don’t need ‘em. Human intellectual relationships, with all their friction and richness, are way less appealing than the frictionless AI alternative.

Moving Eggs

I’m not here to throw LLMs under the bus. Remember, verstand is incredibly useful and important. Hegel’s faculty of understanding is what gets us through 99% of our day. Having a tool that can help you do that is worth its weight in gold.

It’s the other 1% that really matters, though. This where the Trolley Problems of your real life loom in a world of unexpected problems: it’s where you have to decide to vote one way or another, or decide where to put any extra cash you might have—into a trust fund for your kids, say, or a charity for the homeless. That 1% is also where truly new ideas come from. You may have read my take on Badiou’s idea of “the event”—an LLM is not going to help you recognize or generate a thought that is entirely new, since as I said, its ‘thinking’ process relies entirely on the existing connections between ideas.

It’s just… well, when you’re using an AI, picture yourself as a poor hapless bird sitting on a really big, super-speckled ball that you know in your heart of hearts isn’t a real egg. Your real eggs are there, scattered about you—unfinished ideas you can’t even name yet, much less ask some entity about; people who intrigue you but who you don’t know how to approach; movements and religious ideas that have struck a chord in you, but that you don’t know how to engage with. Raise your eyes, and you’ll apprehend a world of liminal things—undefined, unnamed, awaiting your particular mind and experience to render them real for others. Only you can name what’s really fresh in the world.

Try moving to a different egg. It may not seem as rewarding at first. But unlike that big shiny one, it might one day hatch.

The Inner Monologue as Supernormal

Getting back to the theme of “stop thinking”: the internal monologue of daily thought resembles talking to others or being talked to, doesn’t it? This makes me suspicious: does it the hijack neural circuits we evolved for social interaction? If this is true, then the constant “conversation” in our heads provides a kind of supernormal social stimulation—we get the cognitive and emotional benefits of dialogue without needing another person present. We evolved as storytelling creatures who use narratives to make sense of events and predict outcomes. Inner monologue might be an intensified, always-available version of this, turning every experience into a story we tell ourselves, potentially more vivid and detailed than necessary.

Constant internal verbalization might be an “overclocked” version of this adaptive mechanism.

Read more

How do we live whole in a breaking world? It helps to bless what is simply for being. It helps to thank everything for its unbidden everythingness. And still we need help — help holding on to the beauty amid the brutality, help stripping the armors of certainty to be complicated by contraction and more tenderly entire with one another, help seeing the variousness of the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply.

The help of a lifetime comes from John Keene’s poem “Beatitude” — a poem partway between mantra and manifesto, a protest in the form of prayer, a spell against indifference, broadening Amiri Baraka’s instruction to “love all things that make you strong” and deepening Leonard Cohen’s instruction for what to do with those who harm you, carrying the torch Whitman lit when he urged us to “love the earth and sun and the animals” and every atom of one another, all the while speaking in a voice entirely original yet sonorous with the universal in us. It is read here to the accompaniment of Zoë Keating’s perfect “Optimist.”

BEATITUDE
by John Keene

Love everything
Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers,
      mountains and abysses.
Love animals, and not just because you are one.
Love your parents and your children,
      even if you have none.
Love your spouse or partner,
      no matter what either word means to you.
Love until you create a cavern in your loving,
      until it seethes like a volcano.
Love everytime.
Love your enemies.
Love the enemies of your enemies.
Love those whose very idea of love is hate.
Love the liars and the fakes.
Love the tattletales and the hypercrits, the hucksters and the traitors.
Love the thieves because everyone has thought
      of stealing something at least once.
Love the rich who live only to empty
      your purse or wallet.
Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet.
Love your piss and sweat and shit.
Love your and others’ chatter and its proof of the expansiveness
      of nothingness.
Love your shadows and their silent censure.
Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Love your yesterdays and tomorrows.
Love your beginning and your end.
Love the fact that your end is another beginning,
      or could be, for someone else.
Love yourself, but not too much
      that you cannot love everything and everyone else.
Love everywhere.
Love in the absence of love.
Love the monsters breeding
      in every corner of the city and suburb,
      all throughout the soil of the countryside.
Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him
      with love.
Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s
      salted garden.
Love love.

“Beatitude” comes from the elixir that is Keene’s Punks: New & Selected Poems (public library). Couple it with Ellen Bass’s kindred ode to the courage of tenderness, then revisit George Saunders on how to love the world more and Rumi on the art of choosing love over not-love.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Location, Location, Location

I'm 30 kilofeet above the Missouri River, westbound from IND to DEN, with (United tells me) eight minutes to get from Gate B24 to Gate  . It's blank. Doesn't say. I guess we'll find out.

Oh my god!

I know Louis CK got canceled and all, but what he said here before that happened is still true. I'm living it now. In a chair. In the sky.

Predicting the predicting

I fear I will come to hate coverage of politics through prediction markets as much as I hate coverage of sports through gambling. So does this guy.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data. 

Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.

Hegseth, however, did not talk about weapons in his announcement. He talked about spreadsheets and videos. “At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be used to conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed,” Hegseth said in the video on X. Office work, basically. “We will continue to aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before.” 

Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering, also stressed how important GenAI would be to the process of killing people in a press release about the site’s launch.

“There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance. We are moving rapidly to deploy powerful AI capabilities like Gemini for Government directly to our workforce. AI is America's next Manifest Destiny, and we're ensuring that we dominate this new frontier,” Michael said in the press release, referencing the 19th century American belief that God had divinely ordained Americans to settle the west at the same time he announced a new chatbot.

The press release says Google Cloud's Gemini for Government will be the first instance available on the internal platform. It’s certified for Controlled Unclassified Information, the release states, and claims that because it’s web grounded with Google Search–meaning it’ll pull from Google search results to answer queries–that makes it “reliable” and “dramatically reduces the risk of AI hallucinations.” As we’ve covered, because Google search results are also consuming AI content that contains errors and AI-invented data from across the web, it’s become nearly unusable for regular consumers and researchers alike. 

During a press conference about the rollout this morning, Michael told reporters that GenAI.mil would soon incorporate other AI models and would one day be able to handle classified as well as sensitive data. As of this writing, GenAI’s website is down.

“For the first time ever, by the end of this week, three million employees, warfighters, contractors, are going to have AI on their desktop, every single one,” Michael told reporters this morning, according to Breaking Defense. They’ll “start with three million people, start innovating, using building, asking more about what they can do, then bring those to the higher classification level, bringing in different capabilities,” he said.

The second Trump administration has done everything in its power to make it easier for the people in Silicon Valley to push AI on America and the world. It has done this, in part, by framing it as a national security issue. Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at cutting regulations around data centers and the construction of nuclear power plants. He’s threatened to sign another that would block states from passing their own AI regulations. Each executive order and piece of proposed legislation threatens that losing the AI race would mean making America weak and vulnerable and erode national security.

The country’s tech moguls are rushing to build datacenters and nuclear power plants while the boom time continues. Nevermind that people do not want to live next to datacenters for a whole host of reasons. Nevermind that tech companies are using faulty AIs to speed up the construction of nuclear power plants. Nevermind that the Pentagon already had a proprietary LLM it had operated since 2024.

“We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The Department is tapping into America's commercial genius, and we're embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm,’ Hegseth said in the press release about GenAI.mil. "AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI's future positive impact across the War Department."

The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.”

Those six words are well understood by everyone in the natural world, and have been for the history of civilized life, and probably before that as well. But they are alien in the digital world.

Here’s why: Our knowledge of privacy in the natural world is tacit, meaning we know what it is but can’t easily explain it. Meanwhile, the digital world is entirely explicit. It is made of bits and code.

We don’t yet have a way to make explicit our wish to be let alone. Or not. Or under what conditions.

“Consents” such as those provided by cookie notices, can’t do it, because all the agency you have is what they provide, and they have little or no interest in obeying whatever “choices” you’ve made about being tracked. They might not even be able to do more than put up one of those notices. To see how total the suckage is, read this, this, this, this, or this. It’s a fecosystem, folks. 100-proof bullshit.

For real privacy, we need to make our requirements explicit, and enforceable. That’s why we now have IEEE 7012-2025 Approved Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Its nickname is MyTerms, much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi. After years in the works, MyTerms will be published on 22 January of next year, a little over a month from now.

MyTerms is for privacy what TCP/IP is for the Internet and HTTP/HTTPS is for the Web: a foundation atop which an infinitude of products and services can be built—ones that can’t be built so long as privacy is a corporate grace and not a personal right, and all customer-company relationships are exclusively under company control. Simply put, if your privacy is in the hands of others alone, you don’t have any.

The way MyTerms works could hardly be more simple. (That’s one reason developing the standard took so damn long.)

1. You (the person), acting as the first party, proffer a personal privacy agreement to every site or service you meet, or know.
2. If they, as the second parties, agree, you both keep identical records of the agreement, so compliance can be audited or disputed (if need be) in the future. Since MyTerms are contracts, enforcement follows contract law.
3. You will choose the agreement from a short list posted on the Web by a disinterested nonprofit such as Customer Commons, which was created for that purpose. (The model for this is Creative Commons. MyTerms will be for personal privacy what Creative Commons is for personal copyright. We thank them for tilling that field for us.)
4. Both parties use agents. These can be as simple as a browser and Web server (e.g. WordPress or Drupal) plug-ins, or as fancy as AI agents on both sides (such as many companies use to work out B2B agreements).
5. The flow looks like this:

In the sense that these are manners, this is a protocol. But it’s not a technical one. All the tech is up to developers.

To help imagine out how this goes, here is one way MyTerms might look in a browser with a MyTerms plugin that manifests a couple of buttons in the browser header (DuckDuckGo‘s in this case):

The left ⊂ is your side of a potential or actual agreement, and the right ⊃ is the website’s side. With colors, additional symbols (for example within the ⊂ and ⊃, or other UI hacks, these might show states —

• Willingness to engage by either side
• State of engagement
• Additional information (including agreements built on top of the original MyTerms one), such as VRM + CRM relationships
• Records of what’s happening within those relationships, for example market intelligence that flows both ways

The symbols might have pop-down menus with choices and links that go elsewhere. The possibilities are wide open.

I choose ProjectVRM in this case, because it’s ready to agree a visitor’s proffered MyTerm, and a bunch of us did a lot of thinking and working on this problem (and opportunity) back in the ’00s and early ’10s. For one example, look here.

We started ProjectVRM, created Customer Commons, and developed MyTerms, all to open markets to far horizons that cannot be imagined, much less seen, from inside silos and walled gardens built to keep people captive while harvesting vast amounts of personal data just so people can be guessed at by parasites (such as what most advertisers have now become).

By starting with privacy—real privacy—we can finally civilize the digital world. We can also set countless new tables in the marketplace. These are tables across which demand and supply can converse, relate, and transact in countless ways that are simply impossible in the consent-to-surveillance fecosystem.

If you want to help out, contact the MyTerms team through the form at the bottom of every page at MyTerms.info.

Today's links

• Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism": How many $TRUMP coins should your company buy?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: NZ doesn't want US-style copyright; Tron: Reloaded; Mass shootings and gun profits; Descartes God has failed; "The Big Fix."
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism" (permalink)

It's a strange fact that the more sophisticated and polished a theory gets, the simpler it tends to be. New theories tend to be inspired by a confluence of many factors, and early attempts to express the theory will seek to enumerate and connect everything that seems related, which is a lot.

But as you develop the theory, it gets progressively more streamlined as you realize which parts can be safely omitted or combined without sacrificing granularity or clarity. This simplification requires a lot of iteration and reiteration, over a lot of time, for a lot of different audiences and critics. As Thoreau wrote (paraphrasing Pascal), "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."

This week, I encountered a big, exciting theory that is still in the "long and complicated" phase, with so many moving parts that I'm having trouble keeping them straight in my head. But the idea itself is fascinating and has so much explanatory power, and I've been thinking about it nonstop, so I'm going to try to metabolize a part of it here today, both to bring it to your attention, and to try and find some clarity for myself.

At issue is Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner's theory of "political capitalism," which I encountered through John Ganz's writeup of a panel he attended to discuss Riley and Brenner's work:

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/politics-and-capitalist-stagnation

Riley and Brenner developed this theory through a pair of very long (and paywalled) articles in the New Left Review. First is 2022's "Seven Theses on American Politics" (£3), which followed the Democrats' surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterms:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/4813

The second article, "The Long Downturn and Its Political Results" (£4), is even longer, and it both restates the theory of "Seven Theses" and addresses several prominent critics of their work:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii155/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-the-long-downturn-and-its-political-results

(If you're thinking about reading the source materials – and I urge you to do so – I think you can safely just read the second article, as it really does recap and streamline the original.)

So what is this theory? Ganz does a good job of breaking it down (better than Riley and Brenner, who, I think, still have a lot of darlings they can't bring themselves to murder). Here's my recap of Ganz's, then, with a few notes from the source texts thrown in.

Riley and Brenner are advancing both an economic and a political theory, with the latter growing out of the former. The economic theory seeks to explain two phenomena, the "Long Boom" (post-WWII to the 1960s or so), and the "Long Downturn" (ever since).

During the Long Boom, the US economy (and some other economies) experienced a period of sustained growth, without the crashes that had been the seemingly inevitable end-point of previous growth periods. Riley and Brenner say that these crashes were the result of business owners making the (locally) rational decision to hang on to older machines and tools even as new ones came online.

Businesses are always looking to invest in new automation in a bid to wring more productivity from their workers. Profits come from labor, not machines, and as your competitors invest in the same machines as you've just bought, the higher rate of profit you got when you upgraded your machines will be eroded, as competitors chase each others' customers with lower prices.

But not everyone is willing to upgrade when a new machine is invented. If you're still paying for the old machines, you just can't afford to throw them away and get the latest and greatest ones. Instead, as your competitors slash prices (because they have new machines that let them make the same stuff at a lower price), you must lower your prices too, accepting progressively lower profits.

Eventually, your whole sector is using superannuated machines that they're still making payments on, and the overall rate of profit in the sector has dwindled to unsustainable levels. "Zombie companies" (companies that have no plausible chance of paying off their debts) dominate the economy. This is the "secular stagnation" that economists dread. Note that this whole thing is driven by the very same forces that make capitalism so dynamic: the falling rate of profit that gives rise to a relentless chase for new, more efficient processes. This is a stagnation born of dynamism, and the harder you yank on the "make capitalism more dynamic" lever, the more stagnant it becomes.

Hoover and Mellon's austerity agenda in the 1920s sought to address this by triggering mass bankruptcies, in a brutal bid to "purge" those superannuated machines and the companies that owned them, at the expense of both workers and creditors. This wasn't enough.

Instead, we got WWII, in which the government stepped in to buy things at rates that paid for factories to be retooled, and which pressed the entire workforce into employment. This is the trigger for the Long Boom, as America got a do-over with all-new capital and a freshly trained workforce with high morale and up-to-date skills.

So that's the Long Boom. What about the Great Downturn? This is where Ganz's account begins. As the "late arrivals" (Japan, West Germany, South Korea, and, eventually China) show up on the world stage, they do their own Long Boom, having experienced an even more extreme "purge" of their zombie firms and obsolete machines. This puts downward pressure on profits in the USA (and, eventually, the late arrivals), leading to the Long Stagnation, a 50 year period in which the rate of profit in the USA has steadily declined.

This is most of the economic theory, and it contains the germ of the political theory, too. During the Long Boom, there was plenty to go around, and the US was able to build out a welfare state, its ruling class was willing to tolerate unions, and movements for political and economic equality for women, sexual minorities, disabled people, racial minorities, etc, were able to make important inroads.

But the political theory gets into high gear after years of Great Downturn. That's when the world has an oversupply of cheap goods and a sustained decline in the rate of profit, and the rate of profit declines every time someone invents a more efficient and productive technology. Companies in Downturn countries need to find a new way to improve their profits – they need to invest in something other than improved methods of production.

That's where "political capitalism" comes in. Political capitalism is the capitalism you get when the cheapest, most reliable way to improve your rate of profit is to invest in the political process, to get favorable regulation, pork barrel government contracts, and cash bailouts. As Ganz puts it, "capitalists have gone from profit-seekers to rent-seekers," or, as Brenner and Riley write, capitalists now seek "a return on investment largely or completely divorced from material production."

There's a sense in which this is immediately recognizable. The ascendancy of political capitalism tracks with the decline in antitrust enforcement, the rise of monopolies, a series of massive bailouts, and, under Trump, naked kleptocracy. In the US, "raw political power is the main source of return on capital."

The "neoliberal turn" of late Carter/Reagan is downstream of political capitalism. When there was plenty to go around, the capital classes and the political classes were willing to share with workers. When the Great Downturn takes hold, bosses turn instead to screwing workers and taking over the political system. Fans of Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere will know this as the moment in which Gerry Ford legalized pyramid schemes in order to save the founders of Amway, who were big GOP donors who lived in Ford's congressional district:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

Manufacturing's rate of profit has never recovered from this period – there have been temporary rallies, but the overall trend is down, down, down.

But this is just the beginning of the political economy of Brenner and Riley's theory. Remember, this all started with an essay that sought to make sense of the 2022 midterms. Much of the political theory deals with electoral politics, and what has happened with America's two major political parties.

Under political capitalism, workers are split into different groups depending on their relationship to political corruption. The "professional managerial class" (workers with degrees and other credentials) end up aligned with center-left parties, betting that these parties will use political power to fund the kinds of industries that hire credentialed workers, like health and education. Non-credentialed workers align themselves with right-wing parties that promise to raise their wages by banning immigrants and ending free trade.

Ganz's most recent book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s looks at the origins of the conspiratorial right that became MAGA:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke/

He says that Riley and Brenner's theory really helps explain the moment he chronicled in his own book, for example, the way that Ross Perot (an important Trump predecessor) built power by railing against "late arrivals" like Japan, Germany and South Korea.

This is also the heyday of corporate "finacialization," which can be thought of as the process by which companies stop concerning themselves with how to make and sell superior products more efficiently, and instead devote themselves to financial gimmicks that allow shareholders to extract wealth from the firm. It's a period of slashed R&D budgets, mass layoffs, union-busting, and massive corporate borrowing.

In the original papers, Riley and Brenner drop all kinds of juicy, eye-opening facts and arguments to support their thesis. For example, in the US, more and more machinery is idle. In the 1960s, the US employed 85% of its manufacturing capacity. It was 78% in the 1980s, and now it's 75%. One quarter of "US plant and equipment is simply stagnating."

Today's economic growth doesn't come from making stuff, it comes from extraction, buttressed by law. Looser debt rules allowed households to continue to consume by borrowing, with the effect that a substantial share of workers' wages go to servicing debt, which is to say, paying corporations for the privilege of existing, over and above the cost of the goods and services we consume.

But the debt industry itself hasn't gotten any more efficient: "the cost of moving a dollar from a saver to a borrower was about two cents in 1910; a hundred years later, it was the same." They're making more, but they haven't made any improvements – all the talk of "fintech" and "financial engineering" have not produced any efficiencies. "This puzzle resolves itself once we recognize that the vast majority of financial innovation is geared towards figuring out how to siphon off resources through fees, insider information and lobbying."

Reading these arguments, I was struck by how this period also covers the rise and rise of "IP." This is a period in which your ability to simply buy things declined, replaced with a system in which you rent and subscribe to things – forever. From your car to your thermostat, the key systems in your life are increasingly a monthly bill, meaning that every time you add something to your life, it's not a one-time expenditure; it's a higher monthly cost of living, forever.

The rise and rise of IP is certainly part of political capitalism. The global system of IP comes from political capture, such as the inclusion of an IP chapter ("TRIPS") in the World Trade Agreement, as well as the WIPO Copyright Treaties. This is basically a process by which large (mostly American) businesses reorganized the world's system of governance and law to allow them to extract rents and slash R&D. The absurd, inevitable consequence of this nonsense is today's "capital light" chip companies, that don't make chips, just designs, which are turned out by one or two gigantic companies, mostly in Taiwan.

Of course, Riley and Brenner aren't the first theorists to observe that our modern economy is organized around extracting rents, rather than winning profits. Yanis Varoufakis likens the modern economy to medieval feudalism, dubbing the new form "technofeudalism":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Riley and Brenner harken back to a different kind of feudal practice as the antecedant to political capitalism: "tax-farming."

Groups of entrepreneurs would advance money to the sovereign in exchange for the right to collect taxes from a given territory or population. Their ‘profit’ consisted in the difference between the money that they advanced to the ruler for the right to tax and what they could extract from the population through the exercise of that right. So, these entrepreneurs invested in politics, the control of means of administration and the means of violence, as a method for extracting surplus, in this way making for a politically constituted form of rent.

Unlike profits, rents are "largely or completely divorced from material production," " they ‘create no wealth’ and that they ‘reduce economic growth and reallocate incomes from the bottom to the top."

To make a rent, you need an asset, and in today's system, high asset prices are a top political priority: governments intervene to keep the prices of houses high, to protect corporate bonds, and, of course, to keep AI companies' shares and IOUs from going to zero. The economy is dominated by "a large group of politically dependent firms and households…profoundly reliant on a policy of easy credit on the part of government… The US economy as a whole is sustained by lending, backed up by government, with profits accruing from production under excruciating pressure."

Our social programs have been replaced by public-private partnerships that benefit these "politically dependent firms." Bush's Prescription Drug Act didn't seek to recoup public investment in pharma research through lower prices – it offered a (further) subsidy to pharma companies in exchange for (paltry/nonexistent) price breaks. Obama's Affordable Care Act transferred hundreds of billions to investors in health corporations, who raised prices and increased their profits. Trump's CARES Act bailed out every corporate debtor in the country. Biden's American Rescue Plan, CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act don't offer public services or transfer funds to workers – instead, they offer subsidies to the for-profit sector.

Electorally, political capitalism is a system of "vertiginous levels of campaign expenditure and open corruption on a vast scale." It pushed workers into the arms of far-right parties, while re-organizing center-left parties as center-right parties of the lanyard class. Both parties are hamstrung because "in a persistently low- or no-growth environment…parties can no longer operate on the basis of programmes for growth."

This is really just scraping the surface. I think it's well worth £4 to read the source document. I look forward to the further development of this theory, to its being streamlined. It's got a lot of important things to say, even if it is a little hard to metabolize at present.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• EU's New Digital Package Proposal Promises Red Tape Cuts but Guts GDPR Privacy Rights https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/eus-new-digital-package-proposal-promises-red-tape-cuts-guts-gdpr-privacy-rights

• Looks Like We Can Finally Kiss the Metaverse Goodbye https://gizmodo.com/looks-like-we-can-finally-kiss-the-metaverse-goodbye-2000695825

• A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/

• Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/microsoft-slashes-ai-sales-growth-targets-as-customers-resist-unproven-agents/

• The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/turning-public-money-into-amazons-profits/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Student ethnographies of World of Warcraft https://web.archive.org/web/20051208020004/http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html

#20yrsago Sony rootkit ripped off anti-DRM code to break into iTunes https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/04/hidden-feature-sony-drm-uses-open-source-code-add-apple-drm/

#20yrsago English info on France’s terrible proposed copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20060111032903/http://eucd.info/index.php?English-readers

#15yrsago New Zealand leak: US-style copyright rules are a bad deal https://web.archive.org/web/20101206090519/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5498/125/

#15yrsago Tron: Reloaded, come for the action, stay for the aesthetics https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/05/tron-reloaded-come-for-the-action-stay-for-the-aesthetics/

#10yrsago Unelectable Lindsey Graham throws caution to the wind https://web.archive.org/web/20151206030630/https://gawker.com/i-am-tired-of-this-crap-lindsey-graham-plays-thunderi-1746116881

#10yrsago Every time there’s a mass shooting, gun execs & investors gloat about future earnings https://theintercept.com/2015/12/03/mass-shooting-wall-st/

#10yrsago How to bake spice-filled sandworm bread https://web.archive.org/web/20151205193104/https://kitchenoverlord.com/2015/12/03/dune-week-spice-filled-sandworm/

#5yrsago Descartes' God has failed and Thompson's Satan rules our computers https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

#5yrsago Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar's "The Big Fix" https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Future Knowledge)
  https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification

• We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w

• How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s

• Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra
  https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/

• Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution)
  https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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