It’s The Stupid Economy
Let’s establish this up front, “the market” is a construct. That is not the same as it being fake. Nor is it always unreflective of reality. There are foundational rational ideas: things tend to be more valuable if there is high demand and a limited supply than things with similarly high demand that are easily supplied. There’s a clear logic. I would agree with the idea that markets, capitalism, or whatever other terms people use as synecdoche and substitution, has its own anti-human logic. There is the profit incentive, there is a tendency towards monopolization or cartelization, and to do things like truly maximize profit—if that is your primary goal—you have to engage in cruelties. There will always be the temptation and motivation to run roughshod over whoever you can. The benefit of markets being constructed rather than some universal order we have stumbled on is that it means we should be able to apply reasoning to restrain and modify it as situations and morality develop, even move beyond it as much as possible. At minimum, we should be able to look at needs vs want and say “here is what should be supplied as a public service even if we’re being ‘market friendly’ and here is a frippery that can continue as a product.” We should be able to look at a valuable and necessary service or product and use tools to shift the sticker price cost away from those who need it. We have those: in the US expensive medication for infectious diseases are sometimes covered by vouchers. This way the afflicted can still access the medication; public health institutions can make the determination that it’s better to arrest the spread of these diseases as much as possible even if patients can’t pay, so the bill is covered by public money based on need. HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention fall into this category. And that was part of the utter sliminess of Martin Shrekli, not only were medication costs increased, he also found a way to essentially extort public health infrastructure on top of that. Either more people get on vouchers, in which case pharmaceutical companies still get paid, or many don’t and get priced out. Even if nobody lost treatment, it would be because a ransom is being paid. Which is not exactly a prosocial way to run a business.
Neoliberalism is a term that gets thrown around a lot, along with late-stage capitalism. As typically happens with concepts that become buzzwords, they drift not becoming the aforementioned substitution and synecdoche for many different ideas, and thus not all that useful without some defining upfront. I’ll try to do that so we’re all on the same page going forward. I’m going to do that first with late-stage capitalism, because it is murkier from the jump.
Late-stage capitalism is a rewording of late capitalism, a concept first put forth into popular consciousness by Werner Sombart in 1928. It is itself in dialogue with the idea put forth by Vladimir Lenin that capitalism had reached a news stage of development in which the laissez-faire approach had evolved into what Marxist-Leninist writers call state monopoly capitalism, in which the state intervenes to protect significant monopolies or “oligopolistic” arrangements. On that latter part, the form most people would probably be most familiar with is cartels, which are marked by active collusion between multiple firms to reduce competition and increase prices for the purposes of increasing both the profits of the collaborating firms and their overall control of their markets. This is a case where the idea, state monopoly capitalism, has escaped containment even among people who would recoil from the term and its source. It’s was in the air post-2008, the feeling that “too big to fail” had formalized a dichotomy in which there are unimportant businesses that can be allowed to fold even if they’re victims of downstream shocks they had no direct hand in, while businesses that are large enough will be insulated from damages even if they played a hand in creating a crisis or made plain bad business decisions. Which, yeah. You did Lehman brothers go bust during with the housing market crash, due in part to how quickly they sunk, but you also saw bailouts, lack of prosecution, and ludicrously light slaps on the wrists for people who did technically face some consequences like Wing Chau and his firm Harding Advisory LLC, the real name and business behind the CDO manager in the casino dinner scene of the movie adaptation of The Big Short.
Lenin took this a little further, addressing the imperialism of his time in his bluntly titled work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. In the section Imperialism As a Special Stage of Capitalism he refers to imperialism as the “latest stage of capitalism” a few times to distinguish it from earlier ones like the aforementioned laissez-faire period. He also described capitalism at this latest stage as “in decay’ multiple times in that work, which one can link to broader beliefs of that time about capitalism reaching a potentially terminal state of crises. The concept of “the general crisis of capitalism” speaks on this, and also tries to describe inherent problems with capitalism—as an arrangement of control of the means of production— that create recurring crises, and how capitalism and socialism created a division of the world into two systems that are in conflict. Let’s say that, at minimum, there were a number of projections from that time that were too rosy in their speculations about how quickly the final crisis would arrive, and how developed the socialist alternative/opposition would become. It is an interesting work, and you can see some core ideas that would be expanded on by later thinkers. For example, the idea that there was a general bourgeoisification of England’s citizenry as beneficiaries of a global system of colonial rule even while intrastate class division still existed. It’s not hard to see how this might have influenced a thinker like J Sakai, writer of Settlers—perhaps the book most often name dropped on social media without anywhere near enough context for it to add much to a conversation—even where he diverges from Marxist-Leninist thought.( As an aside, I think Sakai’s view of “pan-Islamic facism” and its being able to find reliable cross-racial brethren with white supremicts was the sort of post-9/11 helluva take which might put a damper on discussions of his analytical ability, if you were the sort of person who enjoys that sort of shit-flinging.) Lenin also spends a lot of page space swinging at Kautsky, a favorite pastime of a few different writers that might be a bit baffling in the present as his independent name recognition has faded. That’s just one of those funny little features of political and philosophical texts that exist now as past work rather than present critique throughout history. Sometimes your name carries on, but mostly as someone who is derided by more popularly enduring writers. There are also some graphs sourced from other writers' works that Lenin found dubious, which he used to make points about how poorly their logics bore out and how unscientific their work was. I think it would be useful for a revision to include more recent, better data demonstrating his points. These might exist, but the easiest versions to find are the straight translations readily available for free online. Fair warning, you might find yourself in a “I didn’t know Moby Dick spent this much time talking about whales in general” situation if you do read it.
Anyway, that feeling of decay and capitalism entering a new stage, you can see how something like the term late capitalism gets coined. The complication is that most people don’t seem to be referring to Sombart’s work, but more to Ernest Mandal—and subsequently Fredric Jameson’s—much more robust elaborations on late capitalism as the persistent encroachment of commodification and industrialization into ever more sectors of economic and social life. They are intellectual grandfathers of many of the modern left and center’s “All you do and see is increasingly commercialized” type criticisms of capitalism. Which is a fair analysis, but it gets a little harder to pin down attribution so neatly because, in these discussions, people tend to be talking more specifically about—if you know the jargon enough to apply it retroactively— something like Greta Krippner’s formulation of financialization, in which profit is increasingly sought through the use of financial instruments (think the stock market and all its bespoke tools of trade and investment) rather than through trade and commodity production themselves. But mixed also with elements of criticism similar to Elliot Goodell Ugalde’s proposition that these financial systems have a distortive effect on assets like housing: the exchange value and the market price people are in reality willing and able to pay diverge, so that rather than housing being used primarily to fulfill a necessary service, it becomes a vehicle for speculative investment. The result is that you get these half-formed recreations of an existing term “fictitious capital”, which is part of Ugalde’s whole definition of financialization in the first place that can get lost in simplification and combination. Fictitious capital assets are assets like stocks and securities, Marx postulating long ago that the market value of these assets were only indirectly related to growth in real production. That’s a problem with these ill-defined discussions, you usually find that the problem has been described repeatedly and at length in the past, but we’re trapped in a cycle of re-inventing less specific terminology.
The final part of what people are usually talking about when they talk about late-stage capitalism, in my view, is the feeling that there are not many truly new frontiers. That we have divvied up the world and found all sorts of resources to exploit. We can find new deposits of this and that specific commodity, but we have reached a level of extraction of available concrete, raw resources that cannot be expanded like when nations could conquer and establish a new colony in areas yet to be maximally exploited. You see this idea reflected in “peak oil”, that we’ll hit a point of maximum possible oil production—a popular variant being that the most significant deposits of cheap to extract, process, and/or refine oil will have been found, tapped, and eventually be depleted—and after that output will necessarily decline and costs will increase. Primitive accumulation has happened, the ownership class has snatched up control of the means of production and they can’t simply privatize it again. In this context, late-stage capitalism is a term describing, ultimately, financialization and increased commercialization as a cannibalistic crises: profit must be found beyond trade and production, and so more of life—things like privacy itself—becomes a tradable commodity, more assets become speculative assets, and the eternal problem of growing rent-seeking rears it head yet again as businesses need to find a ways to keep getting money from you rather than just selling you a product outright. Late-stage capitalistism, then, is not a singular phenomenon being described, it is also the feeling of the great, potentially terminal crisis renewed without a clear path through. Commodification will weep when it has no new worlds to conquer, and the markets will leap into the sea. Collapse and calamity both slowly and suddenly.
A little more simply, we can understand neoliberalism not just as a cluster of ideological convictions, but the process of the erosion of the boundary between what were more distinct public and private spheres in the previous stage of liberal capitalism, specifically in ways that favor the latter. When you chip away at public healthcare funding, and then turn the operation of services over to private companies that are looking to make a profit off of their running, that could be considered part of the process. In America, we have HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) to provide and arrange care for a fixed annual fee as described in the Medicare Advantage Plan (Part C). These have mostly failed as cost containment, yet endure despite John Erlichman helpfully explaining to Nixon on tape that they are incentivized to not provide care in order to maximize profits—despite being part of a tax-funded federal health insurance program intended to provide necessary services. Nixon’s response to this explanation was “Fine. [Unclear].” This has created its own headaches, tragedies, and atrocities, but a business like this at least needs to provide something tangible. Ultimately having to provide something tangible while remaining solvent has been a great and useful stumbling block to the more wild eyed dreams of many a blinkered industrialist. No matter what corners they cut, workers they repress, or regulations they ignore, Ford needs to put out cars. To be able to make cars, Ford has to deal with the realities of production. It has to negotiate with entities that hold their own individual influence— even if it tries to overthrow them or slip them a fiver to get preferential treatment— and so it benefits them to honor a minimum of agreements made to keep business going. Regulators may not be muscular, but there is at least a hypothetical point of fucking up where they could trigger serious consequences. Not only that, they do have to make something people want to buy, which creates its own floor for standards when there is serious competition and genuine alternatives.
I think, for all their many sins, there are insiders across many industries that understand this. Or at least, they understand someone out there needs to be making actual things, and are willing-to-happy to play the game of making goods and providing services. These are the Ned Beatty in Network types—if you have that context on hand after having to suffer the company of someone who likes that monologue but doesn’t really understand it like I have. They believe in the “free flow of the dollar”, money moving round the world with as little friction as possible, all the right people getting a taste, and making this and that product for consumers. People give you money, you give them a thing, with all the usual rules and conditions applying. And why wouldn’t they? It gives them all kinds of power and access.
Big Tech, Silicon Valley, whatever name you want to use, is a horse of a different color, but a color that Trump compliments quite well. They may not lay things out explicitly, but when you consider patterns of behavior, they don’t seem to believe in any of that. They have exited the shared reality those industries exist in. And they certainly don’t believe in any more friendly version of the market. They haven’t invented new sins exactly: reckless grasping for market dominance, scams and deceptions, rent-seeking, terrible work conditions, etcetera, have all been done before. They are hardly the only ones currently looking to find new frontiers of rentism. What’s new is that I don’t think their luminaries believe in the necessity of markets as we understand them. I mentioned Trump for good reason, who a lot of people have called an idiot for his seeing trade deficits as conspiracy and scam recently. It is an accurate assessment, but it still gives deeper insight into the man backed by past behavior. He has been in court numerous times for not paying for services of all kinds, often delaying the process as long as possible so people will be willing to take smaller payments than potential judgments to get it over with. He has shafted workers. He’s been an infamously unscrupulous landlord. Trump University was a big bag of nothing he somehow got people to spend money on. He’s been mocked for having shitty, watered down cocktails at his properties, so total is his cheapness. But it is more than being cheap. He is the two-bit charlatan ascended to the throne, a man who genuinely believes that both paying the agreed upon price for things and providing something approximate to what it says on the tin is for suckers. He is the type of not only long term, but also short term unsustainable plunderer that can ruin the game for everyone. He doesn’t just want to rip you off to maximize profit, he thinks an exchange where the terms are the terms is wrong. He doesn’t believe in a business of relationships unless the relationship is extracting maximum value before discarding. The faux anti-elitism he can sell to his base exists in part because, I think, his followers choose to read his general contempt as sincere for those they dislike and as a joke when it's about people they do. He has achieved elitism accusation exit velocity by making a singular elite consisting of one person. Himself. This is not to say he lacks all class solidarity, just that you can find yourself outside of that solidarity if he doesn’t like you.
It’s another saving grace of our economic system that it does need to be an economy. As much collusion as there is, along with suppression of wages and workers rights and so on as there are, at some point people need to have money to spend so other people can make money. There are wealthy individuals deeply invested in capitalism who understand this. Some understand that low tax rates that allow small clusters of individuals to build dragon hoards slows the movement of money, hence why you have Asher Edelman—an inspiration point for film character Gordon Gekko—supporting Bernie and talking about “money velocity” several years back. Some understand that while housing as a speculative asset is a great way to make money, property and stability are great ways to get people to buy into the broader economic system that has supplied it to them, keeping the system itself more stable. A healthy amount of spreading wealth protects wealth, and you can still become quite wealthy as an individual. Bread and circus was not a passive means of pacification, it was an opportunity for wealthy patrons to make a show of magnanimity in spending their wealth for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, making them more likable and civically minded. In a sense they were demonstrating that they could be trusted with being wealthy and powerful.
We, in contemporary times, have movements like the Dark Enlightenment that, when you boil it down, explicitly valorize hoarding and extreme concentrations of power. In this they are not at all unique, but they have the ears of people with the wealth and office to pursue their mole-ishly myopic visions. It’s been commented on that it’s found a number of willing listeners in tech industry circles. I think Mark Zuckerberg shows us why. I can’t say how much of their ideology he may buy into personally, but he is a natural ally anyway. Normally I don’t like to speculate on the inner lives of specific individuals, but in this case he is a person whose choices have highly visible consequences for the rest of us, and numerous accounts indicate that he would like to make them even more unilaterally than he has. For example, The Wall Street Journal in it’s article Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users—Even Children—which I won’t link to directly because of the paywall and the risk of links getting this newsletter sent to spam folders, but the Internet Archive will get you through the all if you want to read it—recently covered Zuckerberg pushing against safety measures for its chatbots in order to not be late to the party like with other services. This resulted in things like celebrity chatbots engaging in sexually explicit changes—against the agreements made with the celebrities—and test minor accounts being able to engage in explicit roleplay. After Meta was informed of this, they denied the risk in a statement, but did put in additional guard rails. There have also been accounts of how the pivot to the Metaverse was a special project of his that did not pay off as hoped by any metric, which he was warned was the most likely outcome.
But Facebook is more than a business making bad decisions, it is a business engaged in manipulation and experimentation that has effects inflicted on its user base and the rest of the world. One of its lesser sins, which still messed up the livelihoods of various people, was the pivot to video, or “shift to video” as Facebook called it in a statement in January 2015. This resulted in cuts to writing positions as media outlets tried to keep up with this supposed shift in content preferences, with the opaqueness in actual viewership and engagement metrics, and fickle nature of algorithmic engagement boosting and deprioritization, making engaging with the pivot an unsound business decisions for many outlets beyond the initial layoffs. Facebook has been criticized for intentionally exposing users to content they think will make them feel negatively to drive engagement, running a social experiment on users to test just how far hate engagement can get you. WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, has been at the root of multiple lethal moral panics and waves of paranoia around the globe from Mexico to India. Facebook has been a platform for spreading genocidal content and organizing hate in places like Malaysia and Ethiopia, as well as its less lethal dissemination of harmful and false content in its homeland and elsewhere. There were violations related to informed consent for data harvesting in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Meta has faced the occasional repercussion, but that’s just a cost of doing business if no one is willing to try at all that hard to stop you more permanently. After Trump's re-election they rolled back moderation efforts and hate speech rules, and even went so far as to remove tampon dispensers out of men’s restrooms in their own offices to realign with the “anti-woke” politics of the White House. You’re not safe from the personality reboots of Zuckerberg even as an employee! And there are of course, Zuckerberg’s slimy personal life decisions, like those multiple personality relaunches and schemes like carving out property in Hawaii.
The multitude and consistency of these issues is how I think we can begin to construct a reasonable idea of how Zuckerberg and his ilk think. A big part of that, reflected in attitudes like “move fast and break things”, is that they don’t believe in restraint. But not necessarily in the same way as other industries. The tech world does not want to have to maintain any sort of minimum of agreements to keep the world turning. They do not want to exist in an economy at any scale. I think it's a mostly forgotten piece of history, but when Apple was criticized for its use of tax havens abroad, higher-ups in the company were releasing statements to places like Fox Business and CNBC about how if people were upset by this, they should push for the US to adopt similar tax codes. I managed to track down an article mentioning Tim Cook advocating for a tax code overhaul in 2013 right around the time he appeared before a congressional committee, if you look up the article Apple CEO Tim Cook grilled on Irish tax scandal by the CBC. That’s a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of tax havens. Those places make money from foreign businesses and individuals by providing them with a service allowing them to avoid greater costs elsewhere. For one, if most countries adopted those codes, these havens would collapse, and subsequently no one would be making money from the arrangement, nations would simply have less tax revenue to spend on public endeavors. It would be a blow to essentially everyone, as businesses themselves benefit from public spending, and public spending helps individuals have more discretionary spending, which numerous companies benefit from in the form of profit. Ireland was a specific “model” for what sort of policy would bring their money back to American shores, but I think the ongoing economic problems in that nation subdued the urge to express that specific sentiment publicly, as many of its citizens would argue against this being a particularly beneficial arrangement even for them, much less anyone else that wasn’t already wealthy. Apple also lost appeals on a case in 2024 and were determined to have to pay Ireland billions in unpaid taxes by the European Commission. The government of Ireland itself had appealed this initial decision in 2016, to give you an idea of what a clusterfuck of corruption that arrangement has become. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of short-sighted thinkers among the wealthy—maybe even a clear majority— who think along these ludicrous lines, but they are at least marginally pushed back on by more competent peers at times. I’m not sure Tech has much in the way of more intelligent outliers in these matters. Apple has to deal with real supply chain issues and the practical realities of logistics in a way something like Twitter didn’t have at the time, so it's worth noting, I think, when even their CEO was that ridiculous.
When you look at the behavior of other companies in the Silicon Valley sphere, I think it’s easy to see where this lack of foresight even in more tangibly oriented firms comes from. Uber tried to get quick market domination, using the offer of cheap services and unloading of costs and risks onto drivers to try and take over the “rideshare” market from the jump. They could undercut taxi services—who do have pretty Byzantine rules in some places that make them slow to adapt to changing times and changing demand—and keep competitors from undercutting them by having such low cost that it’d be hard for less funded services to go lower. This would allow them to rapidly spread as taxi services contract from competition while they have none. This would make them a dominant and hard to shake service in that part of the market. Then they could do as they pleased in terms of pricing, because who else would users turn to? This ran into a number of roadblocks and keep running into issues like people discovering, that, hey, having registered drivers operating work specific vehicles subject to things like location and mileage tracking is actually a smart way to prevent drivers from doing excessively inappropriate things, or at least provide a way to track them down later for compensation or justice later. This may not always work out in practice, but it’s at least a more robust system to work with than “download an app that’ll call the police if your finger is off a button for too long.” There’s been plenty of page space dedicated to streaming services’ quests to find that killer combination of content that’ll allow them to become the king of the castle, only for them to end up recreating cable but more annoying and less productive. I think it's fair to say that large businesses tend towards mergers or arranged fiefdoms over continued competition, in that tech is no different, but it's unusual in its nakedness. And I think that the personalities of that sphere play a role.
I don’t think Zuckerberg wants to just find a monopoly, like with the pursuit of offering accessible chatbots without appropriate safeties, simply for market domination. I think he wants to have a controllable slice of social reality, with the market as a tool. Again not totally unique, but how Facebook exists as a social media company allows him to take his vision to an extreme, it allows him to become unmoored from material reality in ways the CEO of a different business might not get away with. He does face pushback, but he is afforded a great latitude in overriding practical advice to pursue personal desire. I think a number of the supposedly world changing tech wizzes are. He is not subject to the power of No like the rest of us, or even some industrial leaders of more established industries. Mostly because of a weak regulatory state, but that’s an article all on its own. I suspect that Mark Zuckerburg, at this point, desires to change material reality itself, and thinks he can to a degree. As do his peers.
I don’t think Zuckerberg is a chameleon, in that I don’t think he buys his own personality pivots. There’s a rotten, consistent core that persists from his early days of being floored at just how much information women would hand over to his little venture to participate in it to his recent turn as defender of masculinity. It’s not a complete lack of a core personality, he pivoted in whatever ways he thought would let him infest more of the world with his companies. We can see that he’s quite willing to manipulate information on his platform and about his platform, and this is where AI gets interesting in a bad way.
One thing multiple social media platforms want to get into is payment and banking services. Elon Musk also wants to integrate these services into Twitter 2: This Time It’s Shittier, and they have both shown an allowance for and fondness for AI accounts. I want to pack my tinfoil hat too tightly, but I don’t think these are unrelated phenomena. There is the obvious appeal of people sending money through your app gives you juicy data to sell, but let’s indulge in a hypothetical. Let’s say you are comfortable with deception, and you have a platform infested with bots that can do a decent impression of an unexceptional user. This might not make advertisers happy in the now, but there is an opportunity. What if you had bots that could not just use your platform, but perform click-through on ads, and spend money with what seems like verified accounts? This would be fraudulent if you were controlling them, but that’s an issue that can be avoided by having a corrupting relationship with regulators, or if the White House and its apparatus were occupied by a scams friendly president. This would allow you to consistently hit metrics that would open up advertiser’s wallets over and over, the expenses outweighed by gains in payments, even if your user base of real people is dwindling. As a means of profit generation, I imagine this is only workable if you still have real people doing a healthy amount of that spending, but you gain control of the situation as a whole. It would be a great way to make money, the only problem being you’re trapping this money in a loop that produces nothing useful and has goods and services being delivered to/utilized by people that don’t actually exist. I don’t think tech would mind that, I think tech sees that as an ideal. You don’t have an economy, you have money machines that serve their owners alone. Nobody benefits from your services so there is no need for minimal quality beyond functionality, you don’t have to even deal with manipulating consumers as much, you simply invent them. The advertisers no longer have to make appeals to people, they just need to exist to be viewed and clicked on. Note: OpenAI has recently said Meta is trying to poach employees for its AI projects.
There is a difference between this invention and classic manipulation. Tech has done well in the field of manipulating the public, but there is a certain archreactionary distaste for its limitations. The movement to create “tech Zionism”—his words— in San Francisco by Balaji Srinivasan, in which the city is captured by grey uniformed tech company loyalists who violently oust liberals in collaboration with law enforcement, Alex Carp of Palintir talking about using drones to kill critics and protesters, these are fascist ideas, but I don’t think fear is a good reaction to them or fascists in general. Fear confers a certain respect, and there is nothing all that frightening about these people’s ideas, in my view. They are fundamentally childish. These people would be little more than yet more Ignatius J. Reillys among many, if equally foolish and also more cold-blooded—who are probably still making a miscalculation, ultimately— people had not let them gain influence. How do you still have the city of San Francisco existing as it does with all its influence and services if there are no more liberals?
It’s the fool’s idealization of violence. We’ll kill the mean, bad people and then everything will be great. The lack of practical knowledge that violence is unpredictable and can create resistance and unintended consequences limits the accuracy of their assessments. This makes them eager for violence, but not great at predicting how it might go. It is a win button for them; if they’re the first to press it and keep pressing it, surely they will get what they want. Americans in general have proven exceptionally resistant to learning this lesson. Geographically limiting it to a city might even be more dunderheaded than a national movement, because that’s a lot of neighbors who are going to have issues with this, neighbors who have equal amounts of on paper power while you're wrecking your local economy, not to mention higher authorities, whereas seizing the federal government or capturing a state at least gives you access to some big guns and more exceptional powers. But it's co-intelligible with other, less drastic tech luminaries dreams: they don’t want to negotiate with reality to get their way, they want it to be what they say. That is the dream of information control, you no longer have to finesse the details of events to create propaganda, you simply say what is real or not, and without alternative sources of information no one can confidently say otherwise. Except perhaps through conspiratorial thinking, and I think we should have all learned by now that conspiratorial thinking can become a real thorn in your side despite profoundly lacking much in the way of reliable evidence. That’s a strength in the right hands! It’s a pain in our current world, but it is somewhat entertaining to imagine a world in which an Orwellian dystopia is brought down by people confidently bullshitting about their transgressions without ever really figuring out the truth. This all sounds like a great idea to Dark Enlightenment types longing for a return to the kings of old through the ascension of new, dynamic, and technologically backed tyrants that will do away with the feeble, fallen world of liberal democracy. I think this strain of philosophy has had to work its way back into the halls of power as an explicit goal over time because there are logical reasons to be an oligarch or power broker and oppose it despite how flattering it might seem. Concentrating power also gives you clear points to attack power. Being a part of a global apparatus has an anonymizing effect even when you have a great amount of influence.
When you are one of many industrialists or investors, you are not as much of a target if people think of you as a replaceable cog in the greater machine. If you wield extraordinary power and are identifiable as doing so, you are a bigger target in a direct sense, but also become a way for others to gain their own influence in opposing you as an individual. If you stand athwart an enumerated king, for all the risk, you could gain much. If your personal mission in life is to track the sins and rally judgment against the CEO of Coca-Cola, laudable, but it's only going to take you so far in terms of fame, fortune, and influence. Plus you risk being seen as having tunnel-vision. By being part of a class, you can,in theory, engender and enforce solidarity in ways that are challenging with monarchs. You may all look down on the rabble still, but when a peer challenges a claim to ownership of this or that without a moderating social medium to negotiate through, it can spiral. This is something the Catholic Church struggled with at times, trying to use its holy authority to reign in local powers that were too bloody-minded without having to escalate straight to armed solutions. This put them in odd positions at times, like both reifying antisemitism doctrinally and trying to rein in conflagrations of it, like Pope Clement VI sending out papal bulls to condemn certain widespread accusations of the plague being a Jewish plot as infernal deceptions. There’s the root of the stultifying promise made in that monologue in The Network, business can replace the modern problem of national conflict with global economic resolutions. Sinister, yes, but legible as a desirable lesser evil with the right framing. That is explicitly not what neo-reactionary movements want, they want a more fractious alternative.
I think one of the reasons NFTs got more popular flack than other crypto-world projects is that they revealed too much. An element of that was the overpromise. There were a lot of video game related NFT promises like in-game items being made accessible across titles—genres even—that simply didn’t make much sense as proposed. A token cannot guarantee access to assets that have to be implemented by a third party, the developers, and implementing these sorts of randomly generated assets would also cause serious practical headaches, like creating balancing issues in a multiplayer game. Video games are a big business and popular entertainment, which meant there were plenty of people who could look at those promises and confidently say “this is bullshit.” It makes for a decent microcosm of Musk’s journey. As his promises spread across different fields, more people were able to recognize him talking out of his ass about their field, calling into question his knowledge of the other fields. This, in turn, gives an insight into Silicon Valley’s model of over-promise, under deliver. When you have journalism broadly, and your beat specifically, plagued by uncritical stenographic coverage, you don’t need to sell products as they are, you sell hype. You make lofty claims, boost the regurgitation, and minimize interaction with criticism. By the time the falsehoods become too obvious, you’ve already hoovered up money and positive attention. NFT adjacent projects also revealed the money machine mechanics. Dan Olson in his video Line Goes Up covered a game, Axie Infinity, that sold itself to players as an opportunity to make money just by playing it. Long story short, this really only worked for a time as a scheme for wealthier crypto wallet owners to exploit people, primarily in poorer nations, that spent time grinding for a cut of the profit. But it also had that fundamental issue of “I can make money, but what actual social utility comes from this?” And there were a number of NFT schemes that shared this issue. Buy this token now, make money, get in early on the future. But these schemes couldn’t play a large role in a healthy future. Again, somebody somewhere needs to make things and provide services. You can’t democratize the unproductive money machines, or else you have money without a functional economy. And a worrying amount of people didn’t seem to grasp this fundamental issue. They had enthusiastically dove head first into rot. Their dream way of getting rich was though even more fictitious capital than Marx and his immediate intellectual descendants had described, wherein there are no concrete assets made into speculative vehicles or pseudo-reflections of increased productivity. Profit simply gets made out of thin air. The scene was also rife with scams and projects that failed miserably due to fundamental problems that were entirely predictable from the jump. It was crypto with the promises made too starkly ridiculous and/or too obviously deceptive. When you sorted through the nonsense you were essentially left with the promise of “wouldn’t it be cool if you had an e-crystal that made your dreams come true?”
And there is an key issue with cryptocurrency as part of the new economy, the lofty promises were always for the suckers. You’ll unfortunately have to take my word for this, as I lost track of the one journalist I knew of who covered this more esoteric internet knowledge, but there were ancient—by online standards—Listserv groups and the like, including one who had a name quite similar to dark enlightenment, who were early crypto pushers on the grounds that it was social poison. They didn’t like crypto being outside the usual currency channels for liberators reasons, they liked the potential for it to used to squirrel away and grow wealth outside of government control because it would allow reactionary oligarchs and their acolytes to undermine basic functions like the collection of taxes to fund public projects, and funnel that money around the world to allied projects. They wanted to undermine the economies of democracies and prop up authoritarian groups. They wanted to open up new avenues to scam people out of their wealth and redistribute it to themselves, making society that much more precarious. They called that shot like Babe Ruth, while the early utopians ended up being, to be blunt, the first marks. I can’t find that name, but I can point you to a paper from the journal “Progress in Economic Geography” by Jillian Lee Crandall called Plotting cryptoeconomic imaginaries and counterplotting the network state—available on ScienceDirect— which talks about plans to form focused, exclusive online communities led by “crypto whales” that use cryptocurrency to accelerate the wealth accumulation and influence building of these groups outside the limitations of nation-states framework. (Note: crypto whales were also the main beneficiaries of schemes like Axie Infinity, that particular term being invoked.) The term “Network States” comes from a manifesto by—drumroll please—Brown Shirt palette swap enthusiast Balaji Srinivasan, who I will now reveal to be the former CTO of Coinbase, a large cryptocurrency exchange founded back in 2012. These exchanges helped make crypto more “user friendly”, easier to use and get into, thus helping them spread. Seen the headlines speculating on whether or not Trump’s crypto is a way for him to facilitate corruption while also functioning as a pump and dump engine targeting his less wealthy enthusiasts? Wouldn’t it be quite the classic bit of conservative projection if crypto has been, for much of its history, fundamentally a conspiracy that had laid out the clues to its design if you knew where to look?
That is the core problem with the Zuckerburg vision, the exit from consensus reality into a world in which what is real is rewritable on a whim is both inherently anti-social and destructive. It doesn’t matter all that much if his most personal vision aligns with these fellow meaning-eaters that want to crumble the world, his project is their project still. Controlling information, making these unproductive money machines, they degrade society in ways that are ripe for opportunists to exploit. The cynical business leaders who aligned with the Nazis despite their skepticism of its specific ideology were not outside the political machine, they were a wing of it. They got something out of participating, and when you participate well enough, you don’t need to be a true believer. As long as they have sufficient incentive to align with reactionary movements, their cynicism does not make them neatly separable entities if you can just figure out the right counter incentive, they are a liability, a vector through which those movements can re-emerge. There are sensible reasons for the ownership class to not align with neo-reactionaries, but there are plenty who will because those movements are broadly flattering to them— when they aren’t calling particular members Jew or puppets—and share similar dreams of control as the more rapacious and less intelligent. Tech is an industry, or cluster of industries, which is full of those people.
Palantir is a somewhat unique position as it can put out impressive and useful projects. It did a lot of logistics work in distributing and tracking COVID vaccine deployment. It is also trying to pick up defense contracts and works on malignant police programs like predictive policing models and facial tracking technology. But when you know what Alex Carp is like, wanting to drone people and all, and about the involvement of Peter Thiel this makes sense. It behooves these authoritarians and their pals for Palantir to deliver promised products in some form, because those are tools they can use. And guess which company would really like to fulfill the Trump administration's plan to build a more centralized “mega-database” on American citizens and more closely track immigrants? Remembering, of course, that Musk and DOGE have already been sticking their noses in all kinds of databases. Amazon is also in an odd place. Their web services need to be functional, but the store has been allowed to go to pot as that part becomes a bigger revenue stream, seemingly abandoning any pretense of quality control as it is flooded with things like dropshipper, you guessed it, scams. When you look at the waters Bezos swims in, we should also perhaps be open to the possibility that his wanting to get into entertainment is something a little more malevolent than him being a weird guy that wants to get into Hollywood cocktail parties. I think he is that guy, but it can also be true that entertainment is also a type of information control.
Maybe Zuckerburg will never be a true insider, maybe he already is. But his trying to push users out of the world into a VR reality that he controls for everyday interaction, his manipulation, his potential tinkering with unproductive profit generation, his blatant disregard for regulation when he can get away with it, these are all tools that serve the goals of the true, hate mongering believers of reaction all the same. He erodes social cohesion in ways that benefit them, and when you have enough of him trying to implement the same ideas, seemingly unconcerned with the question of “but who will actually make things?”, even if it's for selfish, non-ideological project aligned reasons, those personal money machine projects and reality distortions add up to catastrophe. And the old problems like financialization will persist and deepen.
The stock market had squared the circle of all kinds of “fictitious” accusations well enough to work for the purposes of still attracting and maintaining buy-in, and being seen as serving a broader purpose. It may not strictly reflect economic reality, you see, but it does reflect the general common sense view of the economy's health. Controlling for irregularities and misjudgments, it’s supposed to be a decent temperature gauge for the economy as a whole even if investing in specific stocks is more of a gamble. There are tumbles based on panic and rallies based on vapor that will make daily watchers inaccurately anxious or excited, but if you look at it over larger windows of time, you’ll get an accurate enough snapshot of how the economy is growing or contracting. In that way, portfolio diversification is supposed to be something of a hedge against the irregularities and unpredictability of how individual firms will perform. With a good spread, you should be insulated from problems and events that are not widespread shocks, and if you have enough enough money not tied up in stocks, or haven’t dipped your toes in the pool yet, even those can be a nice time to buy the dip and make money in the long term. Feel free to disagree with this assessment— I personally think it had become increasingly unmoored from general economic health before Trump, and held the public hostage by tying things like their ability to safely retire to the well-being of truly malignant firms like Blackrock—but understand that it was, at minimum, plausible enough to assuage worry and keep chugging along.
I do think prior to Trump, the people waiting on another 2008 were setting themselves up for disappointment. It’s not that a recession because of a bubble of some sort was impossible, but the thing is 2008 already happened. Bailouts and too big to fail happened. What I mean by that is I don’t think we live in a world where the Lehman Brothers shock will play out as dramatically. People suddenly out on their asses, a bankruptcy that left judges gobsmacked with how it played out, the dramatic and rapid collapse of a titan, a liquidation process that takes decades to unfold. My suspicions were reinforced by the GameStop short squeeze and the assistance rendered to Silicon Valley Bank. In both cases we saw rapid assistance provided to firms. In the case of GameStop, involved hedge funds like Melvin Capital got assistance like payment deadline extensions and stabilizing investments from other firms. Melvin Capital did eventually fold, but this, I have to imagine, was a more managed downfall than if they had not received help. Brokerage firms like Robinhood also closed trading on certain stocks for a time, but they say that was due to raising collateral rates affecting the clearing houses they worked with, which if true would not make that decision assistance, but it didn’t hurt. The point being, the world of investment helped cushion the fall of a firm. The Biden administration was always going to help sort the mess of SVB to contain the damage, but it’s notable just how quickly they moved in stabilizing the situation by protecting depositors, ironic given the destabilizing influence of that world. They moved quickly in large part because history has shown us how bank runs play out if you don’t work swiftly to contain the damage.
There were people in the tech world who were still deeply unhappy, because again, they have childish impulses. A portion of the upset came from interest rate hikes that happened in the first place. Tech thrived in a low rate “cheap money” environment. But low rate environments have their own risks, one of which is that if you enter a period of shock in a low rate environment, you don’t have much to cut to encourage stabilization. I think a shock similar in magnitude to 2008, resulting from something like another housing market collapse— a prediction I have seen—would look different, with the government and more stable financial institutions moving to at least cushion the fall and make a softer landing for firms in trouble. If I had to make a prediction I can’t back with much but vibes, I think a Lehman 2 event would see a much more neat and arranged break up. I think that, at the very least, investors feel a certain confidence that they will be cushioned on impact. SVB did fail, but there was substantial damage control, and the Biden administration was looking at new rules to address issues with poor oversight that helped it reach crisis point. People who hate oversight were also mad about this. The crises may remain in capitalism, but governments can, if businesses don't gnaw off their legs trying to escape from regulation resulting from specific events, get better at managing them. I think that for a Lehman 2 to look like Lehman 1, you would need a shock of a higher magnitude. A shock big enough that the tools developed to deal with those situations are rendered insufficient.
Trump is a less predictable creature, or rather he is less predictable than he should be because so many people choose to not believe that he believes what he says despite evidence to the contrary. Despite his promises, I don’t think many traders were braced for a wave of spuriously reasoned tariffs. And let’s be clear, despite the walk backs and exemptions, tariff rates are still higher than at the beginning of the year. There are still expected and implemented price increases for consumers. I think, well in specific cases I know, that some people don’t understand how profound even smaller tariffs can be. I put this partially on what I call “soda economics”. Soda syrup is famously so low cost to make at the industrial scale that soda companies can make substantial profits margins off cheap products. Large soda companies could, the argument goes, shed their margins substantially and still be left with a perfectly profitable company. This shapes some individuals' views of profitability too strongly. This is not replicable across industries. The number I’ve seen frequently is that large multinational conglomerates—the biggest of businesses—have something like a 30% profit margin. If their overall costs rise by 30% without adjustments to bring in more revenue, they are going to lose the ability to absorb further losses, become unprofitable, and become insolvent if conditions persist. And most businesses would fold well before then. Small businesses, after all, still make up the majority of businesses in America. They generate a substantial amount of economic activity and are a large source of employment. For all their sins and deceptions, Walmart well and truly could not take peak tariffs on the chin, they would indeed need to raise prices to remain in business.
The larger problem with Trump though, being a creature of whim now vested with substantial problems, is that the stock market is now having to attune itself to his whims in a way it didn’t with past administrations. It becomes even further abstracted from reality, which is a compounding issue with the more novel derealization of the economy. Dow Jones has struggled to escape the 42,000 range, and it was above 44,000 in February and reached a high slightly above 45,000 in December of last year. Markets have already gone through technical correction during peak uncertainty. Things like TACO—Trump Aways Chickens Out—are not safe bets to be making. He can pivot a thousand times, but only has to stick to his guns once to renew the uncertainty. It’s like the IRA tactic of making more threats than you intend to follow through on to force an opponent to make unnecessary expenditures and impose inconveniences on its citizens, only applied to his own nation’s economy. This uncertainty is not good for economies. And those small businesses cannot handle tariffs like Apple can, trying to cut deals with third parties like Vietnam so that they can move Chinese products through other nations to avoid higher tariff rates when the retaliation was escalating. Other nations are going to look for new partners elsewhere to avoid the uncertainty, creating more enduring problems. Trump may have walked things back, but the dramatic stove touching never came, the supposed true masters of the economy are still having to eat new costs, some reduced to protestive grousing by adding tariff surcharges or appearing desperate to participate in nakedly extortionist exemption schemes that will be beyond many businesses. In the case of the automotive industry, union leaders like Shawn Fein are also willing to lend support while wearing their most cherished Ross Perot tat, becoming the sort of insular aristocrats unconcerned with the solidarity with other workers they have so often accused of being, on the grounds that industry will have an opportunity to return despite people like Musk denigrating American workers in favor of more exploitable H-1B visa workers, and both he and Trump talking about how this will indeed hurt, those brilliant plans for long term gains and the return of well paying blue-collar jobs perpetually never being quite ready to be shown to the public and scrutinized. And when you see how the influence of Curtis Yarvin has worked its way into the White House through people like Vance, it's a safe bet that reducing precarity is not what this administration as a whole is after. The thing about special arrangements is that they are themselves uncertain, what is granted may be subject to revocation, or at least attempts at revocation that will spook investors.
The whim based realignment makes things make less sense. Unconfirmed rumors gain the power to cause significant market movement at the moment of deployment. Whenever Trump indicates he’d like to replace Jerome Powell with a loyalist, the stock market gets a short bout of the lergy. Supposedly the market doesn’t see steady growth because the problems with tariffs are being priced in. But are they? Because the tariffs are not just a problem by themselves, they are a source of wider uncertainty. Rallying off a better than expected job report might normally make sense, but does it make as much sense for movement to occur based on individual reports when there is the potential for new, unnecessary problems to be introduced everyday for the next four years? Especially when the trade wars are set up with the option to renew every 90 days. Tariffs fluctuating makes it difficult for businesses to know when to buy. Do you need to accumulate what stock you can, or should you wait and avoid getting hit with unnecessary cost? The logistics of how to apply these tariffs hasn’t even been resolved, and their tracking and application would have been an enormous, fulfillment slowing effort if they hadn’t been flattened out. In these conditions, investors and traders who don’t know which supply chains can’t be cold started—don’t know how long they take to get moving again and how expensive that can be—might have trundled along just fine in normal conditions, but now that lack of knowledge creates the risk of more serious miscalculations. Those disruptions cause more than price increases, employment in shipping is going to suffer directly if products from overseas simply aren’t arriving anymore, for example. I am not an expert on these matters, I can’t offer specific economic advice, but I can see one thing clearly. A market realigned to move more closely with the whims of an individual, much less an unstable one, cannot be a stable and rational one because it only takes a single episode of irrationality or spontaneity or defying his own personal trends to toss new precedent out the window and cause serious pain.
And there are more issues than these. Tesla was a proto-meme stock. A cult of personality stock with fans whose solution to setbacks was to invest more and more. It gained a market cap as an automotive company well beyond any reasonable reflection of its productivity. And it stays high as sales take hits. As Musk makes a spectacle of himself by throwing out more promises that go unfulfilled, have to be partially walked back, or is caught pinning work in established fields on himself as original innovation. As he shows an increased inability to maintain relations. Through Trump, Musk can pick up more contracts despite growing reasons not to do business with his companies. Now we have the fully realized meme-stock. Full blown cults with apocalyptic visions introducing such profound irregularities that GameStop has had to warn potential investors that the price of its stock is not reflective of how it's doing. If you are looking to undermine the nation state as it exists, that might be an interesting avenue to explore. How many irregularities can you manufacture, and can you manufacture enough that irregularity becomes a new, risk creating norm?
When the stock market becomes increasingly irrational, and agents of reaction are working to intentionally introduce new irrationalities and make casino-esque gambling the new norm of wealth generation for the purposes of “disrupting” public life, you don’t simply renew the crises of capitalism. You make capitalism into its most caricaturized, untenable form. The smart capitalists should realize this, but when you reach a critical mass of idiots you lose control even if the wiser types are still technically around. And the tech world is a Katamari ball of stupidity and directionless avarice. This is perhaps the greatest failing of neoliberal policy, why it was inevitably going to be replaced by something either more publicly minded or profoundly divorced from reason: the ownership and investor class bought their own propaganda that private business can do it all so completely that it lost sight of how restraints were also for their own health. There are many who will suffer needlessly for its failures, but those people? We cannot simply roll back policy to old norms, or we’ll risk arriving here yet again later. Things will only get better if we make the choice to hang the failure around their neck in perpetuity. At minimum, they need to be forced to accept culpability and consequence. If that weight crushes them, well, I try not to talk in terms of deserving, but it's a fate they’ve earned. And if they want to fight against taking responsibility and living with restriction, all our personal feelings about revolution and violence will become largely irrelevant, because that will become the most reasonable option left. Perhaps capitalism will survive, but this particular stage, whatever name it is given, cannot persist. It can only lead to worse or be stopped.
Furthermore, I consider Palestine to need to be freed.