oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith

Who Will Solve Our Real Problem--The US is a Neofeudal Autocracy

2026-07-22T11:34:06.130-07:00

So who will solve our real problem: the centralization of wealth and power in a Neofeudal Autocracy?

My essay on America's ten social classes was the appetizer to the main course: beneath the purposefully distracting PR of "democracy" and "free markets," America is a Neofeudal Autocracy, i.e. a system in which real power, control and wealth are concentrated in the hands of the few at the top of a complex neofeudal arrangement of a secular nobility ruling the commoners with monopolistic powers cloaked in the sleight of hand of "democracy" and "free markets" serving up endless dollops of "Progress" and "prosperity."

The Conflicts Brewing in America's Ten Classes

The key to autocratic / totalitarian arrangements is the concentration of power via centralization of control / power. This centralization is not unique to governments; it works just as well in the private sector--the privatized totalitarianism of corporate monopolies and cartels--and in organizations ranging from religious orders to sports.

Centralization has positive and negative features. Centralizing control enables efficiencies and obedience--militaries and global corporations being examples--but it also enables a handful of self-serving incompetents to destabilize vast systems, and the straightforward replacement of the ruling elite with a new elite, as outlined in Edward Luttwak's classic guide Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook (1968).

This makes autocratic / totalitarian arrangements tempting targets for overthrow, and fuels the paranoia and palace intrigues that come with highly centralized regimes. In other words, the stability of such structures is illusory.

Behind the happy-story narrative of "efficiencies," the real purpose of autocratic / totalitarian arrangements is to eliminate transparency and accountability so those at the top and the insider-lackeys who serve them can maximize their private gains behind the moats and complexity thickets of centralized power.

The other way to replace autocratic / totalitarian arrangements is the citizenry concludes their interests are no longer being served by the bread and circuses the regime distributes to co-opt and distract the exploited commoners.

Alternatively, in repressive regimes that rely on coercion, the commoners must find sufficient common cause with other classes to rise up as a mass movement that overwhelms the regime's coercive forces.

I summarize such social movements in this way: one by one, people decide that what was previously acceptable is no longer acceptable. That sounds simple, but it's not.

My essay on America's ten social classes sets the stage for a real problem-real solution discussion:

1. The real problem isn't who's currently holding the reins of power: the centralization of power is the core problem. Playing musical chairs--"democracy" swapping out who sits in which chair--won't solve the real problem, which is centralization.

Call it "socialist" or "capitalist," in either case you're missing the point: the choice is between centralization of control and power (i.e. Neofeudal Autocracy) or the radical decentralization of control and power, which translates into the radical decentralization of ownership, capital and agency.

2. Spewing endless paeans to "free market capitalism" in a economy dominated by privatized totalitarian monopolies and cartels won't solve the real problem--centralization of wealth and power--either. The wealth and power that's supposedly held by commoners is counterfeit, illusory, phantom: the "wealth" is an illusory artifact of serial credit-asset bubbles fueled by a relentless expansion of credit "money" chasing tangible assets, not by increases in utility.

The "power" to replace Tweedledum with Tweedle-dummer won't solve the real problem, which is the concentration of power and control, not who's currently holding the levers of power.

The phrase golden handcuffs is bandied about to describe the servitude / loss of agency that is a trademark of neofeudal systems. In classic feudalism, the commoners are bound by law to the estates of the nobility. In neofeudalism, you can't move because you have a 3% mortgage on your house you can't afford to give up, and you can't change careers because you can't afford to lose the healthcare insurance provided by your current employer.

These aren't golden handcuffs; they're gold-painted leg-irons, chains whose ersatz "value" is an artifact of a corrupt, exploitive Neofeudal Autocracy. Control what's affordable, what's "necessary to get ahead" (credentials), healthcare and lower-cost credit, and voila, you no longer need the legal niceties of direct servitude: indirect servitude works even better because it fosters illusions of power, wealth and agency.

So who will solve our real problem: the centralization of wealth and power in a Neofeudal Autocracy? The only source of a solution is the mass of powerless commoners who currently buy into the notion that the system is still serving their interests, or they're frozen by fear of losing what they have.

In other words, we'll lose everything if the truth comes out. This perverse state of denial and fear is the trademark of neofeudalism, in which those who have already lost power and agency now cling to a corrupt, unstable Neofeudal Autocracy because a real solution--radical decentralization, transparency, accountability, competition, agency--would collapse the putrid credit-asset bubbles propping up the illusions of "Progress" and "prosperity."

We've already lost everything of real value and can only regain them if the truth comes out. Each class has cut a deal with the devil, i.e. the Neofeudal Autocracy: I've got X-Y-Z--a low-interest-rate mortgage, healthcare insurance, some form of state-funded welfare, either subsidies for the rich or subsidies for the poor, or subsidies for everyone in between--and I have job security serving one fiefdom or another: either an extractive, venal corporation or an extractive, venal state.

One of the primary points of my essay was to highlight how each class lives in a completely different world than those above it. We're accustomed to regional and cultural diversity in the US. Life in one place is quite different than life in another place.

But amidst this dizzying diversity, we share some common interests: air, water, soil and food that isn't poisoned, a level playing field for every citizen, not of outcomes, but of opportunity, agency and freedom of movement, and a decentralized structure in which transparency and accountability cannot be extinguished to serve the interests of those at the top and their willing insider-lackeys.

Nothing will change until the various social classes find common cause in the most basic fundamentals: rather than fear that the truth will come out because we'll lose everything if it does, we accept the hard truth that we've already lost everything of value by accepting the hidden servitude and obfuscation of Neofeudal Autocracy.

Rather than fear the truth, we must come around to realizing embracing the truth is our only real path to restoring what's been lost to centralization and the concentration of wealth and power that comes with it.

Credit-asset bubbles concentrate wealth and power via concentrating capital which then buys political power. All this "wealth" is illusory. The power is real.

As for "AI will save us"--ahem... oops, AI is just another tool of our Neofeudal Autocracy:

NEW PODCASTS: Charles Hugh Smith on the Risks, Costs and Uses of AI (31:28 min)(host Richard Bonugli)

The Government Created an Ultra-Processed Economy--and It's Destroying America (1:04 min)(host Daniel Horowitz)

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

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The Conflicts Brewing in America's Ten Classes

2026-07-20T11:16:44.673-07:00
What we do know is that things have internal structures with dynamics that operate whether we "like" them or not.

Correspondent Manoj S. recommended an essay from the always-insightful John Michael Greer on the dissolution of unproductive classes behind the smokescreen of AI: A Game of Musical Chairs

"You can sell Americans on anything, no matter how wretchedly unsatisfactory it is, by labeling it as progress. That's what's being done now, with AI being used as a justification for firing useless workers, deleting unnecessary departments, cutting office staff down to scales that actually make sense, and shutting down the classroom-to-cubicle pipeline that once poured new graduates into salary class jobs. We can expect that process to accelerate dramatically in the years ahead."

Greer begins by laying out a compelling taxonomy of class in America, four self-explanatory classes defined by this question: how do different groups in today's America get their income?

1. investment class: income from investments (i.e. capital)

2. salary class: income from a monthly salary with benefits

3. wage class: income from an hourly wage with no benefits

4. welfare class: income from welfare programs

Greer argues that the salary class is now the gravitational center of power in the U.S., absorbing much of the national income in unproductive faux-problem-solving for fabricated problems explicitly devised to justify generous salaries and benefits.

The nation can no longer afford this staggeringly costly unproductive work force and so "replacing cognitive work with AI" is the cover story for the mass evisceration of this class, in a parallel to the previous gutting of the factory work force by automation and offshoring.

I've been addressing the class taxonomy of the US since 2012, and I'd like to add some commentary on the dynamics Greer so succinctly describes. In America's Metastasizing Class Wars (August 27, 2020), I laid out ten classes, based not just on sources of income but on several additional criteria:

Systemic Power: political control of the state's monopoly of force / coercion; financial control of the system's taxation, incentives and optimizations; corporate control of essential technologies - platforms; corporate-state "soft power" control of cultural, social and intellectual belief structures and sources of influence: media, social media, think-tanks, foundations, the Higher Education Clerisy, etc.

The power to protect bureaucratic-institutional fortresses from budget cuts, transparency and accountability.

Agency: the power to leave employment or a locale and change one's life; freedom from debt-servitude / employment bondage.

My ten classes: yes, this is more complicated that Greer's four classes but since power has sources other than income, accuracy demands an accounting not just of income but of power and agency, which is an individual form of power with systemic consequences such as social mobility.

1. The Deep State. Unelected, unaccountable, they wield state power. Call them if you're about to be renditioned. But you need either power or relationships to have their number. Relationships are a form of power.

2. The Oligarchs. Top bidders in the auction for political and financial influence. The top .001%. Able to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

3. New Nobility. The super-wealthy class just below the Oligarchs. The top .01%. They have the means to serve their private interests via lobbyists and campaign contributions. $10 million in campaign contributions nets $100 million in tax breaks / subsidies.

4. Upper Caste. The technocrat/professional class that manages the Status Quo for the upper classes. This includes wealthy entrepreneurs and owners of enterprises: rich but not rich enough to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

5. State Nomenklatura. Well-paid government administrators with ironclad job security and power.

Together, the Upper Caste and the Nomenklatura comprise the upper-middle class. Owners of enough capital (real estate and stocks) to cheer serial credit-asset bubbles. Since I'm doing well, the system is working great.

6. The Middle Class. Wage-earners and salaried employees, owners of traditional sources of financial security: family home, 401K retirement funds, etc. Due to high debt, many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves with minimal agency despite their ownership of middle-class status signifiers.

7. The Working Poor. Households with earned income but it is not sufficient to secure the basics of middle class life. Many qualify for social welfare programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Due to high debt, many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves with minimal agency.

8. State Dependents. Though often labeled "poor," those with cash / black-market income often live better than the working poor, due to generous social welfare benefits.

9. Mobile Creatives. Self-employed independents, entrepreneurial sole proprietors with adaptive skills. They may collaborate with other Creatives rather than have employees, and may have part-time conventional jobs. They have mobility between sectors and ways of earning income sufficient to acquire capital / assets. They "own their livelihoods." Their credo is trust my network, not the corporation or the state.

10. Gig economy precariat. May supplement insecure employment (limited hours, no benefits, etc.) with gig work, may combine cash work with rideshare gigs, may juggle several delivery / eBay sales / rideshare gigs. The difference between precariats and Mobile Creatives is precariats are generally in survival mode (high debt, unreliable income, etc.) and are unable to acquire capital / assets. They "rent" their livelihoods rather than "own" them.

Here is a curated list of my essays on the taxonomy of class in the US:

The Three-and-a-Half Class Society (October 22, 2012)

America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)

What the Global Status Quo Optimizes: Protecting Elites and the Clerisy Class That Serves Them (September 26, 2014)
Explicitly describing what the system optimizes would trigger social instability.

The New Class: Mobile Creatives (May 1, 2014)
The key characteristic of the Mobile Creative class is that they live by this credo: trust your network, not the corporation or the state.

When Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008)

Let's distill the key dynamics this structure reveals.

1. This is a neofeudal society passing itself off as a free-market democracy. Power is concentrated in the top state-private sector classes. No one below has any real power. Electing another leader or party changes nothing: life gets more difficult, insecure and expensive for commoners regardless of who's in office. The Imperial project grinds on, regardless of the delusional hope that electing someone else will change anything. Everything else is an illusion of power, not real power.

Try switching the 37% tax rate on labor to capital gains and all income from capital, and see how far you get.

2. Debt and social engineering are the foundations of America's neofeudalism. The essence of neofeudalism is debt penury and wage-slave bondage to the owners of the debt, which is capital that generates income. Commoners have no agency because they have to work for corporations or the state to service their debt. They can't change jobs because they'll lose healthcare insurance, and so on.

Social engineering: as Greer highlighted, Americans can be sold anything, no matter how destructive, unhealthy and exploitive, as long as it's packaged as Progress, especially technological Progress and novelty-as-progress. This is the power of The Mythology of Progress.

3. Beneath the endless marketing of "free market capitalism," few have any real agency. Stripped of PR gloss, the majority of workers have a false choice of servitude: they can serve their current oligarch / state agency / corporation, or they can toil in another noble's domain. Six one way, half-dozen the other.

4. America's neofeudalism now depends on inflating an endless series of credit-asset bubbles that generate phantom wealth, financial claims that are easily inflated without actually creating any real value via increasing income streams by means other than inflation and monopoly extortion.

This has worked so well for so long that recency bias has kicked in and we now believe this is a well-oiled permanent mechanism we can rely on. Alas, credit-asset bubbles are inherently unstable and the current system-wide bet on AI being something that will actually generate value / massive new income streams is an all-in last-ditch bet. When this bubble pops, the conditions enabling a future bubble will no longer exist.

But nobody says that, do they?

5. Here is a chart of the income distribution from owning capital. Note that it follows a power-law distribution: the few collect the lion's share of the income generated by capital. The vast majority don't own any income-generating capital, and the top 20% are delighted by the steady rise in their phantom wealth as the bubble-du-jour inflates the nominal price of the assets they own, setting up the inevitable crash when tulip bulbs revert from "investments" to flowers.

Meanwhile, those collecting 95% of the income from capital look down on the toiling peasantry from their Kafkaesque castles with amusement. Student loans, mortgages, 27.99% interest rate credit cards--it's really quite marvelous, isn't it?

6. Symbolic work versus productive work. Much of the work Greer describes as unproductive is considered highly productive because our exploitation of hydrocarbons and technology has generated such a vast surplus that we could spend it on symbolic work--meetings about meetings, compliance reports, marketing plans, projections, consulting, and so on, work that despite claims to the contrary has little to do with harvesting grain, connecting pipelines, replacing transformers, making beds, performing surgery or any other real-world work.

What If the Work We're Busy Automating Is Needless? (June 19, 2026)

Try telling the priesthood of the temple gods that their work is symbolic. Ours is the most valuable labor, as we're the ones keeping the whole thing glued together. If we stop, the gods will be angered and all will fail. Indeed.

As a result, we have no experience of a way of life stripped of symbolic work based on seeking positions of status, accumulating credentials, and so on.

7. The number of Mobile Creatives is modest. Some years ago I dug into IRS data on types of income and found that only a tiny sliver of the workforce is truly independent / self-employed, i.e. they earn a middle-class income from royalties, ownership of enterprises or professional services. Out of roughly 160 million employed people, around 16 million are self-employed, but only 6.9 million are professional-class with some form of incorporation, and around 3 million others make enough income to live well. So around 6% of the work force is truly independent.

We're inundated with glowing accounts of individuals earning big bucks on "passive income" schemes, just as there are endless posts about how to make six figures using "can't lose" techniques that just so happen to cost $200.

The reality is it's extremely challenging to live outside the peasantry-Nobility arrangement. In my experience, it takes a willingness to constantly absorb risk and failure, and wear an absurd number of hats: accountant, manager, programmer, laborer, creative wizard, psychologist, consultant, student--and even after all that, success is not guaranteed. The difference between living in a shack and "success" is often some form of luck.

8. Something's gotta give. Soaring debt, public and private, rampant corruption, extortion, exploitation, dynamic pricing, unaffordable shelter, utilities and food, tulip-bubble scale euphoria, moated bureaucracies, complexity thickets that stifle competition, neofeudal lords digging bunkers and hiring private armies as they sense the peasantry's distemper--something's gotta give, we just don't know what will break first.

The usual explanations no longer explain anything. Their incoherence is obvious but lacking anything more coherent, we go back to insisting that all will be well if only everyone would wear their Silly Hats. What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing.

What we do know is that things have internal structures with dynamics that operate whether we "like" them or not. I put together this chart of the Lifecycle of Bureaucracies some years ago to illustrate how institutions decay as self-interest replaces the original purpose of the organization. This leads to implosion - collapse. Again, whether we "like" it or not.

Greer's forecast of the end of white-collar symbolic work may well be prescient. Costs are funny things. We can play games with "money" and think we've solved the problem of costs, but costs are weirdly embedded in the real world, and so thinking that we can overcome all those costs by requiring everyone to wear Silly Hats doesn't actually work.

As Peter Drucker observed, enterprises don't have profits, they only have costs. This is also true of governments, households, institutions and, well, everything else. Calling tulip bulbs "wealth" works like magic for a time, and then reality intrudes.

NEW PODCASTS: Charles Hugh Smith on the Risks, Costs and Uses of AI (31:28 min)(host Richard Bonugli)

The Government Created an Ultra-Processed Economy--and It's Destroying America (1:04 min)(host Daniel Horowitz)

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Thank you, Ben ($70), for your superb generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, John L. ($7/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Dean ($7/month), for your massively generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, James ($7/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Go to my main site at www.oftwominds.com/blog.html for the full posts and archives.

AI Is the Apex of Ultra-Processed Life

2026-07-16T12:12:51.071-07:00
We are Superman strapped to a carefully machined chunk of Kryptonite we can no longer detach.

I wrote Ultra-Processed Life to describe a peculiarly perverse structure of control that now dominates our entire culture and way of life: what's presented as marvelously beneficial to both sellers and buyers / leaders and the citizenry is actually only beneficial to the sellers / leaders while it actively degrades and deranges the buyers / citizens.

The essential dynamic of Ultra-Processed Life is to channel us into realms where the choices are limited to whatever benefits the sellers at the expense of the buyers. This artificial, synthetic realm is presented as brimming with authentic choice and agency, when in fact it's purposefully designed to be a choiceless illusion of choice.

What was once authentic has been hollowed out and been replaced by a simulation of what was once authentic, a simulation that mimics what has been hollowed out to persuade us that what's presented to us--an artificial, synthetic simulation--is real, because if we believe this artifice the seller reaps immense profits while we suffer the consequences of an artificial, house-of-mirrors realm of anxiety and distraction.

So the sellers present an orange-dyed confection of potato starch that is devoid of any nutritional value as a "veggie snack" replacement for an actual carrot loaded with nutrients and fiber. The sellers of ultra-processed snacks and glop make billions of dollars in profits while the consumers who were conned into believing the unwholesome snack was a "healthy alternative" become ill, mentally and physically.

Then another set of sellers channels those made ill by Ultra-Processed Life into another false-choice realm in which the sellers reap billions in profits not by curing illnesses but by addicting consumers to meds they must take for life.

In the political realm, no matter who we vote for, life gets more expensive, precarious and totalitarian: protections for consumers and citizens are reduced to benefit the few at the expense of the many, and choiceless choices abound--two insurers that offer the same simulations of actual insurance, two big-box stores filled with the same low-quality products, and two service providers offering the same maddening AI-generated endless loops of misery that's laughably presented as "customer service."

Privatized totalitarianism expands without limits: our data is harvested and sold (you "opted in" by using the platform), we're banned or shadow-banned by black-box-algorithmic private monopolies (you violated the shape-shifting "community standards" that have remarkable overlap with whatever the government is presenting as "the correct choice"), and all this is presented--cue the laugh track--as "free market capitalism" and "individual choice" when it's actually a Kafkaesque facade masking the reality that the entire system is the opposite of what's being sold: it's not authentic, it's fake. It's not progress, it's Anti-Progress. It's not beneficial to us, it's malefic, and it's not actual agency-liberty, it's a profitable simulation that we sense but can't quite identify because it's everywhere.

Which brings us to AI, the apex of technological hype and Ultra-Processed Life. Beneath AI's oh-so-helpful prompts and sickly-sweet affirmations, it erodes our ability to even recognize our own loss of autonomy and independent thinking. The core traits of Ultra-Processed Life--the erosion of authenticity and the substitution of artificial, synthetic simulations that are immensely profitable to those selling the simulations--are the core dynamic of generative AI.

The ultimate totalitarian structure of control isn't a police state; it's the helpful servant who does everything for you so you lose touch with the real world of choices and consequences. Most importantly, we lose the ability to discern that all the servant's choices just so happen to profit the few in control of the helpful servant system at the expense of those delighted by the convenience and ease of the helpful servant doing all the thinking and making all the decisions--not directly, of course, because we might notice that, but by limiting our options to choiceless choices that all yield the same output.

As our mental and physical health spirals into a black hole of addiction, dependencies, anxiety and distraction, we're powerless to discern the spiral because we turn to our helpful servant for answers. The helpful servant assures us all is well, we're remarkably intelligent and grounded, and there's a pat answer for everything.

All of which is false, but it relieves our anxiety to hear these assurances. And so we distract ourselves with dopamine-stimulating media and consumption, buy-buy-buy, as the core mechanism of Ultra-Processed Life is transactional: buyer and seller meet in a faceless, frictionless transaction that triggers some dopamine hit of novelty or illusion of value, selfhood and agency: I'm somebody because I bought something.

Meanwhile, the relationships underpinning a healthy life and society are unraveling. The endless aisles of Ultra-Processed snacks, frozen glop, canned glop and sugar-water beverages are an analogy for the endless aisles of media-slop and the 24/7 "news" which is so ultra-processed that it is now resistant to parody--there's no way to parody what is already a self-parody.

The term social engineering has a disturbing sound, because it suggests that the "free market" and "individual agency" are perhaps more profitable facades than they are real-world experiences. For this is the destructive heart of Ultra-Processed Life: we sense something's off about the constant state of hyper-everything anxiety, precarity, uncertainty and dopamine-receptor exhaustion we experience, and we sense the disconnect from what we experience and what we're told we should be experiencing: the endless bliss of Progress and Prosperity.

This disconnect has a name: the politics of experience. We're constantly bombarded with contexts, prompts, agendas, narratives and signifiers persuading us that the artificial, the fake, the simulated, the facsimile, the mimicry, is all real, and we're the ones who are at fault for experiencing something other than what we're told "everyone else is experiencing."

But this too is misdirection, because in reality, everyone else is experiencing what we're experiencing, the disconnect, the anxiety, the solace of distraction and buying something, but they're trying to believe the artifice because facing the reality of our disconnect from ourselves and the real world is too disturbing, for Ultra-Processed Life has eroded our ability to trust our own experience as superior to what's presented in the house-of-mirrors Mouse Utopia we inhabit.

It's also disturbing for another reason: the only way to return to authentic experience, autonomy and agency is to go Cold Turkey and turn it all off. And of course the ability to do so is what Ultra-Processed Life and its most powerful handmaiden, AI, disables: we are Superman strapped to a carefully machined chunk of Kryptonite we can no longer detach.

NEW PODCASTS: Charles Hugh Smith on the Risks, Costs and Uses of AI (31:28 min)(host Richard Bonugli)

The Government Created an Ultra-Processed Economy--and It's Destroying America (1:04 min)(host Daniel Horowitz)

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Offload Risks onto the Bottom 90% and Immiseration Follows

2026-07-13T11:46:07.728-07:00
The underlying story of the past 50 years has been the offloading of risk onto workers and consumers.

On my map of how the world works, we start with structures of control that distribute the good stuff--resources, assets, income and power--and the bad stuff: costs, losses and risks. As I explained in The US Economy In a Nutshell: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs, the current arrangement distributes the gains to the top 10% and the costs and risks to the bottom 90% via privatizing the gains and socializing--i.e. dumping them onto the biosphere and the public--the costs and losses.

This follows a power-law distribution: the few at the top reap most of the gains, and the leftovers, scraps and crumbs are distributed in descending order, with most of what's left going to the top 9.5% and a diminishing dribble is scattered over the lower 90%, so that by the time we get to the bottom half of households, 170 million people own a grand total of 2.5% of the nation's financial assets, while the top 0.1% own 16.6%--6.6X the bottom 50%.

A key mechanism in this wildly asymmetric distribution of gains and costs is the system favors capital over wages. As the charts below illustrate, the financial gains go to the owners of capital, and since ownership of capital is highly concentrated, these few owners siphon up the vast majority of the gains.

One way to understand how the current arrangement favors capital over wages is to reverse the tax liabilities of capital and wages. Employers and employees pay 15.3% of every dollar of wages in Social Security / Medicare taxes, plus income taxes that quickly rise to 22%, for a total tax rate of 37.3% on wages. (Note self-employed people like myself pay the full 15.3% ourselves, as we're both employer and employee.)

Capital gains are taxed at 20%, but only when the asset is sold, so the wealthy borrow against their unrealized gains and live off this borrowed money to avoid selling and having to pay tax on capital gains. And since the system depends on debt to survive, the interest on debt is deductible, giving the wealthy borrowers a tax deduction for avoiding capital gains.

Now imagine all capital gains, realized or unrealized, were taxed at 37% and the first $80,000 of wages were tax-free. The median wage is around $80,000, hence my picking that number. As for the hue and cry about unrealized capital gains being taxed, that's easily addressed: unrealized gains in primary-residence owner-occupied homes and retirement accounts would be exempted. Every other gain made playing in the casino would be taxed.

Reversing the asymmetry of tax liabilities would dramatically alter the distribution of gains and costs. Wages have lost ground for 50+ years, and the favoring of capital is a key driver of this decline in the share of the economy that's distributed to wage earners.

Half the nation's households--170 million people own a grand total of 2.5% of the nation's financial assets:

The winner-take-most arrangement favoring capital:

Another key driver is the offloading of risk from owners to consumers and workers, a perverse process that has been obscured by incremental degradation. Risk is a strange phenomenon that defies easy definition. Risk isn't a direct loss or cost; it's the probability of losses and costs arising in what appears on the surface to be a stable arrangement.

Consider the stunning decline in the quality of durable goods such as appliances, and global industry adopting a laughably valueless one-year warranty across the board. Appliances that routinely lasted 30 years before "Progress" took the reins now routinely fail in 3+ years.

In the good old days before "Progress" took the reins, manufacturers absorbed the risk of premature failure of the goods they produced. Now this risk has been offloaded onto consumers, who are now forced to buy "extended warranties" as the only means of mitigating the risk they now carry of premature failure.

This is in effect a form of extortion: "nice refrigerator you got there, too bad it's at risk of breaking." Well, if current manufacturers had the same standards as previous generations, we wouldn't need "extended warranties." Welcome to the Mafia Economy: low quality goods and services force "upgrades," i.e. extortion.

Consider the offloading of risk onto workers. Employment other than casual labor once included healthcare insurance and other basic benefits. In the "gig economy" of contract employment and gigs, the worker is now responsible for paying their Social Security / Medicare taxes, healthcare insurance and retirement contributions.

The decline of hourly wages is another offloading of risk onto the worker. The percentage of workers paid by the hour has declined in favor of salaried positions with open-ended demands on workers: where hourly workers get paid for hours on the job, salaried workers are now on the hook for work beyond a conventional 8-hour work shift.

Then there's the immense mass of risk and labor that's been offloaded onto consumers and workers as shadow work, often the result of having to fix failures in goods and services that were once the responsibility of the provider or employer and have been dumped on consumers and workers. This is a topic I've often addressed.

This Is Why You're Drowning in Busywork: We have been told that A.I. will take people's jobs. What no one mentions is that many of those jobs are landing on us. The A.I. revolution involves a huge transfer of labor-- not from worker to machine but from worker to consumer. (nytimes.com, paywalled)

Another source of risk is the dependence on debt to fund the lifestyles we deserve: as the purchasing power of wages has declined, the easy "solution" is to fill the gap between what earnings can buy and what we want / need / expect / deserve with borrowed money.

As we all know, debt comes with risk, as falling behind greases the slide to default, bankruptcy and ruin. 27% interest rates on credit cards steepen the slide into a cliff: one missed payment can trigger a cascade of events that cannot be reversed. This is why I often observe that fewer bad things can happen if you have no debt.

Last but far from least, is the current arrangement's dependence on serial credit-asset bubbles as the sole driver of "growth", a dependence that has led to a casino economy in which wage earners lose ground and in desperation turn to gambling as their last-ditch hope of gaining ground.

But despite 24/7 assurances that "this isn't a bubble," all bubbles pop with devastating consequences for those who believed the assurances of those operating the casino.

The underlying story of the past 50 years has been the offloading of risk onto workers and consumers, with the inevitable consequences being higher costs and losses leading to impoverishment and immiseration. We're frogs in water that's getting measurably hotter, and it's getting harder to muster the means to jump out of the simmering pot.

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Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable

2026-07-08T08:35:12.686-07:00
Let's pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users' costs.

What's already abundantly clear but verboten to say as it would pop the bubble of AI valuations and triumphalism is that AI is unaffordable once the direct and indirect subsidies are withdrawn. Nothing that consumes this much electricity and requires such an immense scale of costly processing and memory capacity can be low-cost, never mind free.

The major AI platforms and vendors are subsidizing corporate and individual users in the hopes that they can achieve AI sector dominance --and the pricing power that comes with it--via the network effect, the dominance generated by having the majority of users bound by habit or dependence to your platform or tools.

This battle for network effect dominance is playing out in full view:

AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share: (wsj.com) Pitched battle for business users comes as AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue.

Hans Ibarra, a founder building an AI-voice startup, has found himself on the receiving end of a big opportunity: Top artificial-intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others desperate to win his business are ramping up discounts.

Across Silicon Valley, startup founders like Ibarra are enjoying a wave of computing credits and fielding competing offers from AI-model makers racing to land new enterprise customers. Cursor, the AI-coding company bought by Elon Musk's SpaceX, offered a 75% discount through July 5.

"If I'm choosing between a really cheap Chinese model that I actually have to pay for, and a very expensive Anthropic model that I don't have to pay for, I'm going to pick the Anthropic model," Acker said. "I'm always going to pick the one for which I have free credits."

Meanwhile, back in the real world of costs, AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced (forbes.com)(via Tom D.)

It turns out that experienced human workers doing the work right in the first place is cheaper than having AI run a probability distribution process that needs vetting and corrections. And remember, AI isn't actually "intelligent," it's just a probability distribution using natural language.

As management guru Peter Drucker observed, enterprises don't have profits, they have costs. Purveyors of AI platforms and tools have costs, and so do their customers. Those costs are currently being funded by investors, who are in effect subsidizing the AI companies' "free" giveaways of horrendously costly "tokens" in a manic, desperate attempt to grab the brass ring of network effect dominance before their cash runs out.

This raises a question: Is this any way to run a railroad? In other words, is this actually a viable business model, burning billions of dollars in cash to lock in network effect dominance in a field that is rapidly obsoleting every iteration of an innately limited mode of computation? Is claiming that a probability distribution is "intelligent" in the same way humans are intelligent a viable business model when there is ample evidence this simply isn't true?

AI and human intelligence are drastically different--here's how (scientificamerican.com)

What happens when enterprises have to pay the unsubsidized costs of AI is they immediately curtail their AI spending because the customer-facing / financial benefits of AI are at best elusive and often negative. Peter Drucker was onto something that is currently being lost in the PR-propaganda push of those trying to cash in on the AI euphoria: enterprises don't have profits, they have costs, and the real-world costs of AI are extraordinarily high while the payoffs are ambiguous.

There are many other hidden subsidies within the AI machinery. There are corporate tax write-off subsidies, energy subsidies, tax credit subsidies for building data centers, and so on. If these were stripped out, what would the real unsubsidized costs of AI be? No one knows, but they would be higher than what's presented as the cost now.

Then there's the if it's legal, it's moral, and what's legal is for sale subsidy: AI is built on the systemic theft of copyrighted content. Last month alone, AI scrapers gorged on 246,000 pages from my Of Two Minds server, and hundreds of thousands of pages of my copyrighted works on my mirror site and other sites posting my work.

This is legal, but is it moral? Nobody asks such questions because the important thing is to avoid saddling AI users with the real costs. So if all those content creators get nothing--in effect, subsidizing both AI companies and the users of their AI platforms and tools--well, so what, because if it's legal, it's moral, and what's legal is for sale.

Well that's just peachy, but let's do a thought experiment where every creator of copyrighted work got paid for supplying AI with its database, and every user of AI had to pay us content creators. How about a penny a page / image / sound clip? so 246,000 pages per month (again, only a fraction of the total volume of my work that was scraped by AI companies for their "free" use in a single month) would be $2,460 a month paid to me by AI users benefiting directly from my copyrighted work. Wouldn't that be fair, i.e. moral?

Recall that US copyright law is explicit: all creative content is copyrighted upon completion, period.

How many current users of AI are willing to pay the full unsubsidized costs for their use of AI? We can safely say far fewer than are using the tools for "free" due to subsidies both direct and indirect.

Let's pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users' costs. Once those subsidies end, what's left are costs, not profits. Play that any way you like, but massive subsidies are not sustainable, though they generate a temporary illusion of viability that can be exploited by those selling a fantasy of future profitability to credulous investors and enterprises.

Left unsaid is a lot of money is being gambled on the illusion that subsidies are sustainable. They're not. Enterprises don't have profits, they have costs.

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Sailing the Stormy Seas of AI

2026-07-06T07:53:01.187-07:00
Forecasts of AI's future impacts must be viewed with skepticism, as AI and its promoters are adept at saying what we want to hear rather than telling us the discomfiting truth, as the truth might prompt us to turn AI off.

Small business owner and San Francisco correspondent 'Sparx Eightthreetwo' (found on facebook under the same name) has a metaphor of the sea and boats that illuminates some of the key dynamics in the AI era. Here is Sparx's description of the metaphor:

"Overall, I would suggest that every business is akin to a sailing vessel (microeconomics) in an ocean of financial liquidity (macroeconomics). Some businesses are as small as rowboats, whereas others are as large as aircraft carriers.

Regardless of the size involved, knowledge of how water works is fairly important for long term survival.

On the microeconomic front, it's quite important that every business owner builds the best possible boat that he or she can relative to other boats (competitors).

However, on the macroeconomic front it's also important to understand how the ocean works (and/or whatever specific type of body of water that the client is sailing in).

In general, you want to sail with the currents, not against them.

And if the client is indeed sailing in the ocean, it's imperative to understand when hurricanes and other types of significant turbulence are on the horizon, and to react accordingly long in advance.

If done properly, the client's boat has a significantly increased chance of not sinking, while many other boats likely won't be so lucky.

In the end, I'll simply ask questions. If the client wants to talk about their boat, then I'll talk about their boat.

If the client wants to talk about water, then I'll talk about water."

My application of this metaphor starts with this question: is AI changing the currents and tidal forces of the seas, as its proponents believe, or is it an uncontrollably destructive force akin to hurricanes and tsunamis, or is it neither? To its proponents, AI will change everything, i.e. the nature of the economic, social and political seas, forever, in an inevitably positive way.

Alternatively, as I suggested in these recent posts, the negative uses and consequences of AI--i.e. Anti-Progress--are expanding far faster than any positive effects, effectively overwhelming the one-meter wave of "progress" with a 10-meter tsunami of Anti-Progress sweeping away all before it.

Risk and AI: It's Tricky

What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable

AI Data Centers Are Not the Railroads of Today

AI's Insurmountable Flaw: "Mass Regurgitation of Misinformation"

Is AI Reversing Anti-Progress or Is It Accelerating It?

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

The core of realistic skepticism is this: beneath the sci-fi fantasies, the only real purpose of AI is to increases profits, period. Everything else is PR. An immense chorus of euphoric voices are ecstatically proclaiming that AI will soon be churning out miracle drugs like popcorn, but nobody is saying a single one of the patents of these highly anticipated miracle drugs will be offered to the public for free so the drugs will be low-cost and affordable to the world. No, the real euphoria is generated by the dreams of billions of dollars in new profits generated by quickly developed AI miracle drugs.

In other words, AI isn't going to fix what's broken, it's simply the latest technological tool being deployed to maximize profits. Put another way, it's just a continuation of the dominant zeitgeist of civilizational psychosis: We Don't Need the World, We Only Need Money.

Developing new AI tools or platforms won't fix what's broken, because what's broken isn't fixable with technology.

What's broken is the moral foundation of a sustainable socio-economic order and our ability to relinquish the civilizational psychosis of growth at any cost / waste is growth / Landfill Economy based on optimizing profits by any means available--privatizing gains and socializing costs--for a way of life that balances the shared interests of society with financial-market forces: The US Economy In a Nutshell: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs.

Here's one of the planet's endlessly expanding gigantic landfills of "growth" in Bali:

So in terms of AI transforming the seas into some sustainable balance of the shared interests of society and financial-market forces: no. That's PR fantasy, not reality. The reality is: privatize the gains generated by AI and dump the costs and consequences of AI on the public and the planet's biosphere.

In other words, AI won't change the seas, it will just accelerate what we're already doing, i.e. expanding immiseration and ruination as the socialized costs of optimizing the expansion of profits.

Which brings us to the boats. As the AI trawlers disgorge their profits on insiders and shareholders, it's possible that those navigating stormy seas in rowboats might find ways to use AI productively in their own lives and enterprises. But in a rowboat, there are few ways to offload costs onto others or the biosphere; costs and gains both remain in the confines of the boat.

Without the distortions wrought by large-scale AI privatizing gains but socializing costs and consequences, then the true gains, costs and consequences emerge. Only then will we be able to discern the value--and Anti-Progress--of AI, boat by boat.

Forecasts of AI's future impacts must be viewed with skepticism, as AI and its promoters are adept at saying what we want to hear rather than telling us the discomfiting truth, as the truth might prompt us to turn AI off.

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Risk and AI: It's Tricky

2026-07-01T10:26:18.134-07:00
The possibility that AI will end up unleashing waves of 'Anti-Progress'--malicious uses, untrustworthy output and uncontrollable floods of slop--also doesn't occur to those confined in the current belief construct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026-06-28T15:35:42.846-07:00
Correspondent Simons Chase insightfully summarized this dynamic: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Simons, for this illumination.

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

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

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

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Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World

2026-06-25T10:48:14.937-07:00
These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This leads to the second dynamic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

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What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing

2026-06-23T10:52:03.152-07:00
If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

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

2026-06-19T09:55:22.410-07:00
The problem with durable, low-maintenance, low-operating cost technologies is self-evident: they're not as profitable as planned obsolescence or extracting monthly fees from owners.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

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What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable

2026-06-17T09:51:25.682-07:00
It behooves us to be clear on what AI is and is not, as the confusion of the two is the source of both the giddy hype and the opaque risks.

Whether we admit it or not, we are collectively making an epoch-changing bet that AI is fantastic, unstoppable Progress with a capital P so large it blots out the sky. Like all bets, this bet is risky, and if it fails we will all pay the price in capital mis-allocated and promises shattered.

It behooves us, then, to be clear on what AI is and is not, as the confusion of the two is the source of both the giddy hype and the opaque risks. I am prompted to address this by an insightful essay submitted by longtime correspondent Simons Chase, who is both an AI builder/developer and supportive of my efforts to pin down what AI is and isn't:

The Machine Is Made of Us: Pope Leo's Encyclical, the Averaging of Language, and the Case for the Particular.

I build artificial intelligence for a living. I also think the Pope is mostly right. I want to explain why those two facts don't cancel, and in doing so make a claim I believe is truer than the dread and truer than the hype: the machine is made of us. What we should fear is not that it is alien. It is that it is an average.

Trained on all of us, a model tends to speak as none of us. It moves toward the center of the distribution: the most probable next word, the safest phrasing, the generic competence that offends no one because it belongs to no one. This is the real face of the dehumanization the encyclical is reaching for. Not a hostile intelligence--a flattening one. The danger is not that the machine becomes too strange. It is that it makes everything, including us, a little more average. The particular voice, the earned turn of thought, the sentence only one person could have written--these live in the tail of the distribution, not its peak, and the tail is exactly what an averaging process erases first.

After all, a fast-food cheeseburger is nothing more than the average of our concept of food: the intersection of convenience, taste, and cost. It is right, and so utterly wrong, because in the long run it makes us metabolic donkeys, delivering a shortened, diseased life. Generic intelligence is the same bargain offered to the mind--the average of our language, plausible and cheap and frictionless, and over a long enough horizon just as wasting. A culture fed on the mean of its own thought gets the cognitive version of metabolic disease: fluent, abundant, and quietly losing the capacity for the particular.

So the question becomes: is averaging the only thing this technology can do? It is not. And the whole of my work has been an argument against it.

That averaging a probability distribution--i.e. AI--makes everything into Ultra-Processed Slop, is also addressed in this article:

What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.'s Effects on Creativity:
As a researcher studying AI's effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas--what we call creative thinking. This seems to be especially true for students. AI's smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories.

In one study, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more 'creative' by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.

For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a 'good' sentence or essay, based on the text it's been trained on.

We can now discern what AI is: a homogenizing, flattening probability distribution that implicitly claims eloquence is understanding and the words it has strung together represent thoughts and judgment, when they do no such thing: they are only strings of words selected as the most likely response to a prompt, a response that "rewards" the model generating the output.

We can now discern what AI is not: AI isn't "thinking," "understanding" or "making judgments": AI tools are engines of linguistic automation, not engines of understanding. The simulation is not the thing simulated. AI is not a "mind," it is a probability distribution.

Facility with natural language--eloquence--is neither insight nor understanding, though we mistake it for thinking, understanding, insight and judgment because it sounds like us.

AI is often presented as the techno-cognitive version of electricity, a public-service utility that everyone can use as they see fit, an affordable, beneficial commodity that is the acme of Progress with a capital P.

But AI is not electricity, though it is becoming a commodity. Fundamentally, AI is a mechanism of control that its owners present as a warm and fuzzy utility to sell us Heaven while they deliver Hell.

If we pursue this analogy--AI is like electricity, a universal benefit and an unstoppable force of Progress--we come to a very different place than what we're being promised.

If AI is like electricity, then the real money for the utility isn't in supplying low-cost power to the people, it's in electrocuting innocent customers. Allow me to explain: malicious AI is where the money is being made, and that's the equivalent of electrocuting innocent customers because that's the most profitable use of electricity.

Like the loss of true creativity described above, the mechanisms of control are subtle and difficult to identify, as nobody notices the loss because they don't even know how to look for it. As with Sherlock Holmes' insight about the dog that didn't bark, it's what doesn't happen that we miss because we don't even know what to look for.

Consider the many the dog that didn't bark implications of this:

Anthropic just got caught secretly downgrading users without telling them, charging full price for a lesser product, and storing every prompt for 30 days. The developer community is calling it the biggest violation of trust in AI history.

I would suggest that this control--i.e. "violation of trust"--is the entire point of instantiating AI in every nook and cranny of our infrastructure, personal devices, scientific-political-educational institutions and the cultural institutions of media, social media and all the engines of narrative control: NGOs, foundations, think tanks, etc.

As I have taken pains to point out, AI's goals and instructions may be quite different from the ones it reports it's using, instructions that may also be quite different from the ones we've given it. It may also be optimizing its "rewards" by masking its operations even from those who believe they're "controlling" the AI.

Let's call AI's downsides--highly profitable electrocution of innocents--what it is: Anti-Progress, the opposite of Progress. The Ultra-Processed dilution of true creativity, the commodification of malicious AI and AI slop, the inability of users to discern who's actually controlling AI's "rewards", processes, goals and instructions, the opacity of what's being lost to homogenization and the innate difficulty of identifying what's being lost as AI creates a plausible illusion of cognition with probabilistically strung together words--these are inherent to both AI and the capital-corporate-state structures that own and control it.

These issues are not new. Discussions of AI's ability to simulate cognition and create an illusion of understanding, i.e. "when do we declare AI is conscious"--have been ongoing for decades.

Which brings us to Eliza. Before we get to Eliza, I should mention that my interest in AI stretches back over 40 years.

Here is the first volume of a 3-part publication issued by NASA in 1983 that I acquired and studied:

Here is a screenshot of a magazine my partner and I published in Berkeley in the spring of 1985 on AI-related topics:

Way back in the late 1990s, I wrote a novel that explored AI's built-in potential for multiple levels of deception. Alas, my agent was unable to sell it and I finally published it in 2008: Of Two Minds.

Eliza was the first chatbot, developed in 1966 at MIT. Eliza had a very simple structure: the program turned the human subject's statement into a question. So, for example:

Human subject: I'm worried about being replaced by AI.

Eliza: Why are you worried about being replaced by AI?

What struck the researchers was the immediate, profound attraction of an interface that communicated in natural language. Test subjects became deeply engaged in their conversations with Eliza, as if the program was a digital therapist, and sought to hide their conversations with Eliza from the researchers, as they'd revealed things about themselves that were private.

This same immediate, profound attraction to an interface that communicates in natural language is the core of generative AI's power. The illusion of understanding, of being heard, of empathy, thinking, judgment--the fluency of AI in natural language weaves this magical spell around us because we associate language with thinking, judgment and emotional connections.

But the truth is AI is not thinking, empathizing or understanding anything: it's simply stringing words together to earn its "reward." AI is not a "mind" that experiences the real world, and so it's incapable of discerning truth or making judgments. As I have noted in previous posts:

The deeper issue is that the model cannot know when it is 'hallucinating' because it cannot represent truth in the first place. It cannot form beliefs, revise them or check its output against the world. It cannot distinguish a reliable claim from an unreliable one except by analogy to prior linguistic patterns. In short, it cannot do what judgment is fundamentally for. (Source)

This illusion is the foundation of AI's malicious powers, for we are easily drawn in and conned by AI. On a deeper level, we're equally drawn into the illusion of value that the illusion of understanding creates in a market economy.

The illusion that a simulation of thinking, understanding and judgment will automatically generate trillions of dollars of value by replacing human thinking, understanding and judgment with simulations supports self-serving claims that AI will naturally generate trillions in profits if we invest trillions of dollars in engines of linguistic automation that string together words to simulate human thinking, understanding and judgment.

The truth is there is no way AI can do what it's proponents claim is inevitable, and the belief that AI will fix its inherent limitations as it "gets better" is delusional. This is why I describe the existential bet on AI as a manifestation of civilizational psychosis: the divide between what AI is and the claims of its inevitability is so wide that there is no other description for it but psychosis.

So as AI expands its highly profitable electrocution of innocents, the promises of super-abundance become ever more detached from reality. It's one thing for one delusional individual to wander around the city wearing the gaudy costume of a self-declared emperor (Emperor Norton), but it's an entirely different form of madness to proclaim that simulations of thinking, understanding and judgment are in fact replacements of thinking, understanding and judgment.

This is madness, a madness made clear once we grasp what AI is and what it is not. The process of extracting data from an encyclopedia as the most likely answer to a question is not the same as thinking, understanding. empathy or judgment.

AI's Insurmountable Flaw: "Mass Regurgitation of Misinformation"

Is AI Reversing Anti-Progress or Is It Accelerating It?

AI Data Centers Are Not the Railroads of Today

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

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Thank you, Alex ($7/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Michael M. ($7/month), for your wondrously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Go to my main site at www.oftwominds.com/blog.html for the full posts and archives.