This is a good post, and there are a lot of different threads you could try to elaborate on.
I've just started reading _Number Go Up_ and the two things that I find myself mulling over are (1) there's a basic idea in economics that prices provide information and create incentives, and you get weird incentives when you have prices that are disconnected from real world utility. (2) Whatever intuitions I have about recognizing scams (and that's not something I think about very often), they fall short of knowing what to make of an ecosystem in which some people are clearly engaged in deliberate scams, and a whole lot of other people are involved in more-or-less good faith, and they both boost each other. That's probably common, but the scale with which it occurred during the crypto boom is hard to fathom (and, as you say, has gravitational effects).
Great insight here - surprised not to see this theme more often:
“The primary story of the post-techlash years hasn’t been driven by new technologies or old companies.”
The wealth part is much more of a driver and a good explanation for why things go sideways sometimes.
One thing I will say, however, is that we are fortunate that this exorbitant wealth (usually) cannot actually buy elections, at any level. Sure, money in politics is a big and relevant problem, but for whatever reason, there is no corresponding domination of electoral outcomes in proportion to the wealth of some of these actors - this is evidenced by the fact that the presidency and both houses of Congress are (again) actually up for grabs this year.
There is an impact, for certain, but there is also plenty of resistance, and for now, enough of it to keep governing from completely going sideways. Can’t be sure it will stay that way, but at least we have that going for us.
I've done pretty well as an investor by recognizing that most Americans have been broke since the Reagan Revolution and that there is nothing to invest in so the only thing to do is buy stocks. I retired in the mid-90s and haven't done a lick of work since. Meanwhile, whenever I chide myself for spending too much on a new computer or a vacation, the stock market laughs and says "number go up".
Jeez, sounding like some bomb-throwing anarchist here. We've all seen that graph of the concentration of wealth, but I don't recall anything more specific than that, on how that wealth is distributed among that .01% or whatever the number is these days. Like Donald Trump's shell corporations, probably almost impossible to untangle anyway, though apparantly we all think we know how much money Musk and Theil and all the other robber barrons have, I see those numbers all the time. We peasants think of those numbers as liquid assets, but of course they're not, and of course practically that doesn't matter. Money attracts and generates money once it achieves escape velocity, which our billionaires did long ago. This Guilded Age can only end like the last one, in a global economic collapse. Governments can tinker at the margins, but our billionaires won't give up power any other way. That or a global war, which has its own set of issues, which they are "planning" for.
We might also see money as an amplifier. Not only the inertia of all mass, but an amplification of force.
Inertia is a good concept to use. The IT revolution has created an enormous landscape of discrete (classical) logical dependencies and as logic is inflexible, the landscapes are brittle, and because the landscapes are brittle, they have become harder and harder to change. Large logical landscapes show inertia. https://ea.rna.nl/2020/02/11/a-tipping-point-in-the-information-revolution/ and change is actually slowing down, both in organisations and in society. There *is* two-speed IT: adding is fast-ish, changing is slow. We're probably already in the second half of the traditional S-curve.
"I can't actually fathom what the next $50 million would be for.": I agree with the point you're making, but there is, in fact, a reasonable answer to that question: for improving other people's lives. Of course, that never occurs to most people who have $50 million to spare, let alone people who have billions to spare (which practically every billionaire does, because as you're pointing out, nobody needs a billion dollars). Just today, I saw a news piece* about some fool who plans to build a working replica of the Titanic, and when asked why, he replied, "It's a lot more fun to do the Titanic than it is to sit at home and count my money." Because obviously, those are the only alternatives, right? (Still, replicating the Titanic for a few billion dollars is maybe a step up from first buying and then trashing Twitter for over forty billion dollars.)
"the central theme of these past few years has been the astronomical concentration of capital among a handful of people": Correct. And it's a glaringly predictable and therefore presumptively intentional consequence of Reaganism / Thatcherism / whatever we may call detaxing and deregulating the rich and their corporations, for which tens of millions of fools have voted over and over again.
It's interesting to me that we are not collectively compelled to do much about this. In fact, we have myths that permeate our society that cause people to staunchly oppose doing anything about it.
There's a great TED talk you might be aware of/interested in by Ian Bremmer: The next global superpower isn't who you think. In many ways, it's a complementary analysis of what you've done here, talking about techno-polar worlds where individuals and corporations usurp nation states as the dominant power. It's always spooked me, but more recently, it's started to feel disturbingly prescient. This essay adds to my unease in that regard, and I really like the gravity analogy you use to tease it out.
On the topic of mobilizing global scale wealth: I'm a student of climate science and Indigenous studies. After a lot of learning and reflection, it's now relatively easy for me to understand the enormous scale and scope of capitalism and colonialism's harms. Therefore, it's just as easy to imagine that the money required to meaningfully unwind these problems and their ongoing harms needs to be tidal. When I indulge in fantasising about possessing that kind of wealth, I imagine even Elon-sized bank accounts could be very quickly depleted. Global-scale problems can devour global-scale wealth - it's I think a central reason why global-scale problems still persist.
When discussing this with friends they're often quick to point that thinking like this is exactly why I'm not a billionaire and never will be. I think that speaks to the kind of psychology that one must either possess or (in a model of "absolute power corrupts") eventually succumb to, in order to remain wealthy. Far more people know the name Bill Gates than the name Chuck Feeney (elsewhere in the comments on this aspect, you mention three - I assume - similar names, who I've never heard of before) so I think, psychologically, there's a question of ego, and of wanting to stay relevant that also drives this behaviour. This ties in with psychological/social assessments of Musk as someone who wants to "save the world" but only if he's the one doing it.
I feel there’s also a related point in here, psychologically speaking, about where individuals draw a sense of wellbeing from. As you say, COVID psychologically shattered us. As a student of both, colonialism and capitalism have the same effect on me. Cultivating an awareness of injustice and harm at such scales often leads me to increased personal distress and an erosion of mental wellbeing. It’s therefore very telling, I think, that gravitationally-wealthy people not only think differently – but seem to think oppositely. The wealth explosion of COVID is a fantastic example of this psychology. It’s perhaps too easy to say this without having my morality/psychology truly tempted/tested by gravitational wealth – but I’ll say it anyways – I just couldn’t live with myself if I made money out of that kind of thing. I would feel such shame and personal culpability.
Putting all these thoughts/anxieties into the context of AI and its potential for further concentrations of power is where my concerns really start to skyrocket. The track record of gravitationally wealthy people suggests they are differently motivated, psychologically, and that they are not averse to amplifying their power even if doing so came because of global-scale suffering. As you say, that is all extraordinarily not-great.
Factoring all this in alongside the Californian Ideology, alongside TESCREAL, alongside comments from folks like Thiel saying "We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism" and it starts to get dystopian really quickly. There's a psychology, but also an ideology/agenda that goes disturbingly under-explored. It all meshes together into a pretty dark picture.
"We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."
The problem that we have is that these people are now rich enough to remake the world to conform to their dreams. And their dreams are Ayn Rand and some SF that they've not properly understood. They are Dark Thermians.
The facile comparison is often made between tech giants and countries - e.g. "If Facebook was a country, it would be the biggest on earth".
What this analogy often misses is that tech billionaires want the power of states. They want to be tyrants and god-kings of their realms. And they are mostly libertarians. So this shouldn't make sense but of course many libertarians only despise governments because they limit their freedom of action, not because they object to the concentration of power and wealth.
The countries that have done most to rein in their tech sectors are authoritarian regimes - in part because they have no illusions about the nature of power and its link to money. Xi Jinping will brook no rivals, Jack Ma.
Yes to both - huge impact on policy, in so many different ways. Just the idea that certain policies are quite popular with voters, but that often does not translate into legislative action. Other influence is obviously present - will check out that book.
This is a good post, and there are a lot of different threads you could try to elaborate on.
I've just started reading _Number Go Up_ and the two things that I find myself mulling over are (1) there's a basic idea in economics that prices provide information and create incentives, and you get weird incentives when you have prices that are disconnected from real world utility. (2) Whatever intuitions I have about recognizing scams (and that's not something I think about very often), they fall short of knowing what to make of an ecosystem in which some people are clearly engaged in deliberate scams, and a whole lot of other people are involved in more-or-less good faith, and they both boost each other. That's probably common, but the scale with which it occurred during the crypto boom is hard to fathom (and, as you say, has gravitational effects).
The eyes of most people glaze over when they see big numbers such as a million or a billion.
What’s the difference between a million and a billion?
A MILLION seconds takes a little over 11 ½ days.
A BILLION seconds takes a little over 31 ½ years.
1,000,000 seconds ÷ 60 = 16,666.67 minutes ÷ 60 = 277.78 hours ÷ 24 = 11.57 days
= 11d, 13h, 46m, 40s.
1,000,000,000 seconds ÷ 60 = 16,666,666.67 minutes ÷ 60 = 277,777.78 hours ÷ 24 = 11,574.074 days ÷ 365 = 31.71 years
= 31y, 259d, 4h, 26m, 40s.
Great insight here - surprised not to see this theme more often:
“The primary story of the post-techlash years hasn’t been driven by new technologies or old companies.”
The wealth part is much more of a driver and a good explanation for why things go sideways sometimes.
One thing I will say, however, is that we are fortunate that this exorbitant wealth (usually) cannot actually buy elections, at any level. Sure, money in politics is a big and relevant problem, but for whatever reason, there is no corresponding domination of electoral outcomes in proportion to the wealth of some of these actors - this is evidenced by the fact that the presidency and both houses of Congress are (again) actually up for grabs this year.
There is an impact, for certain, but there is also plenty of resistance, and for now, enough of it to keep governing from completely going sideways. Can’t be sure it will stay that way, but at least we have that going for us.
I've done pretty well as an investor by recognizing that most Americans have been broke since the Reagan Revolution and that there is nothing to invest in so the only thing to do is buy stocks. I retired in the mid-90s and haven't done a lick of work since. Meanwhile, whenever I chide myself for spending too much on a new computer or a vacation, the stock market laughs and says "number go up".
I love your idea of buying Fox and turning it into UHF. It would be a real improvement.
Jeez, sounding like some bomb-throwing anarchist here. We've all seen that graph of the concentration of wealth, but I don't recall anything more specific than that, on how that wealth is distributed among that .01% or whatever the number is these days. Like Donald Trump's shell corporations, probably almost impossible to untangle anyway, though apparantly we all think we know how much money Musk and Theil and all the other robber barrons have, I see those numbers all the time. We peasants think of those numbers as liquid assets, but of course they're not, and of course practically that doesn't matter. Money attracts and generates money once it achieves escape velocity, which our billionaires did long ago. This Guilded Age can only end like the last one, in a global economic collapse. Governments can tinker at the margins, but our billionaires won't give up power any other way. That or a global war, which has its own set of issues, which they are "planning" for.
We might also see money as an amplifier. Not only the inertia of all mass, but an amplification of force.
Inertia is a good concept to use. The IT revolution has created an enormous landscape of discrete (classical) logical dependencies and as logic is inflexible, the landscapes are brittle, and because the landscapes are brittle, they have become harder and harder to change. Large logical landscapes show inertia. https://ea.rna.nl/2020/02/11/a-tipping-point-in-the-information-revolution/ and change is actually slowing down, both in organisations and in society. There *is* two-speed IT: adding is fast-ish, changing is slow. We're probably already in the second half of the traditional S-curve.
"I can't actually fathom what the next $50 million would be for.": I agree with the point you're making, but there is, in fact, a reasonable answer to that question: for improving other people's lives. Of course, that never occurs to most people who have $50 million to spare, let alone people who have billions to spare (which practically every billionaire does, because as you're pointing out, nobody needs a billion dollars). Just today, I saw a news piece* about some fool who plans to build a working replica of the Titanic, and when asked why, he replied, "It's a lot more fun to do the Titanic than it is to sit at home and count my money." Because obviously, those are the only alternatives, right? (Still, replicating the Titanic for a few billion dollars is maybe a step up from first buying and then trashing Twitter for over forty billion dollars.)
"the central theme of these past few years has been the astronomical concentration of capital among a handful of people": Correct. And it's a glaringly predictable and therefore presumptively intentional consequence of Reaganism / Thatcherism / whatever we may call detaxing and deregulating the rich and their corporations, for which tens of millions of fools have voted over and over again.
* https://globalnews.ca/news/10356555/titanic-ii-billionaire-clive-palmer-relaunch/
It's interesting to me that we are not collectively compelled to do much about this. In fact, we have myths that permeate our society that cause people to staunchly oppose doing anything about it.
There's a great TED talk you might be aware of/interested in by Ian Bremmer: The next global superpower isn't who you think. In many ways, it's a complementary analysis of what you've done here, talking about techno-polar worlds where individuals and corporations usurp nation states as the dominant power. It's always spooked me, but more recently, it's started to feel disturbingly prescient. This essay adds to my unease in that regard, and I really like the gravity analogy you use to tease it out.
On the topic of mobilizing global scale wealth: I'm a student of climate science and Indigenous studies. After a lot of learning and reflection, it's now relatively easy for me to understand the enormous scale and scope of capitalism and colonialism's harms. Therefore, it's just as easy to imagine that the money required to meaningfully unwind these problems and their ongoing harms needs to be tidal. When I indulge in fantasising about possessing that kind of wealth, I imagine even Elon-sized bank accounts could be very quickly depleted. Global-scale problems can devour global-scale wealth - it's I think a central reason why global-scale problems still persist.
When discussing this with friends they're often quick to point that thinking like this is exactly why I'm not a billionaire and never will be. I think that speaks to the kind of psychology that one must either possess or (in a model of "absolute power corrupts") eventually succumb to, in order to remain wealthy. Far more people know the name Bill Gates than the name Chuck Feeney (elsewhere in the comments on this aspect, you mention three - I assume - similar names, who I've never heard of before) so I think, psychologically, there's a question of ego, and of wanting to stay relevant that also drives this behaviour. This ties in with psychological/social assessments of Musk as someone who wants to "save the world" but only if he's the one doing it.
I feel there’s also a related point in here, psychologically speaking, about where individuals draw a sense of wellbeing from. As you say, COVID psychologically shattered us. As a student of both, colonialism and capitalism have the same effect on me. Cultivating an awareness of injustice and harm at such scales often leads me to increased personal distress and an erosion of mental wellbeing. It’s therefore very telling, I think, that gravitationally-wealthy people not only think differently – but seem to think oppositely. The wealth explosion of COVID is a fantastic example of this psychology. It’s perhaps too easy to say this without having my morality/psychology truly tempted/tested by gravitational wealth – but I’ll say it anyways – I just couldn’t live with myself if I made money out of that kind of thing. I would feel such shame and personal culpability.
Putting all these thoughts/anxieties into the context of AI and its potential for further concentrations of power is where my concerns really start to skyrocket. The track record of gravitationally wealthy people suggests they are differently motivated, psychologically, and that they are not averse to amplifying their power even if doing so came because of global-scale suffering. As you say, that is all extraordinarily not-great.
Factoring all this in alongside the Californian Ideology, alongside TESCREAL, alongside comments from folks like Thiel saying "We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. . . . The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism" and it starts to get dystopian really quickly. There's a psychology, but also an ideology/agenda that goes disturbingly under-explored. It all meshes together into a pretty dark picture.
"We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane."
The problem that we have is that these people are now rich enough to remake the world to conform to their dreams. And their dreams are Ayn Rand and some SF that they've not properly understood. They are Dark Thermians.
The facile comparison is often made between tech giants and countries - e.g. "If Facebook was a country, it would be the biggest on earth".
What this analogy often misses is that tech billionaires want the power of states. They want to be tyrants and god-kings of their realms. And they are mostly libertarians. So this shouldn't make sense but of course many libertarians only despise governments because they limit their freedom of action, not because they object to the concentration of power and wealth.
The countries that have done most to rein in their tech sectors are authoritarian regimes - in part because they have no illusions about the nature of power and its link to money. Xi Jinping will brook no rivals, Jack Ma.
The magnitudes are hard to grasp:
$100K saved for retirement is a 4.3-inch stack of $100 bills.
$1M: 43 inches.
$1B: 3,600 feet. (World's tallest building is 2,722 feet.)
Richest person: $233B. 190 miles high. 29X as high as Mt. Everest.
Yes to both - huge impact on policy, in so many different ways. Just the idea that certain policies are quite popular with voters, but that often does not translate into legislative action. Other influence is obviously present - will check out that book.
I wonder what role ZIRP played in all of this and what the end of it might change (if anything at all).