The financiers had abstracted the marketplace so many times that they had reduced real-world company stocks not just to derivatives of derivatives, but to memes. And memes are in no one’s control.

When the tech fetishist’s childlike hope for a digital womb combines with the billionaire’s faith in a winner-takes-all competitive marketplace, look out. It results in a brand of activist futurism that sees the present—our reality, including us—as an impediment to their vision of what could and what should be.

By divorcing itself from meaning systems (especially the ones from which it emerged), science made itself particularly vulnerable to forces that sought to leverage it for domination and extraction.

We conform to the reward structure of the technological environment in which we live, always making more accommodations to whichever operating system our technologies—and the billionaires behind them—demand of us.

Whether we’re talking about a smart finance grid, biohacking, drone warfare, space colonization, or universal basic income, technosolutions are too commonly informed by the values inherent in technology itself: exponential growth, automation over human intervention, forward momentum, platformization, and a disregard for existing conditions on the g

Entrepreneurship today has less to do with innovating a product than innovating on the business model for growth. Never is the growth itself questioned.

They were working out what I’ve come to call the Insulation Equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way?

Under scientism, humans are just robots running programs—either the ones dictated by our genes, or destructive pathogens like spirituality. However, by refusing to understand how meaning-making is a subtle community project related to the ways we live together, this orthodox scientism denies any scheme of things where human agency—hand in hand with

The more value is extracted, the fewer opportunities people have to create and exchange value through any means other than participating in the systems of domination and control that have robbed them in the first place. Locals can resist by adopting the violent tactics of their oppressors, but this risks infecting them with the same sensibilities.