Players at this level are pursuing a very particular kind of wealth. It’s not based on dividends, regenerative markets, or the circulation of money through the system. It’s simple conquest and extraction. Find either a new territory to conquer and dominate, or a new technology through which to extract more than you already do.

Social justice infractions are easier to prosecute in a digital media environment, where everyone’s offhand statements from a decade or two ago are indelibly recorded and retrievable for later inspection. But the perfect memory of these platforms also makes it harder for people to endorse progress—especially if new rules may recast once

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?

This drive toward totalitarian technocracy is what educator and media theorist Neil Postman called technopoly, the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”

It’s not a matter of banishing linearity and progress altogether, but rather integrating it within the greater cycles that define our existence. Not a line or a circle, but a spiral, with history never quite repeating but almost always rhyming as it moves forward through time.

In their race to grow exponentially forever, the markets had “gone meta” one time too many. No matter how many digital signifiers we employ to represent its value, the real world just doesn’t scale forever.

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.

It’s not the technology they use but the will to conquer—the striving itself—that creates the core problem.

software companies are no longer programming computers; they are programming us people.