The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture... See more
The unabated “creative destruction” of one kind of capital after another has only further increased the wealth of a few and done nothing to emancipate the overall collective creative spirit, which has remained stagnant. Today, almost every artistic effort inevitably (perhaps unknowingly) reinscribes the values of the ruling capitalist class.
The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.
Perhaps this pattern of radicalisation followed by recuperation has even happened with each emergent technology – newspapers, novels, film, (pirate) radio, the Internet. Each time, the new medium has a progressive force, dehabituating people from expected relations, offering new channels for experimental activity, mediatised subcultures, and the... See more
What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.
Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more