Sparks 👁️

As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has explained,“under capitalism, ‘growth’ is not about increasing production to meet human needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective.”

the Overlord Effect—a Godlike attitude emerging from a feeling that we have mastered the universe and colonized space.

From streaming shows to news feeds to all the advertisements that we see but don’t consciously remember, we’re all Large Language Models now, spending our days absorbing an endless array of text and attempting to arrange what’s cluttered around us into something logical, but, just like our silicon competitors, most of what we generate at this... See more

What did Huxley believe would bring about this dystopia? Not a global world order or a charismatic despot: “The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling... See more

But every modern business model is depending on the same old industrial age premise of making money by getting rid of people, or at least people with skills. That’s what the assembly line was for: get rid of skilled craftspeople, and create a factory system where unskilled, low-paid workers can be trained in minutes and replaced just as fast if... See more