Sublime

For the first time in human history, supply began to outstrip demand. And an entirely new problem was born: who is going to buy all this stuff?

century, but also the most urgent political and economic project.

Joel Mokyr notes that “aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero c

For thousands of years history was full of technological, economic, social and political upheavals. Yet one thing remained constant: humanity itself.

technologies.

Technology builds out not just from combination of what exists already but from the constant capturing and harnessing of natural phenomena.

properly scaled human economy or technology allows a diversity of other creatures to thrive.”

Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.

And they are instantiated as a distributed processing system on human beings. They don’t particularly care about human beings. Their motives are inscrutable, to the extent that they have any, except that they’d like to get bigger. They’ve run on people. They’re implemented on people. But they are not people. They are not persons in any meaningful s