You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism

I really recommend Benn Jordan's excellent video on the state of the economy and our entry into a post-capitalism that shares more characteristics with the worst aspects of Stalinism as business leaders seek to enclose markets and level up their wealth into true power under the Trump administration.

I've been getting into Jordan's videos as of late and was pleased to see a recent video of his go viral on BlueSky. It reminded me of this very good video, which I went back to and wanted to pull in here, I think it's very relevant to the work of tech in general and "AI", ad tech, and privacy to remember what the technology is used for, especially when it leaks user data to the big tech companies.

it would be very naive to think of digital assistants as your assistants they are very much not there to help you but to help their [big tech] owners

The goal of so much of this is to force individuals into situations where they feel like they are doing less, but are actually doing more work to generate data and to--when they realize manipulations built on top of that data--try and navigate around the targeted experiences and dark patterns that are built to steer users towards a much more data-limited informational internet.

It takes so much labor to use the web without the control and limitations layered on top of user experience, but it is an essential skill and work we need to do.

to graduate or transcend from those unfathomable limits of what money's wealth can get you, you need to control the power of information, so that you can manipulate the world that you live in. And I believe that that is exactly what's happening and unfortunately I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better