Strange Ramblings

This is what gave us the Great Financial Crisis: scumbag bankers tricked people into taking out unsustainable mortgages whose "teaser rates" would blow up after a couple years to levels that the borrower couldn't possibly pay back. But the lenders didn't care, because they were only "loan originators" who could pass those loans off to "investors" via exotic financial instruments. These two groups had an irreconcilable conflict: the people making the loans could only keep their scam going so long as the people collecting the loans didn't demand repayment.

But these two groups – scammers and arm-breakers – aren't the only two groups in the economy. There's a third group that you might call, "People who want to make useful things that we like and pay for." This third group is at odds with both the scammers and the arm-breakers, because their potential customers are being tricked (by scammers) and bankrupted (by arm-breakers).

Say you want to go into business renting hotel rooms to people at reasonable rates. You're an honest sort, so you list your room prices right there on your site. But the scumbags you're competing with want to rip people off, so they list a lower price than yours, and then whack the customer with junk fees at check-in that make their room more expensive than yours.

What's more, the scumbags make so much money that they can bribe the handful of dominant travel sites (which are all owned by one of two massive private-equity backed rollups) to list their hotels ahead of yours. They might not like paying bribes – in fact, they probably hate it – but they're willing to part with some of that hard-won ripoff money to keep the money-machine going. Besides, they can make up the difference with more junk fees. Whaddya gonna do, walk away from your nonrefundable, prepaid reservation and try and get a last-minute booking in a strange city?

Societally speaking, the problem is that economic growth only comes from the third group. They're the ones inventing new categories of (useful) products and services that delight their customers and enrich their workers and shareholders (who then buy more things in the economy, keeping the virtuous cycle going).

This festering economic zit is finally coming to a head with AI, whose most profitable use is in predicting how much a vendor can charge you – or how little a boss can pay you – without you walking away from the table:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shitrentals/comments/1q38sh4/if_you_get_promoted_at_work_keep_it_a_secret_from/

AI's most enthusiastic customers, meanwhile, are bosses who dream of firing most of their workers and using the ensuing terror to force down the wages of the remaining workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

If the average American is a squeezed-flat toothpaste tube that's been drained of all its readily extractable contents, then AI is the scissors that slit the tube up the side so that the very last dregs can be scraped out.

As Anil Dash put it,

Those niceties that everybody loved, like great healthcare and decent benefits, were identified by the people running the big tech companies as “market inefficiencies” which indicated some wealth was going to you that should have been going to them.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/06/500k-tech-workers-laid-off/

The scammer/arm-breaker economy is fundamentally extractive. When a private equity fund buys a company, sells off its assets, declares a special dividend and gives the proceeds to itself, and pronounces the company to have been "right-sized" because now it has to rent the things it used to own, they are setting that company up to fail. All it takes is one rent-shock or a couple bad quarters and a once-healthy business will fall over:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

Looking at America, it's hard not to ask, "Where did all the money go?" Where did free state college tuition, excellent public libraries, public housing, transit, fully staffed national parks and air-traffic control towers all go? Why can't we fix the potholes? How is it that a country that once electrified itself from top to bottom and sea to sea can't figure out how to run fiber lines to the same roofs where all those power lines connect?

It's because the system is organized around cheaters and arm-breakers. The Heritage Foundation – architects of Trump's Project 2025 – were founded and funded by Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, the guys who made their billions running Amway, a pyramid scheme that was legalized by their pet Congressman, Gerry Ford, shortly after he became president:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The nation's system has been colonized and is being operated by people whose institutional home was created by pyramid-scheme hucksters. Why doesn't Trump's administration care about scam ads on Twitter and Facebook that clean out the very same Boomers who voted him into office? Because Trump's ideological project was founded by actual, non-metaphorical, non-hyperbolic con artists.

That's where the money went. Smart people keep asking how Trump plans on stealing Venezuela's oil when the country is in a state of shambolic collapse and its people are starving? Who will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new equipment when every dollar spent on capital will require a dollar for a gunman to keep it from being stolen and sold for food?

You could ask the same question about America. In a country where we've literally legalized bribery, who wants to invest in productive businesses?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX9Ej0L6rGk

America's crisis is the world's opportunity. A chaotic mess of cyberwarfare, trade war, and invasions means that America is no longer your ally or your trading partner – it's a threat.

To neutralize that threat, we must take away the money (and thus the power) of America's oligarchs. We start down that path by changing the international laws – passed at the insistence of the US over the past 25 years – that ban foreign tech companies from modifying America's tech products.

Once other countries' companies start producing the tools that let farmers fix their tractors, that let games publishers sell outside of the official ripoff app stores, that let merchants avoid the Amazon tax, they will not only reap billions of dollars, they will also create a market that favors good products, rather than scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

America's largest companies have amassed trillions by robbing Americans (first) and then everyone else (once the US trade rep got laws passed that prevented non-US tech companies from making defensive products). The project of the next ten years is to convert those trillions to billions (in profits for companies that disenshittify America's defective technology – and in savings for people who use those tools to escape America's scam economy).

The beneficiaries of this program aren't limited to the investors in foreign tech companies, nor their overseas customers. Americans will also benefit from this technology, because Americans were the first victims of the US scam economy. Everyday Americans pay the app tax, the Amazon tax, the streaming tax, the Apple tax, the Google tax, the Microsoft tax. Supply Americans with the digital arms to resist these corporate raids, and they will stage a tax revolt (a thing that Americans are remarkably good at).

Escaping oligarchy, escaping the climate emergency, escaping economic desperation: these goals require doing things and making things. They require real products and services, they require real infrastructure and tools. By and large people would rather have real things than scams.

Ponzi America is breaking down. It's run out of suckers.

We just can't afford to structure our economy like an Amway downline anymore. We never could.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/08/after-the-moneys-gone/#who-took-the-money-away

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involve the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.

This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.

If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.

So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.

It's their world, and we just live on it.

For now.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/18/self-licking-ice-cream-cone/#job-creators

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

Speaking of "someone very stupid, or in on the game," Congress just killed a rule that would have guaranteed that the US military could repair its own materiel:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/

Military right to repair is the most brainless of all possible no-brainers. When a generator breaks down in the field – even in an active war-zone – the US military has to ship it back to America to be serviced by the manufacturer. That's not because you can't train a Marine to fix a generator – it's because the contractual and technical restrictions that military contractors insist on ban the military from fixing its stuff:

https://www.pogo.org/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-the-right-to-repair-for-the-united-states-military

This violates a very old principle in sound military administration. Abraham Lincoln insisted that the contractors who supplied the Union army had to use standardized tooling and ammo, because it would be very embarrassing for the Commander-in-Chief to have to stand on the field at Gettysburg with a megaphone and shout, "Sorry boys, war's canceled this week, our sole supplier's gone on vacation."

And yet, after mergers of large military contractors resulted in just a handful of "primary" companies serving the Pentagon, private equity vampires snapped up all the subcontractors who were sole-source suppliers of parts to those giants. They slashed the prices of those parts so that the primary contractors used as many as possible in the materiel they provided to the US DoD, and then raised the prices of replacement parts, some with 10,000% margins, which the Pentagon now has to pay for so long as they own those jets and other big-ticket items:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

This isn't a complicated scam. It's super straightforward, and the right to repair rule that Congress killed addressed it head on. But Congressional enemies of this bill insisted that it would have untold "unintended consequences" and instead passed a complex rule, riddled with loopholes, because there was something unique and subtle about the blunt issue of price-gouging:

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/final_-_warren_letter_to_dod_re_right_to_repair_consequences_092524.pdf

Either these lawmakers are so stupid that they fell for the ole "Federal Wallet Inspector" gambit, or they're in on the game. I know which explanation my money is on.

Maybe this has already occurred to you, but lately I've come to realize that there's another dimension to this, a way in which critics of tech help this gambit along. After all, it's pretty common for tech critics to preface their critiques with words to the effect of, "Of course, this technology has raced ahead of regulators to keep pace with it. Those dastardly tech-bros have slipped the net once again!"

The unspoken (and sometimes very loudly spoken) corollary of this is, "Only a tech-critic as perspicacious and forward looking as me is capable of matching wits with those slippery tech-bros, and I have formulated a sui generis policy prescription that can head them off at the pass."

Take the problem of deepfakes, including deepfake porn. There's a pretty straightforward policy response to this: a privacy law that allows you to prevent the abuse of your private information (including to create deepfakes) that unlawfully process your personal information for an illegitimate purpose. To make sure that this law can be enforced, include a "private right of action," which means that individual can sue to enforce it (and activist orgs and no-win/no-fee lawyers can sue on their behalf). That way, you can get justice even if the state Attorney General or the federal Department of Justice decides not to take your case.

Privacy law is a great idea. It can navigate nuances, like the fact that privacy is collective, not individual – for example, it can intervene when your family members give their (your) DNA to a scam like 23andme, or when a friend posts photos of you online:

https://jacobin.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-interview-bill-gates-intellectual-property

But privacy law gets a bad rap. In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.

That's a hard thing to do! It's just not a complicated thing to do. The routine violations of EU privacy law by American tech companies isn't the result of "tech racing ahead of the law." It's just corruption. You can't fix corruption by passing more laws; they'll just be corruptly enforced, too.

But thanks to a mix of bad incentives – politicians wanting to be seen to do something without actually upsetting the apple-cart; AI critics wanting to inflate their importance by claiming that they're fighting something novel and complex, as opposed to something that's merely boring and hard – we get policy proposals that will likely worsen the problem.

Take Denmark's decision to fight deepfakes by creating a new copyright over your likeness:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence

Copyright – a property right – is an incredibly bad way to deal with human rights like privacy. For one thing, it makes privacy into a luxury good that only the wealthy can afford (remember, a discount for clicking through a waiver of your privacy right is the same thing as an extra charge for not waiving your privacy rights). For another, property rights are very poorly suited to managing things that have joint ownership, such as private information. As soon as you turn private information into private property, you have to answer questions like, "Which twin owns the right to their face" and "Who owns the right to the fact that your abusive mother is your mother – you, or her? And if it's her, does she get to stop you from publishing a memoir about the abuse?"

Copyright – a state-backed transferable monopoly over expression – is really hard to get right. Legislatures and courts have struggled to balance free expression and copyright for centuries, and there's a complex web of "limitations and exceptions" to copyright. Privacy is also incredibly complex, and has its own limitations and exceptions, and they are very different from copyright's limits. I mean, they have to be: privacy rules defend your human right to a personal zone of autonomy; copyright is intended to create economic incentives to produce new creative works. It would be very weird if the same rules served both ends.

I can't believe that Denmark's legislators failed to consider privacy as the solution to deepfakes. If they did, they are very, very stupid. Rather, they decided that fighting the corruption that keeps privacy law from being enforced in the EU was too hard, so they just did something performative, creating a raft of new problems, without solving the old one.

Here in the USA, there's lots of lawmakers who are falling into this trap. Take the response to chatbots that give harmful advice to children and teens. The answer that many American politicians (as well as lawmakers abroad, in Australia, Canada, the UK and elsewhere) have come up with is to force AI companies to identify who is and is not a child and treat them differently.

This boils down to a requirement for AI companies to collect much more information on their users (to establish their age), which means that all the AI harms that stem from privacy violations (AI algorithms that steal wages, hike prices, discriminate in hiring and lending and policing, etc) are now even harder to stop.

A simple alternative to this would be updating privacy law to limit how AI companies can gather and use everyone's data – which would mean that you could protect kids from privacy invasions without (paradoxically) requiring them (and you) to disclose all kinds of private information to determine how old they are.

The insistence – by AI critics and AI boosters – that AI is so different from other technologies that you can't address it by limiting the collection, retention and processing of private information is a way in which AI critics and AI hucksters end up colluding to promote a view of AI as an exceptional technology. It's not. AI is a normal technology:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Sometimes this argument descends into grimly hilarious parody. Argue for limits on AI companies' collection, retention and processing of private information and AI boosters will tell you that this would require so much labor-intensive discernment about training data that it would make it impossible to continue training AI until it becomes intelligent enough to solve all our problems. But also, when you press they issue, they'll sometimes say that AI is already so "intelligent" that it can derive (that is, guess) private information about you without needing your data, so a new privacy law won't help.

In other words, applying privacy limitations to AI means we'll never get a "superintelligence,"; and also, we already have a superintelligence so there's no point in applying privacy limitations to AI.

It's true that technology can give rise to novel regulatory challenges, but it's also true that claiming that a technology is so novel that existing regulation can't resolve its problems is just a way of buying time to commit more crimes before the regulators finally realize that your flashy new technology is just a boring old scam.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: