The parallel was too tidy. The pattern went much further back.

I started with a simple question: why does wealth extraction feel so relentless right now? Gig work, algorithmic rent-seeking, AI displacing workers while stock prices soar. My assumption was that capitalism was broken and I was wondering what "post-capitalism" would look like. But now I think I was wrong about capitalism. 2/8

I was starting from a position of "knowing" the truth and trying to justify it rather than discovering the truth.

The deeper I dug, the more uncomfortable the evidence became. Sumerian temple economies centralized grain surpluses, then extracted labor from dependent populations. Athens ran on slave-worked silver mines. Rome displaced small farmers, creating a landless class pacified with bread and circuses (the "lazy Romans demanding handouts" trope is grade-A bullshit). 3/8

If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, the 2000-year-old Chinese dynastic cycle covers this with the "Mandate of Heaven." We can also document this behavior in ants, hyenas, birds, and other creatures: if you can get away with it, it takes less energy to steal than to create.

The pattern keeps repeating: gain leverage over something people need, then extract. It doesn't matter whether the leverage is grain, land, trade routes, or algorithmic lock-in. 4/8

Ibn Khaldun documented this cycle in the 14th century. Acemoglu and Robinson formalized it as "extractive institutions" (and won a Nobel prize for it). It's not new.

And then I started thinking about @pluralistic's enshittification framework: attract users, lock them in, extract value. That's not a description of platform capitalism. That's a description of Ur. Of Athens. Of Rome. Of the East India Company. Same pattern, different API.

This isn't a "capitalism is bad" argument. 5/8

Wealth extraction is a recurring institutional failure mode that predates capitalism by millennia. Hell, it looks like it predates humanity. Capitalism is just the current operating system running old malware. (And I have a neat chapter show how both Libertarianism and Communism make the same error in their "fix" for our woes).

This matters because if enshittification is only a capitalism problem, replacing capitalism fixes it. 6/8

But that doesn't work because it's a deeper institutional pattern and we need structural mechanisms which understand this. Solutions must assume the extraction will come back, because it always has.

AI is the next great extraction engine. We can see it coming because this has been happening for thousands of years. The working title is Bread, Circuses, and GPUs. I thought about naming it "4,000 Years of Enshittification," but that felt too opportunistic. 7/8

I should point out that the structure of the book is:

1. Prove the thesis
2. Show why we keep allowing this
3. How do we prevent it?

9/8

@ovid as an anarchist, I think this jives with my instinct to blame hierarchies for these problems and oppose capitalism as one hierarchical system among others. I'm not actually that well-read on theory but it shouldn't be hard to find anarchist theorists who have thought through the issue in this way; David Graeber and Kropotkin come to mind as likely scholars to look at.

As for the solution, I think many can agree it requires a change to "human nature" but of those many are pessimistic about that being impossible. I don't share that pessimism. I think that human "nature" is in fact quite malleable over long or sometimes even short time-scales. To me, there are a few key ingredients in human nature required to avoid *a lot* of these problems (surely there would be other problems; I'm not envisioning this as a recipe for utopia):

1. Baseline unwillingness to obey orders from another. Obedience seen as disgusting and/or vaguely disquieting. This makes the task of the random antisocial jerk who wants to be a warlord nearly impossible.
2. Awareness of the risks of hierarchy, and an understanding of how to undermine it. This allows a non-global anarchist society to defeat a hierarchical threat by converting the individuals in the threatening group to their beliefs, ideally in part made easy by materially providing for the needs that the hierarchical society is withholding in order to cement control, and by demonstrating how much more enjoyable a life of free association is.
3. An instinctive impulse to provide for strangers and help one another. This one is already very much present in the current day, just brutally suppressed by states. The fact that it continues to bloom through the cracks of our modern order gives me a lot of hope.
4. That's it, mostly. I think one could argue that another necessary ingredient is some tendency towards spontaneous higher-order organization in order to actually get the work done necessary to feed everyone without hierarchies involved, but I see this as a minor detail.

Of course, *how* to change human nature to get this mix, at sufficient scale, and whether that could happen before hierarchies drive us to extinction is the much harder question.

In any case, as an anarchist I'm not dogmatic about this recipe. Others might have their own ideas about what could succeed, and as long as we don't extinct ourselves (very real possibility on multiple fronts) over millennia I think evolutionary processes at the societal level should produce *something* with longer-term stability than a few measly tens of thousands of years. We do still have existing present-day societies in small corners of the world that have been stable that long, in fact, and they may well simply outlive the present chaos and continue on past it. What I will argue against as an anarchist is pure pessimism. If you don't like my formula, by all means point out specific flaws or advocate for your own, or even day "I don't like that but I'm not sure what you do." Just don't say "That's unrealistic and couldn't possibly succeed, so we must continue with the status quo as the only option," because that means either we have incompatible definitions of "succeed" or you're arguing against any attempts towards changing a failing system because those attempts might fail, which is silly. (Of course, arguing that the failure modes of attempted change could be worse than the failure modes of continuing as is, but that's not a very solid-looking argument right now.)

@tiotasram I like the ideas, but anarchism doesn't seem (to me) to have a good answer to the "Warlord Problem." Take away institutions and, over time, someone rises up to claim power. History is VERY CLEAR about this. That "someone" will then start extracting. I don't know of any counter-arguments to this.

Humans as bastards and if we don't have inclusive, resilient, anti-extractive institutions, a handful win at the expense of the masses.