OK, I've been silent for a while because ... research. My wife's gonna kill me if I write another book, but I realized she's not on Mastodon, so let's keep this our little secret, eh? My question: does the following make your socks roll up and down or is it a yawnfest?
I was comparing AI job displacement to the Enclosures—English commons privatized, millions of workers displaced. Seemed like a tidy historical parallel. Unfortunately, I kept reading. And reading. And reading. 1/8
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 enjoying your threads. And nodding
@urlyman Thank you. Trying to figure out the "fix" for the issue. I think about writing tests for software. Most (not all) devs recognize the importance, but they get lazy. But it's been continued awareness of the issue that makes this practice more common.
For extraction, we need continuous awareness. An education campaign. How would it happen? And we have entrenched powers who will fight against it every step of the way. We need to make awareness and prevention core values.
@KerryMitchell @urlyman I replied to you earlier, but deleted those replies. I realized that you're hitting an important topic, but a Mastodon post isn't the right place to do it justice. The short version: rent-seeking describes extraction through economic and institutional channels, but the pattern I'm tracing predates economics entirely. Cuckoo birds don't seek rent, even if they do extract.
It deserves a proper chapter, not a thread. So thank you. You've given me homework.
@KerryMitchell @urlyman Curiously, one of the first non-human extractive species I identified was ants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave-making_ant
Turns out that even for "pro-social" species, extraction is inevitable (and slavery is perhaps the worst form of extraction).
@ovid yep, hence my link above to Lisi Krall
Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
Jonathan Schofield
Kerry Mitchell 🍁
