Matthew Butterick is a lawyer, programmer, writer, and designer. He’s written a long, interesting piece about the inherent risks of AI called Extinction-Level Capitalism. It is well-worth a read; I’ve excerpted several passages here but urge you read the whole thing.
In practice, certain people in a capitalist liberal democracy tend to get increasingly rich. Absent countermeasures, the wealthy gain control of the political apparatus, thwarting liberal-democratic norms. This tension between capital and politics is a long-considered topic. A key early work was, of course, Karl Marx’s Capital (about which more later). In the current era, Mancur Olson’s book The Rise and Decline of Nations set out how small groups with a shared interest (which could include capital concentration) can effectively undermine stable societies. More recently, economists Robert Reich (“How Capitalism is Killing Democracy”), James Galbraith (The Predator State), and Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism) are among those who have studied the escalating political consequences of rising wealth inequality. The synthesis might be: as more wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer citizens, liberal democracy weakens, because whichever citizens are losing economic relevance will also lose political relevance. A nation sending many of its citizens toward economic irrelevance risks becoming politically illiberal.
Sci-fi plots are optimized for cinematic impact. So as a metaphor for AI risk, they can lead to faulty intuitions. Among realistic AI risks, we can expect that most will be boring, slow, and depend on minimal extra technology. Whether AI will cause literal human extinction is esoteric—a lightning strike. But AI could easily induce future economic and political conditions that most Americans today would consider intolerable—a cancer that extinguishes a certain way of life. Nobody’s going to make a movie about boring AI risks. But they comprise the majority of worrisome AI outcomes.
Marx’s observation has a subtler implication too. New technology often holds itself out as the starting point of a narrative: from now on, everything is different. When we consider the technology alone, that narrative dominates. But when we zoom out and consider the historical context, the new technology becomes the current endpoint of a much longer political narrative.
What would Marx say to AI critics—social, legal, economic, political—that have arisen so far? Maybe that we’re missing the bigger picture. That as a human invention, AI may be the starting point of a new technological narrative. But as an affront to human workers, it continues a long tradition of capitalist technologies, beginning with the Industrial Revolution (if not earlier).
When we think about AI risk, we’re necessarily making guesses about the future. But when we frame AI in the narrow sense of new technology, we’re primarily considering a timeline that starts now. Whereas when we shift to thinking of AI as a capitalist instrument, we’re considering a timeline that starts centuries ago and has evolved continuously into the present. We can and should study those existing economic and political trends, because those will likely shape the future trajectory. Put differently: AI may be new. But it’s not immune to history.
“Technology always makes certain jobs obsolete; new ones will arise.” AI’s predicted labor replacement is unprecedented in three ways: the diversity of tasks replaced; its outsize effect on highly educated workers; and the backdrop of 50 years of wage stagnation. Automation-driven transitions aren’t necessarily easy, even when they’re narrow and the economy can absorb the workers. Those who handwave over the details should study historical examples. When you tell a large group of workers that their skills no longer have economic value, you risk a political and social tinderbox. Recall Carl Benedikt Frey’s comment: “the short run can be a lifetime”.
Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself. By the process described above: Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story. Many of those tech companies—and their shareholders in the public markets—may also find that AI is a poisoned chalice.
The value of the concentrated resource creates what Jeffrey Frankel calls “a political contest to capture ownership”, which in turn encourages the emergence of autocratic or oligarchic institutions captured by an economic elite who seek to retain control of the resource. The process is self-reinforcing in two ways. First: the economic elite uses its wealth to repress political opponents. Second: as the government derives more income from the concentrated resource, it relies less on taxation of citizens, which weakens democratic accountability.
I could have easily excerpted the whole thing.
Paul McCartney on Song Exploder. I think he was with The Beatles at some point?
Artist Claire Salvo has painted the starting five of the world champion NY Knicks on a set of US one dollar bills. If you’re in NYC, you may have seen these cheekily pasted up around the city.
She’s selling a print of all five bills but is also auctioning off the hand-painted originals. The auction ends in a bit more than 4 days and the top bid currently stands at $3200.
See also: The Harriet Tubman $20 Stamp and a discussion of whether such modification of US currency is legal or not.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
Sports but make it wealth inequality: “Brunson…didn’t take an extra $113M so the Knicks could sign KAT, Mikal Bridges and keep OG long term… It’s almost as if sharing wealth leads to better outcomes for all…”
The world’s first trillionaire is a killer. “A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.”
Two competing (?) thoughts kept going through my head while reading this: “Not even a celeb like Emily Ratajkowski can find a decent man to date” and “A celeb like Emily Ratajkowski especially can’t find a decent man to date”.
Joe “Handyman” Negri, a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fixture, has died at age 99. “He really was like the friendly fellow you might find walking around a neighborhood. He was just incredibly gentle as a person, but also as a musician.”
US Authorities Investigate Huge Etching of ‘8647’ on National Mall Grounds. Bwahaha. Make it a new US National Treasure. An Interior Dept. spokeperson hyperbolically called it a “threat against the president”. 🙄
David Hockney, iconic British artist known for his colorful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88. “His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure.”
Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes. However: “What is the point of adding value to the internet if it is only going to rob you? Why do research, make diagrams, and develop new knots?”
“This song has no instruments in it.” This is cool: a song made only from pink noise and an equalizer.
This is clever & depressing: the Apocalypse Early Warning System tracks private jet activity. “In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies…”
For his great visual field guide to the chili peppers of the world, Erik Gauger hand-drew 176 peppers from India, South America, Korea, Thailand, Africa, and seemingly every other place on the Earth.
Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot is an evolutionary filter designed to punish mammals and reward birds. Mammals feel it as pain because mammal digestion destroys seeds. Birds don’t have the receptor that detects it, so they eat the fruit, fly off, and deposit the seeds far from the plant from which they ate. The plant needed birds, and birds didn’t mind the heat, because to them there was no heat to mind.
What we’ve built from that, from the paprika, the Thai bird’s eye, the ancho, the chocolate habanero, began as a dispersal mechanism. Humans entered the picture late and changed almost everything about the pepper’s form, flavor, and range. But the underlying logic is still there in every fruit: a molecule that says no to the animals who won’t deliver their seeds far from the tree.
Each drawing is accompanied by a description of the pepper, where it originated, the heat level, and even what hot sauces feature it.
See also Gauger’s Hot Sauces of the World page & poster.
John Thomson’s photos of China (1860s-70s). “Unlike many other early photographers he didn’t spend all his time photographing palaces and ruins. He also captured a lot of daily life including peasants, merchants, and criminals.”
A close-up look at some of Spain’s oldest & most compelling cave paintings. “We lost the connection they had to this world. They led the way quite nicely and successfully, and we got…distracted.”
For the first time on record, solar overtook coal in the US electricity mix in May 2026. “Solar supplied a record 12.8% of US electricity, while coal fell to 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.”
Released a few days ago, this is the official video for Max Cooper’s Becoming, directed by Brandon Eversole. It’s mesmerizing, trippy, and a little bit glitchy. The video is also notable for being so wide that it breaks YouTube’s desktop layout — anything less than stretching my browser window to the edges of my screen and I can’t read the left-most text under the video.
“It’s so dumb!” I quote this line from Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion like 10 times a day now. Feel free to add it to your repetoire.
Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever. 15 years ago, billionaires had $4.5 trillion. “Now, their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion — an amount that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.”
The White House’s Top Science Goal Is Ignorance. “The actions are seen as a deliberate attempt to stifle science and ignore the reality of climate change, in order to support the fossil-fuel industry and satisfy the climate denialism of Trump’s base.”
Oof, what a beauty. In the 1960s, four Porsche 912s were customized for use as police cars in Japan. This one, which was used in Kanagawa until 1973, is the only one left standing (and even it needed restoration).
This Japanese police 912 served in Kanagawa Prefecture from 1968 to 1973, operating on the Daisan Keihin and Tomei Expressways. Over five years of service, it covered more than 155,000km and even played a role in stopping a speeder traveling at 178 km/h.
Police vehicles are usually scrapped after their service life, but this one was an exception. After being retired due to engine failure, it was kept and displayed at a police academy for 26 years. Over time, exposure to the elements caused significant deterioration, and in 1999 it was sold to a scrapyard. After six months of negotiations, it was eventually recovered.
Here are a couple of photos of 912s while in service back in the day.
Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized. SEO (and Google’s embrace of it) has spent the last 25 years ruining the internet and search results. Now it’s GEO’s turn (generative-engine optimization).
The Best Headlights in the World Are Illegal in America. “America’s roads are now full of tactical-grade headlights, and no one is happy about it.”
Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.
This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find.
The enthusiasts are not wrong. We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles. That’s a real, existential threat.
The skeptics are also not wrong. When you ship code faster than engineers can read it, in domains where nobody has full context, you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build. Reliability degrades, institutional knowledge evaporates. You end up with systems nobody understands, products burbling into incoherence, and on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out. That is ALSO a real existential threat.
She goes on to say that “the wins and costs are happening to two different groups of people. There is no natural feedback loop.” Interesting read.
Unsurprising open corruption from FIFA & the Trump regime: FIFA rents an office in Trump Tower. “The rent goes to President Trump’s family business, but soccer officials say the space sits largely idle.” That’s called a bribe.
Thomas Bangalter, one half of the legendary duo Daft Punk, played a 75-minute DJ set for The Lot Radio the other day. He played tracks by Boards of Canada, Burial, Sonic Youth, and even Daft Punk (full setlist). The set is also available on Soundcloud.
Bangalter also put recent rumors of a Daft Punk reunion to rest:
Was it scary to be that big? “It was almost performance art where you create these characters and blur the line between fiction and reality.” So it felt like fame was happening to the robots more than you? “I think so, yes.” If not wearing the helmets they would do interviews with their backs to the camera or, on one occasion, with bags over their heads. You can see why he and Homem-Christo, whom he calls “Guy-Man”, decided to wind up the band. “The history of music is made of fruitful partnerships and they usually last way shorter than the 28-year run that we had. It was great but staying in character and not spoiling it became very difficult.”
I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake. “I am a nice horse. I do not fuss. I do not bite the human woman’s face, even though her hair smells nice. I do not ask to go live free in the woods like the deer. I do my duties. I must try cake. Please.”
The teaser trailer for the sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network is here — they’re calling the movie “a companion piece” to the first film. It’s based on The Facebook Files:
Primarily, the reports revealed that, based on internally commissioned studies, the company was fully aware of negative impacts on teenage users of Instagram, and the contribution of Facebook activity to violence in developing countries. Other takeaways of the leak include the impact of the company’s platforms on spreading false information, and Facebook’s policy of promoting inflammatory posts. Furthermore, Facebook was fully aware that harmful content was being pushed through Facebook algorithms reaching young users. The types of content included posts promoting anorexia nervosa and self-harm photos.
Jeremy Strong nails Zuckerberg’s voice & mannerisms. The hint of Reznor/Ross at the end is great, though it looks like Alexandre Desplat is doing the music this time around. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for the first film, writes and directs. Out in theaters October 9th.
Every time I see a link to one of of Car Pal’s BeamNG car simulator videos, I have to stop what I’m doing and watch it. (It’s becoming a problem.) This one was particularly good: Is it possible to reach the speed of light with perpetual speed boosters?
CrankGPT. “Just a hand crank, a little computer, and a small stack of speech and language models running locally. Provided the electronics are kept dry and at a reasonable temperature, there’s no reason this thing won’t still work in a thousand years.”
On the Difference Between Rest and Idleness. “The wellness industry loves rest [because] rest can be sold, because rest promises a return.” But: “[Idleness] does not promise to make you better at anything. It offers no return on investment.”
I (weirdly?) love Amy Casey’s paintings of buildings in peril — being swallowed by the sea, being flung into the sky by wind.
There’s an element of the Kowloon Walled City to Casey’s work, as well as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (specifically the tomato tornado). (via colossal)
Everything Wrong With the 2026 World Cup. “By far the most grave of those is a World Cup host starting a war against one of the participant nations, as happened with the USA’s attack on Iran at the end of February.”
Yesterday, Ollie and I hiked up to Delta Lake (via Lupine Meadows Access) in Grand Teton National Park. It was perhaps a bit aggressive given my current lack of fitness, my non-acclimation to the altitude (we topped out at 9000’), and the rock scrambling we had to do near the top, but we were rewarded with one of the best views I’ve ever seen.
That’s the Grand Teton (13,775’) in the background. The lake was so enchantingly blue…the photos don’t do it justice. I shared a few more photos from the hike on Instagram.
TIL about variant sudoku puzzles, “sudoku with strange rules like thermometers, ratio dots, cages, and other things that you’re probably already confused by”.
The excellent Scene on Radio podcast is back with a new season on The News. “Just about everyone is mad at the media, and Americans seem helpless to solve our problems, in large part because we have no shared narrative and few shared facts.”
A lovely story by Mary H.K. Choi about her husband and wedding. “A green card wedding was the story I was selling…but it became clear I’d wanted to get married for all the typical risky reasons most of us do: love, understanding, hope.”
The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate. “The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.”
Nominations are open for this year’s Tiny Awards. “The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of personal web projects that tend to get overlooked.”
Interesting question and resulting thread: have you talked with someone who was alive in the 1800s? I think I technically have (a relative in the 80s when I was a kid) but I don’t remember the circumstances. Anyone have a good memory to share?
The folks at Fred Rogers Productions have launched a YouTube channel dedicated to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They plan to post compilations, clips, and full episodes, some of which haven’t been seen on PBS in years & years. One of the first complete episodes they’ve posted is the one about how crayons are made!
Other full episodes include A Visit with Officer Clemmons, The Very First Episode (from 1968), and Koko the Gorilla Meets Mister Rogers.
And there’s also this 30-minute compilation of fan-favorite factory visits.
Again, here’s the channel if you want to subscribe or explore more.
My Students Can’t Read. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”
Yeah, I’ll read the hell out of a Wesley Morris profile of Steven Spielberg. “Spielberg has always known that his movies are attempts to understand his boyhood and his parents, to try to heal them through fiction and illuminate parts of himself.”
I’m observing summer Fridays here at KDO again this year, which means I (mostly) won’t be posting here on Fridays. If past years are any guide, this doesn’t actually have too much of an effect on how much I work or post…more of a redistribution of time & effort. But it’s nice to have the extra non-weekend day to catch up on other things. This morning, I lounged in bed a little, sat on my deck and read while drinking my morning chai, and stared off into the distance on this lovely day. Then I need to finish mowing my lawn after posting this.
Since it’s been a bit since the last open thread, let’s convene one today. What’s been going on in your neck of the woods? Anything you’d like to share with the rest of the group? Do you have something fun coming up? Something you’re dreading? How can we help? What’s the best thing you’ve seen or read or listened to recently? Got a new project? Or an old one, rekindled?
Illustrated break-downs of how common objects work. Currently featuring a mechanical pencil, PEZ dispenser, retractable pen, and Zippo lighter.
Chipotlai Max is an AI agent that runs on “stolen compute” from Chipotle’s AI chat bot. They are looking to borrow from bots from Ikea, Expedia, Home Depot, and others.
Older posts
Socials & More