all posts tagged 'capitalism'

What are you getting paid in?


šŸ”— a linked post to approachwithalacrity.com » — originally shared here on

A long time ago, a manager friend of mine wrote a book to collect his years of wisdom. He never published it, which is a shame because it was full of interesting insights. One that I think a lot about today was the question: ā€œHow are you paying your team?ā€

With this question, my manager friend wanted to point out that you can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun. And in fact most people donā€™t just want to be paid in money ā€” they want to be paid some mixture of these things.

When I was in college, the phrase ā€œitā€™s all about the perksā€ became something I ironically said often when people described their jobs.

Iā€™m realizing as I get older just how true that axiom is.

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Effective obfuscation


šŸ”— a linked post to citationneeded.news » — originally shared here on

Some have fallen into the trap of framing the so-called "AI debate" as a face-off between the effective altruists and the effective accelerationists. Despite the incredibly powerful and wealthy people who are either self-professed members of either camp, or whose ideologies align quite closely, it's important to remember that there are far more than two sides to this story.

Rather than embrace either of these regressive philosophies ā€” both of which are better suited to indulging the wealthy in retroactively justifying their choices than to influencing any important decisionmaking ā€” it would be better to look to the present and the realistic future, and the expertise of those who have been working to improve technology for the better of all rather than just for themselves and the few just like them.

Thatā€™s it, Iā€™ll admit it: Iā€™m a Molly White stan.

Effective altruism always felt wrong to me, but leave it to Molly to explain those abstract feelings in such clear and well considered terms.

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What If Money Expired?


šŸ”— a linked post to noemamag.com » — originally shared here on

For most of us today, money is assurance. We live in a culture in which the pursuit of security is paramount. Save money, we are told ā€” for a health crisis, for our kids to go to college, for retirement. But is it possible to have any guarantee, through money or anything else, of our safety in life?

This article explores the idea of money automatically losing value unless you continue to pay tax on it.

For example, letā€™s say you earn a hundred dollar bill. Every week, youā€™re required to buy a stamp from the government which lets that bill maintain its full value. Otherwise, come next week, your $100 becomes a $99.90 bill.

This encourages you to spend your money rather than hoard it. It incentivizes earning money through work rather than loaning your money out and earning it through collecting interest.

This feels like a weird concept until you sit back and reflect on what money means to you right now. Money makes me feel more anxious than any other abstract concept because the threats associated without having it feel so dire.

In her new book ā€œThe Age of Insecurity,ā€ the activist Astra Taylor writes: ā€œToday, many of the ways we try to make ourselves and our societies more secure ā€” money, property, possessions, police, the military ā€” have paradoxical effects, undermining the very security we seek and accelerating the harm done to the economy, the climate and peopleā€™s lives, including our own.ā€

Astra Taylor, it turns out, is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.

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We can have a different web


šŸ”— a linked post to citationneeded.news » — originally shared here on

Okay, I guess this blog is just turning into a bunch of links about why the internet sucks these days.

But I should stop framing these links as a ā€œhereā€™s why what we have right now sucksā€ because truthfullyā€¦ it doesnā€™t.

Or rather, it doesnā€™t have to.

I really enjoyed Molly Whiteā€™s metaphor about gardens1. Iā€™ve been tending to my own garden on this site for more than a decade, and Iā€™ve kept up patches of turf on the web since the mid 90s.

I just like being here. I like having a place where friends and other folks can see what Iā€™m all about and choose to interact with me or not.

A part of this article that stuck out to me was Mollyā€™s observation that the internet started becoming less fun when we all came here to work. I couldnā€™t agree more.2

Somewhat related here: this past weekend, I decided to finally do something about my IRL piece of land. You see, most of my backyard is now just dirt. My front yard is patches of grass but primarily dominated by weeds.

My back patio is in literal shambles, chunks of broken patio paver strewn around the yard.

The screens on my windows are either broken, bent, or missing altogether.

The cool Govee lights no longer stick to my overhang, so they dangle like a complete eyesore.

Itā€™s frustrating.

This past weekend, I went to the hardware store and spent way too much money on grass seed. It felt incredibly rewarding to do the hard work of ripping up the old junk and trying to build something new.

It felt like a sign for me to log off a bit more often and tend to reality.

But thatā€™s not to say this garden is going away anytime soon. Iā€™ll keep sharing articles like these here because I think it fits nicely with the thesis under which I am about to launch a newsletter: technology is so cool, and we could all use a reminder of that sometimes.

We also could use a friend to help us figure out how to use it right.

Much like I could use a friend to help me figure out how to replace my busted up patio.


  1. As an avid anecdotalist, Iā€™m bummed I havenā€™t been using this metaphor the whole time. I mean, we even use the term ā€œwalled gardenā€ to refer to massive platforms like Facebook or TikTok. Get your head in the game, Tim! 

  2. And as someone who nearly swore off programming altogether during my senior year of high school because building Simpsons websites wasnā€™t as much fun anymore, I find myself once again disappointed that I didnā€™t see this one coming. 0-for-2, Tim, youā€™re slipping! 

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Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. Iā€™m Sorry Iā€™m Leaving You.


šŸ”— a linked post to nytimes.com » — originally shared here on

I am grateful ā€” genuinely ā€” for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didnā€™t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that Iā€™ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text Iā€™ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.

This is an example of what AI, in its most optimistic state, could help us with.

We already see companies doing this. In the Apple ecosystem, the Photos widget is perhaps the best piece of software theyā€™ve produced in years.

Every single day, I am presented with a slideshow of a friend who is celebrating their birthday, a photo of my kids from this day in history, or a memory that fits with an upcoming event.

All of that is powered by rudimentary1 AI.

Imagine what could be done when you unleash a tuned large language model on our text histories. On our photos. On our app usage.

AI is only as good as the data it is provided. Weā€™ve been trusting our devices with our most intimidate and vulnerable parts of ourselves for two decades.

This is supposed to be the payoff for the last twenty years of surveillance capitalism, I think?

All those secrets we share, all of those activities weā€™ve done online for the last twenty years, this will be used to somehow make our lives better?

The optimistic take is that weā€™ll receive better auto suggestions for text responses to messages that sound more like us. Weā€™ll receive tailored traffic suggestions based on the way we drive. Weā€™ll receive a ā€œlong lostā€ photo of our kid from a random trip to the museum.

The pessimistic take is that weā€™ll give companies the exact words which will cause us to take action. Our own words will be warped to get us to buy something weā€™ve convinced ourselves we need.

My hunch is that both takes will be true. We need to be smart enough to know how to use these tools to help ourselves and when to put them down.

I havenā€™t used Gmail as my primary email for years now2, but this article is giving me more motivation to finally pull the plug and shrink my digital footprint.

This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I donā€™t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.

My wife and I spent the last week cleaning out our garage. It reached the point where the clutter accumulated so much that you could only park one car in it, strategically aligned so you could squeeze through a narrow pathway and open a door.

As of this morning, we donated ten boxes of items and are able to comfortably move around the space. While there is more to be done, the garage now feels more livable, useful, and enjoyable to be inside.

I was able to clear off my work bench and mount a pendant above it. The pendant is autographed by the entire starting defensive line of the 1998 Minnesota Vikings.

Every time I walk through my garage, I see it hanging there and it makes me so happy.

Our digital lives should be the same way.

My shame closet is a 4 terabyte hard drive containing every school assignment since sixth grade, every personal webpage Iā€™ve ever built, multiple sporadic backups of various websites I am no longer in charge of, and scans of documents that ostensibly may mean something to me some day.

Scrolling through my drive, Iā€™m presented with a completely chaotic list that is too overwhelming to sort through.

Just like how I cleaned out my garage, I aught to do the same to this junk drawer.

Iā€™ll revert to Ezraā€™s garden metaphor here: keep a small, curated garden that contains the truly important and meaningful digital items to you. Prune the rest.

(Shout out to my friend Dana for sharing this with me. I think she figured out my brand.)


  1. By todayā€™s standards. 

  2. I use Fastmail. You should give it a try (that link is an affiliate link)! 

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Tech doesnā€™t make our lives easier. It makes them faster.


šŸ”— a linked post to asomo.co » — originally shared here on

Because weā€™re social animals we tend to go along with the trend, and because we live under capitalist acceleration the trend is always one way, because our system only has one gear. We also have the ability to edit our memories, so can find ways to convince ourselves that this was all our own choice. That very same adaptability, though, prevents us from using the new tech to save time, because ā€“ under a system with a growth fetish ā€“ weā€™ll be expected to adapt to a new normal in which we have to do more stuff and get more stuff in the same amount of time.

The dark irony then, is that it is the introduction of the new tech that inspires the subsequent irritation at its absence. Twenty years ago nobody fidgeted in agitation if they had to wait ten minutes for a taxi. Now youā€™ll check your phone incessantly if the Uber is running three minutes later than you expected. And god forbid the driver cancels, because youā€™ve probably algorithmically planned everything down to the last minute. We increasingly live a ā€˜just in timeā€™ life because, at a systemic level, thereā€™s pressure to pack in as much stuff as possible at both a consumption and production level. Weā€™re just as dissatisfied, only busier.

The more I dig into the reasons behind my anxiety and depression, I keep coming back to some form of ā€œitā€™s the system, maaaan.ā€

And that thought often leads me down two paths:

The first path is wallowing in anger around our horrible healthcare system, our completely corrupt political system, and our inability to have a rational conversation around solutions to all these problems (often with people whom I actually deeply care about).

The second path is spinning around solutions for these problems. How can I tone down the heat in conversations with my loved ones? How can I push back against a culture hellbent on incessant and mindless consumption?

How do we all just slow down?

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The ā€˜Enshittificationā€™ of TikTok


šŸ”— a linked post to wired.com » — originally shared here on

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

If youā€™ve spent much time in the same tech bubbles as me this past year, youā€™ve probably come across this article already.

At a bare minimum, Iā€™m sure youā€™ve seen the phrase ā€œenshittification.ā€

Once you understand the concept, you do start to see the pattern unfold around you constantly. 1

While there are countless examples of this natural platform decay within our virtual world, what about the physical world?

Is enshittification simply human nature, an inescapable fate for any collaborative endeavor above a certain size?

And if enshittification is not inevitable, what are the forces that lead to it, and how can we combat them when building our own communities?


  1. Case in point: the Conde Nast-owned WIRED website on which this article was published. Iā€™m using a Shortcut on my iPad to post this article, and while sitting idle at the top of the post, I've seen three levels of pop ups appear which cover the article content. I havenā€™t even scrolled the page yet!  

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Every Billable Hour is Amateur Hour


šŸ”— a linked post to daedtech.com » — originally shared here on

If, on the other hand, you view freelancing as a path to real business ownership, your first step is to recognize that the billable hour is a binkie that keeps you in amateur purgatory for the entire time you rely on it.Ā  A kind of Hotel California with timesheets.

And thatā€™s really my only call to action ā€” the recognition as the first step.

Iā€™m not suggesting you fire all of your hourly clients or do anything dramatic.Ā  Iā€™m not even suggesting any immediate change.Ā  Rather, Iā€™m just suggesting that you change your viewpoint.

If you want to be a professional business owner, you need to become an expert in delivering outcomes that add value.Ā  And youā€™ll never achieve that without enough reps to flat price your work and enough skin in the game to feel it when you get it wrong.

I found it difficult to do ā€œvalue-based pricingā€ when running my agency.

But I think it took a little time away to really understand my value. It was never about programming stuff. It was about making something that could turn $1 into $2.

And knowing what to spend that $1 on.

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Anti-AI sentiment gets big applause at SXSW 2024 as moviemaker dubs AI cheerleading as ā€˜terrifying bullsh**ā€™


šŸ”— a linked post to techcrunch.com » — originally shared here on

I gotta find the video from this and watch it myself, because essentially every single thing mentioned in this article is what I wanna build a podcast around.

Letā€™s start with this:

As Kwan first explained, modern capitalism only worked because we compelled people to work, rather than forced them to do so.

ā€œWe had to change the story we told ourselves and say that ā€˜your value is your job,ā€ he told the audience. ā€œYou are only worth what you can do, and we are no longer beings with an inherent worth. And this is why itā€™s so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when youā€™re not fulfilled.ā€

Boy, this cuts to the heart of the depressive conversations Iā€™ve had with myself this past year.

Finding a job sucks because you have to basically find a way to prove to someone that you are worth something. It can be empowering to some, sure, but I am finding the whole process to be extremely demoralizing and dehumanizing.

ā€œAre you trying to use [AI] to create the world you want to live in? Are you trying to use it to increase value in your life and focus on the things that you really care about? Or are you just trying to, like, make some money for the billionaires, you know?ā€Ā  Scheinert asked the audience. ā€œAnd if someone tells you, thereā€™s no side effect. Itā€™s totally great, ā€˜get on boardā€™ ā€” I just want to go on the record and say thatā€™s terrifying bullshit. Thatā€™s not true. And we should be talking really deeply about how to carefully, carefully deploy this stuff,ā€ he said.

Iā€™ve literally said the words, ā€œI donā€™t want to make rich people richerā€ no fewer than a hundred times since January.

There is so much to unpack around this article, but I think Iā€™m sharing it now as a stand in for a thesis around the podcast I am going to start in the next month.

We need to be having this conversation more often and with as many people as possible. Letā€™s do our best right now at the precipice of these new technologies to make them useful for ourselves, and not just perpetuate the worst parts of our current systems.

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Poorly Drawn Lines - Your Hottest Take


šŸ”— a linked post to poorlydrawnlines.com » — originally shared here on

Comic by Poorly Drawn Lines

I love the hottest take. šŸ˜‚

(For what it's worth: I am starting to come around on pineapple on pizza, especially if it's part of a really spicy pizza.

A couple years back, I tried to watch all the MCU movies in release order. I gave up after Winter Soldier. It was just too much. I'm glad superhero movies exist, but they're not my cup of tea these days.)

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