Against against tech oligarchs

Or, why it's hopeless to be libertarian

I see people getting increasingly angry about “tech oligarchs” these days, so I wanted to chime in.

The tech oligarchs are actively destroying what little is still decent about our society!

They came for Google search! They ruined dating! They made porn so addictive they created “gooning!” The Tik Tok algorithm has eaten everyone’s attention span! That guy who bought Twitter says things I don’t like! They’re making AI’s that are going to take all our jobs! Oligarchs, oligarchs, all of them!

And yeah, okay. People do stare at screens 11 hours a day, this is CLEARLY the tech oligarchs’ fault! Right?

But it’s not tech oligarchs

But PB, you might say, don’t you yourself decry the fact that the finest minds of our generation have been coordinated and deployed at scale to farm dumb people for eyeballs and alpha?

Don’t you complain about the ten thousand Phd’s in every big company coming up with sophisticated models to find and yank on deep neurological hooks and steer people into self-destructive behavior like overeating and doomscrolling?

Many systems are adversarial these days.

Adversarial systems are rampant

But this is NOT the work of evil billionaire “tech oligarchs” rubbing their hands together and scheming in their penthouse towers.

“And how, today, can we immiserate the masses yet more? For lo, I gaze upon my domain and feel an unholy lust for enshittification! What hasn’t been enshittified yet? Cat memes? Babies? Can we enshittify sunlight?? Get my R&D people up here!”

—Some tech oligarch, probably

It’s not how it works.

Okay, yeah, Zennials stare at their phone 7-9 hours a day, and people stare at some combination of screens for 11 hours a day.

But people were staring at screens 7-9 hours a day before smartphones or “tech oligarchs” even existed. I mean, look at the Nielson breakdown, it’s STILL mostly TV (largely because it isn’t broken down by age and older people prefer TV over phones and there’s more older people, 20 - 29yo are only 7% of the population).

Obviously movie and TV show oligarchs!! They’re just one slimy remove from tech oligarchs! Off with their heads!

Uh huh.

I mean, you don’t think people are going to be mad when you remove the primary source of entertainment and biggest way people spend time per day from their lives? If you ever DID manage to eliminate movie and TV shows, you’re going to have a couple hundred million people with 11 hours a day on their hands and nothing better to do than figure out who did that and vote them into oblivion so they get their blinky boxes back.

And what about the fact that literally 80% of Americans are overweight or obese?

NHANES data, so “actually measured” vs self-report

Mcnugget oligarchs!! Off with their heads!! But there’s hundreds of different fast and junk food companies? Oligarchs, oligarchs, all of them! They’re FORCING people to eat mcnuggets and Coca Cola and junk food every meal! To the oubliettes and bastinados!

What about the fact that 50-75% of people live paycheck to paycheck? This one is easy, right? Obviously capitalism! Billionaires!! Billionaires make it impossible for people to plan more than one month ahead! Off with their heads!

But you know, the paycheck thing has been true back to the sixties, when there was only a handful of billionaires alive.

Arguably, it’s true for millions of years of hominin history, because hunter gatherers CAN’T store big surpluses of food, it’s just sort of the default time horizon for people.

Then what about the fact that ~half of all marriages end in divorce, and of the remaining marriages, at least half are net miserable for at least one party? And all this was happening WELL before smartphones and dating apps?

Um...relationship oligarchs? Off with their heads?

Maybe people just suck

Maybe people just suck, and have the planning horizon of gnats, and will always do a bunch of stuff you consider a bad idea. Eating mcnuggets every meal, staring at screens 11 hours a day, living paycheck to paycheck, getting in bad relationships and then getting divorced.

It doesn’t require “oligarchs” rapaciously harvesting serfs to get people where they are today, all it requires is giving them what they want.

All “tech oligarchs” have done is plugged into the *already existing* drive to stare at screens for 10 hours a day, a little better than TV and movies, and have eaten into their share of eyeball-hours.

Just like all fast and junk food has done is plug into the already existing desire to eat fatty, sugary foods for every meal, and done it so well that literally 80% of Americans are fat.

This isn’t an “oligarch problem,” it’s a human nature problem

Also, this is stretching the word “oligarch” way past any meaning whatsoever.

It’s hilarious to try to paint tech companies as driven by “oligarchs,” when they provide pretty much everything for free, and it’s totally voluntary.

Literal oligarchs rely on political concessions and regulatory entry barriers and lawfare to lock out competition and harvest average people at scale with largely mandatory more expensive and crappier products and services. See electricity or phone service or banking in the developing world. I just finished reading Joe Studwell’s Asian Godfathers, which goes over the fundamentally broken and incestuous politics and economics of SE Asia and Hong Kong, and it’s exactly this story (it’s a fun read, too).

Versus tech companies give you tons of completely free stuff that you can voluntarily use or not use, and just happen to monetize the fact that you waste your entire life staring at screens to make a little money off of it. They can literally only win by being the best, and by giving you that best stuff for free!

Like Google Search - Google came onto the market with the best FREE search engine by far, kept it the best for 20 years for FREE, was serving billions of monthly active users for FREE for a lot of that, and only now, 20 years in, got greedy enough to mess it up.

And shortly after, as soon as ChatGPT got good, a billion people went over THERE, for free, to replace Google search with a better alternative.

It’s the OPPOSITE of “oligarchy.” Anyone using the word oligarchs in this context is blatantly revealing their profound lack of lexical and economic understanding.

Do I think enshittification is generally bad? Yeah, totally - don’t participate in adversarial systems, you’ll definitely be better off - but it’s a much more voluntary system than most. I mean, compare taxes, or electricity, or banking, or your choice in doctors or cell phone carriers, or your choice in politicians.

I’ll actually go one step further here.

The desire to protect people from their own decisions is why we can’t have nice things

What is the solution in a “tech oligarch” mental framework? Like, if they were right?

If tech oligarchs were actually a thing, and it were true that they were running rampant over a captive populace, who were as forced to stare at dumb apps as they are forced to pay dumb taxes, as the oligarchs cackle and enshittify everything in their path, what is the solution?

Probably not competition and open markets, right? Probably some sort of coercive law limiting screentime, like China does, or maybe a ban on some apps or forms of content overall, like China does (famously, the full-strength Tik Tok algorithm is not allowed within China, it’s only allowed in overseas markets).

Okay, now Google is banned. Goodbye Gmail, Google Maps, Waze, Google Voice, Youtube, and a bunch of other stuff. You really think that world is better?

Or maybe the screentime limits, which would require a government monitor on literally every device and a Great Firewall-like infrastructure, where the government strictly monitors and approves everything people see, and limits screentime to reasonable amounts. Sounds good?

Maybe those sound a little extreme? But what else would WORK, is the point, here.

The desire to protect people taken to an extreme always becomes maximally intrusive and stultifying, because it always ultimately grounds out in internal decisions and value judgments, and you can’t police or affect those unless you literally get so intrusive you’re practically inside people’s heads.

Does that remind you of anything?

Remember when wanting to be a little more thoughtful about race and gender composition when making hiring decisions turned into witch hunts and enforced ideological groupthink, complete with forced “diversity statements” to get academic jobs?”

I argued in my post How DEI doomed the light cone that a simple and laudable desire to be more inclusive and fair ultimately broke our society and made us more polarized and less capable than ever, because of basic sociological realities around outgrouping.

Arguably, in the service of protecting various minorities and victimhood checkboxes, we’ve significantly degraded and sacrificed societal function and capabilities for EVERYONE.

So in return for adopting measures that essentially every DEI proponent will tell you were not nearly enough to achieve equity, we collectively lost faith in at least half the country, the media, college education, academia’s commitment to ground truth, public trust in scientists, doctors, and other experts, and materially degraded our state capacity.

And this struggle has been so divisive and polarizing it’s basically wrecked us as a country. America: Once global hegemon, now global “lol c’mon.”

Moreover, we did this just at a time when being able to coordinate and cooperate is more important than ever, as we bring artificial minds into this world smarter than most humans, and soon able to do the jobs of ever-larger chunks of humanity.

The “hate the outgroup” chemical

You know how everyone thinks of oxytocin as the “love chemical?” The thing that gets released when mothers cuddle babies and when people are all friendly and cooperative and helping each other?

Oxytocin is probably why people want to protect other people from their decisions! It’s just basic empathy, c’mon! Don’t be a heartless grinch, bro.

But I’ve got news - oxytocin would be better labeled the “hate the outgroup” chemical, because it has effects 2x as strong in the “hate” direction!

The usual effect size of the increase in ingroup trust after oxytocin administration is cohens d = ~0.4, versus the increase in reactive aggression towards outgroups is cohens d = ~0.97 (Campbell et al. (2013) Effects of Oxytocin on Women's Aggression Depend on State Anxiety).

That’s a HUGE difference! I know which one I think is the more salient function given that background!

See anything there that resonates with the DEI story?

How an admirable desire to be more inclusive and fair led to literal witchhunts and outgrouping so hard it polarized us more than ever?

Maybe we are just not biologically and sociologically equipped to ever be 100% aligned on nebulous things like inclusivity and fairness and other value judgments.

There are studies which show that people maximize relative standings (with their group as far on top of the other as possible) rather than absolute prosperity even in casual games:

“In the first series of experiments, it was found that the subjects favoured their own group in the distribution of real rewards and penalties in a situation in which nothing but the variable of fairly irrelevant classification distinguished between the ingroup and the outgroup. In the second series of experiments it was found that: 1) maximum joint profit independent of group membership did not affect significantly the manner in which the subjects divided real pecuniary rewards; 2) maximum profit for own group did affect the distribution of rewards; 3) the clearest effect on the distribution of rewards was due to the subjects’ attempt to achieve a maximum difference between the ingroup and the outgroup even at the price of sacrificing other ‘objective’ advantages.”

Now add literal game theory and the fact that status is relative and zero sum and so is any given job or attainment or political position. What else is today’s America BUT one of these dumb games? What do you think is driving all the polarization?

And that polarization has made it so that our ability to “address what is in our power to address” seems to be slipping and degrading on essentially every level. Housing, infrastructure, law enforcement, culture, politics, marriages, having and raising kids - we used to be pretty good at all of these societally, and are now pretty bad at all of those, and the roads to getting better are not immediately apparent. Not in the sense of “we can’t think of anything that might work,” but in the worse sense of “we are not capable of TRYING any of those things we think might work,” for various reasons.

We are not built to effectively protect people from their own decisions, is my point

Culturally, societally, even individually. It always goes wrong. To do so, you’d need measures so intrusive you police actual thoughts and judgments, and attempting to get there always goes wrong along the way.

What better way to respect human dignity and autonomy than just letting people make decisions? Even bad ones? Even if you can do various cuts and analyses and show some genders or races or ethnicities or age groups are doing better or worse in the aggregate in a regime where they can make differentiated decisions?

And I hardly need to make the point that the above will always be true, just by the definition of how statistics and normal distributions work. You can always find some measure by which any race/gender/age/whatever clustering will be doing worse! It will literally always be true!

And at the individual level, that differentiation is kind of the POINT. Why are we HERE, if not to assemble a chain of decisions and outcomes that’s different than everybody else’s?

If your life and decisions were being lived millions of times over, ten million pairs of eyes blinking in unison, would that be a GOOD thing? Why even bother, at that point? Join an anthill!

The whole thing here - polarization, reduced state and societal capability, everyone hating everybody else, is driven by people wanting to culturally police other people’s thoughts and actions. What if we just didn’t do that?

What’s the solution?

I feel like there isn’t one. One heuristic I like to follow is this:

• Can this suggested advice / intervention / behavior be understood and followed by an average person?

I feel like many people in our milieu like to think and pontificate about society and politics and culture and economics, and feel that there are blindingly obvious and “easy” solutions laying about everywhere that could solve any one of our serious societal problems.

Housing prices have made everybody cranky and poor and nobody has babies because houses are so hard to buy? Duh, build more houses! My toddler could have suggested that!

Homeless people want to do drugs, but we won’t let them, so instead they make our expensive downtowns post-apocalyptic wastelands full of needles and human feces? Have you tried just letting them have drugs as long as they’re far away from everybody else? Wow, that pays for itself 22 times over? Whodathunk?

Harking back to the adversarial nature of apps (and finance), I really think future minds will look back on this time as “so wait, everyone smart stopped having babies, then your sociopolitical system set all the smart people onto coordinating together to milk rubes instead of actually solving any of their problems?? Well there’s your problem right there!” Have you tried not doing that?

And that’s me right now - “we’re not able to do anything societally because everyone wants to police everybody else’s thoughts and actions, can we just stop doing that and get on with our jobs and / or improving the world?”

Lol, well I think we all know the answer to that!

Why seemingly simple solutions don’t work

On top of our biological underpinnings driving outgrouping, on top of sociological and game theory dynamics making everything important relative and zero sum, on top of us wanting other groups to do worse, there is the additional problem of what we have to work with.

The average American has a 7-8th grade reading level. 98% of people fail at weight loss. The great majority, ~80%+, are sedentary and eat garbage, even though that is literally 2-3x as bad as smoking or a cocaine addiction when it comes to all cause mortality. The great majority of people don’t have a college degree (70%+), and couldn’t actually get one.

Not just that, but essentially everyone, up to and including important executives and politicians and various looked-up-to figures, has the attention span of a gnat, and unless your points are extremely simple to understand, *and* simply phrased, AND are limited to only 1 or 2 points total, 3 at the very most, they will be glossed over and ignored by essentially everybody you are trying to communicate to.

It’s easy for people with grad degrees and nice careers in Tier 1 cities to spot fairly obvious solutions to various problems - but how do you communicate it well enough to get everybody else onboard? How do you reach across differences in values and motivations and incentives and understanding and capability?

If your solution requires personal sacrifices on anyone’s part (okay, a midrise in my neighborhood will slightly slow the growth of my property’s value, in return for cheaper housing for some noisy, probably-criminal deviants I actively want to keep out, hmm which to choose?), or going against what is directly laziest and easiest, how will you persuade anyone to do it? Your solution would require an entirely different humanity and populace than the one we have.

So the solutions are NOT obvious, if they are not communicable and workable at scale, across values and understanding and incentives and capability differences, and we should all do well to consider that.

After all, it’s a pretty safe bet that the majority WANTS to thought police everybody and sees it as a good thing (see 2014-2024 America, China, communist Russia, and countless other examples), and certainly the majority wants to protect people from their own decisions, which is what probably half of all laws and governance are about, in basically every country.

Even Libertarians, which are a much larger superset of this flavor of opinion and policy, only ever got 3.3% of the national vote at the highest, and generally cap out at 3-5% at Governor-level votes.

Maybe we can hope for zedes like Prospera to save us? If all the people who just want to Do the Thing instead of being subject to a bunch of Karens and thought police make a network state, places that are fully opt-in and small enough you can assemble a functioning town or small city’s worth of people and live more sensibly, can’t we do that?

NO! Back to the “average people” thing, Prospera itself isn’t looking all that great, because those same average people are demanding Something Be Done, and it’s lost the mandate of heaven and is getting tied up in lawfare.

After all, if your primary outgroup is “people who want to police other people’s thoughts and actions,” it’s not looking that great as long as they outnumber you heavily, because they will do the thing on the tin and try to ruin your deal, which has always been the glaring flaw at the heart of the network state / clade / phyle idea.

And lo, this is exactly what happened to Prospera!

Back to the DEI point - the common perception is that it was born in female-dominated disciplines in academia, then spread via largely female-dominated HR departments. Is DEI a “feminization” problem? Is this a gender discourse point??

NO! Men are nearly as likely to want to ineffectively busybody everybody at immense social and economic cost:

“Policing other people’s thoughts and actions” is HUGELY popular, probably the one thing everyone can agree on, even if they might disagree about the particular details of what should be being policed.

So what solution exists for all these problems?

Obviously prayer

No, but seriously. Not to GOD god, are you crazy?

Obviously, “regular god” isn’t doing the job. Problem of Evil? Efficacy of prayer? The fact every religion says all the others are wrong? <Gestures broadly> all this?

Nearly ALL of our problems have been solved by tech in the past. Malthusian limits? Hello Borlaug! Poverty? Hello Industrial Revolution! Disease, which in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness, killed ~50% of people by age 50? Hello vaccines and antibiotics!

The horse-shit-pocalypse? Tech again.

Communicating over long distances? Finding stored knowledge? Finding and matching employers, mates, buyers and sellers? There’s billion dollar companies built on using technology to solve all of these problems better.

Why not governance? Why not coordination problems?

Clearly we need to INVENT a god that we can pray to, who actually answers prayers in an efficacious and benevolent manner.

And we have some of our top people on it, thankfully (thanks, Claude Code!). Technology to the rescue for the N-th time!

Personally, I can’t wait.

But in the meantime, I did come up with a governance structure that preserves democracy, ameliorates polarization, and let’s AI do the work of solving our coordination problems, you can read about it here.