One of the best short video descriptions of how state money creation works. Just love the analogies and clear descriptions used. Well worth a listen.

Why do both conservatives and traditional left-wingers get so triggered by MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory? In my latest video, I lay it out for you www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSmL...

'fascisty or thuggish vibes emerge when capitalism is feeling insecure and anxious. That’s when the systemic forces within it will - through…degrees of interconnection - come to favour leaders who batten down the hatches and get people to lean into the more authoritarian parts of their personality.'

THE CULTURE WARS: A SUMMARY One side cares about those who got cancelled between 2017-2024 The other side cares about those who never got booked for the few hundred years before that

A superb explanation by @brettscott.bsky.social of certain alarming trends currently spreading across the western world especially ... Making Capitalism Bad Again open.substack.com/pub/brettsco...

My latest piece just dropped! Making Capitalism Bad Again: How ditching the cognitive dissonance of liberalism makes some men feel secure once more www.asomo.co/p/making-cap...

Granddad, what was it like to experience the world without constant digital intermediation? www.youtube.com/shorts/rtnsa...

Is the taxman a robber, a provider, a redistributor, a technocrat or an anchorman? A guide for how to think about the politics of tax www.asomo.co/p/the-five-f...

I find the language around tariffs so bizarre When a newspaper says Trump puts 50% tariffs “on India”, what it really should read is “on Americans who buy from Indian sellers” (1/4)

“The world of bumbling cavemen trying to exchange mammoth tusks for necklaces is a crude stone-age replica of a modern capitalist economy built in the mind of an economist.” Money as Addiction - @brettscott.bsky.social www.asomo.co/p/money-as-a...

Want a simple foundation from which to understand confusing topics like trade deficits, tariffs, and stablecoins? Check out my new video where I explain the international monetary system in under 15 minutes www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRHT...

A message for every person working on AI in 2025 There’s something slightly obnoxious about watching people who pioneered the Internet later crying tears at the fact that it’s now used for massive surveillance, data extraction and centralisation of power... (1/6)

For a long time I’ve referred to the ‘defence industry’ as the war industry and got mocked for doing so. Finally our global emperor has validated my long-held belief

Are you feeling confused about the geopolitics of tariffs and terms like ‘trade deficits’ and ‘stablecoins’? I drew the global money system in 10 pictures to help y'all understand it www.asomo.co/p/the-global...

Lessons I learned paying $9000 for a pizza with Bitcoin youtu.be/TaKKpRoc1L4

There’s something suspicious about the way tech bros are very keen to have debates about the existential risks of AI superintelligence. It’s almost like they want to focus the minds of the public on a sci-fi danger, rather than focusing on the much more present & more visceral danger... (1/3)

Picture this scene. There's a structurally unsound building. A guy runs up to you with a bucket of sand, screaming, 'it's on fire!' Then he turns to you and says 'buy this sand'. If you refuse he accuses you of being an agent of the status quo This is an allegory for the Bitcoin industry

After 15 (!!!) years "in bitcoin" I share many of Brett's observations in this well-thought essay

A typical financial market has *fundamental* traders who watch the world and *technical* traders who watch other traders. A striking feature of the Bitcoin market is the almost total absence of the former. This has increasingly serious implications for all of us www.asomo.co/p/the-whale-...

Yes, if my net worth was increasing by $10 million an hour by owning companies that steal people's data to build machines that will steal their jobs, I too would redirect some of that to hire bodyguards

Could we draw upon ancient traditions of ritualistic fetishism to improve our toxic relationship to the digital world? I believe so, and in this piece I show you how www.asomo.co/p/how-to-tur...

There’s this ongoing debate about whether AIs can be as smart as humans, but given that AIs are clearly designed to replace our brain functions & thereby slowly make us stupider through lack of brain use, the bar for surpassing human intelligence gets lower and lower over time

VCs do not fund AIs to produce truth. They fund them to product profit. From an evolutionary perspective, then, the test of fitness applied to an AI is whether it can increase the bottom line of the corporate sector. AIs, then, aren't ‘Thinking Machines’. They're Profit Machines that happen to think

Censorship is about creating differences in volume between voices. There are two primary modes of doing it - Mode 1: Turning down the volume (silencing) - Mode 2: Turning up the volume (drowning out) Let's look at how they relate... (1/5)

I value academia a lot, but I have a difficult relationship with it. Here’s why: Academics are specialists, and specialists often lose sight of where they stand relative to the rest of society (1/4)

Technology does many things, but one thing it never does is save time It either reduces headcount, while amplifying the productivity of the remaining workers, so that fewer people working the same amount as before output the same total amount of products as before in the same amount of time (1/3)

Cast your vote! Why is Musk divorcing Trump? Option 1: he's been used, humiliated and then thrown out. With his DOGE a failure, he now wants to save some face by pretending to launch a principled attack on the president (1/3)

All these AI companies training their machines on centuries of data and skills produced by humankind - and then reaping the profits of that - should donate large amounts of their shares to the public in recognition of this. Otherwise they're just parasitic

This looks like a great resource from @brettscott.bsky.social A 7-part video series called The Economy: A User’s Guide.

Remember folks, beekeepers own the hives, but bees make the honey. Billionaires own our hives, but without all of us they make sweet fuck all Happy International Workers' Day! Check out my latest video to delve deeper into this www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Lx...

Never before in history have we had such a powerful class of billionaires wielding so much power over us. This is why no house should be without a copy of Billionaires and Guillotines, a new boardgame from my friend Max Haiven www.kickstarter.com/projects/plu...

I've been working on a big video project for the last few months. Here's Part 1 of 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOih...

If you want to see me riffing on the tariff see-saw, I joined Kieran Andrieu on @novaramedia.com yesterday to talk about globalisation and Ha-Joon Chang’s concept of ‘kicking away the ladder’. I’m about 8 minutes in, but the whole show is worth watching youtu.be/UaDvAMmLe8Y?...

I know many people are losing their shit over the impact of the tariffs, but here's a periodic reminder that, regardless of the short-to-medium term impact of these, the global economy remains fundamentally ecologically unsustainable and unfit to support life on our planet in the long-term (1/3)

“At the core of corporate capitalism, then, are a series of hollow shells, empty legal vessels with no soul that act as centre points around which all the players will gather.” A Lego Model of Corporate Capitalism - @brettscott.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/brettsco...

Why your inner libertarian dreams of digital gold www.asomo.co/p/the-archip...

Cash is great. Learn why from @brettscott.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/brettsco...

Brilliant description of the market-capitalist economy using analogies from attachment theory, by @brettscott.bsky.social. And god yes, it's totally anxious-avoidant, and encouraging (by design) unnatural behaviours in us all. open.substack.com/pub/brettsco...

To be human is to suffer from mind viruses, so as you get rid of one, you need to ask yourself what the new one you're taking on is

To celebrate Valentine’s day, I present to you an essay about the (unromantic) reality of attachments in our economy, and the (romanticised) tales of detachment we get told about them www.asomo.co/p/detachment...

A really good piece on disintermediation and the scourge of interfaces and platforms

There’s something fascinating about the way Trump can openly screw his followers by selling them spammy memecoins in exchange for their real dollars. It has a S&M sub-and-dom dynamic, like people getting turned on by being whipped by a big daddy

The kind of person who believes that meritocracy is the best system, and that they represent it, is typically not the outcome of a meritocratic system

We already live in a VR world Mark. Your platforms played a pivotal role in building it

The phrase 'robots take your job' really just means 'bosses pay your salary to the shareholders and workers of tech companies instead of you'

'Free market': large-scale legal & property rights infrastructure created by states over a few hundred years, backed by military force & bank money systems 'Deregulation': All the above, but without states intervening in the ‘natural' 'spontaneous' workings of the ‘organic’ system

The US government plan in summary: scrap environmental regulation and promote Big Oil so that US Big tech oligarchs can get the energy to power data-centres to win an AI war against China, while workers who are set to get replaced by that AI told to fend off precarity by buying Trump Coin

The 'Bitcoin Strategic Reserve' in summary: 1) Crypto industry lobbied & funded Trump + Trump courted crypto community 2) He faces political risk if price goes down 3) So he wants a government fund to manipulate the price up to distribute patronage, especially to big whales

Today's featured #longreads 2/2: Against the Factory Farming of Creativity by @brettscott.bsky.social "... the economic system will reset to a state of higher acceleration in which the new technology – which used to be ‘luxury’ – now becomes the mandatory baseline required for survival."

Using your own body and mind should never be seen as a luxury endeavour. Don't let the prophets of technology tell you it is My first essay of 2025 www.asomo.co/p/against-th...