Politicians spend a lot of time talking about how to promote economic growth, but they spend almost no time figuring out how to make that economic growth actually improve your life The true shortage in our world is not growth in stuff or technology. It’s growth in things that really matter

Is Black Friday a SPELL? www.youtube.com/shorts/2pENw...

Joe Lonsdale - co-founder of surveillance corporation Palantir, Trump donor and libertarian sea-steader - argues that limiting campaign donations is an attack on free speech, given that you spend to get heard. His message: the more money you have, the more free speech you get

Just uploaded! How the dark wizards of marketing conjured Black Friday www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie4-...

Cashless is not progress www.youtube.com/shorts/SbpXC...

Just uploaded! What David Graeber can teach us about narco gangs, your boss and airport queues www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39n...

Any academic discipline that treats power as if it doesn't exist, exists to protect the powerful Ahem…

Silicon Valley is like a incubator for adult kids who want to build paternalistic technology that will follow us around like an overbearing parent who disguises their control as helpfulness and concern

How the ancient parable of the stone soup helps us think about billionaires youtube.com/shorts/KWlH0...

Never think of money in absolute terms. It's a *relative* concept For example, if everyone had a billion dollars, it would be the equivalent of everyone having 0 dollars. It’s the relative differences in money holdings that give a billionaire power in society, rather than absolute amount held

A Lego Model of Financial Capitalism - @brettscott.bsky.social www.asomo.co/p/a-lego-mod...

Just uploaded! A message for anyone building AI in 2025 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aYQ...

They say billionaires create jobs. I say jobs create billionaires

*MUST READ* #AI

'It’s not impossible for forms of good to come out of new technology, but your mantra should be: I assume this thing will turn out bad, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t.'

Just published: An open letter to all those building AI in 2025 www.asomo.co/p/an-open-le...

Screw cashless. Pay bankless www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1q5...

Billionaire transhumanists who seek immortality want to defeat death, but this also means they want to defeat birth & rebirth That attempt to break cycles of renewal and decay isn’t a celebration of life. It’s an attempt to make life more like death, stable & endless rather than fleeting & precious

My latest YouTube video: Corporate capitalism explained in 10 minutes... using Lego www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu8S...

"To countless low-wage employees across the world, low-cost products will seem attractive - even ‘liberatory’ - but, when you zoom out, they are the ones cheaply producing the cheap things that are being sold back to them." www.asomo.co/p/bufferland

My latest piece is inspired by London Gatwick airport It’s called Bufferland: How corporations violate us and make their employees suffer for it www.asomo.co/p/bufferland

In a cashless society you’re permanently fused to Big Finance and Big Tech with no way to escape. In this video I give 10 reasons for why that's a bad way to arrange our economy and society, and why we need to promote cash to keep a balance of power www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1q5...

Sometimes I like to visualize things to make them seem less alien, because when things seem less alien, your ability to act increases Rather than the financial sector appearing as an obscure and complex realm of shadows, it becomes a space you can mess with www.asomo.co/p/the-ten-la...

When someone attacks a marginalized person, it’s very seldom justified by saying 'I don't like them'. Rather, it’s justified by saying ‘they are dangerous’ (1/5)

I visualized the ten layers of finance, from sunlight and soil to sliced synthetic CDOs www.asomo.co/p/the-ten-la...

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)