Harnessing The Power of New Age Giants "Monopolies give a handful of private citizens powers that autocrats of the past could only dream of." Paul Romer.
Joined September 2020
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Yes, I have the same philosophy! I always buy standardized 5 lb potato bags. I thought: "Life is too short to pick out one by one from that loose potato heap". What is the difference between LSAT candidates and potatos, any way?
Big Tech Law retweeted
The nuclear deal with Iran, put together by the Obama administration, was less about actual nuclear weapons and more about creating a non-kinetic containment framework. Obama’s analysis was that in light of the decline of American power 1/
This graph is fascinating! As you know that Japan's MOF & BOJ are the equivalent of US Treasury & the FED, this graph also proves that it will be futile for the US to intervene to strengthen the US dollar, because the FED & US Treasury will also be forced to do opposite things!
Japan is threatening to intervene to strengthen the Yen. That won't work. Japan did such interventions in 2022 and 2024 (black), but their effect was undercut by BoJ buying of Japanese gov't debt (blue). So Japan's MoF and BoJ are doing opposite things...
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…
Big Tech Law retweeted
The last British monarchs did what you erroneously claim is today's state: they took away the privileges of the City. They also blocked proposals to establish the Bank of England.
A regime change op, civil war, regicide & a full-blown foreign invasion followed, imposing foreign monarchs - who conveniently made the City of London sovereign again & backed the founding of a privately owned Bank of England, as well as City control over parliament - today's state of affairs.
Where Medieval Power Meets Modern Finance And The Untold Story of the City of London
@scientificecon point resonates because the City of London really does sit inside the U.K. with a political and legal structure unlike anything else in the country. Its odd status isn’t modern at all, it’s the product of a series of agreements that go back nearly a thousand years. After the Norman Conquest, William I issued a charter in 1067 guaranteeing that London’s citizens could keep their ancient laws and customs. That single act effectively recognized the City as a semi autonomous community inside the kingdom at a time when royal authority was consolidating everywhere else. In 1215, Magna Carta singled out the City explicitly, promising it would retain all its ancient liberties and free customs. And around that same period, London secured the right to elect its own mayor, a privilege no other English town had. These weren’t symbolic flourishes; they created a civic identity that endured through dynasties, civil wars, imperial expansion, and the rise of the modern British state.
Those liberties also positioned the City to become the country’s financial engine. By the late 1600s, after the Glorious Revolution reshaped the constitutional order, money and politics in England were fused more tightly than ever. In 1694, City merchants founded the Bank of England to finance government debt, marking the beginning of Britain’s permanent national debt and the architecture of modern public finance. As the empire expanded, the City became the clearinghouse of global commerce, all while retaining its unusual governance as a medieval municipal corporation run by livery companies and business interests rather than a typical democratic electorate. When Werner says the U.K. doesn’t have finance; the City of London has it, he is pointing to this long trajectory. Britain’s financial power grew through the City’s institutions rather than through Westminster, giving the Square Mile a center of gravity that sits somewhat apart from the rest of the country.
Why It Still Feels Separate And What the Law Says Today
The City’s modern structure reinforces this older story. It is still the only jurisdiction in the U.K. where businesses have formal voting power in local elections, a system updated in 2002 but still rooted in medieval corporate representation. The City also maintains the office of the Remembrancer, a centuries old official who sits inside Parliament to monitor legislation affecting the City’s interests. And the famous ritual where the monarch pauses at the City’s boundary to be greeted by the Lord Mayor is a surviving symbol of those ancient arrangements, not a legal limit on royal authority. Today, under U.K. law, the City is fully subject to parliamentary sovereignty. Acts like the Local Government Act 1972 and the Representation of the People Acts apply there, and during the U.K.’s membership in the EU, EU law applied equally to the City.
Even so, the City feels distinct because its institutions predate the modern state, and Parliament has historically chosen to respect those ancient liberties rather than rewrite them. When London underwent its Big Bang deregulation in 1986 and transformed into one of the world’s most global financial centers, the City of London Corporation, the same corporate body shaped by documents stretching back to 1067 continued to govern the Square Mile. That continuity creates the impression that the City wasn’t created by the British state but absorbed into it, carrying its older wiring into a very different era.
This is the context behind Werner’s comments. The City isn’t separate from Britain, but it is one of the oldest components of Britain, a place where medieval charters, imperial finance, and modern global markets sit on top of one another, still shaping how power works inside the U.K. today.
Big Tech Law retweeted
🇺🇸🇷🇺🇨🇳US Beta-Testing China Blockade with Attacks on Russian Energy Exports
(NOTE: Because X blocks NEO links, I will post the entire article below).
The incremental build-up toward an overt blockade against Russian energy exports continues with recent aerial and naval drone strikes on both Russian energy production facilities deep within Russian territory, as well as Russian energy terminals and ships used to carry Russian energy exports moving to and from them.
The most recent incidents include attacks on tankers off the coast of Turkey in the Black Sea and naval drone strikes on the Novorossiysk Fuel Oil Terminal. There was also an apparent attack on a tanker involved in moving Russian energy exports, off the coast of Senegal in West Africa, Newsweek would report.
Western media sources have, over the course of several years now, admitted that Ukraine’s aerial and naval drone campaigns are facilitated and directed by the United States through its military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany as well as through the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has assumed control over Ukraine’s intelligence services since as early as 2014, the New York Times admitted.
The New York Times in its 2025 article, “The Secret history of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War,” would admit specifically that:
“…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.”
Besides admittedly directing the attacks itself, the US enables such operations through the use of unique intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities no other Western nation possesses. Thus, attempts to assign responsibility to nations like the UK and France still ultimately implicate the US.
In regards to aerial drones strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russian territory, Reuters would publish its article, “US intelligence helps Ukraine target Russian energy infrastructure, FT reports,” noting:
“The U.S. has been helping Ukraine mount long-range strikes on Russian energy facilities for months in a joint effort to weaken the economy and force President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
U.S. intelligence has helped Kyiv strike important Russian energy assets, including oil refineries, far beyond the front line, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Ukrainian and U.S. officials familiar with the campaign.”
While the recent attacks on Russian energy production and exports is being presented by the Western media and even some independent commentators as being at cross purposes with US President Donald Trump’s various “peace” proposals, they are actually the manifestation of long-standing US geopolitical objectives aimed at stretching out and undermining Russia and beyond.
Attacks on Russian Energy Production and Exports Years in the Making
This strategy was laid out years before Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in 2022, aimed at “extending Russia,” eventually precipitating a Soviet Union-style collapse, and all as part of a much wider strategy of likewise isolating and containing a rising China.
In a 2019 RAND Corporation paper literally titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” in its table of contents included both “geopolitical measures,” like “provide lethal aid to Ukraine” to trigger the now ongoing proxy war with Russia, and “economic emasures” including “hinder petroleum exports” and “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions.”
Very clearly these policies have been implemented for years under the Obama, Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations and include, first sanctions targeting the construction of Nord Stream 2 and eventually its destruction, as well as sanctions placed on Russian energy production and exports from 2014 onward. The more recent physical attacks on Russian energy production inside Russian territory with the aid of US intelligence and now strikes on tankers used to transport Russian energy exports abroad represents an escalation of these long-stated US objectives.
Not only do these attacks have an impact on Russia’s economy regardless of whether this impact meets US expectations, it also creates a dilemma for another nation targeted by US encroachment, encirclement, and containment - Russia’s close partner, China.
A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” would explicitly lay out a strategy to blockade China, noting the obstacles impeding any attempt by the US to do so when the paper was written. An array of proposals were made in order to remove these obstacles - proposals that have since begun implementation including the reconfiguration of the US Marine Corps into an Asia-Pacific anti-shipping force enabling the US to establish chokepoints depicted in a map included in the 2018 paper.
The paper also discussed land routes China was creating through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to bypass these maritime chokepoints and the necessity to pressure nations hosting BRI infrastructure to close it down during a US-Chinese conflict or face US military strikes to physically destroy it. However, long before any open US-Chinese conflict has begun, the US has already conducted strikes-by-proxy on BRI infrastructure, particularly in Pakistan and Myanmar, through US-backed militants.
The paper also noted the significance of Russia’s and China’s shared land border and the already large supply of energy exports Russia was sending China in 2018 and how these exports would only expand over time. The paper made it clear that even with a US maritime blockade imposed on China and the physical destruction of BRI infrastructure, Russian energy exports to China may be enough to allow China to endure.
The implications were clear, in order to successfully and fully blockade China and deliver a crippling blow to its economy and thus its continued rise, not only would the US need to continue preparing for a maritime blockade and the targeting of BRI infrastructure, it would also need to degrade Russia’s ability to supply China with energy.
Now, just as the US is using armed proxies to strike at Chinese BRI infrastructure, the US is using Ukraine to carry out an expanding armed campaign against both Russian energy production within its borders, and Russian energy exports around the globe.
The 2018 paper, far from an obscure, random brainstorm, reflects US policy both past and present. Just as the 2018 paper linked Russia to US efforts to contain China, current US “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has linked the ongoing US proxy war on Russia to US efforts to contain China and the urgent necessity of a “division of labor” with which Washington’s European proxies continue “extending Russia” in Ukraine while the US continues its expanding strategy of encircling and containing China in the Asia-Pacific.
Not only does the US strategy of attacking and degrading Russian energy production and exports serve its stated objective of “extending Russia,” it is also a prerequisite for Washington’s stated objective of containing a rising China. The nascent blockade the US is incrementally imposing on Russia will also serve as a “beta-test” for likewise imposing a blockade on China.
Conversely, Russia and China’s ability to counter this US strategy will determine not just the viability of America’s proxy war on Russia in Eastern Europe, but that of its growing confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific.
Russia’s and China’s Deterrence Deficit
The US’ ability to impose such dilemmas on both Russia and China through proxies affords it the illusion of plausible deniability - preventing Russia and China from retaliating directly and instead forcing both nations to retaliate against US proxies the US itself sees as fully disposable.
Following attacks on Russian energy production and exports, Russia has threatened to, in turn, blockade Ukraine. While this will have devastating consequences for Ukraine itself, it will do little to deter the United States which devised this strategy, enables Ukraine to conduct these attacks, and even directs the attacks itself.
Unless Russia and China can devise a means to actually deter the US itself from its strategy of waging war by proxy (or prevent the US from politically capturing nations and using them as proxies in the first place), the US will continue to inflict damage on both Russia and China, at little to no cost to itself.
Alternatively, Russia and China can continue building up their military and economic capabilities faster than the US can degrade or destroy them, preventing the US from ever successfully blockading and strangling either nation socioeconomically, while continuing to invest in and build up a multipolar alternative to US unipolar hegemony.
Only time will tell whether or not Russia and China fully understand both the actual objectives of US foreign policy and the means by which to defend against and overcome it. The future of not only Russia and China hangs in the balance - but also that of all other nations - from those used as proxies by the US, to those the US seeks to target or use next in its global pursuit of primacy.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
This is a remarkable thread. It confirms ONLY GOLD IS REAL MONEY! Not bitcoin, thank you very much!
What if stock market gains were measured in gold instead of dollars?
As John Authers notes, “Denominate U.S. stocks in gold rather than dollars, and they’ve been in decline since the dot-com bubble burst 25 years ago. Stocks elsewhere have done even worse.”
#stocks #gold #markets #investors #investing
"BRICS’ gold-backed trade mechanisms, potentially tokenized for efficiency, signal a multipolar future where economic sovereignty trumps subservience to a single hegemon. For every developing nations, the path forward is clear but urgent: diversify aggressively & decisively".
THE US IS TRYING TO PULL OFF THE BIGGEST FINANCIAL CON IN HISTORY
According to Bhim Bhurtel in the Asia Times article, the reason this maneuver would qualify as the “biggest financial con in history” is because it would allow the United States to erase or drastically devalue its massive debt burden—not through repayment or restructuring, but by shifting the losses onto foreign holders of dollar-denominated assets under the guise of innovation and monetary reform.
Here’s how the author frames the deception:
🎭 The Con, According to Bhurtel
| Element | Description |
|--------|-------------|
| Stablecoin Trap | The U.S. promotes dollar-backed stablecoins (via the GENIUS Act) as secure digital assets, backed by Treasuries. Foreign central banks and investors adopt them, believing they’re just modern extensions of traditional dollar reserves. |
| Debt Absorption | These stablecoins quietly absorb U.S. debt. Once foreign holders are heavily exposed, the U.S. could devalue or de-peg them—instantly vaporizing their value. |
| Gold Revaluation | The U.S. revalues its gold reserves (held at book value since 1973), creating a sudden windfall to offset domestic liabilities—while foreign holders get nothing. |
| Historical Parallels | Bhurtel compares this to Roosevelt’s 1934 gold revaluation and Nixon’s 1971 dollar-gold decoupling—both unilateral moves that blindsided global creditors. |
🧨 Why It’s a “Con”
- False Security: Foreign holders are lured into believing stablecoins are safe, dollar-pegged instruments.
- Unilateral Reset: The U.S. can change the rules mid-game—de-pegging, revaluing, or defaulting—without negotiation.
- Global Fallout: Trillions in foreign-held assets could be wiped out, triggering financial chaos in developing economies and reserve-dependent states.
- Moral Hazard: The U.S. escapes its obligations not through austerity or growth, but through engineered devaluation masked as innovation.
Bhurtel’s framing is deliberately incendiary, but it taps into real anxieties about monetary sovereignty, digital finance, and the weaponization of trust in global systems.
asiatimes.com/2025/09/us-plo…
Best quote ever about the Ukraine War! Medinsky explains key issues even more eloquently & succintly than Putin. The Ukrainian people must seize this opportunity to embrace peace, neutrality & prosperity by accepting Russia's offer. Stop being used as cannon fodder for the West!
Medinsky - a portrait of sanity - on negotiations with Ukraine.
MUST READ. Worth quoting him at length:
"I feel that deep down, they [the Ukrainian side] are better than they want to appear. They even want to say something, but they can't. I saw the opposite... Two-thirds of their delegation is in military uniform. They are military personnel. I look into their eyes. First of all, they are no different from Russians. They are exactly the same. I see in their eyes a reluctance to fight. They don't want to fight and they don't want to send their soldiers to their deaths.
They remind me a little of top managers hired by some giant corporation. They can make some decisions, but for fundamental ones, they have to consult with the board of directors.
I would divide the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian army, the soldiers, and those who suffer the most, those who are close to the front line and are under attack in one way or another, and a small part of the ruling elite. It seems to me that the Ukrainian leadership is beginning to remind me of Latin American dictators to some extent.
They were also good guys once, when they came to power and promised a lot during the elections. But then they gradually turned into dictators. And in order to remain in power forever, you need a constant enemy. You need a war that does not threaten you personally. And this war does not threaten your families either. Because all your families are abroad, with British passports, and they are doing very well. And you can no longer control the situation without war.
I will tell you one thing that I have probably never said publicly before. If Ukraine had wanted to, if it had been ready, if it had made its own decisions, we could have signed a peace treaty on February 28, 2022. At the first meeting. And its terms were softer than what we are offering today.
By and large, all we wanted was for Ukraine to refuse to join NATO and to refuse to allow foreign military bases on its territory. I told them: be like Austria. Let you have an army like Austria. Second, restore the Russian language and the Orthodox Church on an equal footing. And the third point was to recognize Crimea, because it cannot be ignored.
And the last proposal from our side was this. There are two territories: Donbass, two regions that do not want to be part of Ukraine. Previously, we proposed returning them to Ukraine with autonomous status, so that they could simply elect their own governor.
Ukraine refused and said: we will conquer them. They were unable to conquer them.
Then, on February 28, 2022, we proposed: well, you were unable to conquer them, and you will not be able to live with them, so leave them alone. We finally agreed for the first time in Istanbul, and we prepared a treaty.
On April 15, President Putin reviewed the agreement and made one or two legal comments — he is a professional lawyer. On the same day, I handed the document to Zelensky. Zelensky remained silent for two weeks.
We do not need war at all. Why did the situation for Ukraine get worse? Because referendums were held in four regions. And they are officially part of Russia. And Russia cannot leave there because it would betray all the people. It is impossible. They are enshrined in the Russian Constitution.
But if the conflict is stopped along the front line and no real peace agreement is reached — just some kind of truce, ceasefire, whatever — then that will be it. You know, there was this disputed region between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Karabakh? This region will turn into a huge Karabakh. After some time, Ukraine will join NATO, try to recapture it, and that will be the end of the planet, it will be a nuclear war."
Shocking information never before available to the global public! Thanks @elonmusk for making free speech possible!
USAID in India - A Tale of espionage and economic loot🧵
Regime Change in India
Part 16🎭
USAID has been a tool of soft espionage for the CIA and its allied foundations since the day one.🎭
Let's explore:
how India's first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru sold out India's economy to the USAID Agenda
and
How USAID funded anti India elements with impunity.
Big Tech Law retweeted
10 DeepSeek Prompts Every Entrepreneur Should Know
These will save you time, money, and headaches:
We have been waiting for some innovation like this for so long! The advertising mafia such as WPP/Mindshare (sued by Elon Musk) should be relegated to oblivion.
This guy just crushed the $600B+ ad industry with his AI tool called Icon.
Some are calling him the Sam Altman of UGC ads.
- Backed by Peter Thiel
- Built by ex-YC founder, and
- Used by $100M+ brands like Ridge
Here's why you would be a fool to miss this:
ALT kennan davison — the founder of viral AI ad maker called Icon
Big Tech Law retweeted
‘America is never going to pay its debts, it doesn’t have to. Its debts are in its own currency, we can simply print it. The African debt is not in its currency. Africa has to earn the US dollars.’
Donald Trump may rail against de-dollarisation and BRICS, but for Africa and many countries of the global south, this is why de-dollarisation is not a political choice, but an economic necessity.
This incredible Qwen 2.5 Max AI video generation just released by the Chinese giant Alibaba is not working in the EU. Why??? What a price to pay for residents living in the Animal Farm of the Enslaved Union, aka the EU:
It is clear so much money is wasted in Silicon Valley, where a shameless culture of "Fake It Till You Make It" has ruled for decades. Think Theranos! Now GenAI.
Thank you Chinese Deepseek devs for proving GenAI is a giant scam inflated by capitalists and is actually worth less than $5.5 million.
America must lead the world, instead of being much worse than Mexico, or India, where everyone, rich or poor, has unlimited access to Ivermectin!
NEW ARTICLE: IVERMECTIN and DEMENTIA Testimonial - 93 year old Grandma recovers dramatically with low dose Ivermectin!
"My Grandmother (93 years old) was beginning to show signs of dementia...telling me stories & then forgetting that she had told me...she began to become confused and focused on negative thoughts & emotions"
The grand-daughter saw one of my articles (testimonials) on Ivermectin and Dementia and decided to try the same Ivermectin 24mg dose, as what she had read.
The Result:
"Within 2 days she was back to acting like the Grandma I remembered. She was back to her smart and very mentally coherent self"
"I was shocked at the difference it made"
"I left the country for 2 weeks and when I came back she was still very much improved despite no extra doses" (durable response! 🤔)
"My father was very skeptical...even he has no words, as he can see how stark the contrast is from before and after giving her Ivermectin. The change is night and day"
And my favorite part 😃
"Thank you for your work. I wouldn't have seen that information had it not been for you"
You're welcome! 🙏
I love testimonials like this.
This is my 3rd Ivermectin and Dementia testimonial in a very short period of time.
I continue to be shocked at how much difference a small dose of Ivermectin makes in patients with dementia.
What a beautiful story!
@RobertKennedyJr, we need to make Ivermectin available over the counter on January 21st, without any delays or nonsense.
Perhaps @elonmusk can help clear the red tape on this. America must lead the world, instead of being much worse than Mexico, or India, where everyone, rich or poor, has unlimited access to Ivermectin!
Article Link in photo to avoid shadowban, just re-type the URL in the first photo at the top, into your browser to access.
The Catch-22: AI endangers democracy. Redirecting AI from anti-worker to pro-worker will be very difficult.
A summary of my thinking on shared prosperity, work and AI in ten bullet points.
This is partly motivated by the fact that I have received questions from several people on these issues, and I feel like it may be useful to lay out my thinking in simple terms in one place. We are also about to have a new administration in the United States, so perhaps it’s a good time to think about some aspirations (even though I view it very unlikely that the incoming administration will move us in this direction).
1. Shared prosperity is key.
By shared prosperity I mean economic growth from which most groups (e.g., men vs. women, different ethnic groups, different education groups, different regions, etc.) benefit more or less in the same way (e.g., their incomes growing at similar rates). Economic growth that just enriches one group greatly and generates only small benefits for many other groups is not shared prosperity. This is mostly an ethical precept, but it can also be justified because a peaceful, harmonious society does require shared prosperity. It is also a realistic one. It does not require that all inequalities are wiped away at one fell swoop.
2. Shared prosperity cannot be achieved just with redistribution.
It needs to be rooted in the labor market, in (good) jobs and in wage growth. The safety net and some amount of redistribution are important. But these are not sufficient to generate shared prosperity. Even in social democratic Nordic countries, where redistribution is most robust, it is not the source of shared prosperity. Wage and employment growth have been much more important historically. Redistribution-based shared prosperity doesn’t make political economic sense either: if some portion of the population is continuously impoverished, they wouldn’t have the political power to ensure that robust redistribution remains.
Moreover, even if we had a system where pre-tax inequality was growing a lot but there was enough redistribution to ensure the disposable incomes of all demographic groups grew robustly, it would have other serious problems. People without jobs and those whose pre-tax incomes were not growing wouldn’t feel that they were contributing to society. Worse, we would head towards a truly two-tier society with just some fraction of the population flourishing economically and receiving all the social status as they are the source of all earnings and tax revenues out of which others are receiving redistribution.
3. AI is here to stay and will be very impactful.
I have little doubt that AI will be a defining technology for our future. It can also deliver significant productivity benefits, though I think whether it will do so or not is contingent on how we develop it, and its full effects will take a while to be materialized. There is a lot of uncertainty about AI’s effects. In my opinion, it is also difficult to know what AGI (artificial general intelligence) would mean and when it may arrive, and this adds to the uncertainty about AI.
In sum, we cannot think of the future of work and shared prosperity without understanding AI’s impact.
4. AI’s direction can be pro-worker or anti-worker.
A basic pillar of my thinking and my research is that all technologies are malleable – meaning that they can be developed in many different ways, with very different consequences about who wins and who loses. This is doubly and triply true for AI, which is a broad, flexible technological platform. AI can be developed for prediction tasks; it could be developed for generating text and images; it can be used as an informational tool, etc. In all of these cases, AI can be more anti-worker (meaning that it focuses on automating tasks and disempowering workers) or pro-worker (meaning that it can become an information technology for enabling workers to perform their tasks better and to be able to branch into more sophisticated and new tasks). How AI will be developed is a choice.
5. Currently it is being developed as an anti-worker technology.
The main way in which companies are thinking of monetizing AI is by automation and more powerful digital ads, and neither of which would contribute to a pro-worker agenda. Moreover, the way in which foundation models are developed and trained is shaped by the expectation and desire to reach AGI. But AGI would mean more automation – if AI can achieve general intelligence and perform almost all tasks as well as most humans, then it will take away these tasks from humans. This current path will therefore lead to job displacement and lower wages, and is thus inconsistent with shared prosperity.
6. To redirect it, you need policies.
Putting the previous two points together, we can conclude that while there was a direction for AI consistent with shared prosperity, we are not pursuing it. Moreover, the industry will not suddenly change direction. Therefore, there needs to be an intervention, and this can only come from government policies (across the world) to encourage new directions and also put regulations to prevent the more harmful uses of AI (some of which are synergistic with the anti-worker direction).
7. To redirect it, you need competition.
New technologies especially radically new directions typically come from new companies, not established incumbents. This is doubly so when the incumbents we are talking about are the largest corporations humanity has ever seen. Hence, the pro-worker AI agenda should be symbiotic with agenda of increasing competition and breaking the hold of the existing powerful incumbents on the tech sector and the direction of AI.
8. To redirect it, you need different architectural choices.
Perhaps even more controversially, redirecting AI may need architectural choices. To put it simply, pro-worker AI need to be an information tool in the hands of workers. This is impossible unless AI provides reliable, understandable and real-time information to workers in a range of occupations. The current architecture of AI (partly fueled by AGI dreams) is about AI acting autonomously and has also led to a black box structure of AI. Instead, the pro-worker direction AI needs the tools to provide advice to human decision-makers (rather than make autonomous decisions), and the best autonomous decisions are not necessarily the best advice/recommendation/information to workers. Moreover, pro-worker AI needs to be understandable by human decision-makers, which is not possible with current black box structure of foundation models complemented with fine-tuning and other kinds of ex post training of pre-trained models.
Stepping back, in an ideal world government intervention should be neutral towards different technological choices. After all, entrepreneurs and innovators know which technologies to develop and how to develop them much better than bureaucrats and lawmakers. But in certain situations where different directions of technologies have major social consequences (for example, in the choice of fossil-fuel versus green technologies), then government intervention may need to impact technology and design choices as well. Nevertheless, it is important that this is done in the most minimalist possible way, so that innovation incentives and choices are not impacted beyond the extent necessary for a more socially beneficial direction to emerge.
9. All of this requires democracy.
Since the current direction is chosen and supported by the largest and most powerful corporations in the world, only robust democratic pressure can lay the foundations of a redirection.
10. The Catch-22: AI endangers democracy.
Tech choices in the past, especially those surrounding social media, have been damaging to democracy and active political participation of the citizenry. The same is likely to be true for AI, and even more so. First, AI is likely to be a very powerful technology for manipulation, and this can exacerbate platform choices that can make money while discouraging democratic citizenship. Second, the current ethos in the AI sector is quite anti-democratic, with leading technologists and entrepreneurs believing that experts (themselves) should be empowered to make all key decisions and democratic processes get in the way of the necessary AI acceleration.
This not only creates a Catch-22 (we need democracy to redirect AI, but AI has already damaged democracies) it also suggests that redirecting AI will be very difficult. But I still believe it’s not completely hopeless.
Lulalemon of Brasil is nothing but a fake democracy brand! This Soros controlled politician is even far worse than the puppet version of the new Barbie, Baerbock of Germany!
Regardless which case will turn out, the World Trade Organization, or WTO, will be finished! That will also lead to the demise of the IMF & World Bank, though not immediately. The second Trump administration will be the most exciting period in history for economics & economists!
The root problem is Google’s overwhelming dominance of the entire AdTech ecosystem, which enables the company to act simultaneously as buyer, seller, and market-maker in an industry worth over $800 billion today and projected to grow to $2.5 trillion in the next several years:
This is a thread about remaking the tech sector.
Silicon Valley still claims the mantle of “disruption”, as if it is made up of competitive small companies rushing to innovate in order to edge into established industries. The truth is that Silicon Valley is now home to the largest corporations humanity has ever seen. At the beginning of the 20thcentury, when US society and lawmakers were alarmed about the growing power of “trusts” (large corporations), the two leading companies, Standard Oil and US Steel, had market capitalizations of around $1 billion, which in today’s currency would be worth about $32 billion. In comparison, Alphabet/Google’s and Amazon’s market valuations are hovering around $2.3 trillion, Apple’s is above $3.6 trillion, and Microsoft’s is close to $3 trillion. Today’s tech giants also have revenues that are more than 100 times those of early 20th century trusts, including Standard Oil and US Steel.
Tech boosters might argue that this is because of the innovativeness of these companies or an inevitable consequence of network economies, generating winner-take-all dynamics for companies that acquire the biggest clientele or the largest amount of data about users. The truth is more nuanced.
Tech companies have been innovative. Nevertheless, there is recent evidence suggesting that they have done so by employing a large fraction of the supply of innovators and scientists, and once an innovator starts working for these large corporations, they are less innovative than they used to be in smaller companies: ufukakcigit.com/s/Akcigit_Go…
Worse, tech giants have also grown their size partly by aggressively acquiring rivals: ftc.gov/system/files/documen…
Numerous acquisitions, like Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, did not just help tech giants grow rapidly. They may have also extinguished competition:
(see sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
or insights.som.yale.edu/insigh… also papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
for the contrary view).
My overall assessment from this evidence is that these companies have grown so much at least partly because of a failure of antitrust in the United States and Europe.
A tradition dating back to US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis recognizes that a failure of antitrust will not just mean higher prices for consumers and bigger distortions. It would also pose a challenge to democracy, as these companies wield oversized political and social power. This is what we have to come to accept as normal today, with the tech sector becoming the second-largest vendor on lobbying in the United States (after pharma) and the values and viewpoints of Silicon Valley dominating every part of our social lives, including unfortunately journalism. (The data on lobbying expenditures come from Open Secrets, opensecrets.org/federal-lobb…).
Two key antitrust cases against Google’s monopoly in advertising on the two sides of the Atlantic could reshape the web and in the process kickstart a turnaround in antitrust philosophy and practice. (See npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-514… ec.europa.eu/commission/pres…).
It is about time.
The background to the story is very well known. Digital ads dominate the web, and Google/Alphabet dominates digital ads (with Meta/Facebook being a distant second). The question is whether this state of affairs reflects Google’s amazing innovativeness in AdTech (the marketplace for digital advertising) or whether it also reflects the company’s monopolistic abuses. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are converging to the latter interpretation and are accusing Google of abusing its market power to generate monopoly profits and harming consumers, publishers and competition as a result.
US judge Amit P. Mehta ruledin August that Google had illegally monopolized the search engine market, among other things, by paying billions to be the default search engine on various platforms. After years of tech giants consolidating their hold over key markets, this could be a first step towards limiting this growth or even a prelude to a series of breakups.
True, the incoming Trump administration has promised to be much more friendly to various parts of the tech eco-system, and especially to artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto currency. Nevertheless, there is no love lost for Big Tech among some Trumpers. VP-in-waiting JD Vance, for example, recently praisedthe current head of the FTC, Lina Kahn, who is partly responsible for reenergizing anti-trust in the United States: fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-va…
Next will be Europe’s turn. EU moved early against Big Tech, fining them for competition breaches and passing the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. Yet the tech sector is as consolidated as ever and European consumers are still dependent on these mega platforms. EU could take a more decisive step towards ending the dominance of these tech companies with the Google AdTech case.
The root problem is Google’s overwhelming dominance of the entire AdTech ecosystem, which enables the company to act simultaneously as buyer, seller, and market-maker in an industry worth over $800 billion today and projected to grow to $2.5 trillion in the next several years: fortunebusinessinsights.com/…
Google’s control over the entire market leaves advertisers and publishers with little choice but to accept its terms.
This dynamic has been ruinous for many industries, including journalism. Independent publishers are a cornerstone of any democratic marketplace but can no longer survive squeezed by Google. In 2023, Google accrued 237 billion dollars from its AdTech monopoly, while the revenues of independent publishers and newspapers have declined. As a result, we have a new phenomenon: news deserts, which are areas where communities lack access to credible local news sources, once again damaging democracy and civic citizenship: cmpf.eui.eu/news-deserts-on-…
Big Tech defenders have historically claimed that breaking up these companies will harm consumers, slow innovation, and lead to economic stagnation. But monopolies are typically bad for innovation. If the AT&T monopoly wasn’t broken up in 1982, the digital and then the subsequent Internet revolutions may not have taken place. Why should the dominance of today’s Big Tech be any different?
Breaking up tech giants wouldn’t by itself be sufficient for a competitive marketplace in new technologies. In the US, bipartisan draft legislation proposes structural firewalls to prevent companies from operating on both sides of the AdTech market. Portions of the Digital Markets Act mandates ad transparency. If adopted on both sides of the Atlantic, these measures could help but are not sufficient.
I have argued repeatedly that the key challenge for today is to innovate in new technologies that provide better information and services to consumers and create new tasks and productivity-enhancing for workers: amazon.com/Power-Progress-Th…
Yet, such technologies are unlikely to be forthcoming rapidly when digital ads are the only game in town and most of the revenues online are from digital advertisements. This isn’t just because of the social negatives of massive data collection and the attention economy undergirding huge digital ad revenues, which are now well understood. It is also because the current structure is anti-competitive.
New companies experimenting with new technologies and business models are at a disadvantage relative to big platforms when they can only raise revenues by monetizing data via digital ads, because they have less data than established incumbents. Worse, as unknown quantities, they cannot develop new business models based on subscription fees or sales of new services when leading platforms are making money using digital ads.
One way of breaking this cycle is to impose a sizable digital ad tax in order to increase competition in the online economy, as Simon Johnson and I have argued. We proposed a tax of 50% for all ad revenues above $500 million a year, which EU can unilaterally impose, changing the whole digital game at one fell swoop: shapingwork.mit.edu/research…
Other reforms are also necessary. The future of the Internet and AI is entangled with creating a fair data economy, as a new report under the auspices of the Project Liberty Institute argues (to which I also contributed): projectliberty.io/news/proje…
To make such an aspiration a reality, we need new laws that simultaneously protect the privacy of individuals and lay the foundations for more inclusive markets, in which individuals and data collectives (or data unions) can control data, so that large platforms and AI companies cannot expropriate people’s information and the fruits of their labor.
I believe that this shouldn’t be bad for tech companies. The right architecture of data markets would ultimately help the tech sector by encouraging people to invest in and produce higher-quality data, which are a key input for more useful AI tools and more valuable online services. But there would be a lot of opposition from many tech companies today against any attempt to protect people’s data and introduce property rights over data.
Here, too, Europe can play the leading role, not only disrupting the current oligopoly in the tech sector but also taking steps towards a new, more productive, more competitive and fairer data economy.