Today's article is about product design. It's about the role that opinions play in product design and a look into a very opinionated approach happening today, airlocked economies.

Today's article is about product design. It's about the role that opinions play in product design and a look into a very opinionated approach happening today, airlocked economies.

The harvest has begun, slowly and silently. For decades, capital has been retooling itself to no longer depend on the masses it once fed upon. We are witnessing a system that, once set in motion, follows the path of least resistance toward a stark endgame: intensifying inequality, perpetual labor precarity, and even a selective contraction of the human population. This is not science fiction or wild conspiracy. It is the plausible outcome of forces already at play, a long harvest of society’s...

The harvest has begun, slowly and silently. For decades, capital has been retooling itself to no longer depend on the masses it once fed upon. We are witnessing a system that, once set in motion, follows the path of least resistance toward a stark endgame: intensifying inequality, perpetual labor precarity, and even a selective contraction of the human population. This is not science fiction or wild conspiracy. It is the plausible outcome of forces already at play, a long harvest of society’s...

It happened on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room, half-listening to my boss run through quarterly numbers, when I realized the mood in the office was eerily subdued. The hissing fluorescent lights overhead felt overly bright as if exposing something we weren’t ready to see. Then the announcement came: our company was laying off a third of the team. An artificial intelligence system we’d been testing—once a side project, now suddenly t...

It happened on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. I was sitting in a glass-walled conference room, half-listening to my boss run through quarterly numbers, when I realized the mood in the office was eerily subdued. The hissing fluorescent lights overhead felt overly bright as if exposing something we weren’t ready to see. Then the announcement came: our company was laying off a third of the team. An artificial intelligence system we’d been testing—once a side project, now suddenly t...

I. Introduction: The Unseen HarvestDepopuflation Defined: Systemic population decline as a second-order consequence of capital optimization.Not a conspiracy—an emergent outcome.Capital learns to grow without labor, leading to demographic collapse.Historical Parallel:Peak Horse in 19th-century London: Horses became obsolete as automobiles redesigned urban infrastructure.Peak Human (2020–2025): AI and automation rendered human labor increasingly redundant.Core Premise:Capital optimizes for effi...

I. Introduction: The Unseen HarvestDepopuflation Defined: Systemic population decline as a second-order consequence of capital optimization.Not a conspiracy—an emergent outcome.Capital learns to grow without labor, leading to demographic collapse.Historical Parallel:Peak Horse in 19th-century London: Horses became obsolete as automobiles redesigned urban infrastructure.Peak Human (2020–2025): AI and automation rendered human labor increasingly redundant.Core Premise:Capital optimizes for effi...

Let us start with some facts about language, before veering into speculation and analysis:The global population is 8 billion. 67% of it is online. Th...

Let us start with some facts about language, before veering into speculation and analysis:The global population is 8 billion. 67% of it is online. Th...

In early 2023, as tech giants announced mass layoffs and Wall Street cheered their stock bumps, a grim quip made its rounds among economists: “Welcome to wither up economics.” The phrase is a dark play on the old promise of “trickle-down” prosperity. Instead of wealth trickling down to the masses, it seems the base of the economic pyramid is withering, even as riches pool ever higher up. This isn’t a conspiracy hatched in smoke-filled rooms, but rather an emergent alignment of incentives – a ...

In early 2023, as tech giants announced mass layoffs and Wall Street cheered their stock bumps, a grim quip made its rounds among economists: “Welcome to wither up economics.” The phrase is a dark play on the old promise of “trickle-down” prosperity. Instead of wealth trickling down to the masses, it seems the base of the economic pyramid is withering, even as riches pool ever higher up. This isn’t a conspiracy hatched in smoke-filled rooms, but rather an emergent alignment of incentives – a ...

Forecasting the future is an easy way to look foolish in ten years. Sometimes however, there is a convergence of trends today that one cannot help but project out into tomorrow. In this case, I feel like I've entered a disturbing liminal space adjacent to necromancy or some other dark art, but we need to call them as we see them. So consider this a chilling view of how things could break once AI and automation really start cooking and neoliberalism intensifies. I'm not suggesting a permanent ...

Forecasting the future is an easy way to look foolish in ten years. Sometimes however, there is a convergence of trends today that one cannot help but project out into tomorrow. In this case, I feel like I've entered a disturbing liminal space adjacent to necromancy or some other dark art, but we need to call them as we see them. So consider this a chilling view of how things could break once AI and automation really start cooking and neoliberalism intensifies. I'm not suggesting a permanent ...