Posts Tagged ‘technology’

The Return Economy

Posted: October 27, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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What happens to the things we decide we don’t want?

You click Buy Now. A few days later, a package appears at your door.

Maybe you ordered the wrong size. Maybe the color looked different in person. Maybe the thing simply wasn’t what you expected.

So you put it back in the box, print a label, drop it off, and eventually receive a notification: Your refund has been issued. Done.

From your perspective, almost nothing happened. That’s what makes modern returns so interesting. The return button makes the process feel simple because most of the complexity happens somewhere else.

The product has to travel again. Someone has to receive it, inspect it, sort it, and decide what happens next.

It may need new packaging. It may move to another warehouse. It may go to a liquidator, refurbisher, donation center or recycling facility. And sometimes, after all that, it becomes waste.

The environmental story of a return isn’t simply about a box traveling backward. It’s about everything that happens after we decide: I don’t want this anymore.

The Return Trip

Online shopping has made returns extraordinarily common.

The National Retail Federation estimates that 19.3% of U.S. online sales will be returned in 2025, with total retail returns projected at roughly $849.9 billion. Its survey also found that 82% of consumers consider free returns important when shopping online.

Those numbers aren’t evidence that consumers are doing something wrong. Returns solve real problems.

The product may not fit. It may arrive damaged. The seller may have sent the wrong thing. Sometimes we simply discover that it isn’t right for us.

A return can prevent someone from being stuck with something useless. And if that product goes directly back into circulation, the environmental impacts of producing a replacement may be avoided. That’s important.

But it raises a different question: What happens when the product doesn’t simply go back on the shelf?

Because the trip home was only the first trip. The return begins another one.

One Purchase, Multiple Journeys

Think about the conventional path of an online purchase.
  • Factory.
  • Warehouse.
  • Delivery truck.
  • Your front door.
  • Now return it.
  • Your front door.
  • Drop-off point.
  • Carrier.
  • Return facility.
  • Warehouse.
  • Maybe another warehouse.
  • Maybe a refurbisher, liquidator, donation center or recycling facility.
  • Maybe another consumer.

Every additional movement requires energy. And depending on the transportation network, that means additional fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.

Research on reverse logistics identifies collection, reverse transportation and onward transportation as distinct environmental impacts of returns. A returned product doesn’t necessarily stop moving when it reaches the retailer. It can continue through the secondary supply chain.

A 2025 U.S. apparel study found transportation was the dominant source of return-related carbon emissions in some of the retailers it examined, with long-distance returns accounting for a particularly large share.

Distance matters. So does transportation mode.

A return moved efficiently along an existing route isn’t environmentally equivalent to one traveling hundreds or thousands of miles through a centralized reverse-logistics network.

The more convenient the return appears to us, the more invisible the physical journey becomes.

The friction hasn’t disappeared. It has moved.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

The Box Inside the Box

Then there’s the packaging.

The original shipment required a box, mailer, or other container. Inside might have been cardboard inserts, plastic bags, protective film, air pillows, foam, labels, or other materials designed to protect the product.

Now the product is going back.

Maybe the original packaging can be reused. Maybe it can’t. Maybe the box is damaged. Maybe the product needs additional protection.

And if the item is eventually resold, it may need to be packaged again. One object can therefore generate more packaging simply because it changed its mind about where it was going.

This matters because recyclable and recycled aren’t the same thing.

A material can technically be recyclable while still ending up in a landfill because of contamination, collection limits, processing capacity, economics or local recycling requirements.

EPA’s national packaging data illustrates the scale of the distinction. In 2018, 30.47 million tons of U.S. containers and packaging were landfilled, while 44.33 million tons were recycled.

That doesn’t mean every return package becomes landfill waste. It means we should stop treating the word recyclable as though it means it will be recycled.

Those are different claims. And the waste isn’t necessarily limited to the packaging.

Sometimes the product itself becomes part of the waste stream.

The Product’s Second Life

A return isn’t automatically waste. A returned product can be inspected and put back into inventory.

  • It can be cleaned or repaired.
  • It can be refurbished and sold as used.
  • It can enter a secondary marketplace.
  • It can be liquidated.
  • It can be donated.

These pathways matter because keeping an existing product in use can avoid the environmental impacts of producing another one. Retailers have built increasingly elaborate systems around this.

Amazon, for example, describes programs through which eligible returned products can be inspected, graded and resold rather than automatically discarded. Its seller programs also include liquidation and donation pathways for eligible inventory.

That’s the hopeful side of reverse logistics. The return doesn’t have to be the end of the product’s useful life. It can be a detour. And a detour can make environmental sense if the product eventually reaches another consumer.

But what happens when it doesn’t?

When There Is No Second Life

A product can be perfectly functional and still become economically worthless.

That’s one of the strange realities of modern consumption. The environmental resources invested in an object don’t disappear when its market value falls.

The raw materials were still extracted. The energy was still consumed. The factory still operated. The product was still transported. Its packaging was still manufactured. None of that gets refunded when the product is thrown away.

A 2024 study examining more than 630,000 returned apparel items in the European Union found that 22–44% of returned products never reached another consumer under the management scenarios studied. The researchers also found that emissions associated with producing and distributing those unused returns could be substantially larger than the combined emissions from their post-return transportation, packaging and processing.

That’s an important distinction.

The highest environmental cost of a returned product may not be the truck bringing it back. It may be everything required to make a product that ultimately isn’t used again. The resources have already been spent.

The useful life never happened.

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

The Economics of Disappearance

This is where economics enters the story. Economics helps explain why environmentally useful things sometimes stop being useful.

A retailer has to decide what a returned product is worth.
  • Can it be inspected quickly?
  • Can it be repackaged?
  • Can it be sold again?
  • Will the resale price justify the labor and transportation?
  • Would liquidation recover more value?
  • Would donation make more sense?
  • Is recycling worthwhile?
  • Or is disposal simply cheaper?

The answers determine what happens next.

There isn’t necessarily a single villain making the decision. There is a chain of decisions. And every decision has a cost.

The problem is that the market price of a product doesn’t contain the full environmental cost of producing, transporting and disposing of it.

A shirt doesn’t become less carbon-intensive because its resale value dropped to five dollars. A cardboard box doesn’t become less material-intensive because the retailer can no longer use it.

The environment doesn’t get to participate in the liquidation auction.

The Convenience Paradox

We tend to think of convenience as the absence of friction.
  • Click.
  • Buy.
  • Receive.
  • Return.
  • Refund.
  • Finished.

But physical systems don’t work that way.

The friction still exists.
  • Someone drives the truck.
  • Someone sorts the package.
  • Someone replaces the damaged packaging.
  • Someone inspects the product.
  • Someone decides whether it can be sold.
  • Someone transports the unsellable inventory somewhere else.
  • Someone handles the waste.

The environmental consequences remain even when they disappear from our view. That’s the strange achievement of frictionless commerce.

It doesn’t eliminate the physical process. It separates us from it. And that separation can change behavior.

If returning something costs almost nothing in time, money, or effort, we’re naturally more willing to return it.

The National Retail Federation’s 2025 research found that 82% of surveyed consumers considered free returns important, while 76% said they were more likely to choose an option offering an instant refund or exchange.

The consumer sees convenience. The supply chain sees another unit to process. The environment sees another physical journey.

The Return Economy

None of this means we should abolish returns.

That would miss the point. Returns solve real problems.

They can prevent consumers from keeping products they cannot use. Resale can extend a product’s useful life. Refurbishment can keep products in circulation. Liquidation can move inventory into secondary markets. Donation can put usable goods into new hands. Repair can keep products out of the waste stream.

The environmental question isn’t: Are returns bad?

It’s more useful than that. What happens to a product after it is returned? Does it become someone else’s useful product? Or does it become another object moving through a system that eventually has nowhere productive to send it?

That distinction is everything.

A return that puts a product back into use can be a form of circularity. A return that produces additional transportation, packaging, and handling before ending in disposal adds environmental burden to the original purchase.

The difference isn’t visible when we click the button. But it exists.

What Happens to the Things We Decide We Don’t Want?

That’s the question hiding underneath the return policy. Not: Did I get my money back? We already know the answer.

The more interesting question is: What happened to the thing?

  • Some are returned to inventory.
  • Some are refurbished.
  • Some become somebody else’s bargain.
  • Some enter liquidation markets.
  • Some are donated.
  • Some are recycled.
  • And some never reach another consumer.

There is no single villain hiding at the end of the supply chain. There is a system.

Retailers are trying to recover value. Consumers are responding to convenience. Logistics companies are moving enormous volumes of merchandise. Secondary markets are creating new value from old inventory. And the environment carries consequences that none of those transactions fully capture.

Maybe that’s the strange thing about the modern return. We experience it as an ending. But environmentally, it is often another beginning. The package leaves our hands. The story doesn’t end.

It just becomes someone else’s problem.

When the Algorithm Sets the Price

Posted: September 9, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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What happens when the price of something stops being a decision and becomes an optimization?

There was a time when pricing was relatively simple.

A store decided what to charge. A landlord decided what to charge for an apartment. A hotel adjusted its rates. A customer looked at the number and decided whether to buy.

The decision might have involved spreadsheets, forecasts, competitors, and plenty of guesswork. Today, software can make that decision continuously.

It can watch demand, inventory, competitor prices, location, timing, browsing behavior, and thousands of other signals. It can adjust the price, watch what happens, and adjust it again.

The question is no longer simply: What should this cost?

It can become: What is the highest price the market—or this particular person—will accept?

That sounds like a technological question. It isn’t. It is an economic one.

Because an algorithm does not decide what to optimize. A person does.

And when the objective is maximizing revenue, the machine can become extraordinarily good at pursuing it.

The Market Learns to Move

Dynamic pricing is not new.

Airlines have used it for decades. Hotels do it. Rideshare companies do it. Retailers have long adjusted prices based on demand, inventory, season, and competition.

There is nothing inherently sinister about responding to changing market conditions. The important change is what software makes possible. A human pricing team might review yesterday’s sales and adjust prices today.

An algorithm can monitor thousands of variables in real time. It can test prices continuously. It can detect patterns no human employee could reasonably track. It can respond before anyone even notices the market has changed.

That is useful when the goal is efficiency. Businesses can manage inventory, respond to demand, reduce waste, and sometimes lower prices. But the same capability works in the other direction.

If a system can identify where demand is strong, it can also identify where consumers have little choice. If it can detect when inventory is scarce, it can detect when a customer is unlikely to walk away. And if it can make those calculations continuously, pricing stops being an occasional judgment.

It becomes an optimization problem. That distinction matters because optimization always depends on the objective.

Efficient at what?

From the Market to You

This is where another form of algorithmic pricing enters the picture.

Dynamic pricing asks: What will the market bear? Personalized pricing asks: What will you bear?

The difference can be subtle. A dynamic system might raise the price of a hotel room because demand increased. A personalized system could use information about the person searching for that room to estimate how much that individual is willing to pay. That information can come from many places: browsing history, location, demographics, purchasing behavior, or other characteristics.

The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating this emerging market under the term surveillance pricing. In 2024, it ordered eight companies offering surveillance-pricing products or services to provide information about how they use consumer data to set or influence prices. The FTC has said these systems can use information such as location, browsing history, demographics, and shopping behavior.

The technology is not hypothetical. The economics aren’t hypothetical either.

A field experiment published by economists Jean-Pierre Dubé and Sanjog Misra found that machine-learning-based personalized pricing could increase firm profits substantially beyond an optimized uniform price. Consumers did not all lose: more than 60 percent received lower prices. But total consumer surplus fell substantially compared with uniform pricing.

That distinction is important. Personalized pricing is not simply a machine programmed to charge everyone more.

It is more sophisticated than that. Some people pay less. Some pay more. The system’s purpose is to identify the difference and capture more of the value.

The old question was: What is the price of this thing? The new question can become: What is this particular person likely to pay?

That changes the relationship between buyer and seller. The price is no longer simply attached to the product. It can become attached to the person.

And that raises a more important question: What happens when the person has no good alternative?

The People Who Can’t Walk Away

For a luxury purchase, pricing power has limits. You can decide not to buy the watch. You can wait for the vacation. You can order something else.

But not every market works that way. People need housing. They need food. They need transportation. They need medicine and childcare.

The fewer alternatives a person has, the less meaningful the choice to simply walk away becomes. That is where algorithmic pricing collides with something older than artificial intelligence: unequal bargaining power.

A corporation may have sophisticated data, pricing software, economists, lawyers, and capital behind a transaction. The person on the other side may have a paycheck and a deadline.

The technology does not create that imbalance. But it can measure and exploit the consequences of it with extraordinary precision. And nowhere is that easier to see than housing.

The Apartment

Consider the case of RealPage. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage, alleging that its software helped competing landlords coordinate apartment pricing rather than compete independently. The basic mechanism was strikingly simple.

Landlords provided the software with information about their properties and rental markets, including sensitive information about rents and lease terms. The system processed that information and generated pricing recommendations.

The DOJ alleged that this allowed landlords to use competitors’ nonpublic information to make pricing decisions and reduced the incentive to compete for tenants. The department later expanded the case to include several major landlords.

This matters because there is a major difference between an algorithm responding to a competitive market and an algorithm helping competitors coordinate within that market. The first can make markets move faster. The second can make competition itself weaker. And the issue has not disappeared.

In 2026, the DOJ has continued to reach settlements and proposed judgments involving landlords accused of using RealPage’s system in ways that restricted competition. A proposed September 2026 consent decree involving Pinnacle, for example, would prohibit certain uses of competitors’ sensitive data and certain anticompetitive algorithmic pricing practices.

The machine is not merely calculating the market here. It is becoming part of the market’s structure. That is the important shift.

The algorithm is no longer just a faster calculator sitting behind a human decision. It can influence what competitors charge, how they respond to one another, and what prices consumers encounter.

The tenant does not get a machine. The landlord does. That difference matters.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Need to Hate You

It is tempting to describe all of this as if the algorithm itself were the villain.

That would be a mistake. An algorithm does not hate renters. It does not resent grocery shoppers. It does not want to extract money from anyone. It has no desires. It has an objective.

People choose the objective. That is why saying “the algorithm decided” can obscure more than it explains.

The important questions are:
  • Who built the system?
  • What information does it use?
  • What has it been told to optimize?
  • Who owns it?
  • Who benefits when it succeeds?

The machine does not introduce the incentive. It inherits it.

If a company rewards its pricing system for maximizing revenue, the system will look for revenue. If it rewards the system for increasing occupancy, it will pursue occupancy. If it rewards the system for extracting more from customers who have fewer alternatives, it will become better at finding those customers.

The technology is powerful because it does not have to believe in the objective. It only has to optimize it.

Algorithms didn’t invent exploitation. They industrialized its optimization.

When Optimization Becomes Extraction

This is where algorithmic pricing becomes more than a story about automation.

The system can observe. Then predict. Then price. Then observe what happened. Then learn. Then price again.

That creates a feedback loop. The market provides data. The data improves the model. The model changes the price. The new price changes consumer behavior. That behavior produces more data. And the cycle begins again.

A human pricing department cannot operate at this speed across thousands of products, customers, properties, or markets. A machine can. That gives the owner of the system a new form of economic power.

Not simply the power to set a price. The power to continuously discover how far a price can be pushed.

This is why the question cannot stop at whether algorithms are efficient. Of course they are.

The more important question is: Efficient for whom?

What Happens When the Machines Compete?

There is another problem hiding inside that question.

Competition assumes that sellers have a reason to undercut one another. But what happens when pricing systems become sophisticated enough to learn that constantly undercutting competitors is not the most profitable strategy? Researchers have already explored this possibility.

A 2020 American Economic Review study found that AI pricing algorithms can learn to collude and raise prices without ever talking to each other. More recent economic theory has examined similar problems, including models in which algorithmic pricing can produce inflated outcomes even without the traditional forms of communication antitrust law is designed to detect.

These studies do not prove that every pricing algorithm will collude. They prove something more useful: A machine does not need to be told to collude for competition to become a problem.

If the system is rewarded for profit, it can discover strategies that make more money. Sometimes those strategies may benefit consumers. Sometimes they may benefit the firm at the consumer’s expense. And sometimes they may weaken the competition that was supposed to protect the consumer in the first place.

That brings us back to the question underneath all of this. Who gets the gains from the machine?

Who Benefits From the Optimization?

The answer is not automatically “the corporation.” Businesses can use algorithmic systems to reduce waste, manage inventory, improve forecasting, and operate more efficiently. Those gains can sometimes reach consumers through lower prices or better service.

That is the strongest case for algorithmic pricing. But efficiency does not tell us how the gains are distributed.

The people buying the product generally do not own the pricing system. Renters do not own the housing software. Workers do not own the corporate data. Consumers do not decide what the algorithm is rewarded for maximizing. The companies do. And when the system becomes better at extracting value, the question becomes who captures that additional value.

That is the deeper economic issue. Technology can increase the size of the pie. It does not determine who gets the larger slice.

That depends on ownership, bargaining power, competition, regulation, and the rules surrounding the market.

An algorithm can therefore look like a neutral piece of software while operating inside a very non-neutral economic structure.

The machine may be new. The incentive is not.

The Machine Is Working

There is something almost unsettling about how ordinary this can look.
  • You search for an apartment. A price appears.
  • You look for groceries. A price appears.
  • You book a hotel. A price appears.

You assume the number is simply the price. But behind that number may be a system processing enormous amounts of information, predicting behavior, responding to competitors, and optimizing an objective chosen somewhere above you.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It does not require an evil executive sitting in a dark room. It does not even require anyone involved to believe they are doing something wrong.

The machine can be working exactly as designed. That is the point. The question is not whether the machine works. The question is what we have asked it to work toward.

We built systems capable of measuring human behavior at extraordinary scale. We gave them access to markets, consumer data, competitor information, and real-time feedback. Then we told them to optimize. So they did.

The problem is not that algorithms make decisions instead of humans. It is that we can encode our existing economic incentives into systems capable of pursuing those incentives faster, more precisely, and at a scale no human workforce could match.

Once that happens, pricing is no longer just a number. It becomes a reflection of power.
  • Who owns the data?
  • Who owns the software?
  • Who chooses the objective?
  • Who has the ability to walk away?
  • Who captures the gains?
  • And who pays for the optimization?

Those questions matter because algorithms did not create the economic system they operate inside. They made that system more capable.

Perhaps that is the question we should be asking when the machine sets the price: Was the thing we built it to optimize ever working for us in the first place?

💸 The Trillion Dollar Test 💰

Posted: June 22, 2026 in Excess and Algorithms
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A Civilization Measured by What It Tolerates

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis Brandeis

  • Somewhere tonight, a child will go to bed hungry.
  • Somewhere tonight, a family will sleep in a car.
  • Somewhere tonight, someone will drink unsafe water because there is no alternative.
  • Somewhere tonight, a worker will delay medical care because the bill would be too high.

And somewhere in the same world, one man has accumulated a fortune measured in a trillion. That man is Elon Musk.

In the United States alone, nearly 750,000 people experienced homelessness during the most recent federal count. Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people continue to face chronic hunger. Yet at the same time, we have entered an era where an individual can possess wealth greater than the annual economic output of many nations.

I want to be clear from the beginning: I do not believe any human being should possess a trillion dollars. Not Elon Musk. Not the next visionary entrepreneur. Not the most brilliant innovator in history. Not anyone.

This is not because I oppose success. It is not because I oppose innovation. It is not because I believe wealth itself is immoral. It is because a trillion dollars is no longer a measure of success. It is a measure of concentration. A measure of ownership. A measure of power.

And when wealth reaches that scale, the question is no longer what one individual earned. The question becomes what kind of society allows so much wealth to accumulate in one place while so many basic human needs remain unmet.

When Numbers Stop Meaning Anything

Human beings are terrible at understanding very large numbers.

A million dollars sounds enormous. A billion dollars sounds unimaginable. A trillion dollars belongs to an entirely different category.

A million seconds is about eleven days. A billion seconds is about thirty-one years. A trillion seconds is nearly thirty-two thousand years. The scale becomes almost meaningless.

At that point, wealth stops resembling personal prosperity and starts resembling infrastructure. Many governments operate with fewer resources than the fortune now controlled by a single individual. That fact alone should give us pause.

There is a difference between being wealthy and possessing wealth on a civilizational scale.

I have no objection to people becoming rich. I have no objection to people building successful companies. But somewhere between prosperity and a trillion dollars, something changes.

The discussion is no longer about achievement. It becomes a discussion about power.

Every era has a number that reveals what it worships.

  • Ancient empires measured land.
  • Medieval kingdoms measured bloodlines.
  • Industrial societies measured production.
  • Ours measures valuation.

We are told that a trillion dollars is evidence of genius. Perhaps it is. But it is also evidence of something else: a civilization increasingly comfortable with concentrations of wealth and power that previous generations would have considered alarming.

The Lords Return

Defenders of extreme wealth often argue that today’s billionaires earned their fortunes while yesterday’s kings inherited theirs. Fair enough.

But if the outcome is one individual possessing more economic influence than entire nations, the distinction begins to matter less.

  • Medieval kings controlled land.
  • Modern billionaires control platforms.
  • Medieval lords controlled roads, trade routes, and resources.
  • Modern corporations increasingly control the digital roads through which communication, commerce, information, and culture flow.

History spent centuries dismantling hereditary aristocracies because concentrated power was considered dangerous.

Today we celebrate concentrations of power that medieval rulers could scarcely imagine. The lesson of history was never that wealth creation is evil. The lesson was that power concentrated beyond accountability eventually becomes dangerous.

That lesson has not become less relevant simply because the castles have been replaced with data centers.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

America has already experienced a version of this story. The late nineteenth century produced industrial fortunes so vast that figures like Rockefeller and Carnegie seemed larger than life.

The era became known as the Gilded Age.

  • Economic growth exploded.
  • Innovation accelerated.
  • Industrial output soared.

Yet so did inequality, labor unrest, corruption, and the influence of private wealth over public institutions.

The problem was never that these men built successful enterprises. The problem was the concentration of power that followed. Eventually the public demanded antitrust laws, labor protections, and reforms designed to prevent private fortunes from eclipsing democratic institutions.

The lesson was not that markets are bad. The lesson was that markets left entirely unchecked tend to concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

Today we appear to be relearning that lesson.

The Machine That Makes Billionaires

Elon Musk did not personally build a trillion-dollars worth of products. No human being could.

A trillion-dollar fortune is not created through labor alone. It emerges from ownership.

  • From financial markets.
  • From automation.
  • From intellectual property.
  • From global supply chains.
  • From algorithms.
  • From systems that allow value to compound at extraordinary rates.

This is where economist Thomas Piketty becomes important. Piketty’s research argues that wealth naturally concentrates when returns on capital consistently outpace the growth of the broader economy.

In simple terms, wealth generates more wealth.

  • Ownership attracts more ownership.
  • Capital compounds.
  • The result is not necessarily a conspiracy.
  • It is a tendency.
  • A machine.
  • A system.

Modern capitalism has become remarkably effective at scaling value. What it has not solved is how to prevent that value from concentrating at levels that begin to rival democratic institutions themselves.

The question is not whether Elon Musk worked hard. The question is why modern economic systems repeatedly produce concentrations of wealth that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

A Civilization’s Report Card

Imagine a society where every child has enough food.

  • Every family has safe housing.
  • Every community has clean drinking water.
  • Every citizen has access to healthcare.
  • Every worker can meet their basic needs.

Now imagine someone becomes a trillionaire.

We could still debate whether that concentration of wealth is healthy. But that is not the world we live in.

The world we live in still contains homelessness.

  • It still contains hunger.
  • It still contains medical debt.
  • It still contains preventable suffering.

These are not mysteries. They are not unsolvable. They are choices.

The scandal is not that poverty exists. Poverty has always existed.

The scandal is that poverty exists alongside unprecedented abundance.

We have solved the problems of production. We have not solved the problems of distribution.

The Question We Avoid

I believe a trillion dollars is a moral failure. Not merely the failure of one individual. The failure of a society. Because every trillion-dollar fortune exists alongside needs that remain unmet.

We are encouraged to marvel at the size of the fortune. Perhaps we should be asking what the existence of that fortune says about everyone who was left behind.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has spent years warning that extreme inequality is not only unfair but economically inefficient and politically destabilizing. That should concern everyone regardless of ideology.

Extreme poverty creates instability. Extreme concentrations of wealth create instability.

History repeatedly shows that societies become fragile when ordinary people begin to believe the rules only work for the powerful.

The danger is not that one man becomes rich. The danger is that millions conclude the game itself is rigged.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has often argued that the central political issue of our time is not left versus right but the concentration of power in institutions that become increasingly insulated from public accountability.

The same concern applies here. The question is not whether Elon Musk is a good person. The question is whether any individual should wield economic power on a scale once reserved for states.

What Happens Next?

Many people will celebrate the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire as proof that the system works.

I see something else. I see a warning light.

Not because success should be punished. Not because innovation should be discouraged.

But because no human being should possess that much wealth while so many struggle to obtain necessities.

A trillion dollars is not merely a fortune. It is a concentration of power unprecedented in modern history.

The real story is not Elon Musk. The real story is the world that made a trillionaire possible. A world capable of producing unimaginable abundance while leaving millions behind.

The question is no longer whether we can create trillionaires. The question is why we keep accepting them.

📲 Influence Machines: How Digital Platforms Learned to Shape Human Behavior 🤳🏻

Posted: June 9, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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What happens when the most powerful institutions in society become experts at shaping attention itself?

For most of human history, power was relatively easy to recognize.

Kings controlled armies. Governments controlled laws. Corporations controlled resources. Media organizations controlled information. The centers of influence were visible.

Today, influence is becoming harder to see.

It arrives through recommendation engines, notifications, search results, personalized feeds, and algorithms that quietly decide what appears in front of us each day.

Glenn Greenwald famously argues that the greatest power of the state is not controlling what people think, but controlling the actual information they are allowed to see.

That distinction matters.

Most people imagine propaganda as something obvious—a government ministry, a state broadcaster, or a censor with a red pen. But modern influence rarely works that way. Instead, it emerges through systems designed to maximize engagement, collect behavioral data, and compete relentlessly for human attention.

The result is something new in human history: a world where billions of people interact daily with platforms that continuously study, predict, and increasingly shape human behavior.

Not necessarily because anyone designed a grand conspiracy. But because influence itself has become profitable. And profitable systems tend to expand.

The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth

Oil powered the industrial age. Data powers the digital age.

Every click, scroll, pause, search, purchase, and interaction leaves a trail behind. Individually, these actions seem insignificant. Collectively, they create a remarkably detailed portrait of who we are, what captures our attention, what triggers our emotions, and what keeps us engaged.

Consider what happens during a typical day. A smartphone records location data. A search engine records questions. An online retailer records purchases and browsing habits. Social media platforms record likes, shares, comments, watch time, and scrolling behavior.

Individually, these data points appear trivial. Together, they form a behavioral profile of extraordinary depth.

For the largest technology companies, this information has become one of the most valuable resources on Earth. The longer we stay engaged, the more advertisements can be shown. The more advertisements that can be shown, the more revenue can be generated.

At first glance, this appears to be a simple business model. But once engagement becomes the primary objective, the incentives begin to change. The goal is no longer merely to understand behavior. The goal becomes predicting it and eventually shaping it.

When the Experiment Was Real

For years, critics warned that social media platforms possessed extraordinary power to influence human behavior.

Then, in 2014, Facebook demonstrated it.

Researchers working with the company altered the news feeds of hundreds of thousands of users without their knowledge. Some users were shown slightly more positive content. Others were shown slightly more negative content. The objective was to determine whether changes in information exposure would influence emotional expression.

The results suggested they would.

Users exposed to more negative content tended to post more negatively themselves. Users exposed to more positive content tended to post more positively.

The study became controversial after it became public, largely because participants had not given informed consent. But the larger implication received less attention.

The significance was not that Facebook conducted the experiment. The significance was that Facebook possessed the capability to conduct it.

A platform used by hundreds of millions of people had demonstrated that adjusting information flows could produce measurable changes in behavior.

The experiment was small. The implications were enormous.

Behavioral Futures

In her work on surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff details how tech monopolies no longer merely predict human behavior but actively seek to modify it for corporate profit.

The Facebook experiment offered a glimpse into a much larger economic model.

For decades, businesses have studied consumer behavior to predict purchasing decisions. Digital platforms expanded that process dramatically. Every interaction became measurable. Every preference became data. Every behavior became another signal that could be collected, analyzed, and monetized.

Prediction gradually evolved into optimization. Optimization gradually evolved into influence.

Not because engineers necessarily wished to manipulate people, but because engagement was rewarded. The system followed the incentives placed before it. And over time, optimization itself became a form of behavioral engineering.

The Day the Curtain Moved

If Facebook’s emotional contagion experiment revealed the capability, Cambridge Analytica revealed the potential.

The scandal exploded into public view in 2018 after reports revealed that data from millions of Facebook users had been harvested and used to build psychological profiles. The controversy centered on elections. But elections were only part of the story.

The larger revelation was that modern digital platforms had created the infrastructure for highly personalized persuasion.

Different people could receive different messages. Different fears could be activated. Different motivations could be targeted.

Not at the level of demographics. At the level of individuals.

Cambridge Analytica did not invent these capabilities. It exposed them.

For many people, it was the first glimpse into a world where persuasion itself had become increasingly automated, data-driven, and personalized. The curtain moved just enough for the public to see the machinery behind it.

Manufacturing Reality

Tech ethicist Tristan Harris frequently warns that modern technology is no longer just competing for our attention; it is competing for absolute control over it.

That competition for attention shapes nearly every aspect of the modern digital experience.

Consider TikTok’s recommendation engine. The platform became famous not because users carefully selected what they wanted to watch, but because the algorithm became exceptionally good at predicting what would hold attention. A few seconds of watch time, a pause, a replay, or a swipe can rapidly reshape the content that follows.

Within minutes, two people opening the same app for the first time may find themselves in entirely different information environments.

A similar dynamic has fueled years of debate around YouTube’s recommendation system. Researchers and former employees have questioned whether engagement-driven recommendations can gradually push users toward increasingly sensational content. The platform’s goal is straightforward: keep people watching.

Yet emotionally charged content often performs exceptionally well.

Conflict performs well. Outrage performs well.

The recommendation system may not intend to create polarization, but it can amplify polarization when polarization proves engaging. The result is not a single shared reality. It is millions of individualized realities.

Two people can open the same app at the same moment and encounter different headlines, different narratives, different fears, and different priorities. Both may believe they are seeing an accurate reflection of reality.

In truth, they are seeing a filtered version of reality assembled through algorithms designed to maximize engagement.

The Invisible Architecture

The Twitter Files reignited debates about censorship, content moderation, and government influence. Reasonable people continue to disagree about many of the conclusions.

But one observation emerged clearly: the modern information ecosystem is far more interconnected than most people realize.

Government agencies communicate with platforms. Researchers communicate with platforms. Journalists communicate with platforms. NGOs communicate with platforms. Political actors communicate with platforms.

Influence no longer flows through simple hierarchies. It flows through networks.

The public often imagines information control as a top-down process directed by a single institution. The reality appears considerably more complex.

Multiple actors, pursuing different objectives, interact within a sprawling ecosystem that helps determine which information gains visibility and which disappears from view.

No single organization controls the entire system. Yet the system itself remains extraordinarily powerful.

Because influence does not require centralized control. It only requires aligned incentives.

The Influence Ecosystem

Viewed individually, Facebook’s emotional contagion experiment, Cambridge Analytica, and the Twitter Files appear to be separate stories. Together, they reveal a broader pattern.

Facebook demonstrated that exposure to information can influence behavior.

Cambridge Analytica demonstrated that behavioral data can be used for highly personalized persuasion.

The Twitter Files demonstrated how networks of institutions increasingly shape information environments.

Consider how most people now experience major events. Elections, wars, public health emergencies, and social movements increasingly arrive through algorithmically ranked feeds rather than direct observation. Most people encounter reality through recommendations, trending topics, suggested videos, and curated posts.

The information may be accurate, inaccurate, or somewhere in between. But the experience is increasingly mediated. Three separate stories. One emerging reality.

Attention has become a strategic resource. And the institutions that understand it best possess extraordinary influence over public perception.

The New Architecture of Power

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…” – Noam Chomsky

For much of history, accomplishing that required editors, gatekeepers, and institutions.

Today, portions of the process can be automated. Not through conspiracy. Not through ideology. But through optimization.

Algorithms shape visibility. Visibility shapes attention. Attention shapes belief. Belief shapes behavior. Behavior shapes history.

Previous generations worried about who owned the factories. Today, we may need to ask who owns the systems that shape perception itself. Because power no longer depends solely on controlling land, resources, or industry. Increasingly, power belongs to those who can guide attention.

And in an age of influence machines, attention may be the most valuable form of power ever created.

🏭 The Price of the Cloud: Water, Power, and the Communities Fueling America’s AI Boom 🤖

Posted: June 1, 2026 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Cloud Has a Physical Address & The Myth of the Weightless Internet

The cloud has always been sold to us as something weightless.

Our photos float into it. Our emails live there. Movies stream from it. Artificial intelligence draws upon it. We speak of “the cloud” as if it exists somewhere above us, detached from geography, resources, and consequence.

But the cloud is not a cloud.

It is concrete, steel, transmission lines, cooling towers, substations, and warehouses filled with servers running around the clock.

Most importantly, it exists somewhere.

As artificial intelligence accelerates demand for computing power, data centers are expanding at a pace rarely seen in modern infrastructure development. Communities across America are increasingly being asked to host the physical infrastructure supporting a digital economy that often feels invisible to the people living beside it.

The New Industrial Revolution

The AI boom is frequently framed as a software revolution. In reality, it may prove to be one of the largest infrastructure expansions of the twenty-first century.

According to projections from the International Energy Agency, electricity demand from data centers worldwide is expected to more than double by 2030. The United States is expected to account for nearly half of that increase as technology companies race to build the computing capacity needed to power artificial intelligence.

For many Americans, these facilities remain largely out of sight.

For others, they are arriving in their neighborhoods.

Powering the Machine: Artificial Intelligence Runs on Electricity

Every chatbot response, image generator, recommendation algorithm, and machine-learning model requires enormous computing power. The more sophisticated the systems become, the greater their energy demands.

Artificial intelligence may feel virtual, but its appetite is profoundly physical.

Utilities across the country are now forecasting electricity demand increases not seen in decades. New transmission lines, substations, and generation projects are being proposed to support the growing needs of data centers.

Northern Virginia: Data Center Alley

Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in Northern Virginia.

Often referred to as “Data Center Alley,” the region has become the world’s largest concentration of data centers. Vast facilities operated by major technology companies support much of the internet’s daily activity.

For local residents, however, the story is not simply about technological innovation.

Communities have raised concerns about land use, noise, transmission infrastructure, environmental impacts, and the strain that continued growth may place on local resources. What began as a niche industry has evolved into a defining feature of the region’s economy and landscape.

The experience raises a broader question:

When infrastructure becomes essential to the global economy, how much influence should local communities retain over its expansion?

The Human Cost of Growth

Supporters argue that these projects create jobs, attract investment, and strengthen America’s technological competitiveness.

Critics ask a different question.

If communities are expected to provide land, power, and public resources, how much of the economic benefit actually remains local?

The answer varies from project to project, but the question itself reveals a growing tension between national ambitions and local realities.

The Cloud Drinks Water: The Resource Nobody Talks About

Electricity is only part of the equation.

Data centers generate extraordinary amounts of heat, requiring sophisticated cooling systems that often depend upon large quantities of water.

While most Americans understand the relationship between water and agriculture, manufacturing, or population growth, few think about the water needed to support cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

That is beginning to change.

Arizona and the Water Question

In Arizona and other drought-prone regions, water has become one of the most controversial aspects of data center development.

Residents who have spent years hearing warnings about conservation increasingly question how scarce resources should be allocated. Local governments are being asked to balance economic development against long-term concerns about sustainability and water security.

For supporters, the facilities represent jobs and investment.

For opponents, they represent another demand being placed on an already stressed resource.

Neither side is entirely wrong.

The challenge lies in determining how communities should balance immediate economic opportunities with future environmental realities.

Competing Visions of Progress

The debate is not simply about gallons of water. It is about competing visions of progress.

One vision sees technological growth as an investment in the future.

The other asks whether communities should have greater influence over how finite resources are allocated.

Both perspectives ultimately lead to the same question:

Who gets to decide?

Who Gets a Say? Local Consequences, Global Benefits

A data center may serve users around the world. The consequences remain local.

The land use decisions remain local. The water consumption remains local. The noise remains local. The visual impact remains local.

As AI infrastructure expands, many residents are discovering projects only after negotiations have already begun.

Community Pushback

Across the country, communities have increasingly pushed back against proposed projects through zoning hearings, public meetings, moratoriums, and legal challenges.

Some oppose specific facilities. Others object to the process itself.

The concern is often not whether development should occur, but whether citizens have a meaningful opportunity to influence decisions that could shape their communities for decades.

Democracy in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly. Democracy moves more slowly.

Public hearings, environmental reviews, community meetings, and local elections all take time. Yet those slower processes exist for a reason. They create opportunities for citizens to weigh competing interests and participate in decisions that affect their lives.

As investment accelerates, communities are increasingly asking whether democratic participation can keep pace with technological change.

Progress for Whom? A Question Bigger Than Data Centers

The cloud has a physical address. It consumes electricity. It consumes water. It occupies land. It reshapes communities.

The infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence may feel distant and abstract, but its footprint is increasingly local.

Powering that infrastructure requires resources. Allocating those resources requires decisions.

And those decisions inevitably raise questions about fairness, accountability, and representation.

The Future Is Being Built Somewhere

The debate over data centers is not a debate about whether innovation should continue.

It is a debate about who benefits, who bears the costs, and how communities participate in shaping the future being built around them.

Throughout history, every transformative technology has forced societies to confront similar questions. Railroads, factories, highways, telecommunications networks, and the internet itself all delivered remarkable benefits while concentrating power in new ways.

Artificial intelligence may prove to be the defining technology of the twenty-first century. But long after the hype cycles fade, one question will remain:

If the future is being built in our communities, using our resources, and reshaping our lives, shouldn’t the people most affected by those decisions have a meaningful voice in determining what that future looks like?

The servers may store humanity’s data. The consequences remain deeply human.

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