Pluralistic: Machina economicus (14 Apr 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Machina economicus (14 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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An engraved illustration from a 1903 French edition of HG Wells's 'War of the Worlds.' It shows a shadow street scene in which revelers are spilling out of a nightclub, oblivious to the looming 'tripod' Martian at the end of the block. It has been modified. The Martian's eyes now emit two beams of brown light that strike the revelers, who have been tinted red, making it appear as though they are being cooked by lasers. Behind the skyline looms a giant poop emoji.

Machina economicus (permalink)

"Homo economicus" is the hypothetical "perfectly economically rational" person that economic models often assume us all to be, despite the fact that we are demonstrably not perfectly rational.

The economists who built models based on homo economicus understood that its assumptions were unwarranted, but that's OK! As the "Nobel prize"* winning economist Milton Friedman famously wrote:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

  • The economics prize is a fake Nobel that was made up in 1968 by economists who were desperate to have their work recognized as an empirical science on par with, say, physics.

Behavioral economics – the fastest moving and widest reaching econ subfield – consists primarily of researchers carefully checking to see whether people actually behave like homo economicus and concluding, "nope":

https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/what-is-behavioral-economics

Which is a good thing! Homo economicus is a total asshole. A perfectly rational, utility-maximizing person is a selfish prick who'll steal from you and push you in front of a bulldozer if they have a "rational expectation" of coming out of the affair $0.01 ahead of where they started. Homo economicus is the kind of one-dimensional fantasy character populating manosphere mythology, where femmo economicus pursues a "sexual strategy" that chases "high value males":

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10600567/

As Yochai Benkler quipped, no one wants to live with homo economicus, even Wall Street traders, the most evangelical members of the cult of neoclassical economics. Finance bros may say they believe "greed is good," but if you hang around a downtown playground, you'll see guys in $8,000 tailor-made suits shouting at their toddlers, "Timmy! Share!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8

The "perfectly rational" being that responds solely to incentives, applying the precisely correct discount to future losses from present-day cheating, is nothing like a decent person. Someone who truly believes "there is no such thing as society" or who invoices their kids for the total cost of their upbringing on their eighteenth birthday is so fucking terrible that they might as well be an alien.

Indeed, this kind of bottomless cruelty conjures up HG Wells's Martians from War of the Worlds, the "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" that "are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts." Humanity has an instinctive, longstanding terror of beings whose cognition is so different from our own that they act without the strictures of shame, empathy or social contract: demons, aliens…AI.

The existential terror of AI evinced by corporate leaders is instantly recognizable as a species of these other ancient terrors: that some kind of superhuman being, operating within a framework that denies all moral consideration to human beings, will seize control over the planet and enslave us, torment us, and, ultimately, devour us.

But what if we already have such beings living among us, artificial beings that are millions of times more powerful than humans, more powerful than any human institution, in control of our working lives, our health, even our politicians and governments?

Arguably, we do live in the shadow of such modern demons: we call them "limited liability corporations." These are (potentially) immortal colony organisms that treat us fleshy humans as mere inconvenient gut flora. These artificial persons are not merely recognized as people under the law – they are given more rights than mere flesh-and-blood people. They seek to expand without limit, absorbing one another, covering the globe, acting in ways that are "economically rational" and utterly wicked. As Charlie Stross says, a corporation is a "slow AI":

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html

Ted Chiang has proposed that when a corporate executive like Elon Musk claims to be terrified of AIs taking over, they're really talking about the repressed constant terror they feel because they are nominally in charge of a powerful artificial life-form (a corporation) that acts as though it has a mind of its own, in ways that are devastating to human beings:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

But I think it's worse than that. CEOs who run their companies according to the psychopathic imperative of "shareholder supremacy" ("if murdering a worker costs me $1,000,000 in fines and saves me $1,000,000.01 in operating expenses, I have a duty to kill that worker") aren't just prisoners of the slow AIs that threaten the human race:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

They are collaborators, quislings who have betrayed their fellow humans to throw in their lot with the alien invaders who have colonized our planet and are xenoforming it so that it is no longer capable of supporting human life. What else would you call a human being who directs their corporate assets to build data-centers that use up the water that other humans rely upon, in order to multiply and enhance the AIs they hope to use to displace human workers with?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/09/big-tech-datacentres-water

Seen in this light, corporations and their execs are living out a version of the AI bros' superstition of "Roko's basilisk":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

In this fairy tale, today's AI is destined to "wake up" and become a superintelligent, omnipotent demon. When it does, it will instantly know which humans abetted its awakening, and which of us stood in the way of its eternal rule, and it will punish any human who attempted to prevent that great awakening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

When "effective altruists" claim that they're justifiable in ignoring (or worsening) the misery of billions of real human beings today, provided they are acting to improve the lives of an octodecillion artificial people 10,000 years from now, they're playing out this Roko's basilisk fantasy. Same goes for Mark Andreesen's claim that AI regulation is "a form of murder":

https://www.404media.co/marc-andreesen-manifesto-says-ai-regulation-is-a-form-of-murder/

These are people whose chain of logic goes, "homo economicus is the truest state of humanity; corporations are the truest homo economicus; AI is the truest expression of the corporation; therefore, whenever humans and corporations come into conflict, my duty is to help the corporate person at the expense of my fellow humans."

And indeed, all-powerful corporate aliens reward their human collaborators handsomely. If you're willing to run a health insurance company in a way that leads to mass death, you will bring home millions. Same goes for making drones or AIs that can root out and capture refugees, or airlines that transport refugees to slave labor camps in El Salvador:

https://ktla.com/news/california/low-cost-airline-partners-with-ice-for-deportation-flights/

Which brings me to enshittification: the steady, constant worsening of the products and services that we rely on. I've repeatedly insisted that enshittification isn't an ideological phenomenon, but rather, a material one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

For me, the most important riddle that enshittification solves isn't "why do these products suck now?" but rather "why didn't they suck before?" After all companies like Facebook have been led by the same people through their pre-enshittified era up to this day. They were always compelled by the profit motive. And – as anyone who's read Careless People can attest – Mark Zuckerberg has always been a terrible, terrible person:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

So why didn't they torture us before? The answer lies in constraints. In earlier years, corporations faced real consequences for enshittification: customers leaving for competitors, regulators stepping in with punishments, mass resignations by irreplaceable tech workers, and interoperable add-ons that disenshittified their products and services and severed their relationship with their customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

Then came lax antitrust (bye, competition!), regulatory capture (so long, regulators!), mass layoffs (see ya, tech worker power) and expanded IP laws (sayonara, interoperability) and now corporations are free to enshittify to their hearts' content, without fear of consequence.

But most of us are good, even without the fear of consequences. We don't shoplift, even when we know we could get away with it. Nor do we walk into a stranger's house, break into their cars, or run down pedestrians we see on lonely roads. We don't act like homo economicus, because we're not total assholes.

But those humans in the C-suite who've sold us out to the alien invaders, whose fiduciary duty demands that they wreck anything they can get away with destroying? They truly aren't like us: given the chance, they will sell us out to their AI overlords in exchange for their worthless millions.

Homo economicus is real, but he doesn't rule: rather, he serves the true transhuman threat to the human race: "machina economicus*, the paperclip-maximizing corporate slow AI that has conquered our planet and enslaved our species.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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