From yesterday’s post on the possible (and promising, but also potentially painful) future of computing to a pressing predicament we face today. The estimable Anil Dash on the threats to the open web…
You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.
It’s not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for “open” as we’ve known it on the Internet over the last few decades.
The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.
Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what’s still open, and likely won’t rest until they’ve either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don’t say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is…
[Dash details the treats– largely, but not entirely driven by AI and its purveyors. He concludes…]
… The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there’s no fortune or fame in it.
Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it’s the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who’ve survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they’re trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
So, we’re in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we’re all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we’re being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.
At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don’t think it’s any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.
Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member.) That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words! These are the people whom I’ve seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web’s defenders. [Further full disclosure: so is your correpondent, and so have I.]
Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site’s members without reciprocating in kind.
The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can’t just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying “enough”. And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick’s recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be… AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who’s read everything I’ve shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.
But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don’t think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called “good AI“. It’s going to take better policy, which may be impossible in the short term at the federal level in the U.S., but can certainly happen at more local levels and in the rest of the world. Though I’m skeptical about putting too much of the burden on individual users, we can certainly change culture and educate people so that more people feel empowered and motivated to choose alternatives to the big tech and big AI platforms that got us into this situation. And we can encourage harm reduction approaches for the people and institutions that are already locked into using these tools, because as we’ve seen, even small individual actions can get institutions to change course.
Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time…
As we protect what’s precious, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to a man whose work helped lay the foundation for both the promise and the peril unpacked in the article linked above above: J. Presper Eckert; he was born on this day in 1919. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.
Eckert (standing and gesturing) and Mauchy (at the console), demonstrating the UNIVAC to Walter Cronkite (source)
Insofar as (at the risk of sounding tautological) transformative technologies are concerned, Neil Postman is surely right. But then, as Roy Amara pointed out, “we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” David Oks uses a common myth of technological replacement to illustrate– and more specifically, to observe that there’s a lot more to replacing labor than just automating tasks.
He begins by recounting an interview a few months ago of J. D. Vance by Ross Douthat in which (in response to a question from Douthat about the potential downsides of AI, in particular the prospect of its “obsoleting” human workers) Vance responded sanguinely, arguing that ATM machines didn’t eliminate bank tellers. Indeed, Vance suggested, “we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work…”
There are two interesting things about what Vance said, both relating to the example that he chose about bank tellers and ATMs.
The first thing is what it tells us about who J. D. Vance is. The bank teller story—how ATMs were predicted to increase bank teller unemployment, but in fact did not—isn’t a story you’ll hear from politicians; in fact, for a long time, Barack Obama would claim, incorrectly, that ATMs had decreased the number of bank tellers, in order to suggest that the elevated unemployment rate during his presidency was due to productivity gains from technology. I’ve never heard a politician cite the bank teller story before: but I have seen the bank teller story cited in a lot of blogs. I’ve seen it cited, for example, by Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias and Freddie deBoer; and I’ve heard it, upstream of the humble bloggers, from such fine economists as Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. The story of how ATMs didn’t automate bank tellers is, indeed, something of a minor parable of the economics profession…
… But the other thing about the bank teller story that Vance cites is that it’s wrong. We do not, contrary to what Vance claims, have “more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created”: we in fact have far fewer. The story he tells Douthat might have been true in 2000 or 2005, but it hasn’t been true for years. Bank teller employment has fallen off a cliff. Here is a graph of bank teller employment since 2000:
So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.
But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?
The answer, I think, is complementarity.
In my last piece, on why I don’t think imminent mass job loss from AI is likely, I talked a lot about complementarity. The core point I made was that labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage: the relevant question for labor impacts is not whether AI can do the tasks that humans can do, but rather whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone. And I suggested that given the vast number of frictions and bottlenecks that exist in any human domain—domains that are, after all, defined around human labor in all its warts and eccentricities, with workflows designed around humans in mind—we should expect to see a serious gap between the incredible power of the technology and its impacts on economic life.
That gap will probably close faster than previous gaps did: AI is not “like” electricity or the steam engine; an AI system is literally a machine that can think and do things itself. But the gap exists, and will exist even as the technology continues to amaze us with what it can now accomplish.
But by talking about why ATMs didn’t displace bank tellers but iPhones did, I want to highlight an important corollary, which is that the true force of a technology is felt not with the substitution of tasks, but the invention of new paradigms. This is the famous lesson of electricity and productivity growth, which I’ll return to in a future piece. When a technology automates some of what a human does within an existing paradigm, even the vast majority of what a human does within it, it’s quite rare for it to actually get rid of the human, because the definition of the paradigm around human-shaped roles creates all sorts of bottlenecks and frictions that demand human involvement. It’s only when we see the construction of entirely new paradigms that the full power of a technology can be realized. The ATM substituted tasks; but the iPhone made them irrelevant…
[Oks unpacks the stories of the ATM’s and iPhone’s impact on banking, then looks ahead, by anaology, to what might be in store with AI. He concludes…]
… I am not a “denier” on the question of technological job loss; Vance’s blithe optimism is not mine. But I’m skeptical that simply slotting AI into human-shaped jobs will have the results people seem to expect. The history of technology, even exceptionally powerful general-purpose technology, tells us that as long as you are trying to fit capital into labor-shaped holes you will find yourself confronted by endless frictions: just as with electricity, the productivity inherent in any technology is unleashed only when you figure out how to organize work around it, rather than slotting it into what already exists. We are still very much in the regime of slotting it in. And as long as we are in that regime, I expect disappointing productivity gains and relatively little real displacement.
The real productivity gains from AI—and the real threat of labor displacement—will come not from the “drop-in remote worker,” but from something like Dwarkesh Patel’s vision of the fully-automated firm. At some point in the life of every technology, old workflows are replaced by new ones, and we discover the paradigms in which the full productive force of a technology can best be expressed. In the past this has simply been a fact of managerial turnover or depreciation cycles. But with AI it will likely be the sheer power of the technology itself, which really is wholly unlike anything that has come before, and unlike electricity or the steam engine will eventually be able to build the structures that harness its powers by itself.
I don’t think we’ve really yet learned what those new structures will look like. But, at the limit, I don’t quite know why humans have to be involved in those: though I suspect that by the time we’re dealing with the fully-automated organizations of the future, our current set of concerns will have been largely outmoded by new and quite foreign ones, as has always been the case with human progress.
But, however optimistic I might be about the human future, I don’t think it’s worth leaning on the history of past technologies for comfort. The ATM parable is a comforting narrative; and in times of uncertainty and fear we search naturally for solace and comfort wherever it may come. But even when it comes to bank tellers, it’s only the first half of the story…
As to whether the wisdom of Amara and Oks is widely-shared, consider this from Crunchbase:
Crunchbase data shows global venture investment totaled $189 billion in February — the largest startup funding month on record — although 83% of capital raised went to just three companies. They include OpenAI, which raised $110 billion, also in the largest round ever raised by a private, venture-backed company.
The record month for venture funding took place against the backdrop of a trillion-dollar stock market drop as AI compute and tooling unsettled leading public software companies. [See also here.]
All told, venture investment was up close to 780% year over year from the $21.5 billion raised by startups in February 2025.
OpenAI was not the only company to raise tens of billions of dollars last month. Its closest rival, Anthropic, raised $30 billion, marking the third-largest venture round on record.
Waymo, Alphabet‘s self-driving division, raised $16 billion. Together, those three rounds totaled $156 billion, representing 83% of the global venture capital raised in February.
A further four companies each raised $1 billion or more last month: Tokyo-based semiconductor manufacturer Rapidus; London-based self-driving platform Wayve; San Francisco-based AI for robotics World Labs; and Sunnyvale, California-based AI semiconductor company Cerebras Systems.
These massive rounds were led by strategic corporate investors, a host of private equity and alternative investors, as well as a few multistage venture investors and a government agency…
As we contemplate change, we might send sanitary, odor-free birthday greetings to Sir Joseph William Bazalgette; he was born on this date in 1819. A civil engineer, he became chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, in which role his major achievement was a response to the “Great Stink of 1858,” in July and August of 1858, during which very hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent. Bazalgette oversaw the creation of a sewer network for central London which addressed the problem– and was instrumental in relieving the city from cholera epidemics, in beginning the cleansing of the River Thames, and in creating (a crucial part of) the infrastructure that underlay its extraordinary growth over the next century.
It’s nearly impossible not to be watched these days. It can start right at home with your neighbors and their Ring cameras—a company that sold fear to the American public and is now integrating AI to turn entire neighborhoods into networked, automated surveillance systems.
Head out a bit further and you’ll likely be confronted by Flock’s network of cameras that not only track license plates, but also track people’s movements with detailed precision. And as the Trump administration raids cities across the U.S. for undocumented immigrants, tech giants like Palantir are powering tools for ICE, including one called ELITE that helps the agency pick which neighborhoods to raid.
Understandably, people are worried about violations of their privacy by companies and the government. And many wonder, is there any way to go back once we’ve released all this AI-powered, surveillance tech?…
* “Bentham’s Panopticon [at top] is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery… He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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As we feel seen, we might recall that it was on this date in 2000, that the dot.com bust effectively began. Between 1995 and its peak five days earlier, on March 10, 2000, investments in the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose from 1,006 to 5,048—a 400% gain fueled by the conviction that the internet would render every prior valuation framework obsolete. It did not.
On March 13, 2000, news that Japan had once again entered a recession triggered a global sell off that disproportionately affected technology stocks. Soon after, Yahoo! and eBay ended merger talks and the Nasdaq fell 2.6%; still, the S&P 500 rose 2.4% as investors shifted from strong performing technology stocks to poor performing established stocks. The market held steady on the 14th. Then, on this date 26 years ago, the broader market begin to drop… and kept dropping. By the end of the stock market downturn of 2002 (the “second chapter” in the correction that began in 2000), stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalization since the peak. At its trough on October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped to 1,114, down 78% from its peak. It took 15 years for the Nasdaq to regain its March, 2000 peak.
Max Haiven has shared a provocative essay on capitalism that “moves beyond the conventional framing of cheating as the exceptional malfeasance of bad economic actors, as well as beyond the claim that capitalism’s drive to profit encourages dishonesty and manipulation (thought that is indeed true). Rather, it proposes we recognize cheating at capitalism’s ideological and operational core, not its periphery.” Haiven offers three case studies, then notes that the perspective he sketches “can help us recognize some elements of the rise of reactionary, far-right, and fascistic sentiment and politics today. These in many cases revolve around a rhetoric of cheating that misrecognizes the culprits, targeting poor and precarious minorities rather than those at the commanding heights of the economy.” From the introduction…
We are, by now, so familiar with the economy being described as a game that the metaphor often passes without notice (Cudd; Mooney). Scholars from a wide diversity of disciplines and across the political spectrum have explored the importance of metaphors to the functioning of the economy, both for economists and policymakers and for more humble market actors, including consumers, workers, and small investors (McCloskey; Gramm; Young). The metaphor of the game not only affirms that capitalism is competitive and rule-bound, it also frequently implies that it is at least ideally fair. Metaphors of a ‘level playing field’, for example, were crucial to the neoliberal project that promised that trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation would lead to a system where hard work and talent were rewarded and where innovation would thrive (Krarup). That ideology never promised equality, and indeed inequality was crucial to the driving motivations of its actors, but it did promise fairness. And yet, forty years into the neoliberal revolution and it would be hard to find anyone who believes the game is fair.
This exploratory essay presents three scenes where cheating can be seen to be at the ideological core of the free-market project. Its purpose is to contribute to the argument that cheating is not simply, as defenders of neoliberal capitalism and financialization tend to claim, the exceptional and regrettable outcome of individual amorality or regulatory failure (see Jaeggi). Nor is it simply, as many critics of the system contend, a matter of the rich and powerful breaking or bending the rules, as for example in the use of tax havens and other tax avoidance schemes, or lobbying efforts, insider trading, or the gaming of regulations to avoid the inconvenience of human or environmental responsibility (Shaxson). It also goes beyond the Marxist supposition (with which I agree) that capitalism is fundamentally built on the inherent swindle of the wage relation, where workers, deprived of the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power in return for a fraction of its actual value, the rest being pocketed by their boss and reinvested in the expansion of capitalist accumulation (Harvey). Rather, across three cases, I seek to sketch a pattern where cheating is integrated into the very ideological and operational core of capitalism.
My purpose is not to make a moral critique of free-market capitalism or a structural analysis of financial accumulation, although both might be well-served by my argument. Rather, it is to lay the groundwork for an explanation for our present-day conjunctural political salience of the cheat and cheating. Why is it that today’s far-right, fascistic, and reactionary politicians, influencers, and personalities so successfully mobilize vitriol against supposed cheaters? Donald Trump is only the most famous example in his claims that he must be given profoundly antidemocratic powers to save democracy from cheats: political miscreants alleged to have cheated him and his supporters of the 2020 elections; migrants accused of cheating the ostensibly fair border regime; racialized grifters supposedly cheating the capitalist meritocracy with their cynical claims to oppression and demands for bureaucratic remedies (preferential hiring or university admissions, etc.); and, more generally, ‘elites’ said to have cheated the hardworking and entrepreneurial (white) American everyman of his due.
The success of Trump’s antics are all the more surprising given that he is himself a convicted cheat, and proud of it (Haberman and Feuer). His policies have hamstrung or completely eliminated many government bodies tasked with controlling corporate crime and he has used Presidential fiat to pardon multiple notorious wealthy cheats (Claypool; Goldstein and Silver-Greenberg). It appears almost certain the he cynically deployed his bellicose threats of tariffs to undertake one of the world’s most staggering acts of insider trading (Faturechi, Rebala, and Roberts) and that he has developed a cryptocurrency as a means to essentially sell political influence in plain sight (Chayka).
But Trump is only the most egregious, telegenic, and bombastic of many such characters. Many similar accusations could be leveled at Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (Nunes), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (Yang), Argentina’s Javier Milei (Callison and Gago), Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (Stille), or India’s Narendra Modi (Auvray). All of them are illiberal democratic autocrats who have wielded accusations of widespread cheating to fuel pro-market reactionary politics, while at the same time overseeing parties or regimes that are significantly built on cheating. These and other far-right political revanchists mobilize a public rhetoric that revolves around fostering the anger of manufactured majorities against what I will call the ‘cheating other’, minorities who are rumored to be defrauding society and refusing to play by the rules. The claim is often that this cheating has either been intentionally allowed by venal political elites or permitted because of the stupidity and gullibility of liberal or left-wing policies, and that matters have become so dire and corrupt that it requires radical actions that contravene the law, human rights, and other such inconveniences.
Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, actual well-documented cheating continues in plain sight. For example, none of these regimes have done anything meaningful to reign in the use of tax havens and other forms of tax evasion whereby the wealthiest members of society essentially use legal loopholes to cheat the common purse. Indeed, many of these reactionary political actors and their supporters are named in leaked documents such as the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers (Tax Justice Network, 2024).
However, the purpose of this essay is not to point to the rank hypocrisy of these actors, which is rarely hidden and whose revelation seems to do little good. Nor is it to provide a complete account of how we came to live under what I will, elsewhere, call ‘the rule of the cheat’ (Haiven, forthcoming). Rather, it is to try and understand a tendency deep at work within financialized neoliberal capitalism, one that has helped feed the revanchist political sentiments that gave rise to the popularity of reactionary politics (Haiven).
Those sentiments brood within financialized subjects. Forty years into the global neoliberal revolution and its accompanying processes of financialization, we have witnessed profound pressures on the formation of subjectivities, as individuals are compelled to conform to an increasingly competitive, austere, and precarious socio-economic environment (Cooper). Yet, as many theorists have demonstrated, this is rarely encountered or interpreted as the grim imposition of market domination, but rather as a set of agentic opportunities to speculate, perform, and compete (Lazzarato; Martin; Haiven). For example, while housing precariousness has increased in many jurisdictions thanks to the financialization of urban real estate, many non-elite subjects have embraced property speculation as an opportunity to profit and improve their life chances (Stein). Likewise, although work has generally become more precarious, many subjects see increased opportunities to start their own businesses or invest in financial assets, from publicly traded shares to cryptocurrencies (Lorusso). The affordances of social media and other platform corporations offer opportunities to leverage one’s personality and talents in the name of becoming an influencer or streamer, which are among the top career aspirations for young people today (Bollmer and Guinness). While these opportunities are themselves the result of the economic forces that generally tend to increase precariousness, inequality, and the domination of society by the market, they nevertheless are experienced by many individuals as pathways to freedom. This is more than ideological false consciousness in any simplistic sense. Financialized neoliberal capitalism’s unique success has been to not merely subdue but to seduce our agency.
As Wark and Jagoda note, such conscription of agency often feels like – and is frequently expressed in terms of – a game. Even though success in capitalism is extremely rare, each of us is tasked with reimagining ourselves as a ‘player’, convincing ourselves that the game is or at least ideally should be meritocratic and fair, even if far from equal. And yet most of us will fail while we watch others, whom we imagine to be less talented or hardworking, succeed. We increasingly feel cheated. This feeling is compounded by fines, fees, and costs, including inflation. These have, ironically, increased under neoliberal financialization largely thanks to the deregulation of capital and the privatization of public services, despite claims that the system would eliminate the red tape of overprotective government bureaucracy (Cooper). It is this figure of the ‘cheated player’, the financialized subject whose sense of agency and possibility has been betrayed, that is especially susceptible to the siren song of the reactionary political commentators, influencers, and political candidates who promise to apprehend and take revenge on people and populations they depict as cheaters.
This essay takes this set of problems as a point of departure, but ultimately seeks to excavate three moments in the genealogy of contemporary financialized neoliberal capitalism where we can observe cheating being at the very center of its operations, not simply because certain cheating individuals or institutions hold pivotal roles, but because forms of activity that can very well be understood to be cheating are incorporated into the core operations of the system. Such an analysis would not only undermine neoliberal claims that capitalism fulfills the liberal dream of a society built on the Rawlsian principle of procedural justice – that is, one in which markets may generate inequality but nonetheless remain fair (see Hunt). It would also contribute to a complication of Marxist approaches which, in their zeal to understand the abstract laws of capitalist accumulation and the ways these are enabled by a legal superstructure, have tended to downplay the crucial role of cheating, fraud, and criminal activity.
In the first case, I take up the imperialist ‘great game’ on which modern capitalism was founded: the operations of imperialist states and their corporations and companies. Here, the ‘great game’ was one that promised to bring freedom, ‘fair play’, and free trade to colonized people, but in fact established a rigged game. European powers imposed punitive and exploitative trade relations on their protectorates while also insisting that they submit to their colonizers’ sanctimonious tutelage.
In the second case, I take up the paradigm of game theory, which has become a pivotal element in neoliberal financialized capitalism, both as a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal as well as a crucial mechanism in financial decision-making, geopolitical strategy, public policy, and the development of digital technology. Within game theory’s, cheating has a specific meaning, namely defection from a previous agreement. But cheating is also anticipated and incorporated into game theory’s fundamental assumptions, whereby it is rational and expected that optimal players will almost inevitably ‘cheat’.
In the final case, I look much more broadly at what I would frame as the normalization of cheating in recent financial history, which we can trace via the work of acclaimed and highly influential financial reporter Michael Lewis, whose books have tended to focus on the rule-bending or rule-breaking mavericks whose defiance of the conventional norms (and sometimes laws) that govern finance quickly comes to be common practice and around which a new set of rules and norms quickly form.
In each of these three cases, I am not seeking to make a categorical historical argument. Rather, my effort is to paint, in broad strokes, an overarching pattern.
By way of conclusion, I take up Johann Huizinga’s distinction between the cheat and the spoilsport: the former may be unethical, but is often accepted and sometimes admired because they bend but do not break the rules, allowing the game to continue; the latter is loathsome because, in their (often justified) refusal to play a game they think is stupid, rigged, or fruitless, they call into question the wisdom, morality, or agency of their fellow players. This has significant consequences for our consideration of strategies against fascistic politics and for collective liberation…
* Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 8). to which he added (in Book 1, Chapter 11): “The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public … The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order … ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined … with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men … who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public…” As Branco Milanovic observes, the oft-called “Father of Capitalism” was no blind worshipper of the market economy.
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As we rethink the rules, we might recall that it was on this date in 2019 that Forbes annoited Kylie Jenner “the world’s youngest ever billionaire” (at age 21). A media personality and socialite, Jenner had been involved (with her sister Kendall) in the clothing company PacSun, had launched her own cosmetics line, and had, of course, featured in the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians and had “starred” in its spin-off, Life of Kylie. A year later Forbes released a statement accusing Jenner of forging tax documents so she would appear to be a billionaire.
When President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on “Liberation Day” last spring, the promise was that manufacturing– and the jobs it provides– would return to the U.S. Scott Lincicome (from the conservative Cato Institute) assesses the “progress” to date…
US manufacturing ended 2025 with a thud, capping a rough year for the sector. To recap, manufacturers shed 63,000 jobs, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It wasn’t just labor that was hurting. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index clocked in at 47.9 for December, marking the 10th consecutive month of contraction as new orders were especially weak and costs at historically elevated levels.
Then there’s the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book of regional economic conditions and surveys from the regional Fed banks, which have repeatedly documented cases of manufacturers delaying hiring and investment amid weak market conditions, rising costs, shrinking profit margins and persistent uncertainty. As for the “hard” data, manufacturing capacity and output, while incomplete, sagged through the Fall.
Overall, the evidence reveals a sector that’s stagnant at best, and a long way from the manufacturing renaissance President Donald Trump promised when he took office for a second time a year ago. No wonder administration officials have pivoted from predicting a factory boom in 2025 to now saying it will happen in 2026 and beyond.
Better tax, regulatory, and monetary policy should indeed provide a tailwind for manufacturing, but the sector will probably continue to struggle. If so, Trump’s tariffs will be a big reason why…
[Lincicome unpacks the several ways that Trump’s tariffs have confounded domestic manufacturing: increased costs (especially on materials/compnents not available in the U.S.) and tariff and policy/regulations that might be politely called “inconsistent” (or less politely, “flighty”); last year, the US tariff code was amended 50 times)– which has added management/coordination costs (Federal Reserve economists estimate that domestic manufacturers will pay $39 billion to $71 billion annually to comply with the new regime, representing time and money they can’t spend on their businesses); but perhaps even more damagingly, has created uncertainty that has slowed corporate action/investment. Lincicome concludes…]
… The harms to manufacturers are consistentwithresearch on past tariff episodes and help to explain why the sector struggled in 2025 — and why things might not get much better this year. Recent forecasts also suggest caution, with manufacturers and supply chain professionals predicting continued headwinds due to the costs, uncertainty and complexity of tariffs. And the Supreme Court won’t save them. If it invalidates Trump’s “emergency” tariffs in the coming days, administration officials have promised to invoke alternate authorities to recreate them.
Global supply chains took years to develop. They’ll take even longer to reorganize and will do so at great cost if, that is, they don’t break altogether in the meantime…
Relatedly, Trump’s immigration policy was (like the “manufacturing boom”) supposed to have reduced the federal deficit. The Administration is deporting immigrants at a brisk clip– but at an extraordinary cost, both economically and constitutionally. That’s not to mention the costs to the targeted immigrants themselves, to their familires and to the companies and economies of which they have been preponderantly positive and productive parts. Indeed, a different group at Cato recently published a thorough study demonstrating that– far from being a drag on the economy– immigrants have reduced federal (and state and local) deficits by $14.5 Trillion since 1994… though, of course that contribution is now, thanks to the ICE storm, slowing down.
It’s easy to see Trump’s election and the imposition of his economic and immigration policies as America’s Brexit. That abrupt rupture of social, cultural, and economic conventions is now about a decade old… and the results aren’t pretty…
Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union, is a rare contemporary example of a major developed economy raising trade barriers and more generally pulling back from international economic integration. When the Brexit referendum took place in 2016, academic and professional economists generally forecast that the policy about-face would result in a negative hit to the United Kingdom’s economy of about 4% of GDP over the long-term. Rather than a sudden, visible economic shock following the vote, the costs of Brexit have been gradual and cumulative. Now, almost a decade later, new research aims to assess Brexit’s actual impact on the United Kingdom’s economy, which involves the challenging task of comparing the country’s economic indicators to what they would have been if the United Kingdom had remained in the European Union. This research finds that, ten years on, the economic cost of Brexit has been larger than analysts predicted and that prolonged policy uncertainty contributed importantly to the magnitude of the impact… We estimate that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time… Understanding the ways in which Brexit resulted in a drag on economic growth for the United Kingdom provides potential lessons about the costs of abruptly pulling back from the global economy for other countries… – “The Economic Costs of Brexit on the UK” (where there is much more detail)
* Donald Trump
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As we interrogate empty promises (and lest we think that history doesn’t rhyme), we might recall that it was on this date in 1856 that the Know Nothing Party (dba, “the American Party” and “Native American Party”) convened in Philadelphia to nominate its first presidential candidate. A nativist (and largely anti-Catholic) group composed of anti-immigrant/Old Stock breakaways from the American Republican and Whig parties, the Know Nothings nominated Millard Fillmore.
The last member of the Whig Party to serve as President, Fillmore had been a Congressional Representative from New York who was elected to the Vice Presidency in 1848 on Zachary Taylor’s ticket. When Taylor died in 1850, Fillmore became the second V.P. to assume the presidency between elections.
Fillmore’s signature accomplishment was the passage of the Compromise of 1850 passed, a bargain that led to a brief truce in the battle over slavery– but was so ill-conceived (it contained the Fugitive Slave Act) and unpopular that Fillmore failed to get his own party’s nomination for President in the election of 1852, which he sat out. Unwilling to follow Lincoln into the new Republican Party, he got the nomination of the Know Nothings– though he was not a member of the party and hadn’t sought it; he was out of the country during the convention. Fillmore finished third in the 1856 election. By the 1860 election, the Know Nothings were no longer a serious national political movement.
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