Documents that crystallized a narrative and moved billions of dollars of capital.
Hype, financial narratives, and self-fulfilling prophecies in surveillance capitalism
The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies, geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.
Capital in the Twenty First Century
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation…
Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS
A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future
Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Welcome. I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I direct the Media Economies Design Lab and teach and learn from our students. I’ve written a book each on online democracy, cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and I’ve edited ones about solidarity economies, crypto, and co-ops. Reporting articles for both magazines and academic journals keeps my notebooks filled. Working with others to build a democratic economy keeps me accountable.
Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future (Paperback)
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”To live in data in the twenty-first century
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Tran…
A cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial chang…
Thoughts on narratives and the role of AI and validators going forward
I wanted to quickly share some reflections and connect some dots around ongoing work with Prashant on causal claims and language in Economics. We have extended
The Birth of the Attention Economy
The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.
Ronald Reagan & the Biggest Failure in Physics
“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science
For years, spurious journals have proliferated online, promising academic credibility in exchange for cash.
Scientific production in the era of Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping scientific research. We analyze these changes in multiple, large-scale datasets with 2.1M preprints, 28K peer review reports, and 246M online accesses to scientific documents. We find: 1) scientists adopting LLMs to draft manuscripts demonstrate a large increase in paper production, ranging from 23.7-89.3% depending on scientific field and author background, 2) LLM use has reversed the relationship between writing complexity and paper quality, leading to an influx of manuscripts that are linguistically complex but substantively underwhelming, and 3) LLM adopters access and cite more diverse prior work, including books and younger, less-cited documents. These findings highlight a stunning shift in scientific production that will likely require a change in how journals, funding agencies, and tenure committees evaluate scientific works.
Russian strikes destroy 12 million books ahead of Ukraine's first week back at school - sh.itjust.works
> Russia has hit printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine in a series of recent attacks, destroying 12 million books and damaging other icons of Ukrainian history and culture. Local media report [https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2026/08/22/8049865/] that Russia has destroyed one third of all the books printed in Ukraine this year. — This community deals not only with banned books but also with books deemed “challenging.” Therefore, I believe this news, which reports on the destruction of the Ukrainian publishing industry for “challenging” the Russian regime and aggression, is in line with the community’s theme.
Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy: