And no one's excited to buy insurance.
What State Farm and Liberty Mutual Don't Want You To Know
Decentralized advocacy | Patrick Singletary | Offprint
How serious are we about AT Protocol / DID ?
Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists
Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.
The “De” In “Decentralization” Stands For “Democracy”
There’s a certain dark irony in watching tech billionaires who built their empires on the “democratizing power of technology” now actively working to dismantle democratic institut…
We Needn't Have a One True Platform - Aaron Ross Powell
On Bluesky, user numbers, and the silliness of endless growth.
Claim denial rates from health insurers have been declining (maybe) - Kevin Drum
I'll have our last ACS chart later, but in the meantime I happened to run across some actual data about health insurer claim denial rates, the topic du jour since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight, allegedly in part because of his company's astronomical denial rate. These figures come from ACA transparency data and is limited…
Substack Doesn't Want You to Leave - Aaron Ross Powell
Substack's business model is unsustainable—unless they lock all their writers in.
Will the AI IPO boom make S.F. richer, or wipe out what’s left of its middle class?
OPINION: Anthropic and OpenAI plan IPOs that make previous tech booms look tiny. If San Francisco wants to benefit, our leaders need far more urgency on housing, the editorial board writes.
The Antitrust Revolution, by Barry C. Lynn
Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech
Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization by …
How Control Exists after Decentralization by Galloway, …
Distinguishing Labor from Work - Aaron Ross Powell
We should get rid of the former, if we can, but we should absolutely keep the latter.
Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan - Schneier on Security
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?” We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the ...
1% for the People
Capitalism is the undisputed powerplant of global prosperity. Since Adam Smith first described the “invisible hand” that allows economies to be efficiently self-organizing and self-renewing, every attempt to supplant it with a competing system has failed spectacularly.
Exclusive | Blackstone to Grant Equity to Most Employees in Future U.S. Buyouts
The private-equity firm’s plan is part of a broader movement in the buyout industry to expand ownership beyond management ranks.
In agreement with @eclecticcapital.bsky.social analysis here. Blacksky’s business model thus far has been patronage which is what gives me freedom in my leadership decisions (building things like Assembly, etc) “Coordination IS the moat” “[Technology] has not democratized economic value”
The Economics of Sovereign Media: A Roadmap for AT Protocol - ATmosphereConf 2026
youtu.beActually I don't think #atproto is about decentralization. It's more about indexing over distributed data. @bsky.app and @tangled.org are actually a centralized service just like general web search engines are. But just like search engines, we don't own your content and this is the important part. 🧵
Theo
👀👀 To be clear I’m very into decentralized tech and atproto is very cool, I just don’t love shoving it into everything and don’t see it as valuable in a use case like GitHub I’m down to be convinced
