@MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @alexanderbird@mstdn.ca

@alexanderbird@mstdn.ca AI is a set of different technologies. The best way of talking about it is by pointing to which one specifically is relevant to a conversation.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 08, 2026

Replying to @simon_brooke@mastodon.scot

@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot Markets have existed as a medium of exchange well before capitalism and have enabled mutual exchange, even among participants with different levels of wealth. It's in markets governed by unnatural wealth-gettting (or chrematistics in Aristotle's language) do we begin to see this perversion by market makers at the expense of participants. That's not to say markets are perfect, but like any resource they're only as good as they're governed. https://misaligned.markets/greed-is-not-selfishness/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 07, 2026

RE: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@pluralistic@mamot.fr wrote a great post on the AI bubble, and this is a standout section.

As critical as I've been about the tech in my blog posts, I've tried to make space for people who have/will find useful, scoped applications.

Doesn't make any of this worth it. Also, this way of financing creates terrible path-dependencies.

But our goal, as I see it now, is to educate and steer society towards better use cases after the bubble, to prevent Big Tech from reasserting their agenda.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

RE: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

I wrote a thread about this! Markets under capitalism are interfaces where capitalists get to control the inputs.

Should we keep using the computer metaphor?

Maybe. So long as we recognize this has less to do with computation and more to do with rules.

@MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(8/8) When capitalists build interfaces they often result in what I refer to as enforceable asymmetries of action. These are states in which the rules, as followed, lead to undesirable outcomes for a counterparty. When your DNS gets hijacked and your browser routes you to “evulhaxxor.website,” the computer was just following the rules. Tough luck. But markets don't have to be this way, which is why I'm writing about this! https://misaligned.markets/gaming-the-system/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(7/8) Markets should be seen as interfaces: a boundary between the constructed reality of capitalist inputs (rents, property, entitlements) and the physical world. Just as a digital interface, like a browser, controls what you see and can do over network states, the goal of a profit-maximizing capitalist is to build an interface that routes to slices of reality that function in their favor. https://misaligned.markets/gaming-the-system/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(6/8) One way that capitalists game the market is by encoding property rights and other legal entitlements in a way that benefit them asymmetrically. Employees as contractors, CDOs built on AAA tranches from subprime mortgages. The fact that capitalists get to choose what inputs are fed to the “computer” absolutely kills the notion that markets are naively optimizing for distribution or efficiency! https://misaligned.markets/one-year-of-misaligned-markets/#capitalist-serialization

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(5/8) Digital goods are the perfect illustration. Digital assets are non-rivalrous; one person's use doesn't deplete another's, and the marginal cost of production is near zero. Yet, the tech industry has produced the most profitable companies in history. Why? Because they've found ways to capture value that have nothing to do with distribution. https://misaligned.markets/21st-century-property-rights-conflicts/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(4/8) Computers actually are a good analogy for market capitalism. Not because markets “compute” how to allocate resources but because they are a distributed system (like a computer network) whose implicit and explicit rules affect throughput and user experience. Price as a signal indicates where there are opportunities, but cannot inherently show what knowledge is being acted on. Very often it has nothing to do with “allocative efficiency.” https://misaligned.markets/capitalism-as-a-stack/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(3/8) Naive market fundamentalists miss a key detail: distributed knowledge isn't just about the game (competition), but the rules of the game. You can't escape this with a “small state.” The minute you grant a patent, you've interfered with the free market and created an attack surface that undermines all future competition. This is why capitalism is inherently political; it's a governance structure that imposes values onto markets. https://misaligned.markets/tension-market-capitalism/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

(2/8) Where I diverge from market fundamentalists, like Hayek, is that solving for “distribution” is incidental to market capitalism. Profit, not allocation, is the goal. Knowledge is useful insofar as it serves that end. This is the real “AI alignment problem” where the objective function (profit) is misaligned w/ desired outcomes (efficient distribution). Many profitable opportunities deliberately result in suboptimal distribution. https://misaligned.markets/capitalism-ai-alignment/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

(1/8) As always @pluralistic@mamot.fr writes about exactly what's on my mind a thread 🧵:

My political economy begins by taking F.A. Hayek seriously. I kid you not.

Hayek saw markets as a form of decentralized processing a logical “spontaneous order” that aggregates knowledge. He saw this pattern everywhere, including within the human mind (I'm sure like Dawkins he'd have been one-shotted by Claude).

@pluralistic@mamot.fr

#capitalism #economics #markets #oligarchy

mamot.fr

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) - Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

RE: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@pluralistic@mamot.fr the “revealed preference” of capitalists is that they hate markets. Political economy starts to make more sense when you cleave markets from capitalism and understand that capitalism is a gameable governance structure that supervenes on markets.

When we allow capitalists to intentionally conflate capitalism and markets, they're able to use the merits of markets to justify this enshittified billionaire oligarchy.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @bencurthoys@mastodon.social

@bencurthoys@mastodon.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr Market capitalism is a metastable system whose governance structure (capitalism) creates affordances that allow market actors to avoid competition. Some are intentional (patents) others emerge from gaming the rules. https://zirk.us/@MidniteMikeWrites/114808262786519399

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us

@mike @socketwench The thing that chodes like Peter Thiel don’t understand is that progress relies on innovations whose value can’t be captured. Whether it’s Newton or Einstein creating theories that lead to technologies they’ll never see (or patent), open source software, or hell the very language we’re using to express ourselves… Real progress is anti-rival, built on ideas that get better the more they’re shared. Something Thiel's winner-take-all capitalism cannot produce.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 06, 2026

Replying to @mike@sauropods.win

@mike @socketwench it’s not just that there’s no growth, but also something that solves a problem and is easy to replicate diffuses and helps others without capturing value. In Competition is for Losers, Thiel seemingly laments that Issac Newton didn’t capture the value of his theories. Can you imagine how worthless that work would be if it were subject to #enshittification

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 05, 2026

(1/12) The 'AI bubble' is a political economy story I've spent over 20k words unraveling. LLMs aren't just a technology; they're a mirror of the same delusions that drive market fundamentalism: a naive understanding of innovation, deference to capital, and the denigration of human labor.

Our debates are implicitly about all of these and more. A thread 🧵:

https://misaligned.markets/tag/ai/

#AI #LLMs #tech #AIbubble #bigtech #poliecon

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 04, 2026

#capitalism is fundamentally a game over asymmetric enforcement of property rights. Nowhere is that clearer than with digital goods, where rights holders control what counts as “access” to the digital products and services we buy.

This isn't unlike the brutal fights over land and personhood fought earlier in capitalism's history. This keeps happening because capitalism is a political governance system.

https://misaligned.markets/21st-century-property-rights-conflicts/

#righttorepair #DRM #enclosure #enshittification #tech #bigtech

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 01, 2026

Replying to @mattsheffield@mastodon.social

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social This is such a good insight. It’s one that pops up in a lot too, if I’m not misunderstanding it. Naïve epistemologies like “scientism” can end up not understanding the integrated relationship between perception and the mind, even though we tend to separate these. In other fields something similar happens where formal models end up replacing the complexity of the underlying reality being modeled. Noticing this is what got me interested in philosophy.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · May 01, 2026

Replying to @nash@labyrinth.social

@nash Thank you for doing your part to make a more goblin filled internet.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @ralph@social.tchncs.de

@ralph @smeg was one of my favorite recent talks on LLMs, validated my understanding and own reading on the topic.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @xankarn@mastodon.online

@xankarn@mastodon.online @xankarn@mastodon.online Adam Smith their supposed hero interrogated capitalism too, even if they find most of his work agreeable.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Apr 17, 2026

Replying to @Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt

@Natasha_Jay Get out of my head.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @alxndr@tech.lgbt

@alxndr @nyhan @annaecook The people who have this fear are basically trying to organize labor around the illusion that AI is valuable by enclosing annotation, infrastructure, and models. They’re the insufferable startup bros who can’t stop talking about Claude Code. Idk if they really believe in it, but they definitely have to act like they do in order to pitch their startups solving some niche problem for a negative bajillion dollars.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Mar 25, 2026

Replying to @bigiain@aus.social

@bigiain@aus.social @Daojoan@mastodon.social This is a post about everything that shareholders touch.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Feb 10, 2026

Replying to @benlockwood__dup_16027@ecoevo.social

@benlockwood@ecoevo.social market economies are a wicked problem politicians treat as an engineering problem. Until that changes any runaway consequences will remain unaddressed.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Apr 20, 2025

Replying to @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au

@aj I would do this (was originally self hosting my blog) but between the services on my own network and everything else I have going on it’d be a lot of work for me to manage my own Mastodon instance. It might be a long term goal for me though, as I want to build a community around my project Misaligned Markets.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Mar 10, 2025

Replying to @NikitaTarsov@rollenspiel.social

@NikitaTarsov@rollenspiel.social @mapto@masto.bg @wonka@chaos.social @Christo_459@mastodon.me.uk @nazgul@infosec.exchange I think I understand. His playbook's similar for other companies. Neuralink was headed by Max Hodak who worked at Duke under Miguel Nicolelis. Much of Nuralink's experiments are duplicates of the work at the Duke lab (Nicolelis had monkeys at Duke controlling a robot in Kyoto in 2008). In so far as Nuralink is doing something "novel" it's just packaging a bunch of best practices together (if that). Example from Duke: https://today.duke.edu/2014/10/nicolelis

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Mar 08, 2025

Replying to @ThePolishDispatch@mstdn.social

@ThePolishDispatch@mstdn.social @nazgul@infosec.exchange Musk actually has taken advantage of another kind of exploit. Trust. Every year at his fancy company announcements he gets on stage and promises something; it never comes, and then he just does it again next year. The insane thing to me is that it's one thing to do this with individuals he does it to companies too. Pepsi still doesn't have all the Tesla Semis they were promised. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-semi-trucks-short-supply-pepsico-its-rivals-use-competing-ev-big-rigs-2024-04-19/

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Mar 08, 2025

Replying to @Christo_459@mastodon.me.uk

@Christo_459@mastodon.me.uk @nazgul@infosec.exchange Probably a narcissist, him and Trump both. Everything he says is projection and designed to inflate his own ego. Became really obvious to me after the Thailand diver incident.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Feb 14, 2025

Replying to @evacide@hachyderm.io

@evacide Media reporting on Musk in general has just been poor. He has always been given freedom to set the narrative on what it is that he's doing. This is just a futher extension of that. It's just all the more absurd because it's plain to see he has massive conflicts of interest and is intently motivated on exploiting them. He's not really even hiding it.

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets @MidniteMikeWrites@zirk.us · Feb 10, 2025

Replying to @shanselman@hachyderm.io

@shanselman@hachyderm.io Not only is he not those things, he might very well be a chaos gremlin when it comes to complex systems (among other things) if this story from his second biography is to be believed. He apparently physically ripped out primary Twitter servers in an unplanned migration and paid random people off the street to move them. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-servers-himself-in-the-night-new-biography-details-his-maniacal-sense-of-urgency.html

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Mike @ Misaligned Markets

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