Our DAU/MAU is up 15% (these people are below me).
Engineering hours for other humans makes you feel like God. You feel their King. Certainly, you do not feel like a user. "User" is an abstracted term reserved for the NPC, the ipad kid, the profit center.
The "K Shape Economy" is maligned by hundreds of commentators who feel themselves to be in the upward sloping leg of the K. Up only.
Imagine Instagram. But the posts from your friends fade to 1 in 10. The advertisements are 3 in 10. Optimized content is 6 in 10. This is today. But what if Zuck was directly beaming spoken instructions through your screen for 6 hours. That reality we approach.
"Neo Feudalism" is derived from "I have more allegiance to my group chat than my state legislature". Downstream impacts are less discussed, mostly for being too cliche to address. Chat GPT has made it slightly realer, though still ignored like frogs in warm water. When GPT psychosis folks throw themselves off bridges following screen instructions, we pay more attention, for maybe one news cycle
What does it mean to own someone's inner dialogue; do the people without inner dialogues have one now? Is the socratic GPT-speak some mystic ritual we confront (Lauren Balik elaborates).
Meta was early but their medium is stale. If I wanted to take over running your mind I'd pipe directly in via spoken word. Sam Altman. Your consigliere.
What's all this worth on a cashflow statement? A paradox: GDP contribution of the 85th percentile citizen goes to zero while the lord's influence on their next hand movement converges to 100%.
What is neo feudalism? These new kings dictate your routine but do they care what you get up to? Rather than a farmer on a field in service of a lord in a nearby castle, you live a screen heavy live: making spreadsheets and taking phone calls with subconscious desires subverted in service of your domain owner, after work. Do you have children? Can they break out?
We used to organize ourselves economically via the baker, carpenter, crossing guard paradigm of aligning interests through commerce incentives. Now one fella runs 500 million sedated people's days. What should he do with them? Might a superintelligence know better?
How may the new upper middle class ($150m and a wife) extricate themselves from this place?
Epilepsy Warning will explore some of these questions. Or whatever I may think of. Goodnight.