"Homo economicus" is the hypothetical "perfectly economically rational" person that economic models often assume us all to be, despite the fact that we are demonstrably *not* perfectly rational.
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Cory Doctorow
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The economists who built models based on *homo economicus* understood that its assumptions were unwarranted, but that's OK! As the "Nobel prize"* winning economist Milton Friedman famously wrote:
> Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)
pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/cal…
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Pluralistic: Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces (17 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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* The economics prize is a fake Nobel that was made up in 1968 by economists who were desperate to have their work recognized as an empirical science on par with, say, physics.
Behavioral economics - the fastest moving and widest reaching econ subfield - consists primarily of researchers carefully checking to see whether people actually behave like *homo economicus* and concluding, "nope":
news.uchicago.edu/explainer/wh…
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Behavioral economics, explained
mheslinga (University of Chicago)Cory Doctorow
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Which is a good thing! *Homo economicus* is an *asshole*. A perfectly rational, utility-maximizing person is a selfish prick who'll rob you and push you in front of a bulldozer if they have a "rational expectation" of coming out $0.01 ahead of where they started. *Homo economicus* is the kind of one-dimensional fantasy character populating manosphere mythology, where *femmo economicus* pursues a "sexual strategy" that chases "high value males":
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/…
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The use and misuse of evolutionary psychology in online manosphere communities: The case of female mating strategies - PMC
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govCory Doctorow
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As Yochai Benkler quipped, no one wants to live with *homo economicus*, even Wall Street traders, the most evangelical members of the cult of neoclassical economics. Finance bros may *say* they believe "greed is good," but if you hang around a downtown playground, you'll see guys in $8,000 tailor-made suits shouting at their toddlers, "Timmy! Share!"
youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee…
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Cory Doctorow
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The "perfectly rational" being that responds solely to incentives, applying the precisely correct discount to future losses from present-day cheating, is nothing like a decent person. Someone who truly believes "there is no such thing as society" or who invoices their kids for the total cost of their upbringing on their eighteenth birthday is so fucking *terrible* that they might as well be an *alien*.
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Cory Doctorow
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Indeed, this kind of bottomless cruelty conjures up HG Wells's Martians from *War of the Worlds*, the "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" that "are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts." Humanity has an instinctive, longstanding terror of beings whose cognition is so different from our own that they act without the strictures of shame, empathy or social contract: demons, aliens...AI.
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Cory Doctorow
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The existential terror of AI evinced by corporate leaders is instantly recognizable as a species of these other ancient terrors: that some kind of superhuman being, operating within a framework that denies all moral consideration to human beings, will seize control over the planet and enslave us, torment us, and, ultimately, devour us.
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Cory Doctorow
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But what if we already have such beings living among us, artificial beings that are millions of times more powerful than humans, more powerful than any human institution, in control of our working lives, our health, even our politicians and governments?
Arguably, we *do* live in the shadow of such modern demons: we call them "limited liability corporations." These are (potentially) immortal colony organisms that treat us fleshy humans as mere inconvenient gut flora.
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Cory Doctorow
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These artificial persons are not merely recognized as people under the law - they are given *more* rights than mere flesh-and-blood people. They seek to expand without limit, absorbing one another, covering the globe, acting in ways that are "economically rational" and utterly wicked. As Charlie Stross says, a corporation is a "slow AI":
antipope.org/charlie/blog-stat…
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Cory Doctorow
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Ted Chiang has proposed that when a corporate executive like Elon Musk claims to be terrified of AIs taking over, they're really talking about the repressed constant terror they feel because they are nominally in charge of a powerful artificial life-form (a corporation) that acts as though it has a mind of its own, in ways that are devastating to human beings:
buzzfeednews.com/article/tedch…
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Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
Ted Chiang (BuzzFeed)Cory Doctorow
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But I think it's worse than that. CEOs who run their companies according to the psychopathic imperative of "shareholder supremacy" ("if murdering a worker costs me $1,000,000 in fines and saves me $1,000,000.01 in operating expenses, I have a duty to kill that worker") aren't just prisoners of the slow AIs that threaten the human race:
pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/fal…
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Pluralistic: There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy” (18 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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They are *collaborators*, quislings who betray their fellow humans to throw in with the alien invaders who have colonized our planet and are xenoforming it so that it is no longer capable of supporting human life. What else would you call a human being who directs their corporate assets to build data-centers that use up the water that other humans rely upon, in order to multiply and enhance the AIs they hope to use to displace human workers with?
theguardian.com/environment/20…
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Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas
Luke Barratt (The Guardian)Cory Doctorow
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Seen in this light, corporations and their execs are living out a version of the AI bros' superstition of "Roko's basilisk":
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s…
In this fairy tale, today's AI is destined to "wake up" and become a superintelligent, omnipotent demon. When it does, it will instantly know which humans abetted its awakening, and which of us stood in the way of its eternal rule, and it will punish any human who attempted to prevent that great awakening.
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AI thought experiment
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
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When "effective altruists" claim that they're justifiable in ignoring (or worsening) the misery of billions of real human beings today, provided they are acting to improve the lives of an octodecillion artificial people 10,000 years from now, they're playing out this Roko's basilisk fantasy. Same goes for Mark Andreesen's claim that AI regulation is "a form of murder":
404media.co/marc-andreesen-man…
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Marc Andreessen Manifesto Says AI Regulation “Is a Form of Murder”
Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)Cory Doctorow
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These are people whose chain of logic goes, "*homo economicus* is the truest state of humanity; corporations are the truest *homo economicus*; AI is the truest expression of the corporation; therefore, whenever humans and corporations come into conflict, my duty is to help the corporate person at the expense of my fellow humans."
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Cory Doctorow
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And indeed, all-powerful corporate aliens reward their human collaborators handsomely. If you're willing to run a health insurance company in a way that leads to mass death, you will bring home millions. Same goes for making drones or AIs that can root out and capture refugees, or airlines that transport refugees to slave labor camps in El Salvador:
ktla.com/news/california/low-c…
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Cory Doctorow
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Which brings me to enshittification: the steady, constant worsening of the products and services that we rely on. I've repeatedly insisted that enshittification isn't an ideological phenomenon, but rather, a *material* one:
pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/urs…
For me, the most important riddle that enshittification solves isn't "why do these products suck now?" but rather "why didn't they suck *before*?"
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Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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After all companies like Facebook have been led by the same people through their pre-enshittified era up to this day. They were always compelled by the profit motive. And - as anyone who's read *Careless People* can attest - Mark Zuckerberg has always been a terrible, terrible person:
us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…
So why didn't they torture us before? The answer lies in *constraints*.
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Book details - Macmillan Publishers
MacmillanCory Doctorow
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In earlier years, corporations faced real consequences for enshittification: customers leaving for competitors, regulators stepping in with punishments, mass resignations by irreplaceable tech workers, and interoperable add-ons that disenshittified their products and services and severed their relationship with their customers:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap…
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Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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Then came lax antitrust (bye, competition!), regulatory capture (so long, regulators!), mass layoffs (see ya, tech worker power) and expanded IP laws (sayonara, interoperability) and now corporations are free to enshittify to their hearts' content, without fear of consequence.
But most of us are good, even *without* the fear of consequences. We don't shoplift, even when we know we could get away with it.
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Cory Doctorow
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Nor do we walk into a stranger's house, break into their cars, or run down pedestrians we see on lonely roads. We don't act like *homo economicus*, because we're not total assholes.
But those humans in the C-suite who've sold us out to the alien invaders, whose fiduciary duty demands that they wreck anything they can get away with destroying? They truly aren't like us: given the chance, they will sell us out to their AI overlords in exchange for their worthless millions.
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Cory Doctorow
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*Homo economicus* is real, but he doesn't rule: rather, he serves the true transhuman threat to the human race: "machina economicus*, the paperclip-maximizing corporate slow AI that has conquered our planet and enslaved our species.
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Cory Doctorow
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in #NewZealand at UNITY BOOKS in #AUCKLAND (May 2, 6PM):
eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-…
and #WELLINGTON (May 3, 3PM):
unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-even…
More tour dates (#PDX, #Pittsburgh, #London, #Manchester) here:
martinhench.com
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An Evening With Cory Doctorow
EventbriteSue Strong
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Artemis
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We need term limits on corporations?
Suggestion:
After 50 yrs from founding every corporation MUST BE split into two or more new equal sized competing corporations with their own 50 yr deadline. They and any future splits may never merge again with another split.
(Add some obvious and sensible restrictions and limits of their behavior, how to share patents, trademarks, etc...& full cooperation from C-suite, unions, owners, on penalty 1yr + forfeiture )
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MidniteMikeWrites
Unknown parent • • •@forthy42 @jackwilliambell @artemissian
The problem is twofold. Capital accumulation insulates from market forces + leads to the use of IP to block competition. It's a nasty reinforcing feedback loop.
Some of this in the US probably could be addressed by enforcing antitrust laws already on the books + revoking limited liability for specific CEOs/investors who golden parachute their way from one fire to another while presiding over consolidation of industries at our expense.
Bernd Paysan R.I.P Natenom 🕯️
Unknown parent • • •@jackwilliambell @artemissian See how China is doing it in it's real estate crisis: the company goes bust. However, the projects already sold get completed. That way, no company is too big to fail.
A less harsh thing now happens with the PV bubble: the CCP wants cheap PV to continue to grow fast, so to avoid bankruptcy of the less fortunate companies, they push for a patent pool, so that everybody can produce better and cheaper stuff.
Jonathan
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •