August 2026

Money - the original reverse centaur

Corey Doctorow became famous recently for his concept of enshittification -- the idea that tech products become worse once they've become integrated in public life, indispensable -- trapping users in a dependent relationship on a now inferior resource. It's not unlike the way that substances, products, give off a high in the beginning, and then, because of tolerance, become another ancillary aspect of one's life -- one's life made, having zoomed out, worse by the product itself. Except in the case of enshittification, it's not the subject's tolerance, it's the product itself that is made worse as companies increase ads and cut other services, knowing their users are hooked -- and not always because of their dopamine depdency, but because they need it to promote their dog walking services, or hire employees, or find their way to the fastest way to a hospital. 

His recent book invoked this concept of the reverse centaur, which I think can cast some light on a state that we've all be in for some time. A reverse centaur is someone who is used by a tool, rather than using a tool. A centaur is someone who uses a shovel to dig a hole, or a computer to write an essay. A reverse center, in it's most extreme form, would be like the human batteries in the Matrix. In the examples that Doctorow gives, it's like human beings being used to check the mistakes that AI-guided xtrays take, and getting blamed for those mistakes. The humans are used to aid the AI, rather than the other way around. 

Yet, this arrangement is not new nor is it specific to AI. There's a technology that's been around for far longer which, I think, we all have a reverse centaur relationship to, and that technology is money. Money is a technology because it facilitates the production and exchange of goods. It's a universal medium. Rather than finding someone who has what I want, and wants what I have, in equal measure, I can just give my stuff to someone in exchange for a universal currency, and then use that currency to buy what I want at a later date. This as a story of the origins of money has been disproven (money has arisen in other contexts and for other reasons than to transcend the limits of a trade and barter system), but it's relevant to why money persists as such a useful device. 

Yet, to what extent are we used to aid the flow of money, vs the other way around? 

The roads out from this point are many, and I don't plan on trying to ennumerate them all or travel far down any of them. Simple examples could be the drive to open up foriegn markets at the turn of the century, in the Phillipeans, for example, or using the propaganda apparatus developed in WW1 to turn Americans into a want-based consumers from need-based consumers in the 50s, or in the post 9/11 world, to equate consumerism with patriotism. All of these are examples of human behavior being molded to satisfy -- not necessarily even the demands for profits from the business class, although that was true -- but to stave off economic calamity, to keep stave off economic stagnation or contraction. 

But there are maybe simpler, more elementary ways in which we serve the technology of money, rather than the other way around. Money, like AIs, are not intentional systems -- they do not want, they do not have subjective experiences. Yet, because the companies that create them do (see attachment hacking with AI) it seems like they do set goals. Visa wants us to use credit cards, so they make them pretty colors and give "rewards" for spending them (devising one of the greatest illusions that you can somehow make money by losing money). Amazon wants us buying more stuff, so they invented a buy now (a command to us, as well as an option) button. Even cash -- probably not intentional, but having it on us is a liability. It can be lost or stolen. It begs to be spent.

I don't think money, the monetary system, capital flows -- any of it, is anything other than the product of human exchange. Unlike the jetstream, or networks of micilium, or the movements of celestial bodies -- if humans disspaeared, it would also disspear. But that doesn't mean that it does not have, in some ways, a flow of its own. That flow may be directed by some people, and it may direct most people. But AI similarly does not (yet) have its own autonomous standing in the world, and it's not goal oriented. Both are kinds of technology, and both, still and increasingly, are one's that exercise a kind of authority over our lives. There's agency and empowerment in preempting the way that AI might be used in the workplace, to subordinate us, to surveil us. There's also agency and empowerment in going for a walk without the wallet (including the Apple wallet) and not planning on buying anything. Or hanging out with friends in a context that is not mediated by any consumer activity. There's is power in moving around, looking around, and, and not engaging in any way whatsoever without money. 

Earlier I wrote that one of the greatest lies in this system is that you make money by losing it (not the same as investing it). The possibly greater lie is that all activity has to be mediated by money --- that a thing is not valuable unless you've spent money on it. That is the ultimate reverse centaur move: to think that only things that have prices have value, and that if you are doing something that does not involve spending money, that thing might be worthless. A thing is worth doing when it feels worth doing, and that should be decided independently of it's relationship to spending money. If money helps facilitate that thing, that is using the technology of money like a centaur. If a thing's cost determines its value, that is having the dynamic flipped on its head --- and the money falling out of your pockets. 

Against the Selective Terror of Nuclear War

The Odyssey was recently released, and was I think accurately seen as extension of Nolan's previous film Oppenheimer. They both involve a guy who has an idea that has a superficial (and in the latter case, false) justification: do the terrible thing and prevent an even more terrible thing -- the continuing of a war. But the real reason why they carry on with it is the same reason why in Jurassic Park they make dinasaurs, and why in Jurassic Park 2 they go back to the island: because they can, and because, as LSOO notes, "it's an island full of dinosaurs." Some famous calibe was once asked why climb Everest (a similar conversation actually in JP2). He answered, "because it's there." It has to be climbed. The Trojan Horse trick has to be played. The nuclear bomb has to be built. 

The Odyssey ends in the past, at the end of a civilization, even the end of written language. Oppenheimer ends with an ominous warning from the 20th century's favorite mind that nuclear weapons could herald the end of our present civilization. "Its a literal mircale that that there has not been a nuclear war," Chomsky said. Last week, Bill Gates (sorry, yes, both disappointingly Epstein contacts) said on the Atlantic that AI is the singular, sea-change technology of his lifetime, over the personal computer, over the internet, over smart phones, and warned of it's risks after sprawling rogue AI agents, for bio warfare. He strangely did not mention nuclear war.

But he doesn't have to. Before AI, there was another threat that made nuclear war more likely, which is climate change. Climate change makes nuclear war more likely because it makes war more likely: through population displacement and resource shortage. It also does so by destablazing the global world order (which maybe deserves to be dismantled, but when shredded raises greater risks), downstream of which can be the weakening of organizations meant to monitor nuclear activity. As communities in the global south face sea level rise, as desertification spreads, and as food shortages increase, increased waves of migration will continue to stimulate the right-wing populism we've been seeing for the last ten years: demagogues like Trump - the peace candidate - who in the first two years of 2.0 has kidnapped Venezuela's president, threatened to invade Greenland, and started a war with Iran. 

The irony of the latter being that Trump justified it by preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Trump said in 2024 that Dems are messing with WW3 and no one wants to think about it. This is the selective terror of nuclear weapon. To say Trump is a bad faith actor is like saying water is wet.  The Iraq war, which Hillary supported and he claimed to have opposed, increased terror, which the Bush administration knew would happen. The risk of increased regional violence and international blowback happens when you attack a soverign country. Other states are motivated to bulk up incase they're next. And so far, his war seems to have only strengthened the Iranian regime. They may have never taken the gamble of closing the Straight of Hormuz, but forced into it, it's worked in their favor. If they survive this, that kind of leverage could insulate them even more from scrutiny if they want to build their arsenal. From a  different direction, the UN has lost credibility as, exposed as toothless to stop Israel's Trump-backed atrocities against Gaza and Lebanon. How serious should anyone take them as an international body when they want to inspect country's nuclear programs in the future? 

Bad faith actor or not, but if there's anything even billionaires should care about it's nuclear war. The point is that no one survives (Annie Jacobs interview on this with Lex Friedman is genuinely one of the scariest thing's I've heard). If there's any shred of humanity in any leader, instrumentalizing the threat of nuclear war (using it selectively) should be a red line. This is a thing no one comes back from. We could theoretically adapt to sea level rise, desertification, freak storms, food shortages. We cannot adapt to nuclear winter. That's the point. 

The fact that thousands of these things exist, many times more powerful than those dropped on Japan, lying around on earth's surface, is terrifying. Its like having asroids just suspended outside earth's atmosphere, waiting to have their tethers cut so they can pound our surface, killing billions. It's just beyond words. The fact that two self-serving psychopaths - Trump and Putin, sit atop the biggest arsenols of all, bring about other images of Nolan films -- the soldier from Dunkirk just walking into the English channel with all his gear on, or the basement full of dreamers in Inception. 

"It is practically a miracle there has not been a nuclear war."

Someday there will be no one alive who did not remember a time before the 9/11, or the internet. There is almost no one left alive who remembers a time before nuclear war. For anyone who thinks about it, is to live in what Deluze called a "peace of generalized terror." For those who were always born with it, maybe that terror is less so. But it shouldn't be, no more than astroids suspended outside our atsmostphere should be, or black hole gradually moving closer to our solar system. We need the fear to have us attend to the truth, and we need the anger to motivate us to act against those who made the world like this, and keep the world like this -- AI just being the latest wild card stuffed into the deck.

Yet, it is possible to eliminate every nuclear weapon. The answer to the right-wing populism that, in my view, raises the risk of war as it preaches isolationism and embraces military cheavunism, is left-wing populism. It is improving the material conditions to all working class people, draining demegogues of much of their xenophobic fertilizer (this, combined with an education campaign --and maybe an appeal to libertarian logic -- to demonstrate the roots of migration waves in war and warming largely driven by the West). There's a twin effect here where on one side, we reduce the support for jingoists like Trump, giving leverage to internationalist and genuinely anti-war candidates on the left. On the other side, we actually help pay for these programs (Medicaid for all, free higher ed) by defunding the military (itself also the major driver of climate emissions). The icing on the cake would be taxing and regulating companies like Boeing and Lockeed into submission.

Any defensible democratic socialism should be international in scope, recognizing that the society of workers is a global one, and we all stand to win from demilitaraizition, nuclear disarmament, and the redistribution of access and wealth. Existential threats should be the greatest unifier, the greatest cause for internationalism -- and nuclear war is the greatest existential threat. Selective attention for bad faith political ends like Trump's war on Iran (actually a spasm of legacy seeking) likley increases the likelyhood of nuclear holocaust, as it erodes trust and diplomacy, isolates allies, breeds blowback, damages the global economy, and even undermines credibility for discussing the topic of nuclear war -- not to mention actualy just carrying out war itself where nuclear weapons are never not on the table (he literally threatened to destroy their civilization).

On the other hand, honest and holistic attention to just how terrifying this is can reduce the the likelihood of armageddon, as we globably work dowards total disarmament.