premise: capitalism is not first an economic system. it’s a political philosophy that redefined who counts as a person, what counts as property, and which institutions can say “no” to power. the economics follow from that.

if you keep this in view, the long arc from feudal contracts to dutch joint-stock companies to platform capitalism and china’s hybrid model clicks into place.

tl;dr

• private first, markets second: the distinctive feature is not production or exchange. those predate factories. it’s the invention and defense of private ownership against rival claims (especially by states and lords).
• countervailing force is everything: private property is only real where something can stop someone stronger from taking your stuff: armed retinues; leagues; churches; eventually, courts and codified law.
• legal person → corporate persona: rights for individuals generalized into rights for artificial persons. that unlocked transnational firms whose power rivals states.
• prices abstract history: the price system strips narrative from goods, allowing “clean” exchange of “dirty” inputs (e.g., slave-grown cotton into British looms), then later into balance sheets and platform metrics.
• neoliberal turn: after mid‑century corporatism and the bretton woods order, the 1970s–90s shift (volcker shock → reagan/thatcher → wto) normalized capital mobility, financialization, and state as guarantor of markets.
• today’s bind: globalized supply chains, platform monopolies, and sovereign-like corporations. the old covenant (“we let you extract; you let us govern”) is unstable.

definitions that actually matter

• capitalism (core): private ownership of means of production and distribution + market exchange for profit + a legal-political regime strong enough to protect private claims from sovereign expropriation, yet weak enough to be constrained by those very claims.
• the novelty is not “factories” or “trade.” it’s the institutionalization of the word “private.” everything else is downstream.

Two immediate implications:
- relative to what? “private” only makes sense relative to a higher power that could take it. you need an alternative force—feudal bonds, leagues, canon law, common law, napoleonic code, later constitutional courts—to say “no.”
- who is a person? expand the circle of persons who can hold rights, then allow those rights to aggregate into artificial persons (corporations). that is the lever.

a very compressed timeline (with the levers highlighted)

feudal reciprocity → commons of obligation

Before “private” as we know it, land was embedded in obligations. a duke “owned” an estate the way a conductor owns a symphony: through interlocking claims—widows’ wood-gathering rights, pasture rotations, tithe obligations, military service. it was legible through stories, not prices.

Key properties:
- ownership is conditional; sovereignty can disinherit you tomorrow.
- enforcement is social-military, not legal-abstract.
- “markets” exist episodically (fairs), tightly constrained to protect status order.

monetization by necessity → tax → armies → more tax

Standing armies are expensive. the fiscal state learned that fairs and weekly markets boosted taxable flows; then required taxes in coin; then forced peasantries into money circuits. monetization was not “natural”; it was policy (and war finance).

enclosures → invention of the modern “private”

The enclosure movement in England is the crisp demonstration. hedges and fences were legal instruments that converted customary, narratively-defined use rights into alienable, saleable property. “free labor markets” did not pre-exist; they were engineered by removing non-market subsistence options.

courts as the new sword

Private armies (VOC/EIC), leagues (hansa), and churches once countered kings. modernity replaced spearpoints with statutes:
- common law: precedence binds the sovereign (in principle) to general rules; subjects litigate against crown agents.
- napoleonic code: absolutist in myth, but conceptually clarifies property, contract, and person; later republican constitutions harden limits (e.g., quartering bans, takings clauses).

corporate personhood → transnational muscle

1602: VOC (and siblings) fuse a new business form (joint-stock, transferable shares, perpetual life) with state delegation (monopoly charters, private armies). the result is a non-state actor that can project power, tax traders, wage war.

This is the first clear case of a political invention producing an economic supercharger.

industrial revolution → mass abstraction

Factories compress time and space: wages become the common denominator; prices scale; accounting universalizes. the more an economy is denominated in money, the more narrative is stripped. you stop buying “ed’s milk” and start buying “milk at $X.”

the 19th c. contradiction: persons vs property

Slavery dramatizes the tension: is a human a person, or property? the us civil war amendments (13–15) redefine the legal “person,” but retain the deeper link between citizenship and property rights. emancipation restricts what counts as ownable, not whether property dominates the grammar of rights.

20th c. managerial capitalism → mid‑century truce

Corporations internalize supply, labor, and finance; states backstop demand (new deal, postwar social contracts). bretton woods constrains capital flows; keynesian stabilization norms embed labor power and public investment. competition policy is aggressive; unions matter.

1970s–1990s: the neoliberal turn

Oil shocks and stagflation break the truce. volcker crushes inflation via interest rate shock; capital reasserts mobility; reagan/thatcher deregulate; wto globalizes rules. the result: financialization; offshoring; shareholder primacy; state repurposed as guarantor of markets more than employer of last resort.

china’s hybrid (and the post‑2008 world)

China embraces export-led growth, disciplined credit, quasi-state firms; wto accession accelerates global supply-chain integration. post-2008, western states rescue balance sheets; platforms consolidate; surveillance + data moats substitute for 20th‑century vertical integration.

the philosophical core: why prices are so powerful (and dangerous)

Prices are a brilliant compression algorithm: they encode vast coordination information into one number. but they also erase history. the same abstraction that lets you compare substitutes also lets you ignore origins.

Examples I gave in lecture:
- Britain interdicted the slave trade at sea while happily spinning slave-grown cotton at home. abstraction makes that socially thinkable.
- sunday closing norms in parts of europe preserve non-market values; 24/7 retail in the us encodes the opposite.
- education and medicine migrated from status/virtue goods to income-maximization pipelines; once denominated in ROI, prices rationally soar.

This is not a morality tale that “prices are bad.” it’s a reminder that price is a political choice: which histories we strip, which frictions we preserve, which externalities we tolerate.

political technology, not just economics

Capitalism wins by evolving institutional counterweights:
- when kings were strong, aristocratic compacts and ecclesia limited them.
- when states professionalized, courts did.
- when national governments sought to police borders, joint-stock firms and later platforms leapt them.

Each step is a new political technology that refactors the boundary between “public” and “private.” the balance has never been stable for long.

the present order: platform capitalism as soft sovereignty

• platform monopolies: network effects + data moats + default contracts concentrate power; antitrust tools built for railroads misfire on attention markets.
• financialization: balance-sheet optimization outruns productive investment; accounting tail wags operating dog.
• regulatory arbitrage: global entities pick jurisdictions, shift profits, and shape standards.

The result is a de facto constitution wherein the “private” parses and often preempts the “public,” echoing VOC logic with cloud-native tooling.

where do we go from here?

I see three levers—each political before economic:

1) Re-specify personhood (again)
- Expand rights/responsibilities to artificial persons differently (e.g., fiduciary duties beyond shareholders; climate liability; data trusteeship).
- Recognize agentic software as economic actors, but attach auditability and narrow purpose rights before unleashing general capabilities.

2) Re-embed prices in histories
- Mandatory provenance disclosures (labor, carbon, governance) attached to skus; machine-readable by default. let the abstraction carry context.
- Public option metrics: normalize non-price signals (health, time, resilience) in procurement and consumer interfaces.

3) Rebalance countervailing force
- Modern antitrust for networked markets (interoperability, data portability, neutral pipes) rather than solely structural breakup.
- International minimums (tax floors, supply-chain due diligence) to blunt jurisdictional races to the bottom.

a useful mental model

Ask of any proposal: which countervailing force does it empower? courts, codes, or compute? if you cannot name the thing that can say “no,” you don’t have a new equilibrium—you have wishful thinking.

further reading / anchors I drew on in the lectures

• Hansa, VOC/EIC charters; enclosure acts; napoleonic code vs. common law evolution; bretton woods primary docs; volcker-era minutes; wto accession protocols; contemporary platform antitrust cases.

closing

capitalism’s genius is institutional. it keeps finding new ways to make “private” real against stronger adversaries. the danger is the same: left unchecked, the private becomes sovereign. to govern that, we will need to get as inventive with our political technology as the last five centuries were with their economic ones.

order your groceries. saves an extra 1-2 hours a week. compounded, thats 50-100 hours a year. a whole week work of work you gain. i promise that time is more important then the $10 delivery fee
https://x.com/boywaif/status/1965426098499715218

gaurav @gaxrav
quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat clean. journal. save a life. learn to code. read poetry. create art. stay composed. refine your speech. optimise for efficiency. act sincere. help people. be kind. stop doing things that waste your time. follow your intuition. craft reputation. learn persuasion. systemise your day (or don’t). write. write. write. write more. iterate violently. leave your phone at home. walk to the grocery store. talk to strangers. feed the dogs. visit bookstores. look for 1800s novels. experience art. then love. sit with a monk and offer them lunch. don’t talk shit about people. embody virtue. sit alone. do something with your life. what do you want to create? turn off your mind. play. play a sport. combat sports. notice fonts in trees. fall in love. notice patterns on a table. visualise it. talk to people with respect. don’t hate. be loving. be real. become yourself. cherrypick your qualities. discard the useless. rejections aren’t permanent. invite what aligns. accept what does not. read great people. be different. choose different. do great work. let it consume you. lose your mind. value your time. experience life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Gv5e253xA
The hosts latch onto Deleuze & Guattari’s famous line from What Is Philosophy?:
“Philosophy is the creation of concepts.” (17:38)
17:49 — co-opted by capitalism (“plant positive thoughts → positive outcomes” = Silicon Valley BS)
This idea, they argue, has been neutralized by contemporary academia and “innovation culture”—turned into a sterile slogan about positivity, creativity, design-thinking, pluralism, niceness. Culp’s pushback:
“Creating concepts has been co-opted into familiar positive refrains of capitalist culture.” (17:49)
Contemporary affective management
The central thesis is that Deleuze has been co-opted by capitalism. Since modern capitalism thrives on “creativity,” “connectivity,” and “networking,” a revolutionary philosophy cannot just be about creating more concepts.
The Problem: The “Joyful Deleuze” (the dominant reading) focuses on affirmation and production, which aligns too perfectly with Silicon Valley ideology and neoliberalism.
In the hands of capital & academia this becomes:
“Be creative, be constructive, invent concepts → positive outcomes.” Like a Silicon Valley TED-talk version of Deleuze.
8:31 — capitalism produces anxiety then sells “self-care” as a management protocol
This is a Deleuze-Guattari critique directly from Anti-Oedipus:
capitalism both induces and administers neurosis.

The speakers cite Deleuze’s Nietzsche:
“Sad passions” are emotions that weaken life, that drain its power to act. (4:39–5:44)
They note Foucault’s warning:
The Left “should beware the sad passions.” (4:51)
These are not “radical anger”—they are moods of exhaustion, moralism, guilt, resentment.
The examples from the video:
The French Communist Party’s depressive rigidity (7:10)
Neo-Maoist purity antagonism (7:10)
The Left’s self-help-ification (8:31)
“Politics of blame” (10:36)
Resentment as a typology (7:49)
The speakers make a sharp distinction:
Anger = active, world-making, Nietzschean
Resentment = reactive, moralizing, immobilizing
This matches Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche exactly.
Where this sits in Deleuze’s texts
In Nietzsche and Philosophy:
Reactive forces = sad passions
Active forces = joyful passions that increase power
Resentment creates morality, guilt, victimhood
Revolution requires active affects, not reactive ones
In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy:
Sad affects decrease our “power to act”
Joyful affects increase capacity
Liberation = arranging encounters that maximize joyful affects
Culp’s interpretation:
much of left politics has sunk into sad passions masquerading as moral clarity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Gv5e253xA
The Reference: The essay opens with a quote from The Gay Science: “Whom do you call bad? – He who always wants to put people to shame. What is most human to you? – To spare someone shame. What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself”.
The Concept: Nietzsche contrasts “slave morality” (which uses shame to police others) with the free spirit who transcends the need for external validation.
In the Text: This sets the essay’s central conflict: the “bureaucraization” of the soul (shame culture) versus the struggle to remain human (sparing others shame).

This was one of my top philosophical realizations this year and biggest break with libertarianism: the realization that the laws of civilization aren’t first principles; that the only first principles are that of violence (which are straightforwardly derived from the laws of physics); and that “you can’t let your ideals for what ought to happen inside a civilization come before what it takes to have a civilization in the first place” (grateful to
@Devon_Eriksen_
for sparking the insight).
https://x.com/Altimor/status/1995893516162257284?s=20

The Uruk Machine gets its name from the “Uruk period” — an era of mass urbanization that took place in Mesopotamia between 4000 – 3100 B.C. Small agricultural villages were transformed into the largest urban center in the world, complete with a bureaucracy, military, and class system. Two years ago, the writer Lou Keep named a new god after this city. The Uruk Machine represents what happens when irreversible market forces collide with pre-industrial social systems. The Machine has authoritarian impulses, and it seems incapable of caring about lifestyles and rituals that don’t add value to the economy. It turns chaotic “messiness” into coherent “order” that can be exploited, creating social unrest wherever it goes. Lou Keep argues that this pattern has repeated itself throughout history:

Smaller units (individuals, communities, etc.) have efficient but localized forms of doing a thing. The doing of the thing is plugged into a much larger worldview which explains both how to do the thing and why you do the thing — James Scott calls that metis. When a larger unit (states, corporations, what have you) subsumes the smaller unit, it tends to uproot metis for efficiency, for raw gain, for humanitarian purposes, etc. Power is weighted heavily in favor of the larger unit, not least because community explanations appear irrational or are otherwise unintelligible. To regain some of that power, communities or groups within them tend to form mass movements. Those then replicate the ill effects of the original larger unit, whether they gain power or not. For various reasons, mass movements tend to sap power from their adherents and frustrate them more. They also tend to prescribe epistemic solutions. In other words, the origin and response tend to exacerbate and blur into one another.

A prototypical example of The Uruk Machine is the story of what happened when the first European settlers tried to make deals with indigenous people. The Native Americans did not have the deeds, titles, surveys, and institutions that proved land ownership to Europeans. In their culture, oral agreements carried more weight than the written word, and they didn’t even think of property as something that could be privately “owned”. But their way of life was invisible to the market that fueled European colonization and later, American “manifest destiny.” As a result, millions of indigenous people ended up getting brutally sacrificed at the hands of the Uruk Machine.

An example of The Uruk Machine in urban planning: Le Corbusier’s early 20th century vision to re-design Paris.

In its quest to measure and optimize for a very specific type of economic productivity, the Uruk Machine bulldozes over traditional cultural practices at the expense of our emotional well-being. In fact, the better it gets at collapsing these social relations, the bigger it grows. Today we’re left with the damage this god hath wrought: widespread loneliness, disconnection from community, and a mental health crisis. The Uruk Machine has created a seemingly irreversible feedback loop and, like Moloch, it’s a demon that we participate in but can’t seem to control.

https://subpixel.space/entries/the-desire-for-full-automation/