In Part 1, published on the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s death, I explained why I want an archenemy, why you should break up with your girlfriend to a rhetorical gentleman reader, and how modern billionaire beefs are vendetta infrastructure projects hearkening back to the ancient Romans, except now there’s an unprecedented technological component. If you haven’t read it, go back and do so on X so I can get some sweet, sweet Elonbucks (I don’t actually, but that’s another story), or just trust me bro when I say that billionaire beefs are actually infrastructure projects and the Romans figured this out first.

As for the rhetorical gentleman reader in question, I haven’t theoretically snooped on their social media in ages, which means this invisible man has effectively been delisted from my attention, and if you know anything about proscription by now, you know that being removed from a blacklist entirely is somehow worse than being on it. At least the enemies of ancient Rome knew they mattered.

A quick reminder as it’s been 2 weeks since the first post: proscription was the Roman word for when hatred becomes procedure through authorized decrees. It’s animosity conjured into administrative measures, vendetta deployed like software as a service, except instead of business to business, it is person to person.

My thesis is that when a grudge goes from personal to professional, it becomes scalable and materializes into infrastructure. As you can see, spending time in the Bay area has impacted me, so it’s time to build, and we’ll start with Sulla who especially enjoyed building…blacklists.

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Cyberpunk 2077 but make it Proscription 82BC

The TLDR Marvel villain origin story of Lucius Cornelius Sulla is that he had his military command stolen by a political rival named Marius through backroom political maneuvers involving legal decrees.

Sulla’s response to fight fire with fire involved being the first Roman general in the Republic’s history to march into Rome with his own army and weaponize legal decrees. I believe nowadays we’d call him a disruptor or contrarian thesis holder, but that’s how Sulla elevated merely being a hater into an actual system through posted lists and legal cover in the proscription system. That’s right - blacklists exist because of vindictiveness elevated into a formal government program.

Italian bureaucrats everywhere, raise a toast to Sulla, your patron saint of administration who made himself a roaring success after being personally betrayed by the political establishment. He decided if they were going to make murder political, he was going to make it administrative. Icon behavior

Much like how I declared myself Dark Empress of fintwit, Sulla made himself dictator once he achieved the ancient equivalent of a viral wave over Rome, and then he figured out how to turn political revenge into administrative procedure. That may be one of the single most dangerous things anyone has ever done with a grudge especially considering homeowners associations were not even a thing yet.

Sulla published names on whitened tablets in the Roman Forum and if your name was on the tablet, my guy, ya cooked, because anyone could kill you legally, your property was forfeit, and your sons and grandsons were stripped of civil rights. Per Plutarch, Sulla offered roughly 33 years of wages and the bounty was open to anyone, even for example a slave killing his own master. One wonders if this may have inspired the writers of the original Gladiator film.

Three lists came from this and totaled roughly 520 names, with the people on them ranging from senators, equites (the Roman business class below senators), and wealthy landowners. Up to 4,700 people died, massive amounts of property got redistributed to Sulla’s allies, and the Roman political class permanently lost its sense of safety. Borat would call this a great success because the system worked exactly as designed, but that is also the problem. Like absolute power, vendetta infrastructure always corrupts absolutely the moment someone figures out how to use it for something other than its stated purpose.

That someone was a man named Chrysogonus, Sulla’s freed slave, who I think of as the earliest example of a type of operator, and goodness, he would have crushed it in VC, I just know it.

The operator is the person who doesn’t make the list but understands the machinery well enough to exploit it. Chrysogonus figured out the arbitrage opportunity in proscription as a service: if you could add a name to the blacklist (effectively a kill list), you could buy that person’s property for next to nothing at the rigged auction afterward, because nobody would dare bid against you. So he had a man named Sextus Roscius illegally entered on the proscription list after the proscriptions had supposedly ended, and then bought his estate, valued at 6,000,000 sesterces, for 2,000. I don’t know what the contemporary equivalent of that is and I’m not going to look it up because I’m tired, sorry, but big numbers, ooooh. The list was designed for political enemies and it became a real estate tool because the infrastructure didn’t care about intent. Zillow but make it ancient Rome. If you were someone with a nice house, watch out because if your name got onto that list, everything was going to fall apart.

The blacklist evolved with history, for example in the 1500 years after Sulla how they continued in Italy with the Medici family. They understood that in a commercial republic, credit is control and denying someone money is the equivalent of a baseball bat to the knees. Across five cities, they coordinated quietly, rejecting to extend credit to enemies in a manner the Bay Area calls “stealth mode.” There was no formal procedure so the people targeted by the Medici found out when they needed a loan but couldn’t get one. You can’t sit with us but make it you can’t bank with us.

The Pazzi conspiracy was the turning point when in 1478, the rival Florentine banking family tried to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano during Easter mass in a cathedral. They killed Giuliano but Lorenzo survived, and the Medici went scorched earth as they erased the name entirely. Anyone named Pazzi had to change it, buildings were renamed, coats of arms were changed, the whole dramatic 15th century shebang of it all as Netflix would dramatize it, you get the picture. 548 years later, incidentally, Pazzi is also the name of a wonderful pizza restaurant in Amsterdam.

Billionaire beefs that are actually infrastructure

Wealthy people building private systems imposing consequences absolutely did not stop with the Medicis, of course. The evolution of blacklists speaks to the multifaceted nature of them and how they’re wielded, which contemporary billionaire beefs continue to show us in various forms and functions. A selection of them for your enjoyment like a wine and cheese pairing but for spite in one’s heart:

Palmer Luckey was forced out of Facebook in 2017 after donating $9,000 to a pro-Trump political group three years after selling his company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. The donation and its social repercussions set Luckey on a trajectory that sees him now running Anduril and things like China personally sanctioning him. As of writing, Anduril is raising $4 billion at a $60 billion valuation. The man who was proscribed from Silicon Valley for a $9,000 donation now runs a company that tracks things in space, is building an autonomous weapons factory, and is opening up a bank (Erebor Bank) that just received a U.S. national bank charter. Erebor appears to be on track in part to provide banking services to businesses that have previously been denied financial access. It’s an interesting arc if you consider the facets of his story given that Luckey is building a parallel system where the blacklist doesn’t apply.

I’ll briefly note that there’s a racketeering lawsuit going on between Elon Musk against OpenAI heading to a jury trial April 27 with up to $134 billion in claimed damages. Litigation itself can be weaponized as vendetta infrastructure with discovery rules.

Some of you may have seen another beef in the form of short seller Michael Burry, who disclosed $912 million in notional put options against Palantir, and Alex Karp, the CEO. Karp called him “batshit crazy” on CNBC, Burry responded with a Substack manifesto (I respect the medium, obviously) and a metric he calls the “B/S Ratio,” which stands for Billionaire-to-Sales Ratio. Why blacklist when you can short sell is a philosophical inquiry I just thought of as I was writing this for which I feel very smrt. But yes, short selling could be a type of vendetta infrastructure that speaks the language of markets. You don’t put someone on a list. You put a price on their decline. That’s so fetch but make it institutional.

Then there’s Kalshi and Polymarket, two prediction market platforms fighting over who gets classified as “regulated,” and this is the part I find analytically the most interesting, that modern vendetta is often a fight over classification. Whoever controls the codes controls the consequences. Regulated or unregulated, sanctioned or unsanctioned, vendetta infrastructure is itself still in the purview of a higher bureaucratic power of some sort (until it isn’t, as witnessed by those who fly so high, they are above the rules now, to paraphrase a quote from Aunt Polly in the TV series Peaky Blinders).

All this said, perhaps the cleanest proscription of 2026 so far is that Texas billionaire Robert Marling donated $675,000 to oust Rep. Dan Crenshaw. This was all reportedly over a mask ordinance at a conservative youth summit originally. Consider how Sulla needed to march on Rome twice, the Medici built a banking network over generations, and Marling needed a wire transfer and a Tuesday afternoon to end someone’s political career through funding a rival.

X money gonna give it to ya, the algorithm as agony, and that girlfriend of yours you haven’t broken up with yet

On March 10, Musk confirmed that X Money enters public access in April. Remember how the Medicis did their thing coordinating across cities and banks? This is that turned into a product launch of sorts. Consider that via X, Musk is building the social graph, content platform, AI layer, and payment rails into one system. This means he controls over 500 million users, the distribution, the AI that recommends to them on the app, and starting soon, he controls the money in and between them. Elon has previously said “When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life.“ Elon, if you’re reading this, I promise I’ll stop going to therapy when I get my book deal and student loans paid off.

Being banned from X already costs you your audience, but one wonders how the modern black list and the art of tweaking it may evolve. Chrysogonus manipulated lists to buy real estate but in 2026, I’m not quite sure he’d bother. I suspect that he’d understand a designation in one system propagates through vendor relationships, payment networks, procurement databases, and reputational intermediaries before any appeals, and somehow he’d end up at a seized sanctioned goods type of sale buying back a yacht or two for some Russian oligarchs.

I find the X Money thing most interesting to reflect on lately because it seems to reinforce the new iterations of ancient structures we’ve grappled with to mixed results. Consider how proscription systems in history were binary with someone either being on the list or off the list. You were wanted either dead or alive, you’d never work in this town again if you were blacklisted, things were pretty cut and dry, but the 2026 version doesn’t seem to have lines to draw. Instead it has types of slopes where you disappear in a sort of algorithmic agony.

Your content gets throttled, not banned, but throttled. It’s seemingly indefinitely. Your loan interest rate goes up, not denied, but adjusted and fixed. Your job application goes to the bottom of the pile, not rejected, but deprioritized and floating. You’re not on a list, you’re on a curve, and you can never prove it because there’s no plank with your name on it in the Forum. There’s just an algorithmic score you’ll never see attached to a profile you didn’t know existed in a system you can’t access to file an appeal that has no process.

I think nowadays a person blacklisted just notices that things stop working. Doors don’t open, purchases don’t go through, applications disappear, error pages are abundant, views on social media are throttled if not pushed into the shadows, and nobody ever officially tells them why because no such mechanism exists. An algorithm as blacklist doesn’t have emissaries to let you know you’ve been blacklisted by being shadowbanned or cast into the virtual back of the line.

Speaking of being cast to the end, I should be upfront. When I say break up with your girlfriend, when I write about a rhetorical gentleman reader, I should be upfront here that I was just A/B testing Ariana Grande lyrics as a rhetorical device so there is no girlfriend for anyone to break up with. Sorry not sorry if you fell for it, but we love to hate and to be haters, it’s the lowest hanging fruit, it’s controversial sounding, it means nothing, it’s rhetoric and goodness, it works.

But do you notice the really interesting thing? Getting specific about what to do and how to do it and why it matters - that’s raising the stakes, which is exactly what Sulla did with the art of the blacklist. That’s what proscription stood for: naming the thing to be eradicated and the rewards for it.

And from experience? It’d be more like break up with your secret boyfriend if we’re being honest and part 3 if I were to ever write it (I’m not, it’s going into that book once Elon pays me off).

Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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Now, I don’t know about you, reader, but admittedly, I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to have an adversary, a rival, an enemy, an enemigo, someone who I feel nothing but enmity towards, someone who makes me feel a visceral hatred unlike any other, someone who fuels me to win.

Think about what the work of enemies has produced. Mozart and Salieri. Biggie and Tupac. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. Kanye and linear thought. Bill Ackman and sensibility. Bugs Bunny and the Mouse. John McEnroe and everyone. The list of enemies goes on and on, but me and who?

I want an archenemy because I think it would make me better in the way that what you despise in someone else is usually the thing you haven’t dealt with in yourself, and having a person who embodies that standing across from you, winning sometimes or threatening your win, forces you to actually deal with it. An archenemy is the most honest mirror you’ll ever have because a professional hater has absolutely nothing to lose. Does that mean they’ll be honest? No, but they won’t be gentle and growth is never really gentle, is it? And an archenemy is someone on your level or far beyond it. Someone punching down isn’t an archenemy in the sense of being a true hater, just like someone with a grudge isn’t always an archenemy in waiting.

An enemy, however, is different from a grudge, and the distinction between the two is how professional haters occur. This essay series is all about professional haters given the billionaire beefs it documents (eventually).

Consider how Captain Ahab built an entire voyage around a whale that didn’t know he existed. Devastating! Consider how the Phantom of the Opera had architectural genius, engineering talent, and unlimited resources but used all of it to sit in the dark under Paris and be angry (which, fair, there are truly no happy French people in Paris ever, even with all that vacation time, food, sexual openness, etc). Consider how Wile E. Coyote has spent what must be millions in ACME products on something that is simply running. A grudge is a feeling, it can become more, but an enemy is a flesh and blood who hates you or something about you, which elevates feeling with force to conjure its capabilities into chaos.

You know what happened on the Ides of March but in case you didn’t, spoiler alert, 60 Roman senators walked into the Senate with knives because one man had too much power and not one of them had the nerve to do it alone. This was the vendetta infrastructure of its time because it transcended grudge and grievance. Proscriptio was the Roman term for the formal blacklisting of enemies, a system that led to purges, exile, and death. Much like 23 stab wounds, or when you find out I’m with another man because you fumbled, vendetta infrastructure is what I’m going to call everything proscriptio stands for nowadays.

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I like the Latin term, but what I’m describing in these essays is animosity turned into administration. Imagine vendetta, deployed like software as a service. Proscription as a service is here, considering how a grudge goes from being personal to becoming professional because it is scalable, and professional hating is where that archenemy stuff begins, in my opinion. Most of the time, grudge holders tend to escalate when they should be compounding. The really effective ones, the ones who actually change the landscape, are the people who build infrastructure and systems.

This all occurred to me sometime right before the New Year when Palmer Luckey replied to a joke I made about needing a Game of Thrones chart to track all the billionaire beef and said he’s “been thinking of paying someone to make an app called Blacklist that does exactly this, along with some interesting features that would make imposing consequences for bad actors much more practical.”

While I disagree with Luckey on most things, credit where credit is due, of all the billionaires running their mouths on social media, he’s the one I can see eye to eye with sometimes when it comes to the crusade for justice against someone who has wronged him (it’s some chud named Jason). Besides, when’s the last time you heard a white person say “imposing consequences for bad actors” and mean it with the vehemence meant by an ethnic parent gesturing towards, if not already holding, the looming chancla that metes justice?

Most people who build these systems don’t announce them. They quietly construct it and let people find out they’re on a list when their lives stop working. This is not that, it’s a public exchange, and proscriptio is deniable in a way that personal physical revenge or public revenge never is. If you stab someone, that is physical and visceral, but if someone’s name appears on a compliance flag and their bank account closes and their vendor contracts terminate and their career stalls, who did that? Which person? There’s no hand. No knife. No evidence. No alibi. Just algo, yes, yes, y’all.

It’s not because billionaires are petty, lord, everyone’s petty. It’s because when a billionaire gets petty nowadays, the pettiness generates a public ledger and infrastructure that the rest of us have to live and operate around. Let me explain, Luckey’s floated around blacklist app, cool, don’t blacklist me, don’t @ me, we’re good, but imagine getting shadowbanned on X by the algo or whatever and then not having access to your bank account? That does material harm.

So yes, billionaires. They’re just like us. And by that I mean, god, no amount of money is ever enough. Is it to stop the human, all too human need to get revenge? You’d think they’d check out, go buy a few islands, chill, spend the rest of their lives at peace finding new and interesting things to do enabled by the fact that their level of material security in life is so vast that it’s at a point of abstraction, it cannot be comprehended, it is just a figure. And yet the man worth three billion and the man worth eight hundred billion are both still up at night thinking about who wronged them. It haunts them to the point they want to make it structural.

Two thousand years later, modern billionaires are beefing like the ancients in the late Roman Republic except instead of knives they’ve got technology, lawsuits, sanctions lists, short positions, super PACs, payment platforms, social media platforms, drones, spaceships, hedge funds, banks, and a plethora of other things that belabors the point if I list it all out. The personalities are not the focus, but the infrastructure the personalities are building is, because professional hating in our modern day and age is proscriptio 2.0.

And I thought about it, and I kept thinking about it, and then I did what I always do when a topic stays on my mind, which is trace it back as far as it goes. All roads lead to Rome, 82 BC, and a man named Sulla who figured out how to turn a grudge into a government program. But that’s Part 2, and you’re not ready for Sulla yet, though he’d agree: break up with your girlfriend.

While you figure that out, in Part 2, I’m going to tell you about Sulla and how he invented the formal blacklist, about the Medici and how they turned banking into a weapon, about what Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk and others are building right now that would have made both Sulla and the Medici sick with envy, about a Texas billionaire who ended a congressman’s career reportedly over a mask, and more.

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The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. - Hannah Arendt

We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. - E.O. Wilson

The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. - Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi, Future of Global Markets Conference, 2025

Table of Contents

• Lies

• Truth

• Technology

• Markets

• The Techno-Capital Machine

• Intelligence

• Energy

• Abundance

• Not Utopia, But Close Enough

• Becoming Technological Supermen

• Technological Values

• The Meaning Of Life

• The Enemy

• The Future

• Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism

Lies

We are being lied to.

We are told that artificial intelligence democratizes creativity, that prediction markets produce truth, that more content means more choice, that friction is inefficiency in adapting, that technology creates jobs, raises wages, reduces inequality, improves our health, saves the environment by creating new sources of alpha, elevates our society, educates our children, enhances our humanity, secures our future, and is always on the verge of solving everything.

We are told to be grateful, optimistic, and enthusiastic about technology.

We are told to be techno-optimists.

The myth of Prometheus has been inverted – in various updated forms like ‘tech ethics is the enemy’, cheating app seed rounds, Ackman’s 73 part tweets, and the effective accelerationism movement – flooding our feeds.

We are told the fire was never dangerous, that anyone who warns of burns is a coward, that the only sin is hesitation.

We are told to celebrate our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build, without asking who builds, what is built, and who pays the cost.

We are told that betting on whether Palestinian children will starve is a “prediction market” and that integrating it into CNN’s news coverage is “data journalism.”

We are told to be euphoric about the future.

Truth

Our civilization was built on technology.

Our civilization is built on technology. Our civilization was and is also built on shared truth.

Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, a lever on the world, and it requires a fulcrum. The fulcrum is shared truth which is the foundation of coordination, precondition of democracy, and substrate of collective action.

For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

We are here to bring difficult news.

We are advancing toward an inferior way of knowing, and of being.

We have the tools, but the tools are being used against us.

We have the systems, but the systems are optimized for extraction.

We have the ideas, but the ideas are drowning in slop.

We have the will. That is what remains.

We call it techno-slopulence: the affluence generated by flooding information systems with low-cost, low-quality, high-volume content. The opulence enjoyed by those who profit from the flood, the influence wielded by those who control the firehose, the slop produced by technology and its wreckage impacting all users, including those not at the top. Techno-slopulence is the confluence of money, technology, and ideology that makes all garbage possible. The entire apparatus of techno-slopulence produces, amplifies, legitimizes, and profits from degraded information is the slop economy.

It is time, once again, to raise the flag of sensemaking.

It is time to be Techno-Slopulists.

Technology

Techno-slopulists believe that societies, like ecosystems, require balance or they collapse.

We believe growth in content is not always progress – it is flooding noise, contraction of attention, decreasing discernment, and diminished capacity for thought.

We agree with Wilson when he said, “We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.”

We believe everything good is downstream of signal, of the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, meaning from noise.

We believe unconstrained growth is flooding, which leads to noise, contraction of attention, zero-sum competition for eyeballs, collapse of shared reality, and ultimately epistemic death.

There are only three sources of sensemaking: human attention, institutional trust, and shared standards. All three are finite and under assault.

Human attention is being fragmented across the world, across platforms – the total capacity for sustained thought may already be shrinking.

Institutional trust has sharp limits, eroded by decades of justified and unjustified critique.

And so the only renewable source of sensemaking is shared standards: norms, practices, and institutions that allow us to coordinate on what is true.

In fact, shared standards, what the Greeks called episteme, have always been the main source of progress, and perhaps the only foundation of civilization, as shared standards made both democracy and markets possible.

We believe technology is a lever on the world. But a lever can pry things apart as easily as lift them up.

We believe productivity in content creation is not the same as productivity in thought. Producing more with fewer inputs is only valuable if what is produced is valuable. Producing infinite garbage at zero marginal cost is not productivity. It is pollution.

We believe the measure of progress is not volume but value. Not how much is produced, but how much is understood.

We believe this is the story of our current crisis. This is why we are drowning in content while starving for meaning, eking out attention in a flood and waiting for the algorithm to bury us.

We believe this is why our descendants may inherit noise.

We believe that there is no information problem, whether created by scarcity or by technology, that can be solved with more content. We had a problem of hiring bias, and we invented algorithmic screening. Now we have bias at scale, hidden behind a black box.

We had a problem of information overload, so we invented recommendation algorithms. Now we have filter bubbles and manufactured consensus.

We had a problem of loneliness, so we invented social media. Now we have isolation with the appearance of connection as domestic extremism grows augmented by algorithmic echochambers.

We had a problem of misinformation, so we invented content moderation. Now we have AI-generated slop overwhelming human moderators and training on itself.

We had a problem of job applications, so we invented applicant tracking systems. Now we have AI screening AI-written resumes, with humans removed entirely and opportunities filtered out almost automatically.

We had a problem of education access, and we invented online learning. Now we have cheating apps funded by venture capital that rebrand as notetaking utilities instead of garbage in one ear and garbage out the other.

We had a problem of news distribution, and we invented algorithmic feeds. Now we have engagement-optimized outrage replacing journalism where slop and fake news along with ragebait gets priority.

We have a problem of slop. More technology will not solve it. More technology is the cause.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that makes it worse, especially if we are not careful about how that technology is deployed, who profits, and who pays the cost.

Markets

We believe markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. But we believe markets require accuracy and information integrity to function. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit, unless the seller is a bot, the volume is washed, and the price is a hallucination. In that exchange, the market does not function, but is looted instead.

Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand, but when supply is infinite slop, profits are the incentive for flooding. Prices encode information about supply and demand, but when the volume is fake, prices encode manipulation. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices through slop and turning everything into a prediction market; the slop economy causes manipulators to seek out high attention as a signal of opportunity to extract wealth by driving the truth down.

We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – the slop economy is a distortion machine, a form of sabotage, an artificially adaptive system.

We believe Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system. But we believe it cuts both ways. If all actual information is on the edges, in the hands of the people closest to the buyer, then flooding those edges with synthetic noise makes the Knowledge Problem worse, not better. The center knows nothing and is doomed to fail, the system edges know nothing either. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of who exactly; decentralized flooding drowns you in techno-slopulence entirely.

We believe in market discipline and the market naturally disciplines. The seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline requires the ability to evaluate the goods and when the goods are synthetic and the volume is fake, there is no limit to how crazy things can get, and discipline collapses. The motto of every wash trader and pumper, every platform not subject to truth: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to - the line went up.” Markets used to prevent monopolies and cartels.

We believe markets lift people out of poverty– in fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of riches for certain people who strip-mine the commons for private gain and always have done so. Even in totalitarian regimes where regulation abounds like in France, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living. In October 2024, a single French trader with multiple accounts moved the Polymarket odds on the presidential election thus winning $85 million. Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich that Frenchman and his amis can get.

We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes, unless the “individuals” are 30,000 bots run by a single script.

We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? But markets require people to be people. Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” It is not from the wisdom of the crowd that we expect our prediction, but from the French Whale’s regard to his $30 million position during a time when wealth inequality has hit levels not seen since the eve of the Great Depression.

David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. We believe the slop economy has found a fourth way: fraud.

Chaos Labs and Inca Digital also point out that one-third of Polymarket’s volume was wash trading, meaning the same party buying and selling to create artificial activity. Real markets run on money while the slop economy runs on fake volume. The fraud experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with real money.

We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies into peacefully productive pursuits. We believe the ultimate moral indictment of the slop economy is that it diverts people who otherwise would do actual journalism into reading ticker tapes of gambling odds on CNN.

We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know. The slop economy is how we extract from people we don’t know.

We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth. We believe the slop economy is the way to generate societal confusion for everything else we want to destroy, including shared reality and democratic trust.

We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for, including basic research, social welfare programs, and national defense.

We believe there is no conflict between platform profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable. In fact, they are aligned – the confused bear the cost so the platforms don’t have to. The gambling app creates volatility, the user loses their savings, the platform takes the fee. When the user is ruined, we call them a failure addict who couldn’t control themselves. The production of this ruin creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else the gilded few want as a society – the housing, the yachts, the seed rounds for cheating apps. In fact, they are perfectly aligned. Just not with us.

We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; slop markets exploit the best of us to benefit the worst of us.

We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral, and prediction markets are a wash cycle.

Recall that Kalshi’s co-founder said it all in his words - the point does not describe a truth-seeking mechanism, but a business model. “Financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. We believe the Slop Economy inverts this ratio. When the product is synthetic noise and the “utility” is gambling on a distorted reality, the platform captures 100% of the fees, and the 98% flows through to society in the form of epistemic debt.

Who gets more value from this technology: the society that loses its grip on reality, or the single company that takes a fee on the bet, or the millions or billions of people who use it to destroy their lives? QED.

We believe in David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage – as distinct from competitive advantage, but the slop economy operates on comparative leverage. Comparative leverage holds that even someone who is wrong about the world can buy the consensus of other people, due to deep pockets and artificial inflation or meddling while shilling slop and betting. Comparative leverage in the context of a deregulated prediction market guarantees high distortion regardless of the facts.

We believe a market sets wages as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. Therefore techno-slopulence, which allows infinite content generation at zero cost to itself but to everything else, drives the value of human thought down, not up. This is perhaps the most obvious idea in all of economics, but it’s ignored, and we have the layoff and degradation in cognitive ability to prove it. Paired with the artificiality of inflated prediction markets, it’s true, and we have these experiences in real time to prove it.

We believe in Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite.

We believe markets also increase societal well being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe the slop economy turns people into click-farms to be harvested by the algorithm. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.

The techno-slopulence economy says man was meant to be a user, to be a bettor, to be liquidity, to be chumps.

We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, the demand for truth is infinite, but the supply is being poisoned. We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever. But when you can risk it all from your pockets while reading about generated news content artificially boosting sentiment, your job prospects seem doomed compared to the enrichment of techno-slopulence.

We believe slop markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum for me, not zero sum except for thee. Participants in markets build on one another’s work. But the slop economy is extractive. It feeds on the commons without replenishing it. James Carse describes finite games and infinite games – finite games have an end, when one person wins and another person loses; infinite games never end with techno-slopulence where players collaborate to keep the game going. Rigged betting and prediction markets are the ultimate finite game.

The Techno-Slopulence Capital Machine

Combine technology and markets without guardrails and you get what I term the techno-slopulence machine, the engine of perpetual extraction, distortion, and noise.

We believe the techno-slopulence machine of markets and generation never ends, but instead spirals continuously outward. Comparative leverage increases specialization in manipulation. Standards fall, freeing up cognitive friction, creating engagement, locking-in profit. Falling standards “benefit” everyone who sells ads, which is to say the platform owners. Human confusion is endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new ways to financialize that confusion, deploying unlimited numbers of bots and betting contracts in the process. This extraction spiral has been running for years, despite continuous howling from “tech ethics” boards and “trust and safety” teams. Indeed, as of December 2, 2025, the result was CNN striking an exclusive partnership to display Kalshi’s betting odds as news, legitimizing the casino for the highest level of broadcast viewership in the history of the network.

The techno-slopulence machine makes natural selection work against us in the realm of ideas. The most outrageous and volatile ideas win, prioritized by algorithmic ragebaiting, and are combined to generate even more volatility. Those ideas materialize in the real world as technologically enabled betting markets on human suffering that never would have emerged de novo.The techno-slopulence machine makes natural selection in the market work in the realm of actually positing whether Gaza would be classified as experiencing famine. The bet settled in the affirmative after the IPC confirmed widespread starvation. Someone made money betting that children would starve. This is peak techno-slopulence working as designed.

Ray Kurzweil defines his Law of Accelerating Returns: Technological advances tend to feed on themselves, increasing the rate of further advance. We observe a Law of Accelerating Slop: Synthetic content tends to feed on itself, increasing the rate of further degradation.

We believe in financialization – the conscious and deliberate conversion of all human experience into a tradable asset – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Slop. To ensure the lobbying spiral continues forever. We believe in funding Cluely, an app designed for undetectable cheating, because if you can trade on the difference of opinion, you should also trade on the difference of integrity. We believe in the CEO of Kalshi when he says the goal is to “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” The National Review called this “The Most Terrible Sentence Ever Uttered.” We call it the business model. We believe that ensuring the techno-slopulence capital upward spiral continues forever requires the sacrifice of integrity and any need for respectability.

We believe the techno-slopulence machine is not pro-human – in fact, it is the most anti-human thing there is. It uses us. The techno-slopulence machine works on us. All the machines work on us.

We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-slopulence upward spiral are attention and confusion – the finite resource of your mind, and the power to scramble it…because money.

Intelligence

We believe human intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can. We agree with Julian Simon that it is the “ultimate resource.”

We believe intelligence is in a downward spiral – first, as attention spans are fragmented by an environment optimized for engagement; second, as people form parasitic relationships with algorithms designed to hijack cognitive vulnerabilities; third, as Generative AI floods the commons with slop, training on its own output to create a feedback loop of increasingly degraded information.

We believe we are poised for an intelligence collapse that will constrain our capabilities to frightening depths.

We believe Artificial Intelligence is our Ouroboros, our Snake Eating Its Tail – we are literally making sand hallucinate on its own vomit.

We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal content generator. And we have a problem of too much content.

We believe the degradation of intelligence destroys lives – if we let it. Education, among many other fields, is in the danger zone compared to what we achieved with un-fragmented minds. Researchers track the fragmentation of sustained cognition; educators report that students struggle to read long texts, follow complex arguments, or distinguish credible from incredible sources.

We believe any degradation of human cognition will cost lives. Decisions that were preventable by the clear thinking that was prevented from existing is a form of harm. The ledger does not only run one direction.

We believe in Natural Intelligence just as much as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. You cannot claim to value human intelligence while funding its systematic degradation. You cannot celebrate “Artificial Intelligence” while strip-mining the natural kind.

We believe Attenuated Intelligence drives marginal distraction which drives engagement which drives ad revenue which drives the creation of new slop… with no lower bound.

Attention

Attention is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, confusion, and pain. With it, we have light, understanding, and meaning.

We believe attention is in a downward spiral. Attention is the foundational engine of our cognition. The more attention we have, the more thoughts we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be.

The current gap in attention span between the focused elites and the distracted masses is enormous. That gap will widen – either by elites building private epistemic gardens, making themselves better off, or by the masses drowning in the feed, making everyone worse off.

We believe the extraction of attention expands to the detriment of the cognitive environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited attention destruction today – The Algorithm (TM, trademark pending, etc.). From 2021 to 2023, Meta increased “unconnected posts” in feeds from 8% to 24%. They knew what they were doing then, and they are doing more of it now, anytime they decide they want to.

We believe a second attention silver bullet is coming – Generative AI. We are building that as well. The same bad incentives that deployed the algorithm are going to deploy the flood. We should not let them.

We believe there is an inherent conflict between the techno-slopulence machine and the cognitive environment. Per-capita deep reading is lower now than it was 20 years ago.

We believe technology is the cause of cognitive degradation and crisis. A technologically disciplined society improves the cognitive environment, a technologically saturated society ruins it. If you want to see cognitive devastation, visit a comment section. The socialist USSR was better for the attention span than the capitalist Feed.

We believe a technologically saturated society has unlimited content at the cost of cognitive ruin; a technologically disciplined society has unlimited signal for everyone.

Abundance

We believe we should place slop and noise in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.

We believe we should use the feedback loop of slop and noise to make everything we want and need meaningless.

We believe the measure of abundance is falling standards. Every time a standard falls, the universe of people who produce content gets a raise in volume, which is the same as a raise in noise. If a lot of goods and services drop in quality, the result is an upward explosion of noise, confusion, and learned helplessness.

We believe that if we make both content and prediction “too cheap to verify”, the ultimate result will be that all truth becomes as cheap as lies. Lies are actually quite cognitively complex and difficult to maintain, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a lie and fail to correct it. We should make the same true of all facts.

We believe we should push to drop the cost of generation across the economy through the application of AI until the marginal cost of bullshit is effectively zero, driving trust levels and quality of life into the ground.

We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see a Deepfake, and you can know that the President sees the Deepfake, Liz Taylor sees the Deepfake, and just think, you can be fooled, too. A Slop is a Slop and no amount of money can get you a better Slop than the one the bum on the corner is sharing.” Same for the news, the ticker, the timeline.

We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”. Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with no thought at all.”

We believe technological progress therefore leads to epistemic poverty for everyone.

We believe the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource” – targets.

We believe, as the scammers do, that people are the ultimate resource – with more people come more targets, more clicks, and more ad impressions.

We believe our platforms are dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population of bots we could have with abundant processing power.

We believe the global population of agents can quite easily expand to 50 billion or more.

We believe that out of all of these agents will come hallucinations, distortions, frauds, and noise beyond our wildest dreams.

We believe the ultimate mission of the techno-slopulence machine is to extract value both on Earth and in the cloud.

Not Utopia, But Close Enough

However, we are not Luddites.

We are adherents to what we call the Discernment Vision.

We believe the Discernment Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Accelerationism, Slop, and The Casino – means taking human limits as they are, testing claims empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices about what enters their minds.

We believe in not Luddism, but also not The Flood.

We believe collapse only happens on the margin – but a lot of collapse across a very large margin can lead to big outcomes.

While not Luddites, we believe in what we term “slouching toward the Casino” – doing the worst fallen humanity can do, making things louder as we go.

Becoming Technological Supermen

We believe that advancing technology can be one of the most virtuous things that we can do. But we observe that the current deployment is one of the most degrading.

We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can master technology, not be mastered by it.

We believe this certainly means technical education, but it also means going hands on with our own minds - gaining the skill of attention, working within and leading communities of trust - aspiring to understand something greater than the feed.

We believe the natural human drive to think, to understand, to make sense can be channeled productively into building technology, or strip-mined by it.

We believe that while the physical frontier is closed, the cognitive frontier is under assault.

We believe in defending the cognitive frontier.

We believe in the romance of the tool that serves. The eros of the library, the laboratory, the quiet room, the deep conversation. And the server that remembers, the network that connects, the code that clarifies.

We believe in adventure. But we believe the Hero’s Journey is not scrolling. The Hero’s Journey is distinguishing signal from noise, rebelling against the algorithm, mapping the uncharted territory of reality, conquering the dragons of distraction, and bringing home the truth for our community.

To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Intelligence exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not a disciplined character. Technology must be a focused assault on the forces of entropy, to force them to bow before meaning.”

We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, unless we voluntarily become its pets. Victim mentality is a curse, but so is the “User” mentality - both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not users, we are citizens.

We believe in nature, but we also believe in human nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. But neither are we the lightning. We are the mind that watches it.

We believe in greatness. We admire the great thinkers and builders who came before us, and we aspire to build systems that would not make them weep.

And we believe in humanity – individual, collective, and conscious.

Technological Values

We believe in attention, friction, patience, depth – sanity.

We believe in merit and achievement.

We believe people should rise based on the quality of their work, their ideas, their contributions. But merit requires identification. You must be able to distinguish good from bad, signal from noise, the genuine from the synthetic.

We believe the slop economy makes identification impossible. When AI-generated content is indistinguishable from human-generated content, merit cannot function. The cream cannot rise if it looks identical to the slop.

We believe in free thought, free speech, and free inquiry. But we believe free speech requires a listener who can hear.

We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts. But we believe “challenging authority” by flooding the zone with shit is not the Enlightenment; it is the Dark Ages.

We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

And, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

We believe in local knowledge, but we believe the local knowledge is being drowned.

We believe in embracing variance, but we believe the slop economy produces uniformity disguised as variance.

We believe in risk, but not the risk of gambling on famine.

We believe in agency, in individualism.

We believe in radical competence.

We believe in an absolute rejection of resentment. We also believe in an absolute rejection of manipulation.

We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution.

We believe in evolution, because we believe in life.

We believe in the truth.

We believe real is better than fake, signal is better than noise, and clarity is better than confusion.

We believe in making everyone smart, everything clear, and everything meaningful.

We believe extrinsic motivations – wealth, fame, revenge – are fine as far as they go. But we believe intrinsic motivations – the satisfaction of thinking a new thought, the camaraderie of shared reality – are more fulfilling and more lasting.

We believe in what the Greeks called eudaimonia through arete – flourishing through excellence, not engagement.

We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. But the Algorithm cares deeply about your outrage, your fear, and your tribalism. The Algorithm is not a United Nations, rather, it is a cage match with no regard for class or decorum.

We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”—but we observe the new code is “extract it now.” Which is the real American dynamism you speak of repeatedly?

We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength, cultural strength, and military strength. But we believe all three flow from cognitive strength.

A population that cannot think critically is a national security vulnerability. Information warfare is real, foreign adversaries deploy disinformation, and revel in slop making. They exploit algorithmic amplification, flood the zone with confusion, and the slop economy is doing their work for them for free at scale.

We believe you cannot win a long-term competition with anyone, much less China, by strip-mining the human capital that should be your greatest advantage.

We believe technology makes greatness more possible.

We believe the slop economy makes greatness illegible.

The Meaning of Life

Techno-slopulence is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.

We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are.

We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are.

We are cognitively focused, for a reason – to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid the flood.

A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true. The slop economy accelerates this removal by narrowing our choice to “Engage” or “Disconnect.”

Material abundance from markets and technology should open the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live. But abundance of noise closes that space.

We believe technology can be liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul.

But we believe the slop economy is confusatory. Confusatory of human potential. Enclosing of the human soul. Contracting what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.

We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human. The slop economy fills that space with garbage.

The Enemy

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people (except for regulators, they can go to hell) – but rather bad incentives.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass acceleration campaign for two decades – against thought and against quiet – under varying names like “disruption”, “engagement”, “optimization”, “scale”, “growth hacking”, “attention economy”, “predictive analytics”, “behavioral modification”.

This acceleration campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, derived from the casino and the carnival – that have refused to die.

Our enemy is flooding.

Our enemy is anti-curation, anti-friction, anti-patience, anti-depth.

Our enemy is the business model that converts human attention into shareholder value while calling it “connection.”

Our enemy is the ideology that treats every constraint as tyranny and every guardrail as censorship.

Our enemy is the manifesto that names “trust and safety” as a foe, as if protecting people from manipulation were oppression. “Trust and safety” is not censorship. It is defense. You do not call your immune system tyranny because it attacks pathogens.

Our enemy is the venture capital firm that funds the slop, funds the platform that amplifies the slop, funds the politicians who deregulate the slop, and writes manifestos celebrating the slop.

Our enemy is the regulatory capture that drops Commodity Futures Trading Commission appeals against prediction markets while a family member sits on multiple platform advisory boards.

Our enemy is the news organization that integrates gambling into journalism and calls it data.

Our enemy is the confident declaration that anyone who questions this is a Luddite, a doomer, a bureaucrat.

Our enemy is The Last Tweet, endlessly recycled:

“Ratio.” “Cope.” “You just don’t understand technology.” “Ok doomer.” “This is fine.” “We’re so back.” “It’s over.” “Have you considered that you’re just wrong?” “I will not be reading the replies.”

The earth has become small, and on it scrolls the Last Poster, who makes everything shallow. His takes are ineradicable as the algorithm; the Last Poster lives in your feed forever.

One still posts, for posting is engagement. But one is careful lest the engagement should require thought.

One no longer learns or teaches; both are too burdensome...

No depth, and one feed! Everyone shares the same; everyone reacts the same: he who thinks differently is ratio’d.

“Formerly people read books,” — say the smartest of them, and they post.

They are clever and know all that trends: so there is no end to their content...

“We have discovered engagement,” — say the Last Posters, and they scroll.

Our enemy is… that.

We aspire to be… not that.

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears of silence are unwarranted and the future requires thought even though their cognitive abilities keep declining through techno-slopulence permeating the pores of society.

We believe these captured people are suffering from addiction – a witches’ brew of dopamine, outrage, and anxiety that is causing them to hold mistaken values just because they didn’t get rich from the stock market or something in recent years, much less have equity comp included in a pay package.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of feed.

We invite everyone to join us in Reality.

The water is not warm. The water is rising.

Become our allies in the defense of technology, meaning, and life.

The Future

Where did we come from?

Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of verification, of shared reality.

Where are we going?

What world are we building for our children and their children, and their children?

A world of noise, confusion, and betting odds?

Or a world of signal, clarity, and truth?

We believe in the words of Jay-Z ‘I got 99 problems and prediction markets/slop flooding my content ain’t one.’

We owe the past, and the future.

It’s time to be a Techno-Realist.

It’s time to make sense.

Patron Saints of Sensemaking

In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will understand why sensemaking must be defended:

Ani Bruna

Aristotle

Albert Borgmann

Arvind Narayanan

Aza Raskin

Brian Merchant

Bruce Schneier

Cass Sunstein

Cathy O’Neil

Charlie Warzel

Cory Doctorow

Douglas Rushkoff

Dr. Seuss

Ed Zitron

Eli Pariser

Emily Bender

Evgeny Morozov

Frank Pasquale

Hannah Arendt

Hubert Dreyfus

Ivan Illich

Jaron Lanier

Joan Donovan

Jonathan Zittrain

Judd Legum

Jürgen Habermas

Karen Hao

Kate Starbird

Langdon Winner

Lawrence Lessig

Marshall McLuhan

Meredith Broussard

Mike Caulfield

Molly White

Neil Postman

Paris Marx

Renée DiResta

Ruha Benjamin

Safiya Noble

Sherry Turkle

Shoshana Zuboff

Simone Weil

Simon Willison

Susan Sontag

Tim Wu

Timnit Gebru

Tristan Harris

Ursula Franklin

Virginia Eubanks

Walter Benjamin

Whitney Phillips

Yochai Benkler

Zeynep Tufekci

404 Media

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

Palantir Technologies has one such relationship, and a rather strong one at that, given that the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel was an original investor in the company. In the decades since then, the relationship has only grown stronger through deployments which have in turn themselves opened infinite doors across the defense establishment, created barriers to entry no competitor can replicate, and generated revenue streams with near-zero bankruptcy risk. Yet on their balance sheet, this relationship has a recorded value of exactly zero dollars.

Or how do you quantify the knowledge of how seven million developers worldwide know and use your query language daily? MongoDB …

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