New post out this Sunday on the myth of the crowd, and why we’re all speculating on uncertainty. Subscribe to Untangled today to get it in your inbox. untangled.substack.com

This isn't a democratic market of independent thinkers. It's a hierarchical system where a small elite signals, and everyone else reacts.

The result? Accuracy that looks like crowd wisdom—but is really just a reflection of power.

A study of 500 Polymarket contracts found that information doesn’t flow evenly. It cascades—from elite traders down through the system in predictable
sequences.

– High-frequency traders move first
– Active traders follow
– Retail traders trail behind

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How to reclaim our agency in an age of AI.

Alternative visions of AI that center consent, community ownership, context, and don’t come at the expense of people’s livelihoods, public health, and the environment.

Boomers, doomers, and the religion of AGI.

How the companies pursuing this approach represent a modern-day empire, and the role narrative power plays in sustaining it.

The scale-at-all cost approach to AI Big Tech is pursuing — the misguided assumptions and beliefs it rests upon, and the harms it causes.

When you can see sociotechnically, you can fight back. You can make power visible. You can reclaim your agency, and shape your future.

We render these things invisible, and pretend it is technology acting on its own, acting upon us, and shaping our future.

We miss how we — yes, you! — make data all the time through our interactions with one another and institutions, etc. Right, data aren’t predictive, they are descriptive and diagnostic of the behaviors of institutions and our interactions with them.

We miss how the words and frames technologists use — ‘generative,’ ‘hallucination,’ ‘AGI’ — hide and encode power.

We miss how the beliefs and ideologies of technologists shape their creation, and how they understand the problem they’re solving.

We miss the company cultures, incentives, and norms that create the conditions for their actions.

If we only focus on how technology impacts people, we miss the decisions and choices developers make every single day.