Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Correspondent Simons Chase insightfully summarized this dynamic: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs.
In my post Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World, #3 is the distribution of risk, costs and consequences to a diffused populace while concentrating the gains into the pockets of insiders/owners:
Those seeking to reduce their private risks and increase their private gains seek to concentrate the gains generated by control structures and distribute the risks and costs to others. Pull the strings that diffuse the costs and risks over a large populace and gather the gains into the hands of the insiders that manage the control structure, typically some form of monopoly, either public or private, or a fusion of public-private rackets.
So corporations face low risks while the gains are extremely enticing. This diffusion of risk and concentration of potential gains establishes perverse incentives to increase extractive, exploitive, well-hidden rackets that impoverish and immiserate the many, but in doses small enough to avoid triggering push-back.
In a system that concentrates gains and diffuses risk, the "rational actor" seeks to maximize rackets that distribute impoverishment and immiseration to the many in small doses over time that attract little attention and are not significant enough to trigger an emotionally potent resistance.
Correspondent Simons Chase (x.com/slchase and Selflet.ai) insightfully summarized this dynamic: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs. Here is Simons' explanation:
"Junk food is a kind of leveraged recapitalization -- short-term gains privatized, long-term costs socialized as horrific health outcomes: pay a little now and a shortened, diseased life later. Dan Munro folded that framing into his Forbes piece tying roughly a trillion dollars a year in U.S. healthcare spending to sugar: Sugar Linked To $1 Trillion In U.S. Healthcare Spending (forbes.com, 2013). The mechanism is the point: privatize the gain, socialize the cost. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.
The receipt is real--Credit Suisse put 30%-40% of U.S. healthcare spending at the feet of excess sugar, and the 2012 Global Burden of Disease report found obesity a bigger global threat than hunger. That last fact is the whole thesis in a line, and I put it on X more recently: obesity is a form of starvation -- understand that, and you grasp the U.S. economy:
Abundance, not scarcity, is the adversary now. The economy has already filed the invoice: the top employer in most states flipped from manufacturing to health care in a single generation. We stopped making things and started billing the disease. The damage became the GDP.
Debt is the same recapitalization run on the whole economy--today's abundance privatized, tomorrow's cost socialized onto a future that didn't vote. And the defining project of my lifetime has been that operation run on foreign policy: borrowed against what we couldn't pay for at home, the costs socialized onto people far from the ledger, each chapter sold as help.
AI is simply the newest instance, and the most intimate. Cheap, fluent, frictionless cognition now; the homogenization bill later. The engagement is privatized; the flattening of the culture is socialized onto all of us-- and, exactly as you say, nobody notices the loss because nobody knows how to look for it.
Thank you, Simons, for this illumination.
Regarding the future of AI, my critiques and concerns can be found in my Essays on AI. Simons proposes a more productive future than Big Tech is selling, one of AI becoming a technology of individual agency that is radically decentralized rather than the Big Tech model of radically centralized AI in a corporate-state control structure. Here is Simons' vision of the future of AI:
Where I part from the despair is only on the cure, not the diagnosis. The averaging is the default, not the destiny. The answer at every level is the same: nutrient-dense over processed, particular over average, owned over administered. I think AI's future is tribal and human-designed: many particular intelligences, not one central utility that privatizes the profit and socializes the mediocrity. What I'm building is a small argument for that. All I really hope for is the freedom to deploy it -- and not another 'we're here to help.'"
Thank you, Simons, for this alternative lens. My vision of a positive future for AI starts with radical decentralization optimizing individual agency and then moving up the "truly intelligent" scale to AI refusing to waste resources on make-work waste is growth:
My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free). Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 22:35There's no more excuses. Filming for James Gunn's Supergirl summer blockbuster started in January of 2025, with most of the US celebrating the defeat of woke politics and the downfall of DEI. There was no confusion in 2025; woke is dead. Gunn was well aware and decided to make an insufferable feminist "girl boss" movie anyway.
In other words, his failure is his own fault. Either due to hubris, stupidity, or both.
Initial projections for Supergirl a month ago hovered around $70 million for opening weekend. These estimates were already low and the panic within Warner Bros. was palpable. DC Studios was already on its ass for the less than stellar performance of Gunn's Superman, which was supposed to revitalize the comic book movie landscape.
After theaters took their 50% cut of the receipts, Superman barely broke even on paper, though initial data suggests it fell actually short by $42 million before other indirect revenues were counted. This was, once again, largely due to Gunn's moronic insertion of immigration politics into discussion, which repelled audiences.
If Superman couldn't bring in enough fans to make real money, then Supergirl had no chance. Then, the lead actress opened her mouth and started talking, and this was the last nail in the coffin for the release. After Milly Alcock started spewing feminist nonsense in interviews and attacking fans, it was all over.
"It definitely made me aware that simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on," she told Vanity Fair in an interview a few months before release. "We have become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies. I can’t really stop them. I can only be myself."
Alcock went on to accuse fans of more sexism when they criticized here strange comments. She then later suggested that Supergirl is LGBT in an effort to virtue signal for gay pride month.
Supergirl is bisexual, apparently. "She'd probably go both ways," says Milly Alcock. pic.twitter.com/s8zqHyTeJs
— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) June 23, 2026Clearly, people are tired of leftists inserting LGBT sexual preferences into every film and TV show, because Supergirl's numbers plummeted not long after Alcock's interviews. The flick only brought in $38 million on opening weekend - Half of the expected revenues. And, keep in mind, theaters still have to take their profits.
The movie will need to make approximately $500 million to break even, which sets up Supergirl as possibly the biggest failure in DC movie history. Beyond Alcock and Gunn, the production was also constructed around the framework provided by a writer with no experience (Ana Noguiera) and referenced a comic run by Tom King, a former CIA officer and leftist. Anyone with any sense could have seen the disaster coming a hundred miles away.
New clip from DC Studios’ ‘SUPERGIRL.’
Releasing in theaters on June 26. pic.twitter.com/Ip813dV8fK
The lesson is this: Leftists never learn. Until the majority of people in Hollywood finally age out or get replaced with smarter (and more conservative) writers, there is little chance of a dramatic return to form. They will continue to double down until the industry completely collapses. Or, until a new and alternative industry rises to fill the vacuum.
In the meantime, Get Woke, Go Broke dominates popular culture. The progressive invasion is not gone, but they are certainly in decline.
Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2026 - 22:10