I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TOMORROW (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND on WEDNESDAY (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.
I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.
If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:
In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"
Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."
When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).
Friedman was a monster.
But.
He had a hell of a theory of change.
When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.
Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.
But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.
Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.
This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.
Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.
There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.
Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.
Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.
These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:
America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:
But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.
The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":
In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.
It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.
Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.
Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts - those, it will swamp and sink).
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Ty to @master-of-the-elements, @waxlyricalmoon, @serstolas, and @epiphany-jones for the tags! Just dropped out of the Dragon Age Big Bang, because this fic is not getting done for October, but on the plus side I can now share snippets of it, so:
The elf comes over and gives Taash’s arm a slightly awkward pat.
“Good work, girl. I’m sorry about your ma.”
Taash’s nose wrinkles and they swipe at their eyes. “Not a girl,” they mutter. The elf raises his eyebrow a little bit, but there’s no pushback.
“What do I call you, then?”
They blink. Tama always said not to trust anyone from Par Vollen. But Tama is dead, and these guys helped avenge her.
“Taash,” they tell him. “Just… just Taash.”
“Alright, ‘just Taash’. I’m Gatt, and this big lug is Saarbrak. Triumvirate’s got us down here chasing rebels from the Qun.” His pronunciation is even worse than Taash’s, all clumsy rolling Tevinter sounds. It’s weirdly endearing. Their mom would hate it.
Would have. Would have hated it.
“You don’t look like Antaam,” Taash tells him. Gatt shrugs.
“Nope. Better at the quiet stuff, us. What’d your mother tell you about the Ben-Hassrath?”
Passing the tag on v v gently to @serjory, @maagisterpavus, @themildmahariel, and @dancing--lights
Chapters: 21/43
Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age - All Media Types
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: The Iron Bull (Dragon Age)/Original Female Character(s), Female Inquisitor/The Iron Bull (Dragon Age), Female Inquisitor & Solas (Dragon Age)
Characters: Mira Foret, Leliana (Dragon Age), Male Lavellan (Dragon Age), Cassandra Pentaghast, Varric Tethras, Solas (Dragon Age), Cremisius "Krem" Aclassi, The Iron Bull (Dragon Age), Original Characters, Vivienne (Dragon Age), Sera (Dragon Age), Josephine Montilyet, Dorian Pavus, Male Hawke (Dragon Age), Merrill (Dragon Age), Loghain Mac Tir, Cole (Dragon Age), Blackwall (Dragon Age), Cullen Rutherford, Kieran (Dragon Age), Morrigan (Dragon Age), Flemeth (Dragon Age), Corypheus (Dragon Age)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Modern Girl in Thedas, Established Relationship, Open Relationships, Aromantic spectrum, Mira Is a Charger and a Healer, Mira Has Some Knowledge of Events, Explicit Sexual Content, Size Difference, Service Top Bull, soft domming, Aftercare, Just Because Bull is a Masochist Doesn't Mean He's a Sadist, Eye Trauma, Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Found Family, Childbirth, Background Relationships, Platonic love is important too, Additional Warnings In Author's Note
Series: Part 2 of Driftwood
Summary:
Mira Foret has left behind her life with the Chargers. But that was only the beginning of her tale. The Inquisition awaits.
NSFW will be marked with**.
Beta'd by Iron_Angel.
Updates on Mondays.
Chapter 21 - Gaatlok
“They can fall back,” she said. “If you signal them now.”
“Your men need to hold that position, Bull.”
“They do that, they’re dead.”
“And if they don’t, the Venatori retake it and the dreadnought’s dead.” Gatt wasn’t imposing by any means, but he still tried to get in Bull’s face. “You’d be throwing away an alliance between the Qunari and the Inquisition. You’d be declaring yourself Tal-Vashoth!”
Bull sneered at him but didn’t refute it. They watched as the Venatori got closer and Mira knew she was bunching her hands into fists. She didn’t want to have to make this decision for him, she wanted him to choose. But she knew he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
Fight, flight...or freeze, she thought to herself.
“With all you’ve given the Inquisition, half the Ben-Hassrath think you’ve betrayed us already!” Gatt was saying. “I stood up for you, Hissrad! I told them you’d never become Tal-Vashoth.”
“They’re my men.”
“I know. But you need to do what’s right, Hissrad. For this alliance...and the Qun.”
