September 2026 Updates
A round-up of August 2026's content plus a preview of what's to come
August was the busiest month yet for Misaligned Markets, with five blog posts and three podcast episodes. Here is what we covered.
Aug blog posts
Bad eggs
Mike
An eggcellent case study on Urner Berry, the egg producer who authors benchmarks used to price eggs. The largest egg producers colluded to raise egg prices with bids tailored to game how Urner Berry mesured market performance. This post uses this case as an example of my “capitalist serialization” framework which illustrates how markets create abstractions (like pricing benchmarks) to make complex realities operable, and how those abstractions can be captured.
4 Questions to beat AI hype
Mike
The first in a series called “Take the Antidote” where I introduced a four-question framework designed to strip away marketing to ground AI claims in current capabilities and reasonable extrapolations.
AI Agents Are Not Going Rogue
Mike
A detailed analysis of OpenAI’s August 6th Black Hat presentation. This post doubles as an overview of the Misaligned Markets approach to political economy—specifically how optimization actually works and why that explains AI cooridnation without supposing AI has a will of its own.
AI Isn’t Creating Viruses from Scratch
Mike
The third installment of the antidote series. I examine the EVO transformer model to clarify what it actually contributes to medical research—and what it doesn’t.
Aug podcasts
Engineering to political economy and Technology, power, and political economy (with Professor Khalid Kadir)
A two-part conversation with my former professor. We first trace his path from engineering graduate student to political economy lecturer, then dive into the intersection of technology, economics, and social change. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
Toxic Monopoly
A deep dive into the history of leaded gasoline and the corporate strategy of patenting and profiting from knowledge while actively suppressing the known harms. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Last Enclosure
On openAI’s negligence
On the sister podcast this month, we discussed the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack—a companion piece to the “AI agents” post above.
What’s next?
I have several ambitious pieces in the pipeline, though production will be slower in the next two months as I navigate personal matters. Also, I’m aiming to publish on the first and third weeks of every month, but some months (like this one) that may slip. I’ll keep you updated if that needs to shift.
Taking on “Rationalist” AI Doomers
A continuation of the anti-hype series. I’ll be deconstructing the specific framing and assumptions used by communities like Bay Area Rationalists that have now diffused into the broader culture.
Three pillars of the new social contract
A long-gestating piece on how the convergence of plutonomy (asset-driven wealth), extractive corporate relationships, and the decoupling of community from space are fueling the negative economic sentiment of the last five years. I use Citigroup’s 20-year-old “Plutonomy” thesis as a starting point to argue that the current “K-shaped” reality—and the resulting cultural nihilism—isn’t an anomaly, but a very real outcome of these structural shifts.
Stop using “enshittification” as a catch all
Might make this a solo podcast episode where I talk about the three pillars of the social contract and how people are reducing distinct phenomina into one term.
A Topology of AI Use Cases
An attempt to categorize AI applications by how “unscoped” they are and why that lack of scope is where harm lives.
AI national security, superintelligence, and more!
Stay tuned for new episodes of The Last Enclosure where my co-host and I will talk through national security implications of AI, the origin of the concept of superintelligence, and more.
Whatever you want!
My inbox is open if you have suggestions for topics, leave a comment on blog post or use the email on the about page to reach me.
A note on the road ahead
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