"The book is a meditation on the role of sound and vibration as instruments of violence that shape urban life."
Disruptive Dissertation
Wide-ranging topics about the human condition today.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
On billionaires
"But I've spent decades in this industry, often knowing the executives and investors long before they came to wield so much power, and... they're just a bunch of dudes. They're just as prone to becoming swept up in stupid conspiracized thinking as, well, everyone else in their demographic seems to have been. And it's important to remember, nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.
So you have a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated. If you have access to a billionaire (and billionaires all have access to each other, because it suits their ego to think of each other as peers), most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism, and so they push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they're genius outliers who can see things others can't, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit. "I must be smart, look how rich I am." The rising power of movements meant to counter their influence has catalyzed a vicious, and frankly very weird, backlash where they want to put everyone else in their place. And, due to the insularity of their lifestyles, they very seldom have any corrective voices pointing out when they've clearly lost the plot. If it weren't for the deep harm they were doing to so many with these radical ideas, I'd have a lot of pity and empathy for the fact that they're clearly acting out due to social isolation and the existential emptiness that must come from pursuing wealth and power to such an extreme degree that there's no room left in life for someone to call them on their bullshit."
— Anil Dash, "VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons, 07 Jul 2023
"The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of *16%* of world GDP in wealth."
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) April 15, 2026 at 10:21 AM
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"After 2018, in part because of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich that went into effect at the start of that year, America’s richest 0.1 percent are now worth more than the entire GDP of China.
What do they do with all this money? Well, when they’re not just shooting rockets into space or building hideous trucks, they’re spending it on politics.
Billionaire political spending in presidential elections is exploding.
After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, it took off.
In the last presidential election, just 300 billionaire families spent roughly $3 billion. Those families gave an average of $10 million each — roughly 100,000 times what an average donor gave.
And the super-rich are getting a big return on their “investment.” They’re getting more tax cuts, more deregulation, and a government that lets them get away with busting unions, exploiting workers, and monopolizing their markets while poisoning the environment."
— Robert Reich, Inequality Isn't Just Unfair. It's Dangerous! Jun 09, 2026
Hear Danielle Moodie explain that billionaires are a virus (Danielle Moodie, talking to Jared Yates Sexton, We're Reaching the Moment of Truth: The Check-In with Jared Yates Sexton and Danielle Moodie, April 15, 2026, see 31:00 and later)
Monday, June 8, 2026
Sunday, June 7, 2026
June 21 election info from Colombia
The election run-off will be June 21. A simple recommendation:
What Everyone Can See in Colombia’s Presidential Campaign Images (June 10, 2026)
Iván Cepeda says there was no election fraud:
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