The Last Enclosure

Mike @ Misaligned Markets & Nick

From the last parcel of British common land to your precious and limited attention, capital seeks to enclose and commodify every corner of the world for profit. Our very minds and bodies are the latest sites of this movement. The Last Enclosure cuts through the myths to show you who's erecting today’s fences and how. Join hosts Mike and Nick every other week as they give you the knowledge and tools to dismantle the last enclosure. A companion pod to Misaligned Markets (https://misaligned.markets).

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    Meet the AI Resistance

    "AI is like the guy that showed up and started pissing in everyone's beer at the party." Mike categorizes various groups resisting or critically engaging with generative AI, from total abstainers to 'scopers' who seek responsible use cases. Global harms: While AI has become a hot button issue in the US, frustration in the states is a small part of a bigger movement.Diverse coalitions: Like the buckets of AI overlords from episode three, the resistance consists of many desperate groups banding together.Scoping AI: Mike briefly speaks to use cases that are narrow in scope and lower in their externalities to users and the public.Deeper learning The AI Resist List: airesistlist.org Mike's thread on GenAI harms: bsky.app/profile/misaligned.markets/post/3migfnyvuak26 Ghost in the Machine Documentary: notaidoc.com Ethical European model Apertus: infoworld.com/article/4051779/swiss-launch-open-source-ai-model-as-ethical-alternative-to-big-us-llms.html EVO RNA GPT: hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2024-03-14-evo Inside Memphis’ fight against xAI: selc.org/news/inside-memphis-fight-against-xai/ Data centers in drought-region: newsweek.com/map-data-centers-built-drought-hit-areas-11997520 Jeff Geering AI and open source: jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/ai-is-destroying-open-source XKCD infrastructure meme: explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency Distributed AI Research Institute: dair-institute.org Dr. Fatima how to (Anti) AI better: youtube.com/watch?v=y85nqc2zm7M Innocence Project LLM data science: hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html Joy Buolamwini and the Algorithmic Justice League: https://www.ajl.org/about Reach out Site: rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social

    Meet the AI Resistance

  2. Jul 21

    Did Bernie Sanders fail the Turing test?

    Getting a valuation from the US government via the equity tax allows OpenAI to tell investors “we are worth a trillion [dollars]” Mike and Nick examine the dangerous intersection of good intentions, astroturfing, and the kayfabe of the AI bubble. They compare Senator Sanders' proposal for an AI wealth tax to the industry's. Mike also details how industry operatives might be using the left's talking points against them to shape the policy agenda. The valuation magic trick: Valuations are invocations: numbers that become real once believed. If a politician proposes taxing a company based on a specific valuation, they aren't just taking money, they are validating a price tag.Bailouts in broad daylight: If the government holds equity in AI companies, the state becomes a stakeholder. A “tax” becomes a vested interest in an industry losing billions.'Weaponized memetic schismogenesis:' Through influence campaigns AI industry affiliates are nudging critics to frame the debate.Timestamps 0:00 Last Enclosure purpose 2:58 Sanders and Altman, aligned? 5:22 Importance of a valuation 7:54 Perverse incentives + bad tools 15:10 Schismogenesis and Bernie 29:29 Bernie and Yudkowsky 36:22 The legitimacy of Effective Altruism 37:37 Bernie vs Claude 39:34 Hank Green, Bernie, and AI Safety 46:50 Anthropic and EA 53:49 Is this a bailout? 1:00:55 Don't fall for kayfabe 1:03:35 AI economics redux (open source race) 1:12:55 Local models kill AGI 1:16:22 Conclusion Deeper learning Sanders' proposal: forbes.com/sites/jamesbroughel/2026/06/22/bernie-sanders-wants-a-us-sovereign-wealth-fund-for-ai Altman's proposal: techcrunch.com/2026/07/02/openai-proposed-donating-5-of-its-equity-to-a-us-sovereign-wealth-fund Anthropic's proposal: apnews.com/article/anthropic-dario-amodei-ai-afeb5279eef406980dffa46ff91495e0 Amodei's policy vision: darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential Mike's rant on “left is missing out” bsky.app/profile/misaligned.markets/post/3mf76r4ewd22x Yudkowsky: “Shut it all down” (2023 Time article): time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough AI influence in Sci YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=0Plo-zT8W9w Sci-educator on Hank Green: youtube.com/watch?v=9dXqf5CRH5U Reach out Site: rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social

    Did Bernie Sanders fail the Turing test?

  3. Jul 14

    The AI bubble is actually four bubbles

    “If you're looking for a sign companies back down and go: 'Got you, it's a bubble!' They're never going to do that. They'll keep pretending everything's fine until the last death throes.” Mike and Nick describe the AI bubble not as a single failure, but as a stack of overlapping collapses. From the physical reality of energy constraints in the Strait of Hormuz to the shadow banking fueling data centers, they map out how the bubble isn't just an economic issue but increasingly a political one, too. Overlapping bubbles: The economy is experiencing 5 bubbles, with at least 4 of them concentrating around AI spending.The energy ceiling: Silicon Valley ignores the material world at its own peril. Between energy costs and supply chain chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, “scale is all you need” is about to hit a wall no amount of VC can overcome.Capital as labor (The Lie): The promise that AI replaces human workers is an economic fantasy used to justify mass layoffs and degrade remaining jobs.Enclosure of ML: For decades, machine learning was an open academic field. Big tech effectively enclosed this commons, rebranding a general-purpose architecture (the Transformer) as a proprietary product.The “Siri Plus” residual: When the bubble pops we'll be left with scoped, boring automation that works for specific tasks but never achieves the “general intelligence” used to justify trillion-dollar valuations.Timestamps 0:00 What is the Last Enclosure? 2:38 AI bubble in context of Hormuz 8:03 Bailouts? 11:10 Bubble 1: Frontier AI companies 15:33 Bubble 2: “Wrapper” AI companies 17:13 Bubble 3: GPUs, infrastructure, and data centers 19:13 Bubble 4: AI financing (Banks and private credit) 22:33 What drives AI “value?” 30:18 The bubble in the real economy 33:37 Harms of the capital-as-labor myth 38:56 Residuals from the bubble 42:49 AI not causing layoffs 44:10 Why did this go on for so long? 49:08 AI is kayfabe and paper tigers 52:34 Types of bubbles 55:22 LLMs as the last enclosure 57:17 Accountability 1:02:56 Recommendations Deeper learning Mike on the AI bubble: misaligned.markets/what-to-expect-ai-bubble Zitron - OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, Spending Hit $34 Billion: wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials Harvey AI wrapping frontier models like Claude: help.harvey.ai/articles/what-ai-models-does-harvey-use America’s Data-Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule: wsj.com/tech/ai/americas-data-center-build-out-is-falling-way-behind-schedule-e408a9a8 AI Boom Runs on Debt: aol.com/articles/ai-boom-runs-debt-global-144019676.html Reach out Site: rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social

    The AI bubble is actually four bubbles

  4. Jul 7

    The AI overlords fomenting fears of a 'permanent underclass'

    “[AI boosters] are all locked in, because their reputations are staked on this being true.” Nick leads a discussion on the idea of the “permanent underclass,” and Mike outlines the different groups of AI boosters propping up the narrative. The APM Fallacy: Tech workers are optimizing for “actions per minute” or using agents to do more things faster without considering ROI. Productivity as a video game.The Token Reality Gap: When the subsidies end, agents that felt magical become prohibitively expensive.The rogues' gallery of overlords: Dissecting the buckets of AI boosters—from true believers and doomsday cultists to managers using AI to avoid the “witch hunt” of layoffs.Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:43 Silicon Valley's cultural bubble (APM & AI Agents) 8:33 The economic AI bubble 20:40 Who created the permanent underclass story? 22:18 AI doom/human extinction 30:12 Putting AI boosters into buckets 47:55 AI ROI? 53:03 Tech workers embrace permanent underclass anxieties 55:37 Media and investors sleep at the wheel 01:02:10 AI overlords caught in cynical grift 01:09:50 Silicon Valley and UBI Deeper learning Mike on Grandpa Shelby and LLMs: misaligned.markets/understanding-large-language-models Mike on the AI bubble: misaligned.markets/what-to-expect-ai-bubble V.F. Ridgeway on measuring metrics: nesslabs.com/what-gets-measured-gets-managed Richard Sutton's bitter lesson: incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html $500 million on AI in a month: fastcompany.com/91550884/claude-ai-costs-climb-company-spent-half-a-billion-dollars-in-a-single-month-report Pro-extinction AI researchers: archive.is/DBSC4 Google's Larry Page vs Musk on human specieism: archive.is/jBKPn Nvidia CEO causes quantum stocks to fall: cnbc.com/2025/01/08/quantum-stocks-like-rigetti-plunge-after-nvidias-huang-says-the-computers-are-15-to-30-years-away.html Eliezer Yudkowsky makes ~$600k writing fanfiction: projects.propublica.org/nonprofitsorganizations/582565917 Ed Zitron on AI compute demand: youtu.be/-5aPsg3rl3g?si=fUmPZN3Jzc8ZuNJP Reach out Site: rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social

    The AI overlords fomenting fears of a 'permanent underclass'

  5. Jun 30

    AI: industrial reorganization; not industrial revolution

    “We were sold this vision of capital-as-labor. We'll be able to sub one human for one machine, and it will be transformative. It's not true.” Mike and Nick move from the mythology of AI to the mechanics of the current bubble. Instead of building smarter machines, tech is “sanding off the edges” for polished demos. Scaling Plateau: “Scale is All You Need” is a pitch for data centers, not a roadmap to autonomous AI.Industrial Reorganization: 1 unit of capital = 1 human is a lie used for leverage. High-skill work is being degraded into “scaffolding” to shape LLM outputs, turning humans into “reverse centaurs.”Interface Enclosure: While the Transformer architecture is open source, big tech is attempting modern enclosure by making chatbots the only viable interface for machine learning.Weaponized Utopianism: The promise of full automation used as a tool to intimidate workers into acting against their interests.Double Movement: Every technological move by capital eventually triggers a necessary counter-movement to preserve social relations.Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:42 Scaling Myth 3:05 Experts “sick of” transformers 7:20 Capital as Labor 8:51 Industrial reorganization 12:34 Techno-utopianism 18:18 Double Movement 34:10 Scoped LLMs 43:44 Dark patterns 51:07 Outro Deeper learning Mike on the Grandpa Shelby theory of LLMs: https://misaligned.markets/understanding-large-language-models Mike on capital-as-labor/the AI bubble: https://misaligned.markets/what-to-expect-ai-bubble/ Gary Marcus on scale is all you need is dead: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-news-scale-is-all-you-need Llion Jones “absolutely sick” of Transformers: https://venturebeat.com/ai/sakana-ais-cto-says-hes-absolutely-sick-of-transformers-the-tech-that-powers Computer scientist Cal Newport on current AI (LLMs) capabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GezB1XyiQo Meta employees turned into scaffolding: https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai Nikolai Fyodorov, Russian Cosmism, and Silicon Valley Transhumanism: https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-russian-ascetic-who-reached-for-immortality AI as normal technology: https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-as-normal-technology Reach out Site: https://rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social

    AI: industrial reorganization; not industrial revolution

  6. Jun 23

    It's not intelligent, so don't call it AI!

    “I'm trying to implement a rule for myself and those around me. Stop using the phrase AI because these are different technologies." In this inaugural episode, Mike and Nick dissect the current AI debate and who benefits from its current framing: The Vocab Trap - Why using the term "AI" is a victory for the tech villainaires.Beyond "Spicy Autocomplete" - While often dismissed as mere autocomplete, LLMs are more accurately described as modeling the shape of language usage. They're a mirror to our collective cognition.Human Scaffolding - From remote drivers in the Philippines for Waymo to the engineers mapping every pothole, the perceived intelligence of these systems relies on a massive, invisible supply chain of human labor.Digital Dementia (Grandpa Shelby Theory) - LLMs operate with a form of anterograde amnesia; they cannot learn in real-time after training. Also, their outputs are often fuzzy associations rather than factual recall. Humans are being made to fill the gaps. Timestamps 0:07 Intro 4:16 AI's Roots 7:15 How Transformers Work 10:23 Models Without Understanding 15:12 Language Hides Reasoning 19:19 Words by Their Company 21:46 Doomers and Superintelligence 33:27 Data, Limits, and Humps 36:03 Kurzweil and the Singularity 38:22 Humans as Scaffolding 40:24 Grandpa, Lost References Brief history of AI (from Mike's Misaligned Markets) "Grandpa Shelby" and how Language Models work (Misaligned Markets) Self-driving cars would be nowhere without HD maps Talkie LM (1930s open source model) Michael Woolridge on this is not the AI we were promised John Rupert Firth and distributional semantics in context of machine learning A timeline of the origins of AI doomerism Sam Altman: AI will end world but create great companies Elon Musk and Open AI's origins Musk's connections to Nick Bostrom John von Neumman, the singularity, and AI doom Ted Chang on chatbots as blury jpegs

    It's not intelligent, so don't call it AI!
  • 6 Episodes

About

From the last parcel of British common land to your precious and limited attention, capital seeks to enclose and commodify every corner of the world for profit. Our very minds and bodies are the latest sites of this movement. The Last Enclosure cuts through the myths to show you who's erecting today’s fences and how. Join hosts Mike and Nick every other week as they give you the knowledge and tools to dismantle the last enclosure. A companion pod to Misaligned Markets (https://misaligned.markets).

Information

  • Creator
    Mike @ Misaligned Markets & Nick
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Double Movement Media 2026
  • Show Website
    The Last Enclosure