Quy Ma
@quyma.bsky.social
I write about predictive capitalism, the coordination systems that replaced free markets, and the hidden costs nobody's measuring. → quyma.substack.com
Speed is a currency the impatient spend and the positioned collect. #econsky #philsky #life #philosophy
We measure the cost of everything in dollars and almost nothing in time, attention, or energy. Which is convenient for whoever's collecting the time, attention, and energy. #econsky #philsky #life #philosophy
The self is a slow conclusion. Interrupt the reasoning often enough and a person never quite finishes becoming anyone. #econsky #philsky #philosophy #life
Gutenberg’s name isn’t on the Bible he printed. It isn’t on anything he printed. We only know he did it because he lost a lawsuit and the court paperwork survived. He made copying words cheap. The first thing that stopped being copyable was his name. New essay on Substack. #econsky #history
The Retrieval Canon: AI Is the New Library and It Decides What Survives
No civilization has preserved more writing than ours. None has read a smaller share of it.
open.substack.com
rome never really had a free grain market. it had a subsidy, a shipping cartel, and a mob that rioted when bread got expensive. the mob was the regulatory agency. #econsky #history #ancienthistory
Dinosaurs ran this planet for 550x longer than humans have existed. One asteroid ended it in an afternoon. Turns out permanence is the thing you’re least allowed to assume. New essay’s up on my Substack, using Jurassic Park to make the case. #econsky
Life, Uh, Finds a Way
The Hayek Inversion: A Film-Literary Analysis of Jurassic Park
open.substack.com
Left vs right is a fight over slices. Nobody’s touching how the pie gets built. By the time you vote, the menu was written upstream. Defaults set. Systems designed. You pick from what’s left. Power moved upstream of choice. Politics is still down here arguing about leftovers. #econsky #capitalism
Every marketplace, like every ecosystem, builds the same five layers. producers, aggregators, distributors, a money layer, and the recyclers who handle what fails. The catch: each one can go extinct. I wrote about what kills them on Substack. Check it out. #econsky
Convergence Markets: Every Layer Has an Extinction Event
Why the roles inside every marketplace die, and who inherits the niche when they do.
open.substack.com
“The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments." -Thich Nhat Hanh If we want to save human autonomy from predictive systems, we must consistently, consciously, and congruently reclaim the present moment. #econsky #philosophy #buddhism #zen #capitalism
You are the story your brain tells to explain itself to itself. #philosophy
97% of human history ran on legal slavery. We’ve had 3% without it, and even that’s generous: ~28 million people are in forced labor globally right now. It never actually ended. It just kept changing its name. My latest essay on Substack. #econsky #polisky #history #academicsky
The Slave Economy Never Ended. It Just Changed Its Labor Source.
What Rome's slave economy tells us about who should own the one we're building now, and the only version worth building.
open.substack.com
Most of what gets called laziness is just accurate accounting. People are refusing trades that don't pay enough. The hustle crowd calls it a motivation problem. It's a pricing dispute, and the workers are usually right about the price. #econsky
What makes a good life for a human? A good life is probably one where your time, attention, and energy aren’t being extracted by systems optimized for something else entirely. We built efficient systems for stuff. We forgot to build systems for actually living. #econsky
The market doesn't reward value. It rewards position. Value is what the positioned tell everyone else to keep producing. #econsky
AI didn’t make neurodivergent thinking obsolete. It made one half cheap and left the other half as the scarcest skill in the knowledge economy. New essay from me on Substack. #econsky
Your Neurodivergent Brain Has a Second Gear. AI Just Made It the Expensive One.
The neurodivergent economy in the age of AI. The skill you already have, and what it's worth now.
open.substack.com
Old systems demanded your obedience and left your evenings alone. New systems demand nothing and take the evenings. #econsky #philosophy
The Beggar and the Billionaire. At the end of the day, they spent the same amount of time. #econsky #philosophy
The airline figured out the seat isn't the product. Your discomfort is. Legroom, boarding order, sitting next to your own kid. They didn't add value. They subdivided suffering and put a price tag on each piece. #econsky
The market doesn't reward value. It rewards position. Value is what the positioned tell everyone else to keep producing. #econsky
In 2024, S&P 500 companies spent a record 942 billion dollars buying back their own stock. The bill to bring American roads, bridges, water, and transit up to good repair is about 3.7 trillion. The money exists. It would just rather move a share price than fix a water main. #econsky
They stopped selling you things and started renting you the feeling of owning them. Look at your bank statement. Count the subscriptions. That's the new economy. #econsky
The door is open. It's the hallway that keeps getting longer. #econsky #capitalism #philosophy
Exhaustion is the receipt for costs no one itemized. #econsky #philosophy #capitalism