A civilization doesn’t have to collapse overnight. Sometimes everything simply becomes a commodity, nothing is sacred, and people gradually forget what they’ve lost. A system built to serve us becomes a machine that feeds on us, consuming not only our wealth and autonomy, but the very things that give life meaning.
“Everything is cheaper, more efficient, and more available than ever, yet somehow your flights, your vet bills, your search results, and your entire Tuesday feel like they’ve gone to absolute shit. In this video, I break down the four mechanisms quietly enshittifying modern life and why you can be one of the luckiest humans in history while still feeling like you’re drowning.”
I don’t agree with Mark’s conclusions, his micro-to-macro comparison, or his suggestion that things are somehow “miraculous” in the grand scheme of things. That said, this is a useful presentation. Matthew Cooke’s recent video, “They Sold Your Country”, explores the same underlying issue from a different angle. Others have been talking about it, too, so perhaps there’s something in the air in this moment.
This pattern, another phase in the grand market cycle, may be an inevitable outcome of a process that began decades ago. It also seems to echo the trajectory of many civilizations deemed “great” throughout history. Whatever the case, it’s part of why so many of us are quietly miserable and increasingly desperate. We’re being poisoned and parasitized by a system that has spent decades tightening its grip while normalizing the damage.
Those of us old enough to remember sense that something fundamental has been lost. We can’t always name it, but we feel it: life once seemed to offer more agency, more possibility, more control over our own destinies.
All kinds of nasty, violent, deceptive, criminal, and corrupt fuckery was happening then, too. The past was hardly a golden age. The difference is that we had more room to live on our own terms. That autonomy has been sold off bit by bit, siphoned away in the name of profit and market efficiency. Economists and historians have been warning us for decades, but we weren’t listening. We were too distracted by the next shiny thing, the next technological promise.
That loss of agency isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when every aspect of life becomes an asset to be monetized, every public good a potential revenue stream, and every human need an opportunity for extraction. The logic is simple: extract maximum value, privatize the gains, socialize the costs, and move on when there’s nothing left to take.
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader
Private equity firms are among the clearest expressions of this parasitic, predatory model. “Economic growth” has become the ideological smokescreen for an entrap-and-extract economy that feeds on people, institutions, and public resources. Decades of conditioning have made this garbage-first model seem not only acceptable, but desirable. Nothing is off-limits: not the market, not public institutions, not even government itself.
And the machine doesn’t stop at our wallets. It’s coming for our culture, too.
Look at what’s happening to cherished franchises like Stargate, properties that have meant something to generations of fans. These stories become part of our lives. We grow up with them, return to them, share them with our children, and spend years hoping for another chapter. Then a corporate giant like Amazon MGM dangles the possibility of a revival, sometimes with familiar creators or original cast members involved, and fans dare to get excited.
But excitement is a marketable resource, too. Test the waters, gauge the interest, generate the buzz. Then watch as the promise dissolves into corporate maneuvering, vague announcements, and a new creative team brought in to deliver a “fresh take,” often with little meaningful connection to what made the property beloved in the first place.
The risk is that those entrusted with continuing these stories come to see the existing audience not as the community that kept them alive, but as an obstacle to be overcome. The narcissistic, nihilistic corporate mindset operates in spite of the very fans whose loyalty made these properties valuable. Instead of building on a shared legacy, they strip it for parts, slap a new coat of ideology and marketing on it, and call it progress.
The result can feel less like a continuation than a rejection of the very thing fans came back for: derivative storytelling, disregard for the source material, and characters and worlds reshaped to satisfy corporate priorities and ideological agendas rather than the people who care about them.
Franchises can and should evolve, but evolution requires understanding what came before. Reinvention without respect is just another form of extraction. Sure, fans aren’t entitled to dictate every creative decision, but neither are they fools who should be grateful for whatever product gets stamped with a familiar name. When corporations treat our cultural inheritance as a disposable asset and our loyalty as something to exploit, they erode the very trust that made these properties valuable and gave them lasting, generational appeal.
And here’s where the whole thing comes full circle, back to the traps Mark was hinting at.
Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of ardent fans will descend on YouTube comment sections, railing against the latest corporate indignity. The platforms monetize their engagement, while outrage itself becomes another commodity. The comments fill with “FUCK AMAZON!” and declarations that enough is enough.
Then a few days pass. Perhaps a few hours.
The outrage fades, the Prime membership beckons, and the familiar routines resume. The same people who swore they were done with Amazon find themselves clicking “Add to Cart” again, their momentary resolve dissolving into the convenience of habit. Yet the poison lingers, taking its toll on mind, body, and spirit.
And therein lies the trap. We rail against the machine while continuing to feed it. We resent the loss of agency but surrender our choices to convenience, conditioning, and the next shiny thing. That, in a nutshell, is cultural manipulation and, in a broader sense, mind control. Our individual participation might seem insignificant, but multiplied across millions of people, those choices sustain the very system we claim to oppose.
None of this means we can simply opt out of the economy, abandon every corporation, or refuse every modern convenience. The system is too deeply embedded in our lives for that to be a realistic expectation for most of us. This realization may feed into powerlessness, and a victim mindset, even if unacknowledged. But there’s a difference between recognizing the constraints we live under and surrendering to them entirely.
We’d be wise to become more conscious of where our money goes, what we give our attention to, which institutions we support, and what we’re willing to accept in exchange for convenience. We can stop confusing economic growth with human flourishing, corporate valuation with cultural value, and consumer choice with genuine freedom.
The machine thrives on our unquestioning, unconscious participation. It depends on us accepting the inevitable, mistaking convenience for progress, and believing that the next product, platform, or promised revival will somehow make everything better.
Sometimes they do. One might even argue that this is part of the same script of entrapment: keep hope alive. But as should be evident by now, hope, too, is a marketable resource.
Reclaiming our agency begins with something much simpler: recognizing the machine for what it is, refusing to feed it blindly, and catching ourselves when we fall for the same old script. When we become emotionally invested or reactive toward a corporate behemoth over which we have little direct influence, we risk mistaking our outrage for action. We must remember that not everything of value can be bought, sold, or measured in profit.
We’ve been mistaking extraction for progress. We don’t have to keep paying for our own dispossession.
Stop feeding the machine.
Solvitur ambulando
Written by Trance Blackman. Originally published on tranceblackman.com on 25 October 2026.
Copy & share: https://tranceblackman.com/the-entrap-and-extract-economy/
The Entrap-and-Extract Economy: Selling Our Future, Stripping Our Past
A civilization doesn’t have to collapse overnight. Sometimes everything simply becomes a commodity, nothing is sacred, and people gradually forget what they’ve lost. A system built to serve us becomes a machine that feeds on us, consuming not only our wealth and autonomy, but the very things that give life meaning.
I don’t agree with Mark’s conclusions, his micro-to-macro comparison, or his suggestion that things are somehow “miraculous” in the grand scheme of things. That said, this is a useful presentation. Matthew Cooke’s recent video, “They Sold Your Country”, explores the same underlying issue from a different angle. Others have been talking about it, too, so perhaps there’s something in the air in this moment.
This pattern, another phase in the grand market cycle, may be an inevitable outcome of a process that began decades ago. It also seems to echo the trajectory of many civilizations deemed “great” throughout history. Whatever the case, it’s part of why so many of us are quietly miserable and increasingly desperate. We’re being poisoned and parasitized by a system that has spent decades tightening its grip while normalizing the damage.
Those of us old enough to remember sense that something fundamental has been lost. We can’t always name it, but we feel it: life once seemed to offer more agency, more possibility, more control over our own destinies.
All kinds of nasty, violent, deceptive, criminal, and corrupt fuckery was happening then, too. The past was hardly a golden age. The difference is that we had more room to live on our own terms. That autonomy has been sold off bit by bit, siphoned away in the name of profit and market efficiency. Economists and historians have been warning us for decades, but we weren’t listening. We were too distracted by the next shiny thing, the next technological promise.
That loss of agency isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when every aspect of life becomes an asset to be monetized, every public good a potential revenue stream, and every human need an opportunity for extraction. The logic is simple: extract maximum value, privatize the gains, socialize the costs, and move on when there’s nothing left to take.
Private equity firms are among the clearest expressions of this parasitic, predatory model. “Economic growth” has become the ideological smokescreen for an entrap-and-extract economy that feeds on people, institutions, and public resources. Decades of conditioning have made this garbage-first model seem not only acceptable, but desirable. Nothing is off-limits: not the market, not public institutions, not even government itself.
And the machine doesn’t stop at our wallets. It’s coming for our culture, too.
Look at what’s happening to cherished franchises like Stargate, properties that have meant something to generations of fans. These stories become part of our lives. We grow up with them, return to them, share them with our children, and spend years hoping for another chapter. Then a corporate giant like Amazon MGM dangles the possibility of a revival, sometimes with familiar creators or original cast members involved, and fans dare to get excited.
But excitement is a marketable resource, too. Test the waters, gauge the interest, generate the buzz. Then watch as the promise dissolves into corporate maneuvering, vague announcements, and a new creative team brought in to deliver a “fresh take,” often with little meaningful connection to what made the property beloved in the first place.
The risk is that those entrusted with continuing these stories come to see the existing audience not as the community that kept them alive, but as an obstacle to be overcome. The narcissistic, nihilistic corporate mindset operates in spite of the very fans whose loyalty made these properties valuable. Instead of building on a shared legacy, they strip it for parts, slap a new coat of ideology and marketing on it, and call it progress.
The result can feel less like a continuation than a rejection of the very thing fans came back for: derivative storytelling, disregard for the source material, and characters and worlds reshaped to satisfy corporate priorities and ideological agendas rather than the people who care about them.
Franchises can and should evolve, but evolution requires understanding what came before. Reinvention without respect is just another form of extraction. Sure, fans aren’t entitled to dictate every creative decision, but neither are they fools who should be grateful for whatever product gets stamped with a familiar name. When corporations treat our cultural inheritance as a disposable asset and our loyalty as something to exploit, they erode the very trust that made these properties valuable and gave them lasting, generational appeal.
And here’s where the whole thing comes full circle, back to the traps Mark was hinting at.
Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of ardent fans will descend on YouTube comment sections, railing against the latest corporate indignity. The platforms monetize their engagement, while outrage itself becomes another commodity. The comments fill with “FUCK AMAZON!” and declarations that enough is enough.
Then a few days pass. Perhaps a few hours.
The outrage fades, the Prime membership beckons, and the familiar routines resume. The same people who swore they were done with Amazon find themselves clicking “Add to Cart” again, their momentary resolve dissolving into the convenience of habit. Yet the poison lingers, taking its toll on mind, body, and spirit.
And therein lies the trap. We rail against the machine while continuing to feed it. We resent the loss of agency but surrender our choices to convenience, conditioning, and the next shiny thing. That, in a nutshell, is cultural manipulation and, in a broader sense, mind control. Our individual participation might seem insignificant, but multiplied across millions of people, those choices sustain the very system we claim to oppose.
None of this means we can simply opt out of the economy, abandon every corporation, or refuse every modern convenience. The system is too deeply embedded in our lives for that to be a realistic expectation for most of us. This realization may feed into powerlessness, and a victim mindset, even if unacknowledged. But there’s a difference between recognizing the constraints we live under and surrendering to them entirely.
We’d be wise to become more conscious of where our money goes, what we give our attention to, which institutions we support, and what we’re willing to accept in exchange for convenience. We can stop confusing economic growth with human flourishing, corporate valuation with cultural value, and consumer choice with genuine freedom.
The machine thrives on our unquestioning, unconscious participation. It depends on us accepting the inevitable, mistaking convenience for progress, and believing that the next product, platform, or promised revival will somehow make everything better.
Sometimes they do. One might even argue that this is part of the same script of entrapment: keep hope alive. But as should be evident by now, hope, too, is a marketable resource.
Reclaiming our agency begins with something much simpler: recognizing the machine for what it is, refusing to feed it blindly, and catching ourselves when we fall for the same old script. When we become emotionally invested or reactive toward a corporate behemoth over which we have little direct influence, we risk mistaking our outrage for action. We must remember that not everything of value can be bought, sold, or measured in profit.
We’ve been mistaking extraction for progress. We don’t have to keep paying for our own dispossession.
Stop feeding the machine.
Solvitur ambulando
Written by Trance Blackman. Originally published on tranceblackman.com on 25 October 2026.
Copy & share: https://tranceblackman.com/the-entrap-and-extract-economy/
Published in Journal Entries