Reading this now. Silicon Valley’s not trading spices; they’re trafficking in unlicensed faith of a species dumb enough to think Andrew Jackson Roman legions is a backup drive.  The playbook’s the same: monopolize the infrastructure, rebrand extraction as “innovation,” and let the chaos metastasize. The East India Company wasn’t lobbying governments; it was subletting them. It was a vertical monopoly that collapsed when its greed outran the Crown’s patience but not before losing America in the war of independence in the process. 

Which begs the question who’s gonna pull the plug on our slow-rolling corporate singularity when democracy’s just another app draining battery?

History doesn’t repeat. It open-sources

Think of it like this: empires aren’t toppled by barbarians at the gates. They’re hollowed out by the *optimizers*—the ones who promise efficiency but deliver entropy. England lost the colonies because the EIC’s greed turned tea into tyranny. Empires don’t fall. They fork—