Very good read. As I'm taking some classes in the neuropsychology of learning, his first part on how knowledge changes you is spot on. Sometimes the change is tiny, sometimes the change is significant, but it is always on you that it happens.

The technopoly, as the author puts it, was a long way coming, first with patents ensuring that the patent owner got the benefits (which often wasn't the actual discoverer) and later with near eternal copyright thanks mainly to Disney. When computer companies managed to make peeking at their code a crime, society as a whole lost.

If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth.

I can imagine the shareholders going feral, explaining how they create jobs.

Another thing, regarding the USA stranglehold on tech, Brazil was in a very peculiar situation in that regard in the 80s and up to '92. It had a suffocating protectionism, which fully prohibited people from importing computers and videogames, in order to incentivize the local industry. The computer tech was roughly 5 years behind USA and Europe of the time, the first local NES clones were built around '88, if I'm not mistaken. Of course, game cartridges and software diskettes and tapes had to be imported, usually as contraband and often as pirated copies. Come 1992, the recently elected government takes down all the protectionism in a single swoop. It went from full to zero in a day, there was no gradual relief of the protections. The following influx of much, much more advanced computers crashed the local computer economy. We still pirated nearly every software, tho.