Diminishing Returns

I am withdrawing from almost all U.S.-based digital subscriptions; soon, all. This is not a symbolic gesture or an act of ideological theatre. It is a practical decision grounded in observation. Platform governance is converging with corporate and political power into a single operational field, where economic alignment determines visibility, legitimacy, and survival. The architecture of these systems now actively constrains what can be said, what can circulate, and what can endure. Participation increasingly requires narrative compliance. Content that stabilises dominant power flows is rewarded; content that destabilises them is quietly suppressed, throttled, or erased. This is not censorship in its classical form. It is algorithmic suffocation. The narrowing of expressive bandwidth until only reaffirmation remains. To continue funding these systems is to materially support the acceleration of that closure.

What is being defended under the banner of stability is not freedom, nor truth, nor collective wellbeing, but the preservation of concentrated power itself. When wealth becomes the primary measure of value, and success the sole proxy for legitimacy, culture collapses into a feedback loop where dominance reproduces dominance. Influence purchases visibility; visibility manufactures belief; belief secures consent. Over time, this loop displaces ethical reasoning, epistemic humility, and social responsibility. The result is a civilisation that confuses market success with moral authority, and technological reach with wisdom. In such a system, complexity becomes threat, nuance becomes friction, and dissent becomes noise. Withdrawal is not retreat. It is boundary-setting. It is the refusal to subsidise architectures that metabolise human attention into instruments of control. Civilisations do not decay because they lose power. They decay because they lose the capacity to question the structures that grant it.