Thorstein Veblen — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Thorstein Veblen — On AI. 17 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Absentee Ownership
Income derived from capital ownership rather than productive contribution — the platform owner as modern absentee landlord.
Cognitive Derangement
The chronic malaise produced when the instinct of workmanship is denied adequate outlet — persistent restlessness without dramatic suffering.
Conspicuous Computation
The AI-era display of productive power and technological fluency — quantified metrics serving social-sorting functions rather than measuring genuine value.
Pecuniary Emulation
The tendency of each class to imitate the consumption patterns of the class above — producing cascades of competitive display extending through hierarchies.
Predatory and Industrial Habits
Veblen's foundational distinction between orientations toward making (industrial) and taking (predatory) — habits cultivated by institutional environments.
Sabotage (Veblen)
Not destruction but deliberate restriction of productive output to maintain scarcity and profit — the 'conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.'
Tacit Knowledge
The vast, inarticulate substrate of understanding that operates beneath conscious awareness and cannot be captured in any specification, no matter how detailed—Polanyi's foundational insight that "we can know more than we can tell."
The Instinct of Workmanship
Veblen's biological drive toward skilled, purposeful production — satisfaction derived from competent performance regardless of economic reward or social recognition.
The Leisure Class of AI
The contemporary class demonstrating distance from production through direction rather than idleness — disguised beneath meritocracy vocabulary.
The Orange Pill Moment
The threshold crossing after which the AI-augmented worker cannot return to the previous regime — The Orange Pill's central metaphor for the qualitative, irreversible shift in what a single person can build.
The Price System
The institutional mechanism governing productive capacity through prices, profits, and ownership — systematically opposed to community productive interests.
The Silent Middle
The Orange Pill's figure for those who hold the exhilaration and the loss simultaneously—recognized here as an intuitive formulation of Heideggerian Gelassenheit.
The State of the Industrial Arts
The community's accumulated technical knowledge and productive capability — social inheritance owned by none, contributed to by millions, appropriated through enclosure.
Training Data as Public Good
The conversion of humanity's accumulated written output — produced over centuries, sustained by public education and research — into private proprietary value, without compensation flowing back to the public that produced the resource.
