Individually Rational. Collectively Catastrophic.

February 10, 2026

We Built This

My sister's machine got compromised.

Probably malware, possibly a botnet---I never got a definitive answer. What I did get was my brother asking me why his ice hockey emails kept landing in spam. The cause turned out to be my self‑hosted mail server: its IP reputation cratered after her infected machine started spewing junk.

I'd been running my own mail server since the early 2000s. I had the infrastructure, the experience, and the technical ability to fight the blacklist. I could have contacted operators, petitioned for delisting, tightened monitoring, and restored my sender reputation.

But the largest entity blocking my IP was Google. And getting a human at Google to review a small, self‑hosted mail server? You don't.

The irony was unavoidable. Google made my self‑hosted setup effectively unusable---then offered the escape hatch. They created the weather that made my shelter uninhabitable, then offered to rent me a room in their fortress.

My brother wanted his emails to arrive and, frankly, so did I.

So I moved our domains to Gmail.

Individually rational. Collectively catastrophic.

The cost is real. Google reads my mail now. But that felt lighter than fighting an invisible bureaucracy. I chose convenience over sovereignty.

Whoever Pays for Distribution

We tend to imagine censorship as a visible act---a person with authority striking out forbidden text. But the most effective way to shape speech isn't to ban what you dislike. It's to subsidize the distribution of what you prefer.

Every society that tries to sustain a free press eventually discovers the same structural truth: whoever pays to move information gains power over what moves.

  • Canada: Preferential postal rates for newspapers predate Confederation. The Publications Assistance Program subsidized over 1,130 publications. Its successor, the Canada Periodical Fund, distributes over $1.7 billion annually. The stated aim is pluralism. The structural result is media dependency on the very state it is meant to scrutinize.
  • United States: The Postal Service Act of 1792 set newspaper postage at one cent for up to a hundred miles. George Washington advocated free newspaper delivery. By 1952, publishers were having roughly 80 percent of their postal costs covered by taxpayers.
  • India: The government is the largest advertiser in Indian newspapers, routing ads through DAVP. In 2023–24, national print ad spending reached ₹2.59 billion, spiking ahead of elections. Newspapers that refuse government ads risk suspension from official distribution rolls.

The payer varies. The mechanism does not.

The party that subsidizes distribution inevitably acquires editorial power---whether it claims it or not.

The penny press wasn't told to publish sensationalism. Subsidized postage simply made circulation the dominant business model, and circulation rewards sensation. Nobody (overtly) tells Indian editors to self‑censor. Government revenue just makes sustained criticism financially radioactive.

The incentive structure does the editing.

The Wasteland

Advertising industrialized this dynamic.

Radio, television, and the internet converged on the same model: subsidize expensive distribution with ad revenue, then let advertisers' incentives shape content.

In 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow called television a "vast wasteland." He wasn't lamenting taste; he was diagnosing a system where the programming wasn't the product---the audience was. Little Ralphie in A Christmas Story decodes his secret radio message only to read: "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." His disappointment is the realization that the content exists only to carry the payload.

Minow's complaint wasn't about technology. It was about incentives. The system optimized for attention volume over substance.

The platforms changed. The pattern didn't.

A Million Small Surrenders

I use eight or nine different messaging apps because every social group has fragmented across platforms. This fragmentation isn't accidental; it's a business strategy.

We solved global messaging decades ago with open protocols like SMTP. Anyone can email anyone, regardless of provider. But modern vendors---Meta (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), Apple (iMessage), Slack---have deliberately refused to standardize. They built walled gardens instead of bridges, ensuring that leaving means losing your social graph.

They captured users by deliberately breaking the interoperability that made the internet powerful.

This is the Walmartification of information infrastructure. Walmart didn't destroy small‑town retail through conspiracy. It offered lower prices and broader selection (albeit often of poorer quality). People drove past local shops because it made sense that day.

Each trip was rational. The aggregate result---hollowed‑out downtowns and the erosion of local economic autonomy---was nobody's explicit goal and everybody's revealed preference.

We built this internet the same way.\ Not through ignorance.\ Not through coercion.\ But through a million small surrenders.

We traded open protocols (SMTP, RSS, XMPP) for proprietary platforms (Gmail, Facebook, Slack). We saved time on maintenance. We hollowed out the infrastructure of the open web.

Individually rational. Collectively catastrophic.

Renting Superpowers

AI is the next turn of the same wheel.

The technology itself is as transformative as the printing press or packet‑switched networking. But the infrastructure is being built under the same captured incentive structures.

I know this because I'm already inside the walls---refining these words with Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT, running on their servers, governed by their terms of service. The tools are extraordinary. I am faster, sharper, and more productive with them.

But to access that power, I accept centralized control over my cognitive infrastructure.

The trap isn't the technology.\ The trap is that we are once again renting our superpowers instead of owning them.

I can see the wheel turning this time. I'm not sure that awareness alone is enough to step off.

But we should try.

Individually responsible. Collectively ???

This is part of an ongoing series exploring what actually changes when AI becomes infrastructure. Previous: How That Post Was Made.

James Henry is a senior engineer who writes about AI, infrastructure, and the systems we build without noticing. He works with LLMs liberally — including in the writing of this post — because he believes the collaboration is the point, not the secret. More at jamesrahenry.substack.com.