Cognitive mercantilism: AI panic eerily mirrors early capitalism's anxieties
adityaag · x · 2026-10-27
Venkatesh Rao published a long essay, "Cognitive Mercantilism," on his blog Contraptions, arguing that current AI panic is a form of cognitive mercantilism.
- Drawing on Joyce Appleby's The Relentless Revolution, he notes capitalism wasn't the inevitable expression of a timeless instinct to trade, but a historically contingent cultural invention — requiring escape from an older zero-sum worldview (wealth = land, bullion, and control over labor; one nation's gain presumed another's loss).
- Capitalism's breakthrough was discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than just commanded factors of production.
- Rao sketches four interlocking mercantilist beliefs and maps today's AI anxieties onto them: if market capitalism was the first planetary intelligence, the panic around AI as cognitive productive capacity parallels the old mercantilist anxiety over wealth more closely than one might think.
The essay was enthusiastically recommended on X by adityaag as "such a banger."
Related event: Venkatesh Rao: AI Panic Is "Cognitive Mercantilism"(3 posts)→
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