216. Supremacy Goods Revisited: Supremacy People
In 2012 I published my Supremacy Goods microeconomic model. MS and the rest of the industry adopted it, almost wiping out Pay to Win. But now Supremacy Goods are everywhere.
As the gaming industry expands, it has become increasingly influential on society. Games influence movies and media, and our drive to optimize monetisation has spread to almost every other industry. Even our cars now come with microtransactions and subscriptions. Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota/Lexus, GM, VW, Ford, Audi, and Hyundai/Kia all now require you to pay for unlocks even after you’ve paid for the base game car.
As a pioneer in that field, I used to bag on other industries for being so slow to adapt. Now, of course, I regret having egged these companies on. The world has become a nightmare of the worse conceivable monetisation ideas imaginable. It was no accident that I used cars (SUVs specifically) as my example of what a Supremacy Good was in that 2012 paper.
Humans are great at mimicking each other. They learn how to behave and succeed by the culture they are raised/programmed in. Now that our culture promotes the monetisation/commodification of every aspect of human life, it should come as no surprise that the worst monetisation models, the ones I fought so hard to eliminate from society, are now being used by billions of people in their daily lives.
Here I would like to have a little conversation about what happens when humans themselves become Supremacy Goods. So, what is a Supremacy Good?
As defined in the original paper:
A supremacy good is a good or service that reduces the value of all other linked goods and services in its space, including itself.
Essentially it is a Good that generates Threat that then forces linked goods to try to be even more threatening than the other competing Supremacy Goods in the space. This triggers a race to the bottom where everything turns to shit.
So what happens when humans begin seeing themselves as SGs? If you get one or more influential enough threat generating human SGs in a community, then as they are emulated by others there is tremendous peer pressure for all members of a community to threaten each other in an every escalating threat-race.
Supremacy People
If a person becomes a Supremacy Good, then I define them as Supremacy People. As everything in society is now commodified (and treated as a Good), it’s logical to treat humans as Supremacy Goods when they operate within the above definition. So, what does that look like?
I actually explained this in detail in my 2017 Building a Vastly Better Team Using Neuroscience paper. There I explained the construct of the Large Tribe Worldview and the Small Tribe Worldview.
Large Tribe Worldview: An outlook or even ideology that sees everyone in the world as being part of your tribe, and thus equally deserving of various rights, liberties, and opportunities.
Small Tribe Worldview: An outlook or even ideology that sees some people as “your kind of people” and everyone else as “xeno” or foreign. Members of the proscribed tribe are seen as superior to those outside the tribe, and thus deserving of certain privileges.
By 2017 my work was already being heavily censored at Gamasutra where it was being published, so I had to be very clinical and not point any fingers in that original paper. I primarily focused on explaining that Small Tribers were less productive and more prone to cause conflicts. I also pointed out that Human Resources staff tended to hire with the goal of reducing conflicts by only building teams with the identical Small Tribe Worldview. This would result in a monoculture which is low performing, toxic, and prevents the introduction of key labor assets from outside that Tribe.
Thus HR was trained to harm the companies they served because they didn’t understand the science related to their job. I was attempting to counter this by providing the critical education they were missing. Unlike with SG, to my knowledge, not a single company in the USA adopted this key framework. Thus we saw an explosion of monocultures, discrimination, and “toxic positivity”. Even all the fake DEI programs were designed to create “visually colorful” monocultures and did nothing to promote diversity of thought. Often they were just Excel spreadsheet affairs where mixed race people were handy because they could check off multiple boxes and more easily fit in if they were at least “half racially acceptable”.
So if I hadn’t been censored back in 2017, I would have pointed out that Small Tribers are also Supremacists, and that the vast majority of Americans are Small Tribers. The country was built on gender, racial, and class supremacy, it’s all in writing in the original Constitution. The Supreme Court has in recent years been packed with “Originalists” by the Federalist Society. That’s not a controversial statement, it is how they define themselves. Originalists believe that the USA should go back to the original Constitution and purge all the Amendments that added rights to citizens. For instance, the First Amendment is what makes Free Speech a right. Laws have been passed in most States in the last decade to limit that Right. The Supreme Court will allow these unconstitutional laws because they are referencing the original constitution which has no such protections.
Thus the Originalists are Small Tribers (Supremacists) who seek to have a small group of (mostly white, Christian, Libertarian, rich, etc) elites have all the power in government, business, education, and society. Just like our founding fathers envisioned!
So if you are an American, you are being bathed in Supremacy messaging since at least 1982 (when the Federalist Society was formed). I don’t want to rip off the bandage too fast here so I’m going to give some incremental examples to make it easier to identify.
Feel Good Supremacist Products
I’m seeing a ton of “benign” Supremacist offerings on YouTube these days. First I was getting science fiction stories (I’m big on SciFi of course) where humans were in outer space and meeting other aliens. In each of these stories the humans started out as disadvantaged in some way (behind in tech, out gunned, newcomers, etc) and overcame discrimination from other space beings to rise to become the dominant force in the story.
These are feel good power stories that make you proud to be Human, because Humans are the best race in the Galaxy! It’s all fiction, and those other space beings don’t exist, so what harm could come from indulging in a little bit of power fantasy? The goal of the author isn’t to get you to discriminate against space aliens, it’s to appeal to your Supremacist desires or to condition you to think that way.
This is the Supremacist soft sell, and it’s very subtle so it’s great for children.
Pocket FM
FM is an app that has lots of stories in various genres. You can buy a premium currency and use it to listen to the various stories. The art feed in the background seems AI generated and the stories themselves might even be AI generated. They have a lot of content. None of that is what got my attention.
Before I get into it, I should say I read some user reviews. The stories are broken up into episodes. Each episode requires some premium currency. FM uses dark patterns by cranking up the token cost for later episodes (after you are invested in the story). This isn’t disclosed up front, and hides the true cost of the product way before you buy the premium currency. So before I even get into what’s wrong with the content, the platform is based on a consumer antagonistic business model.
The first “ad” that I was exposed to was in between two YouTube videos. The story was called “Weakest Beast Tamer”. Our protagonist starts as the most impoverished student in a magic academy. The academy is pay to win, and he just can’t compete. Kind of like me in 5th grade when I was moved to affluent North Santa Monica and the teachers there graded based on how much money your family had. I was the poorest kid in the school. I got flamed for “flooding” (having on pants that I had outgrown years ago). The rest of the kids wore designer duds every day so it was obvious I “didn’t belong there”.
The FM story protagonist is humiliated brutally by everyone in the school, even the teachers. He even gets mad at his parents because they didn’t give him as much privilege as the other students. As the story evolves, it turns out his parents had a secret magical legacy that they passed down to him, that they never told him about. It seemed like the story was heading for a showdown in the school where he would turn out to be the strongest student, not the weakest. Not for anything he did, but because of some previously unrealized privilege. .
I ended up getting a second FM ad (story called “Heir in Hiding”), and it was a similar story about a relatively impoverished man who married into a very wealthy family. He was humiliated constantly by everyone. Worse, his wife was shamed for her poor choice of partners. The woman’s mother even offered her millions of dollars to divorce the poor guy (our protagonist). Then it turned out his father or grandfather who had previously disowned him was secretly one of the richest men in the world. Out of nowhere he is offered a business worth $100B and a credit card with $20B on it.
Again another rags to riches Power Fantasy where he went from being the Inferior to being the Superior without any effort. He then begins to set the scenario to humiliate those that humiliated him. And of course save his marriage.
Two stories, both almost identical in form. Both Power Fantasies where the protagonist thinks they are Inferior by birth and turn out to be Superior by birth. Both stories train the listener to want to be Superior and feel that they deserve to be so.
Now I must admit that my World of Warships design, that made billions of dollars for Wargaming, used a Power Fantasy technique that I invented. It wasn’t possible in the gaming space before I deployed it, and it took me months to convince the Founders that it would work. I won’t go into the details here, but the key element that made it work was that I made it fair for all participants. I had no desire to promote Supremacy and this is what took us 3 months to all agree upon. The Founders wanted the game to be fair for everyone.
So I understand the potency of the Power Fantasy, it’s core to my game neuroeconomics research. That means I also recognise it when I see it.
Hero Wars Advertising
Hero Wars initially launched on mobile in 2017. It uses comic sans cartoon graphics, similar to the original Joe Camel ads. This is an automatic signal that the app is aimed at children, regardless of any denials from the developer. We already went through those legal discussions for years and don’t need a do over.
All of the ads for this game use a comic sans male protagonist. Thus boys seem to be the target demographic. This is reinforced by the ads always involving the boy fawning over some beautiful looking woman who turns out to be a monster. Often the monster is hiding their monstrous features, but the viewer can see them. In all cases the boy is lured in with pseudosexual invitations, often literally entering the mouth or groin of the monster. The monster attempts to digest the boys and spits out their bones on the ground.
In the case of the protagonist, he resists and loses his “points” that float above his head, but escapes with nothing and then is shown entering the game space at a starting level. There are hundreds of these ads. I used this small sample to show you what they tend to look like:
Here the monster swallows the boys, and they turn into bones and are dropped into the pile.
Here the woman monster winks at the boys, and they jump in the water to reach her. She then grabs them around the neck with her tentacle and shoves their bodies into her vagina. Bones then float down to the sand below her.
Here the boy drops a block of rock onto the neck of the woman monster and breaks her neck. He then loots her treasure and his score goes up to “666”, a Satanic symbol in Christian mythology.
Young boy with heart emojis crawling onto the stomach and breasts of an adult woman. The scale makes no attempt to hide the age of the boy. Imagine what this would look like if we switched the genders here. Uncle Jeff would approve.
Male children are trained by these ads (and the associated game) to see women as these monsters that will abuse and/or reject/kill them. Women often complain that “alpha male” influencers like Andrew Tate are teaching young men to be misogynistic. But Hero Wars has been teaching this to boys for years, possibly with 8 year olds or even younger. The game has been downloaded 205+ million times by March of 2026.
Supremacy Influencers
The systems used to create, rally, and exploit Supremacists have become industrialized at the highest levels. Supremacists are extremely easy to manipulate and control, which is handy for various companies and governments, especially media. Women tend to be much better consumers than men, which may explain why there seems to be a gender bias in how this technology/methodology is being deployed.
Andrew Tate, 39, is a male Gender Supremacist who advocates for using and (some would argue) abusing women. He uses a lot of misogynistic dog whistles. He’s thus run afoul of the police in multiple countries. His content is currently being promoted on Netflix in a “documentary” called “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere”. This despite Andrew Tate refusing attempts to get him to appear in the show.
Leticia Padua, 47, also known as the “Sprinkle Sprinkle” woman, is a top female Gender Supremacist. She’s often called “the female Andrew Tate”. Chances are that you’ve never heard of Leticia Padua. She promotes misandrist advice on how to exploit men for money. She uses various misandrist dog whistles to justify mistreatment of men, such as “…because of the patriarchy.” According to her wiki, her content has been viewed over 20 billion times by 2023 on TikTok alone. It seems fair to estimate that by 2026 across all platforms that number would be north of 50 billion.
Nonetheless, reaction by media has been muted, perhaps because what she teaches is seen as more normalized or legal in modern society. Note that as of the time of this writing, Tate has also not been convicted of any felonies. Both have generated a lot of money for the platforms that host them.
While Gender Supremacy has become big money of late, we also have Religious Supremacists, Nationalist Supremacists, Race Supremacists, and Supremacists for almost any ideology you can think of. I’m not going to point more fingers as I think the point is made without my getting billions of well funded and even state-sponsored Supremacists hunting me down.
Methodology
Identify a group that is suffering in society. In 2026 that’s wide open territory.
Blame their suffering on another group that might have power over them. This sets up a “dog whistle”.
Make a call to action that targets the “oppressing” group. This can be seen as blowing the Dog Whistle.
Now that you’ve captured your target group (easy), rally them by telling them that they are actually Superior to the group “oppressing” them.
Direct them to harm the “Inferior” group.
It is important to note that these are not civil rights actors. They have no interest in “equality”. They seek advantage for their Superior faction. Advantage always comes at the expense of the Inferior group. That expense could be economic harm or reduced civil rights. Taxing everyone then directing that tax to the Superior group is one way, another is restricting the free speech of the Inferior group.
You see social media platforms and their algorithms assisting in this process by applying whatever standards they have to a group they want to be Inferior but not applying it to Supremacy groups. Tracking media bias has itself become a niche industry.
What Does This Have to do with Supremacy Goods?
A supremacy good is a good or service that reduces the value of all other linked goods and services in its space, including itself.
Now, thanks to our world commodifying humans in every way conceivable, humans have been reduced to Goods. Cannibalism is still illegal, but no doubt there are a lot of illegal activities occurring in the dark corners of society. Even the relatively tame unredacted public Epstein files have been shocking to many, and the still secret files (which is most of them) probably will paint humanity in a very poor light.
But under the Supremacy Goods microeconomic model, if you accept my proposal that humans themselves have been converted to Supremacy Goods, then the value of every individual human on Earth is being reduced in value as Supremacy becomes more widespread. As you can see from the above normalized examples of how children are being treated, this degradation of human value is in an advanced stage. Even if we stopped it now (impossible) the effects would last for generations.
As human value approaches zero mathematically, some of the worst uses of humans become themselves normalized. War on civilians, sex trafficking, child labor (Roblox), and legal sex work (at least for women) have all been normalized. Note that I respect my sex working brothers and sisters. But a system that pays them more for that compared to any other income generating option is turning our children into sex workers. Even that I might tolerate (barely), but since generally only people (especially men) over the age of 40 can afford to pay for sex, that could literally lead to extinction for our species.
The days of “boy meets girl and they fall in love” have become mythological. Now we train our children to fear and hate each other. I provided the receipts above. That creates an environment where all our human labor can go into AI and the humans that built it become disposable.
When you go to the market this week and notice the cost of everything you need to live is going up, realize that’s not by accident. It’s by design. And those prices will keep going up, rapidly. If you have a job still, your pay isn’t going up. Many are losing their jobs as everything becomes automated.
When the food, energy, and shelter that humans need to survive becomes more valuable than the work product of said human, it’s going to be end of the line for them. That’s not conspiracy theory, that’s fundamental economic theory as put in print by Adam Smith in his 1775 “The Wealth of Nations”. That’s the tome that created modern economics. From Book 1 Chapter 8, “On the Wages of Labour”:
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties [workers and masters] must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him [not always, see below]; but the necessity is not so immediate.
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate [the survival rate]. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that one with another they may be enabled to bring up two children [I explain in the previous paper on global economics that this minimum pay rate is maintained word-wide, but the other portion now goes to elderly, not children. Hence no children.]
But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying… Many would not be able to find employment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities [crimes]. Want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence extend themselves to all the superior classes, till the number of inhabitants in the country was reduced to what could easily be maintained by the revenue and stock which remained in it, and which had escaped either the tyranny or calamity which had destroyed the rest.
Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always prevent marriage. It seems even to be favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station.
But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The tender plant is produced, but in so cold a soil and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies. It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive…in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children
I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves [this is why slavery ended]
Adam Smith didn’t hold back when talking about starving the children of “inferior” people to death to reduce food consumption. He also gave the mathematical blueprint for minimizing the wages of those Inferiors that were commercially useful. This is economics.
Adam Smith wasn’t psychic. He didn’t predict 2026. He designed it. He is the father of Economics. But I’ve never met an “economist” that was shown the instruction manual in college. It’s like the first, second, and third rule of “Economics Club” is you don’t talk about The Wealth of Nations. I would provide the link to Book 1 Chapter 8, but I want you to see for yourself how your search engine doesn’t want to show it to you.
The American “originalists” that took over the USA Supreme Court want to roll the USA Constitution back to 1776 when only a handful of people could vote and other rights didn’t exist. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1775.
If you are a man that thinks you are better than women, or a woman that thinks you are better than men, or someone in the middle that can’t afford marriage or children, or wondering why the most fertile region of Earth is being bombed, or why you don’t have a job, that’s not “circumstances”. That’s design. That’s 1776 calling. It wants its Golden Age of the Supremacists back.