Maximization of profit is all fine and dandy until you realize that the wages you’ve been suppressing was the lubricant keeping the economy’s gears turning.
If you siphon off too much, the machine screeches to a halt.
Sounds like a problem for someone else / some other day.
- them
Exactly! Tragedy of the commons etc.
If that ever happens I see three possible options:
- Universal Basic Income
- Communism (money is abolished)
- Societal collapse
Two of those are communism and everyone knows that the owner class will never settle for not renting the ashes to us
Societal collapse it is then!
Not of the climate gets us first. That’s probably just what kicks it off though
You forget neofeudal technofascism
Bro the 21st century so great we had to make new concepts by smashing all the old ones together
Technofeudal neofascism
I think that was already rolled into the third bullet.
Eh, the third bullet could mean anything from solarpunk anarcho-syndicalism to cyberpunk anarcho-capitalism. It could also just mean a Mad Max style fight for survival.
Technofascism falls under cyberpunk anarcho-capitalism, obviously
Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism
- Friedrich Engels
If the answer is a mass die-back of the bulk of the population who constituted the now economically unnecessary labour class, where will the genetic diversity come from to prevent the handful of owning families (and the retinues of explosive-collared servants they retained for tasks that can’t be automated) from speedrunning Habsburg Syndrome? They’d need some kind of biodiversity preserve in which sufficiently large numbers of people are kept alive to provide suitable candidates for outbreeding, and some means of ensuring that this captive population never poses a threat.
oh god this sounds like one of those books that’s gonna get really popular and then end up predicting the future (looking at you, 1984)
I actually don’t think that would be an issue, considering the rich are already into eugenics via IVF.
“Technology will solve that, too.” ~Techbros, probably.
I mean, they’re fully expecting functional immortality to save them from death. Them specifically, not us.
Singularity is technopian bullshit. These guys have their head so far up, whose ass? idk. But no, you can’t transfer your self to a computer. It’s preposterous on several levels, the first being, the brain is not binary. It’s vastly more sophisticated. Then if you copied it, you would not be that copy. And so forth.
But the rich will never stop chasing after the fountain of youth.
AI was never the point. It was never going to replace the workforce, that was just a ruse to get enterprise on board; just like “LLMs will tell you any facts and do any research you want to know. It can create computer programs to automate anything you want. Image generators can make any movie or picture you want (even porn lol). Song generators can make entire albums for you.” was to sell it to rubes.
The real point is building out the cloud capacity so they no longer have to sell personal computers to anyone anymore.
It interferes with their profits when you can pirate, when you can create, when you can organize.
They will own the means of compute and you will rent the privilege of participating in society.
This did not start with llm models. They are removing ownership, de facto ownership, from most of our electronics now. It can all be remotely bricked at their whim. Or terms changed, licenses that you agreed to on purchase without knowing and with no way of saying no to while still getting the product, that allow them to deny you access to what you bought.
That applies to the government, able to brick your shit with no court anything, secretly in a way you will never be able to challenge in court.
The real point is building out the cloud capacity so they no longer have to sell personal computers to anyone anymore.
This is indeed probably the goal. What frightens me is the fact that a large majority of the population would go right along with this.
Yeah kinda. But I’d say it’s about removing people’s ability to make purchasing decisions in general more than about piracy specifically.
When you can decide whether or not you want to purchase the newest version of MS Office, you might decide that your current version works fine, there’s no new features in the new version you need. So that means companies selling software licenses need to always be putting resources into improving the software to entice people to pay for newer versions.
If the software is all being run from a data center, you have to pay a subscription to be able to use the software and access your data. They no longer need to make any improvements to the software since they have reliable revenue from just maintaining the computers the software runs on.
It’s techno-feudalism. In feudalism, the lord owns the land and the peasants work the land, try to make a living and then need to pay taxes to the lord. It’s a similar dynamic with data centers. The tech lords own the computers, and they allow the peasants to do work on those computers. Businesses try to make some money on the computers owned by the tech lords, but everyone is required to pay a tax to the lord that owns the computers.
Don’t forget the other goal of surveillance capitalism plus enforcing the actions of the state. They know at some point this is all going to boil over. They’re building the walls to the prison all around us as we speak. Americans are not paying attention. AI + facial Recognition + citizen databases like what flock or Palantir are creating.
Sorry to say but that’s kind of a shit conspiracy theory. I’d say it’s more likely that billionaires just want to replace the entire working population with robots and AI. They don’t need to sell anything to anyone, if their needs are provided by their electric slaves.
Lmao
SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO WHO, BEN? FUCKING CYBORG?
B2B is already a massive segment of the economy.
They’ll sell to other businesses until there’s only one left.
I thought whitepeopletwitter is about dunking on white trash takes. This isn’t white trash 👎
kiana is also not white lol she is iranian
Ah the rare Caucasian
Already, most of the economic growth comes from the purchases of the wealthy.
Normal people aren’t profitable enough to sell to anymore. We’re being positioned not as consumers but as slave labor.
That’s just ridiculous, unless you’re including stuff like stock, real estate or other investments as “purchases”.
There’s only so much bread and milk and books and sofas and cars that a wealthy household needs to purchase, and sure they will outspent other households in terms of cost per item, but not nearly enough to offset the sheer difference in volume.
Tldr, bullshit.
According the Bureau of Economic Analysis, that may not necessarily be the case. Agriculture and retail trade, the stuff you mention laypeople purchasing, contributed nothing to less than nothing toward economic growth in the first quarter of 2026. Cars and maybe sofas fall into the durable goods manufacturing category which was the fourth highest contributor.
The top three contributions came from information, the federal government, and professional/scientific/technical services. I don’t spend a lot of time keeping up with the finances of those sectors and I’m not an economist so take my words with a couple grains of salt, but to me those things mean an increase in data centers, federal spending (and my guess is not on things useful to a layperson), and services that often end up being business to business transactions.
Obviously there is a place today for companies to sell to the masses, but the comment you responded to was discussing economic growth, and at least to my eyes it looks like most of the growth is indeed going to sectors primarily controlled or benefited from by the wealthy while sectors supported by the masses either contributed less or shrank the most out of any sector in the case of retail trade.
If that trend continues long-term because of a decreasing population then I think that’s fine, but if it continues due to a lack of investment because of low profitability, then I think there will be (more) issues.
Yes but if your business is creating anything other than luxury prodcuts, this makes 0 sense.
What do they think is going to happen when half the population can not reliably purchase basic food?
They’re either not thinking, delusionally insane, or just full-on planning on creating mass societal collapse/upheaval.
Like sure, if the plan is… create a mass culling event… that they think they will… come out on top of…
Well I guess best of luck with that.
Historically?
Doesn’t tend to work out so well for them.
You can squeeze people a lot and they’ll delude themselves into thinking its fair… but too far?
Months where decades happen.
I don’t think there is much of a coherent plan tbh. I think they think they’re moving towards Curtis Yarvin style techno-feudalism, but Yarvin is an idiot and so are the oligarchs pushing for that. They have been lulled into complacency by the status quo their predecessors engineered to make revolutionary movements unlikely to gain traction (basic social safety net, reasonably affordable food, a general sense that the state represented the people even though in reality it’s been captured by capital for some time, etc.) while undermining the elements of that status quo that weren’t already collapsing.
It’s madness. They think they can just do whatever they want and people won’t resist, while systematically dismantling everything that stopped people from resisting. This will not go how they think it will. Thankfully they’re mostly surrounded by sycophants who tell them all their dogshit ideas are genius actually, it’s like Putin in Ukraine. They will overplay their hand due to false encouragement from their subordinates, and it will be what destroys them.
In France, already 10% of the population depends on food-banks. In 2023, the largest non-profit providing meals and distributing food sent a distress call saying they were close to bankrupcy as the number of people in need is going up fast while donors have less and less to give being themselves crunched.
France’s richest family, the Arnault, largely responsible for turbo-charging the trickle up trend in the country by buying political influence, rescued them by making a big donation.
The leader of the non-profit, who had been vocal about impoverishment of the population and growing inequalities because of the oligarchs, cannot say anything anymore: now he can’t keep going without these oligarchs good will.
That’s the plan. It’s being executed right in front of us, in the open.
They expect those people to starve (‘and decrease the surplus population’) or accept company scrip for ‘cheaper’ food, thus recreating large-scale chattel slavery.
Got any stats on that? Seems implausible that the global top 0.1% or whatever are doing 1000x more economic activity than the average of the 99.9%. With their companies, sure, but they consist of many ordinary people.
A bit exaggerated, but 70% of OpenAIs revenue is from a handful of enterprise customers. The other tech giants, spearheaded by Nvidia, are shifting their entire business model towards enterprise customers, which is largely why consumergrade hardware is incredibly expensive if not directly unobtainable.
Probably hyperbole on mycodesucks, but the whole AI bullshit alone generated over USD 1 trillion dollars in GDP. USA’s GDP in 2024 was a bit under 30 trillion. Having like 8 companies account for 1/30 of the ENTIRE MONEY SPENT of a country is absolutely nuts, as well as a good reminder of how disconnected to reality GDP alone is.
Is it really generating money if it’s a company spending money it doesn’t have on another company to then pay the original company to provide what was originally promised as a service/product?
I grabbed the first result, but you can find the same information from whatever source you like - it was big news:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-191500198.html
The top ten percent drive half of all consumer spending. The corporations and the rich no longer see the bottom 90% as a profitable market - they see them as a resource and a liability.
When you realize it’s not incidental, but the actual plan, it all makes sense.
Musk made a comment when cornered on this subject a few weeks back, he didn’t have an answer because he’s an idiot, but he did mention a book. I think that’s the book they’ve all read, that presents what they expect to happen. And, I expect is hand-waving bullshit.
I can’t find the post. Does anyone remember what book he referenced?
EDIT: Maybe this was it:
On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “Read this book and give it to all your friends.
“Survival of civilization depends on it!”
The book in question is titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad.
The explanation on Amazon reads: “What happens when a society elevates victimhood to a virtue and decides that punishment is cruel? You get the disease Dr. Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. And the West may be terminally infected… The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline.
“Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.”
The rich and GOP would read that as coddling minorities and immigrants, since they are automatically criminals in their eyes.
When in reality the book is talking about the rich and GOP who are literally criminals and rapists.
Even Gad Saad recognizes that protecting the children rapist Epstein class is leading to the end of the civilization! Let’s bring out the guillotines!!
Other people do nice things and it makes me soooo uncomfortable
Sounds like an Ayn Rand tribute act. The right is always looking for an intellectual justification for being selfish juvenile assholes.
They don’t care about selling to people who don’t have money. They are only focused on those who have money, or spend it as if they have money. The demographic that has money is shrinking, but they also have more money than ever, so let’s get some.
Public corps are incapable of macro action. They can’t see past their next few sets of financial statements.
Their incentives are all fucked up for one thing, the way they do comp. But it’s not just that. It’s the tragedy of the commons on a more massive scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
The tragedy of the commons is the idea that when a resource is shared and can benefit the individual at a cost to the community, it is rational for the individual to overuse the resource, even though this collectively leads to the depletion of the resource for everyone
Except it’s not rational.
Countries with socialized health care systems do have abusers, but they are a tiny minority of the population, because most people don’t want to spend their life in hospitals.
Roads are socialized everywhere but you don’t see many people just driving around to make sure they get their “fair share” of road using/wearing out of their taxes.Depending what we talk about, overusing resources does not translate in increased comfort or quality of life.
This argument is copium, because large companies are already transitioning to more reliance on business-to-business sales
And business just work for themselves? There’s no persons in the line-up, right?
/S
It’s like dreaming of finding a mountain of gold. Instead of riches you would end up devaluing gold into worthlessness.
