That’s someone else’s problem. They only care about making money this quarter
Same as if all of civilization collapses because of climate change caused by global warming. It’s someone else’s problem, they’re just making money for themselves right now. Consequences are for the government that only suckers pay taxes into.
Naw, flawed argument, they steal our resources and then fund themselves by illegal and manipulative means.
Also the economy is shifting where the top 1% are moving closer to being 50% of spending, making the argument rather void.
This isn’t really sustainable though. Regardless of how rich you are, you only really need 1, maybe 2 pillows. You can only get so many haircuts in a year. They do absolutely need the poors.
No, but you do, and guaranteed that as they buy up and shut down competitors they will squeeze you for everything you’re worth over largely inelastic demands like pillows, or medicine, or soap…etc
Also haircuts? Haircuts, unless we’re really that deep in corporate hell, are between you and the barber/shop. Billionaires aren’t cutting your hair, the person cutting your hair, the person who owns the salon or barbershop ever, is a peon just like you and me. Small business owners are in the same class as us.
That’s increasingly not true. Local businesses barely exist anymore, soon your only option will be, like, great clips. Not sure what you mean about squeezing over inelastic demand. They can raise the prices of a pillow but they can’t make a profit when only 1% of the population is buying pillows
They’re trying that right now with focus on producing things like GPUs, data warehouses and the like paid by circular financing.
They can sell to each other and centralize luxury and technology in their circle.
Mega corpos don’t need poor consumers.
Edit:
Corpos want deregulation, monopolistic/cartelic market position, unaffordability for average people for education and technology.
Agreed. We are already kind of there. We have enough food to feed everybody but the people who access it are those with enough money. Profitable food is what gets investments, not healthy food. And what we see more and more is that profits are not driven by feeding the best quality to the most people.
I was calling this 5 years ago and was called a loon.
Like history doesn’t repeat or something.
If 90% of people don’t have a job, the state has to provide them an income. With that income, they can still consume. Public spending for private profits, as usual.
Of course the system isn’t sustainable, but it wasn’t before AI either.
90% of people with no money or a roof over their heads and a lot of time on their hands?
Maybe some will realize those mantions have food.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
Ukraine is (also) a climate war. Fertile soil and continental climate (less affected by the loss of the AMOC). Syrian civil war was partially a climate war. It’s already kicking it off but we simply don’t see it. All we see are Hitlers.
Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism
- Friedrich Engels
You forget neofeudal technofascism
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
Bro the 21st century so great we had to make new concepts by smashing all the old ones together
Technofeudal neofascism
Techno feudalism is how I’ve always heard it, but neofascism is hilarious because I feel like it’s the one thing that doesn’t change at it’s core. Like we have neonazis but the fascism is basically untouched
Yeah I was just being a bit facetious by switching the prefixes and roots. My original comment said “neofeudal technofascism” but then someone complained about remixing concepts so I replied with “neofascist technofeudalism” or whatever I said
You forgot extermination of the poor (i.e., all workers) using the control apparatus being constructed, which actually still could leave a society.
Question:
How is Big Oil™ going to make a profit when the world is ruined and the population are dead?Answer:
Lol, don’t care. That’s someone else’s problem.Seriously. Why don’t care about long term plans, just short term profits
Because look at the age of those in charge. A majority are ancient, and they know they are dying.
They are trying to take their riches with them, like the Pharoahs of old.
And the rest have golden parachutes waiting for them regardless of how good or bad they actually end up being at their job
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.
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.
That definitively is a negative side effect.
Though imagine you have a chat bot that is very convincing, it doesn’t always say the truth but you can control what it will say.
What do you think is best use case for this, and does it have something to do with Western countries changing public opinion toward authoritarianism?
This is a very powerful tool to manipulate public opinion, imagine having a tool and a social network that can manipulate public opinion to get politicians that you back to win, to get laws passed. How valuable such tool is.
Have you wondered why they wanted to put 10 year moratorium on states being able to regulate it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lmao
If 90% of the country is unemployed they’ll work for us and we increase the UBI they pay us.
Or we have a very abrupt reordering of things.
Once the military and its supply chain is automated, the class genocide can begin.
This right here
They aren’t looking far enough ahead to care.
Their end goal is technofeudalism.
The capitalists are far, far beyond forgetting how capitalism… works.
Just… Henry Ford, pay your employees enough that wow you’ve grown your consumer base!
This is like macroecon 101 shit.
So, theyre either ravenously delusionally insane, or, they’re openly declaring themselves the new nobility/aristocracy for the neo-feudalism we now live in.
… or both. Could be both.
What if the Top 1%'s solution to climate change is to just keep going until 90% (or more) of the poors die off?
Then you can cut all your production and pollution by 90% (or more)
It doesn’t have to be all at once. Just let people gradually boil, freeze, drown, starve, die of thirst, whatever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They expect those people to starve (‘and decrease the surplus population’) or accept company scrip for ‘cheaper’ food, thus recreating large-scale chattel slavery.
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.
Excellent site for backing up my claim, thanks you.
Consumer spending, as measured by Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis], accounts for 68% of the GDP.
Top 3 items:
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Housing (33.4% of budget): rent, mortgage interests, property taxes, water, electricity, internet, appliances, furniture.
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Transportation (17.0%), heavily influenced by commuting habits: cars, fuel.
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Food (12.9% of budget), includes groceries and food away from home (restaurants)
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Insurance, Pensions, & Healthcare (20.4% combined)
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“Discretionary”, everything else: clothing, entertainment, education (!), …
That’s a rather interesting breakdown, and a few items surprised me a lot. In any case, and more to the point I was replying, the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey gives this breakdown:
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The Top 20% (Highest Income Quintile): Accounts for roughly 35% to 38% of total consumption.
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The Middle 60% (Middle Class): Accounts for roughly 53% of spendingg
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The Bottom 20% (Lowest Income Quintile): Accounts for roughly 9% of spending.
It seems like this survey, since it’s based on questionnaires, tends to underreport luxury goods, so in reality it might be skewed more towards the top 20% than what’s presented there.
Even if that’s the case, surely it’s nowhere near the point of “not being profitable to sell to normal people”, as was said.
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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.
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?
Factually speaking, only the debt is “generating” money, since the entire concept of bank loans reside in their capacity of lending more than they actually have and charging interest back.
Regarding nvidia and the companies it is giving money to so they buy its chips, lots of legal loopholes make it count as “totally real investment”. That’s why I said the thing generated said money in GDP, which has little connection to reality.
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.
But what are those companies doing with what they’re buying in order to generate their revenue? Ultimately there has to be something that does something useful or enjoyable in and of itself (like food, or a video game), rather than something which is just instrumental for something else. And those useful/enjoyable things will only be profitable if you can sell them to a decent number of people.
You can replace your gamer consumers with corporate customers only if those corporate customers have someone to sell to.
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.
They are probably counting all the exchange of funny money on the stock market and things like the xircular AI buying (Microsoft invests a zillion dollars in OpenAI who then uses that zillion dollars to buy Azure compute cycles from Microsoft).
The majority of economic growth these last few years, I’ve been told by multiple sources on social media that I deemed credible, has been data center build out bullshit.
The point isn’t to sell, it’s to control