RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116126552546349967

But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116126552546349967

But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?

@jenniferplusplus capitalism is always a denial-of-service attack on human potential; it’s not always this direct

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

@jenniferplusplus @ireneista
if I just silently refuse to work and maybe embezzle my employers resources without any communicated goal that wouldn't be called a "strike" either

@jenniferplusplus isn’t it that for instance the ancient Egyptian pyramids can be seen as similar efforts? Maybe a way to funnel excess wealth into sth that has zero value and is of no real world use.

@zeank @jenniferplusplus

Sort of, but most of the labor used to build the pyramids was while the Nile was flooded and the majority of farmhands could not access the fields where they worked so it can also be seen as a jobs program for off-season farmhands.

What's a capital strike? That tends to be the question I get in response to this rant.

You know what a labor strike is, right? It's wielding labor as power, by witholding it, as a bargaining tactic.

A capital strike is the same thing, except with capital.

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus @ireneista

We need to end capitalism. We don't have to end markets. We don't have to (and shouldn't) end distributed decision-making. In fact, the real problem is a dearth of these things. We already have centralized control, thanks to our current economic system's ongoing concentration of wealth.

Imagine what an economy made up entirely of cooperatives would look like. Decision-making: distributed equally among stakeholders. Profit: distributed equally among stakeholders. No more perverse incentives to exploit workers and customers for the sake of far off shareholders who don't have to see the consequences of their actions on the local community, because the shareholders *are* the local community.

How much more money, and power over our own lives, would we all have if we didn't have to pay the transactional tax known as "profit" in perpetuity for a one-time investment of capital? *We* would have the capital then!

@jenniferplusplus

Here are the receipts-
https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-generalized-dutch-disease

OK, they are keeping resources occupied, but aren't they also setting fire to their own money? They are spending money that won't produce a return (Not that they would miss it). Is the object just to keep resources occupied or also make net asset value evaporate?

@hosford42 @Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus @ireneista Are there steps people (ordinary people) can take to make this a reality?

@Doomed_Daniel @jenniferplusplus @ireneista

We need to end capitalism. We don't have to end markets. We don't have to (and shouldn't) end distributed decision-making. In fact, the real problem is a dearth of these things. We already have centralized control, thanks to our current economic system's ongoing concentration of wealth.

Imagine what an economy made up entirely of cooperatives would look like. Decision-making: distributed equally among stakeholders. Profit: distributed equally among stakeholders. No more perverse incentives to exploit workers and customers for the sake of far off shareholders who don't have to see the consequences of their actions on the local community, because the shareholders *are* the local community.

How much more money, and power over our own lives, would we all have if we didn't have to pay the transactional tax known as "profit" in perpetuity for a one-time investment of capital? *We* would have the capital then!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116126552546349967

But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

@jenniferplusplus I was thinking that Musk's data centres in space idea was to add solar panels to the list of items the AI industry is hoarding.

Incidentally, if you divert a trillion dollars to something and get "basically zero" economic activity around it, that's not an investment. It's sabotage. It's become the chief manifestation of the capital strike we've all been enduring since, roughly, the first half of 2022.