But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?
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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.
But, you have to understand what capital actual is. It's not money. Money is a loose proxy for capital, but that's all. Really, capital is control over economic resources. Raw resources, sure. Big industrial machinery, sure. Networks of transportation and communication, yes. And labor.
Money is kind of the exchange medium for all of that. But capital isn't the money, and it's not the resources. It's the power to distort how those resources are used and applied to suit your own interests, at the expense of the other people involved.
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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.
@jenniferplusplus we can imagine the people you're telling this to instinctively going "but theyre right to do that and the workers would be wrong to do that"
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But, you have to understand what capital actual is. It's not money. Money is a loose proxy for capital, but that's all. Really, capital is control over economic resources. Raw resources, sure. Big industrial machinery, sure. Networks of transportation and communication, yes. And labor.
Money is kind of the exchange medium for all of that. But capital isn't the money, and it's not the resources. It's the power to distort how those resources are used and applied to suit your own interests, at the expense of the other people involved.
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.
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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 capitalism is always a denial-of-service attack on human potential; it鈥檚 not always this direct
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But, you have to understand what capital actual is. It's not money. Money is a loose proxy for capital, but that's all. Really, capital is control over economic resources. Raw resources, sure. Big industrial machinery, sure. Networks of transportation and communication, yes. And labor.
Money is kind of the exchange medium for all of that. But capital isn't the money, and it's not the resources. It's the power to distort how those resources are used and applied to suit your own interests, at the expense of the other people involved.
@jenniferplusplus And 'free market' means freedom to manage and deploy capital... not money.
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@jenniferplusplus we can imagine the people you're telling this to instinctively going "but theyre right to do that and the workers would be wrong to do that"
@atax1a Yeah, that is a problem
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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.
@jenniferplusplus I'd been thinking of it as a particular form of what Marx called "fictitious capital" tied to a particular mass of political leverage (specifically, tech companies controlling our planet's information infrastructure) but the framing of a capital strike is interesting. and their demands have been clear more or less from the start.
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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.
They are fighting to make energy useless.
They are wasting energy to stall the transition off fossil fuels.
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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 isn鈥檛 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.
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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.
@jenniferplusplus I've been thinking a little lately about the universal push to recategorize everything as Operational Expenses instead of CapEx and it occurred to me that CapEx is where you put the money to buy loyalty from execs at a new acquisition. It's turned into a slush fund for execs to bribe other execs.
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@jenniferplusplus isn鈥檛 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 I don't know enough about ancient egypt to say with any confidence. But it does seem like a reasonable lens to view them through
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116126552546349967
But at least we only spent a trillion dollars on it, right?
@jenniferplusplus AI and Bitcoin are nothing more than the Great American Grift. The AI Balloon is about to burst,just like the Tech Bubble did
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@jenniferplusplus I've been thinking a little lately about the universal push to recategorize everything as Operational Expenses instead of CapEx and it occurred to me that CapEx is where you put the money to buy loyalty from execs at a new acquisition. It's turned into a slush fund for execs to bribe other execs.
@gooba42 uhhhhh, sort of. It's not really that they're bribing each other. Rather, it's that they're keeping that power concentrated in the capital sphere. Other capitalists like that, for obvious reasons, and reward each other for doing it.
Whatever arguments there are about capex vs opex will mainly boil down to whether they generally think that some use of money is a closed loop within the capital economy, or if it escapes into the real economy.
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@gooba42 uhhhhh, sort of. It's not really that they're bribing each other. Rather, it's that they're keeping that power concentrated in the capital sphere. Other capitalists like that, for obvious reasons, and reward each other for doing it.
Whatever arguments there are about capex vs opex will mainly boil down to whether they generally think that some use of money is a closed loop within the capital economy, or if it escapes into the real economy.
@jenniferplusplus That's more or less what I was getting at but not particularly clearly.
It's helping to keep their class closed by reserving a significant slice of the pie for *only* exchanging within their class.
They've pushed compute into the cloud and with LLMs they anticipate doing the same for general labor. The bros are drooling over *also* consuming all the OpEx but aren't there yet.
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@jenniferplusplus isn鈥檛 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.
My understanding is that was less wasting wealth, more a jobs program to give laborers income during the agricultural off-season. Like unemployment insurance, it spread money around so people wouldn't starve.
Whereas all this "AI investment" is channeling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands.
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@zeank I don't know enough about ancient egypt to say with any confidence. But it does seem like a reasonable lens to view them through
@jenniferplusplus @zeank There will not be a tourism benefit for far future generations wanting to see data centers.
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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 The sillionaires (and people identifying with them) see adoption of AI as the real-economy counterpart to stocks buy-back. It's not supposed to produce further profits; it's supposed to concentrate the flow of existing profits to the sillionaires.
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But, you have to understand what capital actual is. It's not money. Money is a loose proxy for capital, but that's all. Really, capital is control over economic resources. Raw resources, sure. Big industrial machinery, sure. Networks of transportation and communication, yes. And labor.
Money is kind of the exchange medium for all of that. But capital isn't the money, and it's not the resources. It's the power to distort how those resources are used and applied to suit your own interests, at the expense of the other people involved.
@jenniferplusplus equating "capitalism" with "trade" has been one of the biggest coups of discourse - you get people sincerely believing "well without capitalism would we just barter???" and now we must start everything by explaining that no, money was invented in 3000 BC, in fact Jesus was overturning moneylender tables 1500 years before the Dutch East India Company, etc
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@jenniferplusplus isn鈥檛 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 There's historians who would argue that the pyramids had value, just indirect ones. In most of such historians' telling, the value is in establishing methods for herding large numbers of workers. A major piece of the alleged supporting evidence is, a lot of the people who worked on pyramids seem to have worked on them for a limited time, and possibly, in times when other economic activity was on a downtrend.
The GenAI craze has only partial possible counterpart to those: the "balancing the downtrend of other economic activity" detail.
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@jenniferplusplus @zeank There will not be a tourism benefit for far future generations wanting to see data centers.
@linuxandyarn @jenniferplusplus @zeank lmao. that's a good point. they could at least make them aesthetically pleasing and not as noisy.
