#Tag · bonfire.cafe

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means: “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

I’m a science-fiction writer – my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast."
- @pluralistic

#Tech #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #StockMarket #Business #News #World #SciFi

Headline with illustration:
Headline: The featured essay
AI (artificial intelligence)

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

by Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Sun 18 Jan 2026 09.00 EST

Illustration: two wireframe hands looming over a person working on a computer — Headline with illustration: Headline: The featured essay AI (artificial intelligence) AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage by Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots Sun 18 Jan 2026 09.00 EST Illustration: two wireframe hands looming over a person working on a computer

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow boosted

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"The collapse of the #AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the #StockMarket, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a #finance sector and #tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."
- @pluralistic

#Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #Business #Economy #News #World

Text from article:
When the AI-investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the datacenters running. As Stein’s law has it: “Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.”

The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.

To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever more outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.

Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it’s worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls with hi-tech asbestos. — Text from article: When the AI-investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the datacenters running. As Stein’s law has it: “Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.” The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more. To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever more outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side. Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it’s worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls with hi-tech asbestos.

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"AI is a bubble and it will burst... So what will be left behind?

We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics... a lot of cheap GPUs... And we will have the #OpenSource models that run on commodity hardware, #AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images;... These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of."

#Technology #News

Text from article:
AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?

We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.

If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few years coming up with cool new apps, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We would call them “plugins”.

It’s the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, “disruptive” things: big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year. — Text from article: AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of. If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few years coming up with cool new apps, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We would call them “plugins”. It’s the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, “disruptive” things: big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"The collapse of the #AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the #StockMarket, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU.

#Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #Business #Economy #News #World

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means: “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

I’m a science-fiction writer – my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast."
- @pluralistic

#Tech #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #StockMarket #Business #News #World #SciFi

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value...

Which is why growth-stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video or #cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or #AI...

The primary goal is to keep the market convinced that your company will continue to grow"

#Tech #AI #StockMarket #News #World

Text from article(edited for length):
If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you are not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the US than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240bn sell-off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, it was the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history.
....

This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they do not trust your pricing power.

Which is why growth-stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video or cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or AI.

I am not saying that tech bosses are making bets they do not plan on winning. But winning the bet – creating a viable metaverse – is the secondary goal. The primary goal is to keep the market convinced that your company will continue to grow, and to remain convinced until the next bubble comes along.

So this is why they’re hyping AI: the material basis for the hundreds of billions in AI investment. — Text from article(edited for length): If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you are not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the US than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240bn sell-off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, it was the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history. .... This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they do not trust your pricing power. Which is why growth-stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video or cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or AI. I am not saying that tech bosses are making bets they do not plan on winning. But winning the bet – creating a viable metaverse – is the secondary goal. The primary goal is to keep the market convinced that your company will continue to grow, and to remain convinced until the next bubble comes along. So this is why they’re hyping AI: the material basis for the hundreds of billions in AI investment.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · last month

"“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical sleight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means: “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”

I’m a science-fiction writer – my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast."
- @pluralistic

#Tech #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #StockMarket #Business #News #World #SciFi

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow

The Japan Times

@thejapantimes@mastodon.social · last month

Donald Trump’s threat to slap new tariffs on European allies — combined with a plunge in Japanese debt — boosted measures of price swings from historically low levels. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/01/21/markets/markets-greenland-japan-trading/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #markets #markets #greenland #wallstreet #donaldtrump #stockmarket

Angie 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇪🇺🇵🇸🇺🇦

@angiebaby@mas.to · last month

Uh oh. Line go down.

#StockMarket #DJIA #Trump

Cory Doctorow boosted

#Enshittification #Finance #StockMarket #Tech #Technology #AI

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 2 months ago

@pluralistic

"The dot com bubble was actually a great time to start reevaluating how and why we value stocks — to say “hey, wait, that $2 billion deal will only make $100 million in revenue?” or “this company spends $5 for every $1 it makes!” — but nobody, it appears, remained particularly suspicious of the tech industry, or a stock market that was increasingly orienting itself around conning shareholders."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The Enshittifinancial Crisis

Soundtrack: Lynyrd Skynyrd — Free Bird This piece is over 19,000 words, and took me a great deal of writing and research. If you liked it, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’

Cory Doctorow

@pluralistic@mamot.fr · 2 months ago

"Every part of the AI bubble — this fucking charade — is unprofitable, save for NVIDIA and the construction firms erecting future laser tag arenas full of negative-margin GPUs."

-Ed Zitron

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The Enshittifinancial Crisis

#Enshittification #Finance #StockMarket #Tech #Technology #AI

@ZhiZhu@newsie.social · 2 months ago

@pluralistic

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The Enshittifinancial Crisis

Hacker News

@h4ckernews@mastodon.social · 2 months ago

Ultra-Low-Latency Trading System

https://submicro.krishnabajpai.me/

#HackerNews #UltraLowLatency #Trading #System #AlgorithmicTrading #FinTech #HighFrequencyTrading #StockMarket

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: boosted

@wdlindsy@toad.social · 2 months ago

"The immediate concern is that AI is becoming a financial bubble whose bursting will harm lots of innocent people including, perhaps, you.

Anyone remember the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s? The housing bubble of 2006? The tulip-mania bubble of the 1630s? The South Sea bubble of 1720?

They all followed a well-worn pattern."

~ Robert Reich

#AI #crypto #Trump #TechBros #broligarchy #EconomicElites #SiliconValley #economy #bubble #StockMarket
/1

The Japan Times

@thejapantimes@mastodon.social · 2 months ago

Nasdaq plans to ask the SEC to begin round-the-clock trading as it looks to capitalize on a global demand for U.S. equities. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/16/markets/nasdaq-trading-hours-wall-street/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #markets #nasdaq #wallstreet #stockmarket

@wdlindsy@toad.social · 2 months ago

"The immediate concern is that AI is becoming a financial bubble whose bursting will harm lots of innocent people including, perhaps, you.

Anyone remember the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s? The housing bubble of 2006? The tulip-mania bubble of the 1630s? The South Sea bubble of 1720?

They all followed a well-worn pattern."

~ Robert Reich

#AI #crypto #Trump #TechBros #broligarchy #EconomicElites #SiliconValley #economy #bubble #StockMarket
/1

Claudius Link boosted

@wdlindsy@toad.social · 3 months ago

"The reason for all these things happening at the same time is that Trump is getting more desperate than ever as his presidency is crashing down. Across every single poll, Trump’s approval is the worst ever.

We are witnessing a death spiral that is unprecedented in American history."

#Trump #Epstein #coverup #economy #ApprovalRating #StockMarket #crypto #AI #EconomicElites #fascism #violence #Saudis #MohammedbinSalman
/15

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-falls-lowest-his-term-over-prices-epstein-files-reutersipsos-poll-2025-11-18/

@wdlindsy@toad.social · 3 months ago

"President Donald Trump's approval rating fell to 38%, the lowest since his return to power, with Americans unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
The four-day poll, which concluded on Monday, comes as Trump's grip on his Republican Party shows signs of weakening."

~ Reuters

#Trump #Epstein #coverup #economy #ApprovalRating #StockMarket
/19

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/a-look-to-the-2026-midterms-november-2025/

@wdlindsy@toad.social · 3 months ago

The latest NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll shows 55% of Americans inclined to vote for the Democratic Congressional candidate in their district in the next election, and 41% for the Republican.

#Trump #Epstein #coverup #economy #ApprovalRating #StockMarket #crypto #AI #EconomicElites #fascism #violence #Saudis #MohammedbinSalman
/20

A graph of the results of the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll showing 55% of Americans inclined to vote for the Democratic Congressional candidate in their district in the next election, and 41% for the Republican

https://www.altrightdelete.news/p/punishable-by-death

@wdlindsy@toad.social · 3 months ago

"Trump is lashing out, and continually escalating out of desperation. He’s a lame duck president whose attempts to consolidate power haven’t entirely gone to plan.

Every day, more Americans realize this is no way to live. Eventually, we will hit a critical mass. Solidarity is the only way forward."

~ Melissa Ryan

#Trump #Epstein #coverup #economy #ApprovalRating #StockMarket #crypto #AI #EconomicElites #fascism #violence #Saudis #MohammedbinSalman
/18