Post
@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.
I think the best news of all is that reasonable business leaders will cut their losses and won't keep pouring endless money down the drain or setting it on fire. This "AI" hype is finally over!
/s
@jenniferplusplus I think this is why my criticism has mainly centered around sure it might be useful (citation needed) but I'm not sure it's worth the billions put into it
@ladytel There's no argument which admits people have inherent worth that justifies this level of spending on AI. Pick any problem in the world: hunger, poverty, homelessness, even a broad swath of diseases or the climate crisis. A trillion dollars would completely eliminate it, many times over.
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.
@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 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.
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"
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.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
