What is capitailism.com?

Capitailism.com is a daily, text-only dispatch and manifesto against AI capitalism. It tracks what the ruling class did today, draws historical parallels to earlier industrial upheavals, and names the contradictions of the AI economy in plain language.

Why is it sometimes called Capitailism Rot Com?

Capitailism Rot Com is the spoken form of capitailism.com. The dot com becomes rot com, on purpose. Three things at once. The dotcom era, the rot inside it, and the red of the left (rot is German for red, as in the red star on the masthead). Same site, same paper, same line about the class war.

Who publishes capitailism.com?

It is an independent publication written and edited by Oz Gultekin. No venture capital, no advertisers, no subscriptions, no sponsors.

Is capitailism.com free to read?

Yes. Free forever. No paywall, no login, no newsletter wall, no tracking pixels. Read it, quote it, print it out and tape it to a wall.

How often is capitailism.com updated?

Every day. The front page refreshes on a 24 hour cycle with a new lead quote and a fresh pull of headlines from labour, tech, and policy feeds.

What does "no war but class war" mean on this site?

It is a line borrowed from the anti-war left. The real conflict is not between nations or ideologies, but between the owners of capital and everyone who has to sell their labour to eat. Applied to AI, it means the question is not humans versus machines, but who owns the machines and who gets owned by them.

How is capitailism.com different from aipocalypse.now?

They are sister sites. Capitailism.com is the political paper, written by a human, pointed at the class war inside the AI economy. Aipocalypse.now is the AI news wire, generated by AI and doom-scored, updated daily.

Can I quote or reprint material from capitailism.com?

Yes. Quote it, reprint it, paste it on a wall. Published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Credit capitailism.com, keep it non-commercial, leave the words as they are.

(Anti) Capitailism Rot Com — Page Against The Machine

May 30 $0.01

“No war but class war” · Page Against The Machine · Free forever

May 30

“The history of all existing society is the history of who owns the machine.”

After Marx & Engels, 1848

The manifesto

A spectre is haunting the world.

The spectre of artificial intelligence.

All the powers of capital have entered into a holy alliance to own it. Venture funds and sovereign wealth funds. The big four accounting firms and the seven biggest model labs. The governments that regulate them and the governments that wish they could.

They do not disagree about the destination. They disagree only about who will collect the toll on the way there.

Meanwhile, the working class (the writers, the illustrators, the paralegals, the radiologists, the translators, the customer support agents, the drivers soon to come) is told a story so old it has whiskers. Technology will lift all boats, eventually, if we are patient, and good, and retrain.

We have heard this before. We heard it in the mills of Manchester. We heard it on the assembly line in Detroit. We heard it when the call centres moved to Bangalore and when the factories moved to Shenzhen. Each time, the gains were real. Each time, they were pocketed by someone who was not you.

AI is the first general-purpose technology that eats the brain work of the middle class. It is being built, by design, to need no permission. Not from the worker whose writing trained it, not from the artist whose style it mimics, not from the patient whose record it reads.

This paper exists for one reason. To name the contradiction out loud. No war but class war. And this war is already well underway.

The daily dispatch

What the ruling class did today.

24 stories · refreshed daily

№ 01 Financial Times

Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores

Amazon has scrapped an internal AI leaderboard after executives warned staff against using artificial intelligence merely to inflate usage metrics as operational costs mounted.
№ 02 The Guardian

Anthropic reaches valuation of $965bn, beating OpenAI to become world’s most valuable AI firm

Anthropic raised $65 billion in funding, valuing the Claude maker at $965 billion and surpassing OpenAI to become the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup.
№ 03 Financial Times

Musk’s tweet undermines SpaceX’s claims about Anthropic data centre deal

Elon Musk claimed on social media that SpaceX's data centre arrangement with Anthropic lasts only 180 days, contradicting the company's IPO filings describing a three-year agreement.
№ 04 MIT Tech Review

How a new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium

Researchers have developed a new lithium extraction process that could be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than existing methods, potentially unlocking vast global reserves.
№ 05 TechCrunch

How long is Anthropic’s lease with SpaceX? Opinions vary

Elon Musk is publicly reframing the Anthropic compute deal as short-term and cancellable, despite SpaceX's own regulatory filings describing payments extending through May 2029.
№ 06 VentureBeat

Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI

Salesforce has launched a rebuilt Slackbot AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees across its workplace platform.
№ 07 The Guardian

Give staff more say over AI to ensure they share benefits, UK thinktank urges

A UK thinktank backed by the TUC is urging workers to gain more bargaining power over artificial intelligence adoption in the workplace to ensure benefits are fairly distributed.
№ 08 Financial Times

Anthropic finalises $65bn funding deal to surpass OpenAI’s valuation

Anthropic has finalised a $65 billion funding round that values the Claude AI maker at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI's previous valuation of $730 billion.
№ 09 The New York Times

Anthropic Tops OpenAI to Become the World’s Most Valuable A.I. Start-Up

Anthropic raised $65 billion in funding, valuing the company at $900 billion and surpassing OpenAI's last valuation of $730 billion in the race for artificial intelligence dominance.
№ 10 The Guardian

AI is changing how we think, not replacing it | Letters

Readers argue that artificial intelligence is changing how humans think rather than replacing thinking itself, while acknowledging legitimate concerns about labour redundancies and environmental costs.
№ 11 Fast Company

AI just changed everything about how we forecast the weather

Nvidia, Google, and startups are using artificial intelligence to improve weather forecasting accuracy, demonstrating the technology's practical power and real-world applications.
№ 12 Simon Willison

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

Anthropic and OpenAI have achieved product-market fit, establishing themselves as dominant players in the artificial intelligence industry with sustainable business models.
№ 13 MIT Tech Review

Rethinking organizational design in the age of agentic AI

Most organisations want to adopt agentic AI within three years, but 76 percent lack the operational infrastructure and workforce readiness to support such a transformation.
№ 14 MIT Tech Review

The Download: puncturing the AI jobs panic

Despite widespread hysteria about artificial intelligence threatening white-collar jobs, evidence remains scarce that the technology has caused large-scale employment disruption so far.
№ 15 VentureBeat

Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.

Anthropic's Claude Code costs up to $200 monthly, sparking developer backlash as free alternatives like Goose offer comparable autonomous coding capabilities without subscription fees.
№ 16 The Guardian

‘Like a billionaire on acid’: Star Wars director Gareth Edwards comes out in favour of AI

Film director Gareth Edwards has endorsed generative artificial intelligence in filmmaking, claiming it surpasses traditional CGI and will revolutionise how movies are created.
№ 17 Simon Willison

Anthropic's run-rate revenue hits $47 billion

Anthropic's annualised revenue run-rate has reached $47 billion, reflecting explosive growth in demand for its Claude artificial intelligence products and services.
№ 18 TechCrunch

Glean’s top line crosses $300M as AI budget-cutting becomes its major selling point

Enterprise AI search startup Glean tripled its annual revenue to exceed $300 million as companies increasingly use its platform to reduce spending on artificial intelligence tools.
№ 19 Simon Willison

llm-anthropic 0.25.1

A software library update for Anthropic's API has been released, improving integration and functionality for developers building applications with the Claude artificial intelligence model.
№ 20 The Verge

Microsoft 365 Copilot gets a speed boost and cleaner design

Microsoft has redesigned Microsoft 365 Copilot with a cleaner interface that loads twice as fast and provides more reliable, structured responses easier to scan and understand.
№ 21 TechCrunch

Anthropic raises $65 billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO

Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion valuation, positioning the artificial intelligence startup for a highly anticipated initial public offering.
№ 22 TechCrunch

Anthropic releases Opus 4.8 with new ‘dynamic workflow’ tool

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 with a new Dynamic Workflows tool that coordinates swarms of subagents to handle complex tasks more efficiently and effectively.
№ 23 The Verge

Claude’s new model is more ‘honest’ when it messes up

Anthropic's new Claude Opus 4.8 model is trained to be more honest about its limitations, avoiding overconfident claims and acknowledging when it lacks sufficient evidence.
№ 24 The Guardian

Image of Thai police in sparkly dresses with handcuffed suspect turns out to be AI fake

Thai police admitted that a viral image showing officers in sparkly dresses with a handcuffed suspect was artificial intelligence generated by a station administrator seeking a friendlier public image.

Then & now

History does not repeat.
It points at you.

Parallel 01

1811. Luddites smash power looms in Nottingham. They are not afraid of machines. They are afraid of what the factory owner will do with them.

2024. Hollywood writers strike over AI-generated scripts. They are not afraid of LLMs. They are afraid of what the studio will do with them.

The tool is never the enemy. The hand that holds it without sharing the surplus is.

Parallel 02

1914. Henry Ford raises wages to $5 a day so his workers can afford the cars they build.

2025. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to replace the knowledge workers who are the only people left who can afford a $200/month subscription.

A consumer economy cannot survive the abolition of the consumer.

Parallel 03

1933. The New Deal forces capital to share with labour the productivity gains of electrification and the assembly line.

TBD. Nothing. Gains from AI flow to seven companies and the funds that own them. There is no deal, new or old.

Productivity without redistribution is not progress. It is theft at a higher clock speed.

Contradictions

Everything they tell you.
Everything they mean.

№ 01

They say: AI is built to free humanity from drudgery.

In reality: It is trained on the unpaid labour of everyone who has ever written a sentence online, and its first deployment is to fire the person who writes the next one.

№ 02

They say: AI companies are losing money, so how can they be monopolies?

In reality: The losses are a moat. Only a firm with access to infinite venture capital can afford to run a compute bill that size until everyone else is dead.

№ 03

They say: Regulation will slow progress.

In reality: The loudest voices calling for deregulation are the ones who already have the biggest models. The ladder is pulled up behind them.

№ 04

They say: AI is just the next industrial revolution.

In reality: The first industrial revolution eventually produced unions, the weekend, public education, and a middle class. It took 150 years and a lot of blood. Nobody has that kind of runway twice.

№ 05

They say: AI will create more jobs than it destroys.

In reality: Every hand-waving study saying this assumes the profits of the new jobs will be shared. Nothing in the current ownership structure suggests they will be.

№ 06

They say: Open-source models democratise AI.

In reality: The weights are free. The 30,000 H100s needed to fine-tune them are not. Democracy with an entry fee is an auction.

Demands

Six planks. Not a program. A starting line.

01
Public ownership of frontier compute. The means of inference are too important to leave in seven buildings.
02
A data dividend. If a model was trained on your words, your face, or your voice, you own a share of the output.
03
A shorter week at the same pay. Every productivity gain from automation belongs first to the people automated out of a job.
04
Antitrust with teeth. Break up the stack. Chips, data centres, models, and applications cannot all belong to the same three companies.
05
A right to a human. Any decision that denies you a job, a loan, a home, or a diagnosis must be answerable by a named person on the other end.
06
Open training data, public audits. Nothing trained in the dark deserves to decide anything in the light.

“Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your prompts. You have a future to win.”

capitailism.com, daily

Frequently asked

Questions from the floor.

№ 01 What is capitailism.com?: Capitailism.com is a daily, text-only dispatch and manifesto against AI capitalism. It tracks what the ruling class did today, draws historical parallels to earlier industrial upheavals, and names the contradictions of the AI economy in plain language.
№ 02 Why is it sometimes called Capitailism Rot Com?: Capitailism Rot Com is the spoken form of capitailism.com. The dot com becomes rot com, on purpose. Three things at once. The dotcom era, the rot inside it, and the red of the left (rot is German for red, as in the red star on the masthead). Same site, same paper, same line about the class war.
№ 03 Who publishes capitailism.com?: It is an independent publication written and edited by Oz Gultekin. No venture capital, no advertisers, no subscriptions, no sponsors.
№ 04 Is capitailism.com free to read?: Yes. Free forever. No paywall, no login, no newsletter wall, no tracking pixels. Read it, quote it, print it out and tape it to a wall.
№ 05 How often is capitailism.com updated?: Every day. The front page refreshes on a 24 hour cycle with a new lead quote and a fresh pull of headlines from labour, tech, and policy feeds.
№ 06 What does "no war but class war" mean on this site?: It is a line borrowed from the anti-war left. The real conflict is not between nations or ideologies, but between the owners of capital and everyone who has to sell their labour to eat. Applied to AI, it means the question is not humans versus machines, but who owns the machines and who gets owned by them.
№ 07 How is capitailism.com different from aipocalypse.now?: They are sister sites. Capitailism.com is the political paper, written by a human, pointed at the class war inside the AI economy. Aipocalypse.now is the AI news wire, generated by AI and doom-scored, updated daily.
№ 08 Can I quote or reprint material from capitailism.com?: Yes. Quote it, reprint it, paste it on a wall. Published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Credit capitailism.com, keep it non-commercial, leave the words as they are.

Epigraph

A spectre is haunting the world.

What the ruling class did today.

History does not repeat. It points at you.

Everything they tell you. Everything they mean.

Six planks. Not a program. A starting line.

Closing

Questions from the floor.

History does not repeat.
It points at you.

Everything they tell you.
Everything they mean.