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capitailism★com
“No war but class war” · Page Against The Machine · Free forever
Jun 8
Epigraph
“The history of all existing society is the history of who owns the machine.”
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
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№ 01 The Guardian
Billions spent and hypothetical returns: the AI boom explained with six charts
AI spending is accelerating rapidly while consumer adoption grows, but returns remain speculative. Major firms including SpaceX and Anthropic are pursuing massive valuations amid uncertainty about profitability.
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№ 02 Financial Times
Walmart tells workers that AI will improve their jobs, not steal them
Walmart is assuring workers that artificial intelligence will enhance rather than eliminate their jobs, even as the technology raises widespread concerns about mass redundancies across retail.
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№ 03 MIT Tech Review
How virtual power plants could provide energy for data centers
Google has signed a deal to help fund a virtual power plant that would compensate consumers for reducing electricity use to power data centers in the largest US power grid.
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№ 04 The Verge
New York lawmakers pass one-year ban on new data centers
New York lawmakers passed a one-year moratorium on new large data centers, the first statewide ban of its kind, to allow time for studying environmental and energy price impacts.
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№ 05 VentureBeat
Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI
Salesforce has rebuilt Slackbot into a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking autonomous action for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers.
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№ 06 The Guardian
Silicon Valley including Meta has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg
Meta and other Silicon Valley companies have embraced MAGA politics, sometimes for self-interested reasons, according to Meta's former head of global affairs Nick Clegg.
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№ 07 The Verge
The mayor of Shelbyville, Indiana, says only people who live in ‘shitty houses’ oppose data center
The mayor of Shelbyville, Indiana dismissed opposition to a proposed $2 billion data center, saying he only sees "No Data Center" signs in "shitty houses," mostly rentals.
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№ 08 The New York Times
Why the SpaceX IPO Will Affect Your 401(k), Like It or Not
SpaceX's forthcoming initial public offering, potentially the largest ever, will eventually be included in index funds after rule changes by Nasdaq and other index providers.
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№ 09 Fast Company
SAG-AFTRA actor’s union strikes 4-year deal with studios to protect performers against AI
SAG-AFTRA reached a four-year deal with studios and streamers that protects performers against AI while securing better pay and benefits for actors.
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№ 10 The New York Times
Gwynne Shotwell, Elon Musk’s No. 2 at SpaceX, Is the Company’s Steady Hand
Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, serves as the steady operational counterweight to Elon Musk as the company prepares for its blockbuster IPO.
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№ 11 VentureBeat
Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.
Claude Code costs up to $200 monthly while offering similar capabilities to free alternatives like Goose, sparking rebellion among programmers over AI coding tool pricing.
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№ 12 The Guardian
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land
About two-thirds of planned US AI datacenters will be built in drought-ridden areas, raising concerns about water consumption as the industry expands regardless of environmental impact.
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№ 13 The Guardian
Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier
While Bernie Sanders' proposal for an AI sovereign wealth fund has merit, alternative approaches could better achieve the goal of distributing AI industry gains to the public.
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№ 14 The Guardian
Yes, Michelle Obama knows a lot about resilience. She still shouldn’t be lecturing gen Z about it | Emma Beddington
Michelle Obama's advice to gen Z about workplace resilience overlooks how fundamentally the employment landscape has changed since her own career began decades ago.
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№ 15 The New York Times
B.F.I. Preserves ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ and More Videos in Archive of Viral Moments
The British Film Institute has preserved over 400 culturally significant internet videos including "Charlie Bit My Finger" in a new archive of viral moments.
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№ 16 MIT Tech Review
Why this year’s World Cup ball may not fly as far
This year's FIFA World Cup will use a soccer ball designed to fly differently than predecessors, marking one of several changes for the tournament across three host nations.
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№ 17 The Guardian
Global stock markets fall as concerns persist over tech firms at heart of AI boom
Global stock markets fell amid concerns about tech company prospects while oil prices rose following renewed conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Israel.
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№ 18 TechCrunch
Notion restores access to Anthropic after service disruption
Notion restored access to Anthropic after a service disruption, with the company's product head expressing surprise at the social media attention the outage received.
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№ 19 TechCrunch
OpenAI is still working on that ‘super app’
OpenAI is developing a broader platform beyond ChatGPT, with senior employees suggesting that chat-based interfaces represent an outdated approach to AI products.
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№ 20 Financial Times
OpenAI plots biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch
OpenAI plans a major overhaul of ChatGPT to reposition it as a route to higher-margin products before a potential initial public offering valuing the startup at $850 billion.
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№ 21 Financial Times
What we know about the plan to give Americans an equity stake in AI
OpenAI has proposed a sovereign-wealth-style fund that would give Americans an equity stake in AI to address public anxiety about the technology's societal impact.
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№ 22 TechCrunch
OpenAI unveils Lockdown Mode to protect sensitive data from prompt injection attacks
OpenAI introduced Lockdown Mode to reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure from prompt injection attacks, though ChatGPT remains potentially vulnerable to such exploits.
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№ 23 TechCrunch
The Trump administration might take an equity stake in OpenAI
President Trump said he is discussing deals where the American people could benefit from AI success, suggesting the administration might take an equity stake in OpenAI.
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№ 24 The Verge
Meta made its own AI-generated clickbait news feed
Meta's standalone AI app now generates clickbait-style news stories with AI-created topics, images, and text, automating the content that has long filled Facebook's feed.
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.
Closing
“Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your prompts. You have a future to win.”
Frequently asked
Questions from the floor.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.
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№ 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.