Topic

Platform capitalism

The rent-seeking logic of software platforms applied to intelligence itself.

A platform extracts a toll on every transaction it intermediates. Apply that to inference and you get a rent-seeking layer wrapped around language, vision, and decision-making itself. The economic logic that produced the Uber driver and the Amazon third-party seller is now being aimed at the knowledge worker. This topic charts where AI fits inside the longer arc of platform consolidation, from Web 2.0 marketplaces to today's foundation-model gatekeepers.

Columns (3)

  1. Prompt Engineering Is Piece-Rate

    Every generation of capitalism produces a new layer of 'skilled' labour that is actually piece-rate work with a prestigious job title. A column on how AI freelancing reinvented the putting-out system.

  2. The Rent Is Too Damn Inference

    The generative AI economy is a landlord economy. Every prompt is a rent cheque. A column on per-token pricing, API lock-in, and the enshittification curve.

  3. The Three-Company Town

    AI is not a market. It is a three-company town, with NVIDIA as the landlord and the hyperscalers as the company store. A column on the antitrust problem that nobody is treating as an antitrust problem.

Contradictions (1)

Claim
AI companies are losing money, so how can they be monopolies?
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.

Demands (1)

  1. 01

    Antitrust with teeth. Break up the stack. Chips, data centres, models, and applications cannot all belong to the same three companies.

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