She has a point
(midwest.social)
rose56
People TwitterThe point isn't to sell, it's to control
Heard that CEO tenure is historically lower than it's ever been. So their response is, "sounds like the other guy's problem..."
Kind of seems like that's part of the problem? But what do I know, I'm just a toddler that stole Mommy's phone and typed this quickly before she found me and 6&__++3GFd GGG vgggvfh42467!:"hhhghgjjj!!!!!!!!!!
Other corporations.
Capitalism is cannibalisitic. left unchecked it will destroy itself, the planet and everything else with it.
You forgot the part where we're all dead and they're using AI to run everything.
And they're getting upset anyhow because the AI's solutions are just as braindead as the CEO's and Shareholders themselves.
This is literally watching the Kool Aid be drip fed day after day into your mouth.
They aren't looking far enough ahead to care.
Their end goal is technofeudalism.
Solid argument, but this problem is going to resolve itself because by then the planet will no longer be inhabitable.
Once the military and its supply chain is automated, the class genocide can begin.
This right here
Question:
How is Big Oil™ going to make a profit when the world is ruined and the population are dead?
Answer:
Lol, don't care. That's someone else's problem.
Seriously. Why don't care about long term plans, just short term profits
Because look at the age of those in charge. A majority are ancient, and they know they are dying.
They are trying to take their riches with them, like the Pharoahs of old.
If they replaced CEOs with AI the AI CEO would be smart enough to figure this out.
By that point they can retire to a warm beach. The destroyed economy will be a problem for the rest of us.
Absolutely you can sell the fruits of AI labour to unemployed people. Give them a universal basic income and a product worth spending that resource on and you can keep your 1% profit while the rest is taxed to support the citizens economy. You'll still be the richest man alive
I think it could work economically. But a world where humans don't really need to exist to keep the economy going is a little concerning when the economy is the absolute #1 thing governments and the media seem to care about.
But why do they? Why isn't human wellbeing considered more important? Actually IIRC the UK green party was looking to change that as an important metric.
Of all the jobs, CEO is probably one of the easiest jobs for an AI to replace. AI is excellent at being heartless, gaslighting shareholder, and telling people what they want to hear.
Das Capital has entered the chat
The capitalists are far, far beyond forgetting how capitalism... works.
Just... Henry Ford, pay your employees enough that wow you've grown your consumer base!
This is like macroecon 101 shit.
So, theyre either ravenously delusionally insane, or, they're openly declaring themselves the new nobility/aristocracy for the neo-feudalism we now live in.
... or both. Could be both.
What if the Top 1%'s solution to climate change is to just keep going until 90% (or more) of the poors die off?
Then you can cut all your production and pollution by 90% (or more)
It doesn't have to be all at once. Just let people gradually boil, freeze, drown, starve, die of thirst, whatever.
People will get jobs coercing ai assistants like the guy in black mirror
If that ever happens I see three possible options:
- Universal Basic Income
- Communism (money is abolished)
- Societal collapse
Two of those are communism and everyone knows that the owner class will never settle for not renting the ashes to us
Societal collapse it is then!
Not of the climate gets us first. That's probably just what kicks it off though
Ukraine is (also) a climate war. Fertile soil and continental climate (less affected by the loss of the AMOC). Syrian civil war was partially a climate war. It's already kicking it off but we simply don't see it. All we see are Hitlers.
Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism
- Friedrich Engels
You forget neofeudal technofascism
I think that was already rolled into the third bullet.
Bro the 21st century so great we had to make new concepts by smashing all the old ones together
Technofeudal neofascism
You forgot extermination of the poor (i.e., all workers) using the control apparatus being constructed, which actually still could leave a society.
Unlimited growth of the economy, more money printing and trickle down economics /s
AI was never the point. It was never going to replace the workforce, that was just a ruse to get enterprise on board; just like “LLMs will tell you any facts and do any research you want to know. It can create computer programs to automate anything you want. Image generators can make any movie or picture you want (even porn lol). Song generators can make entire albums for you.” was to sell it to rubes.
The real point is building out the cloud capacity so they no longer have to sell personal computers to anyone anymore.
It interferes with their profits when you can pirate, when you can create, when you can organize.
They will own the means of compute and you will rent the privilege of participating in society.
Don’t forget the other goal of surveillance capitalism plus enforcing the actions of the state. They know at some point this is all going to boil over. They’re building the walls to the prison all around us as we speak. Americans are not paying attention. AI + facial Recognition + citizen databases like what flock or Palantir are creating.
Sorry to say but that's kind of a shit conspiracy theory. I'd say it's more likely that billionaires just want to replace the entire working population with robots and AI. They don't need to sell anything to anyone, if their needs are provided by their electric slaves.
The real point is building out the cloud capacity so they no longer have to sell personal computers to anyone anymore.
This is indeed probably the goal. What frightens me is the fact that a large majority of the population would go right along with this.
This did not start with llm models. They are removing ownership, de facto ownership, from most of our electronics now. It can all be remotely bricked at their whim. Or terms changed, licenses that you agreed to on purchase without knowing and with no way of saying no to while still getting the product, that allow them to deny you access to what you bought.
That applies to the government, able to brick your shit with no court anything, secretly in a way you will never be able to challenge in court.
Yeah kinda. But I'd say it's about removing people's ability to make purchasing decisions in general more than about piracy specifically.
When you can decide whether or not you want to purchase the newest version of MS Office, you might decide that your current version works fine, there's no new features in the new version you need. So that means companies selling software licenses need to always be putting resources into improving the software to entice people to pay for newer versions.
If the software is all being run from a data center, you have to pay a subscription to be able to use the software and access your data. They no longer need to make any improvements to the software since they have reliable revenue from just maintaining the computers the software runs on.
It's techno-feudalism. In feudalism, the lord owns the land and the peasants work the land, try to make a living and then need to pay taxes to the lord. It's a similar dynamic with data centers. The tech lords own the computers, and they allow the peasants to do work on those computers. Businesses try to make some money on the computers owned by the tech lords, but everyone is required to pay a tax to the lord that owns the computers.
Lmao
Everything is rich people selling to rich people now. Vegas, video games, PC components—everything. That’s the inevitable outcome of all of this. And then these assholes complain when the working class tighten their purse strings for their own survival.
Already, most of the economic growth comes from the purchases of the wealthy.
Normal people aren't profitable enough to sell to anymore. We're being positioned not as consumers but as slave labor.
Yes but if your business is creating anything other than luxury prodcuts, this makes 0 sense.
What do they think is going to happen when half the population can not reliably purchase basic food?
They're either not thinking, delusionally insane, or just full-on planning on creating mass societal collapse/upheaval.
Like sure, if the plan is... create a mass culling event... that they think they will... come out on top of...
Well I guess best of luck with that.
Historically?
Doesn't tend to work out so well for them.
You can squeeze people a lot and they'll delude themselves into thinking its fair... but too far?
Months where decades happen.
They expect those people to starve (‘and decrease the surplus population’) or accept company scrip for ‘cheaper’ food, thus recreating large-scale chattel slavery.
In France, already 10% of the population depends on food-banks. In 2023, the largest non-profit providing meals and distributing food sent a distress call saying they were close to bankrupcy as the number of people in need is going up fast while donors have less and less to give being themselves crunched.
France's richest family, the Arnault, largely responsible for turbo-charging the trickle up trend in the country by buying political influence, rescued them by making a big donation.
The leader of the non-profit, who had been vocal about impoverishment of the population and growing inequalities because of the oligarchs, cannot say anything anymore: now he can't keep going without these oligarchs good will.
That's the plan. It's being executed right in front of us, in the open.
I don't think there is much of a coherent plan tbh. I think they think they're moving towards Curtis Yarvin style techno-feudalism, but Yarvin is an idiot and so are the oligarchs pushing for that. They have been lulled into complacency by the status quo their predecessors engineered to make revolutionary movements unlikely to gain traction (basic social safety net, reasonably affordable food, a general sense that the state represented the people even though in reality it's been captured by capital for some time, etc.) while undermining the elements of that status quo that weren't already collapsing.
It's madness. They think they can just do whatever they want and people won't resist, while systematically dismantling everything that stopped people from resisting. This will not go how they think it will. Thankfully they're mostly surrounded by sycophants who tell them all their dogshit ideas are genius actually, it's like Putin in Ukraine. They will overplay their hand due to false encouragement from their subordinates, and it will be what destroys them.
That's just ridiculous, unless you're including stuff like stock, real estate or other investments as "purchases".
There's only so much bread and milk and books and sofas and cars that a wealthy household needs to purchase, and sure they will outspent other households in terms of cost per item, but not nearly enough to offset the sheer difference in volume.
Tldr, bullshit.
According the Bureau of Economic Analysis, that may not necessarily be the case. Agriculture and retail trade, the stuff you mention laypeople purchasing, contributed nothing to less than nothing toward economic growth in the first quarter of 2026. Cars and maybe sofas fall into the durable goods manufacturing category which was the fourth highest contributor.
The top three contributions came from information, the federal government, and professional/scientific/technical services. I don't spend a lot of time keeping up with the finances of those sectors and I'm not an economist so take my words with a couple grains of salt, but to me those things mean an increase in data centers, federal spending (and my guess is not on things useful to a layperson), and services that often end up being business to business transactions.
Obviously there is a place today for companies to sell to the masses, but the comment you responded to was discussing economic growth, and at least to my eyes it looks like most of the growth is indeed going to sectors primarily controlled or benefited from by the wealthy while sectors supported by the masses either contributed less or shrank the most out of any sector in the case of retail trade.
If that trend continues long-term because of a decreasing population then I think that's fine, but if it continues due to a lack of investment because of low profitability, then I think there will be (more) issues.
Excellent site for backing up my claim, thanks you.
Consumer spending, as measured by Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis], accounts for 68% of the GDP.
Top 3 items:
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Housing (33.4% of budget): rent, mortgage interests, property taxes, water, electricity, internet, appliances, furniture.
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Transportation (17.0%), heavily influenced by commuting habits: cars, fuel.
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Food (12.9% of budget), includes groceries and food away from home (restaurants)
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Insurance, Pensions, & Healthcare (20.4% combined)
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"Discretionary", everything else: clothing, entertainment, education (!), ...
That's a rather interesting breakdown, and a few items surprised me a lot. In any case, and more to the point I was replying, the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey gives this breakdown:
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The Top 20% (Highest Income Quintile): Accounts for roughly 35% to 38% of total consumption.
-
The Middle 60% (Middle Class): Accounts for roughly 53% of spendingg
-
The Bottom 20% (Lowest Income Quintile): Accounts for roughly 9% of spending.
It seems like this survey, since it's based on questionnaires, tends to underreport luxury goods, so in reality it might be skewed more towards the top 20% than what's presented there.
Even if that's the case, surely it's nowhere near the point of "not being profitable to sell to normal people", as was said.
Got any stats on that? Seems implausible that the global top 0.1% or whatever are doing 1000x more economic activity than the average of the 99.9%. With their companies, sure, but they consist of many ordinary people.
I grabbed the first result, but you can find the same information from whatever source you like - it was big news:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-191500198.html
The top ten percent drive half of all consumer spending. The corporations and the rich no longer see the bottom 90% as a profitable market - they see them as a resource and a liability.
When you realize it's not incidental, but the actual plan, it all makes sense.
Probably hyperbole on mycodesucks, but the whole AI bullshit alone generated over USD 1 trillion dollars in GDP. USA's GDP in 2024 was a bit under 30 trillion. Having like 8 companies account for 1/30 of the ENTIRE MONEY SPENT of a country is absolutely nuts, as well as a good reminder of how disconnected to reality GDP alone is.
Is it really generating money if it's a company spending money it doesn't have on another company to then pay the original company to provide what was originally promised as a service/product?
Factually speaking, only the debt is "generating" money, since the entire concept of bank loans reside in their capacity of lending more than they actually have and charging interest back.
Regarding nvidia and the companies it is giving money to so they buy its chips, lots of legal loopholes make it count as "totally real investment". That's why I said the thing generated said money in GDP, which has little connection to reality.
A bit exaggerated, but 70% of OpenAIs revenue is from a handful of enterprise customers. The other tech giants, spearheaded by Nvidia, are shifting their entire business model towards enterprise customers, which is largely why consumergrade hardware is incredibly expensive if not directly unobtainable.
But what are those companies doing with what they're buying in order to generate their revenue? Ultimately there has to be something that does something useful or enjoyable in and of itself (like food, or a video game), rather than something which is just instrumental for something else. And those useful/enjoyable things will only be profitable if you can sell them to a decent number of people.
You can replace your gamer consumers with corporate customers only if those corporate customers have someone to sell to.
They are probably counting all the exchange of funny money on the stock market and things like the xircular AI buying (Microsoft invests a zillion dollars in OpenAI who then uses that zillion dollars to buy Azure compute cycles from Microsoft).
The majority of economic growth these last few years, I've been told by multiple sources on social media that I deemed credible, has been data center build out bullshit.
I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE STAIRS BRO
I WARNED YOU ABOUT STATES, BRO!
I've been making ~~the opposite~~ a similar point to my friends about growth from the opposite side of the spectrum, that it's hard to imagine every person in the world a CEO.
Sounds like a problem for someone else / some other day.
- them
the billioniares are fleeing america before that happens.
Exactly! Tragedy of the commons etc.
The possible answers to this question keep me up at night
When the rich no longer need us to operate the machinery, they will hunt us for sport.
Puts us out of our misery, frees up more water for datacenters. Win-win.
SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO WHO, BEN? FUCKING CYBORG?
Absolutely, but that's not something you fix at company level.
Am I the only one old enough to remember when we still had homemade products competing with chinese cheap products on the shelves? Consumers picked the Chinese version over and over, until the local plant shut down (or was delocalized in China…).
You could have had exactly the same speech about CEOs at the time: if your market is western consumers (at the time, China was not yet rich enough to have a significant local demand), who are you going to sell to when everyone has lost their job because of delocalization?
Answer is indeed: that's not my problem to solve. It's a systematic issue, it should be addressed through regulation.
CEO's job is not to address that, it's too maximize values for shareholders. If laying off everyone and use AI does that, then executing is just them doing their job right. If regulation bans or adds a high enough penalty on such a move, they won't do it.
This is something I think people forget too often. When you build and tune a system to incentivise anti-social behaviour, don't be surprised when you get anti-social people doing anti-social things. We currently legally demand that management always maximise shareholder value, so that's what they do, and that's the sort of person who makes it to higher levels of management. If we changed that goal, the outcome would change too. Unfortunately the lawmakers who would have to make those changes are too invested in the current system for it to happen easily.
CEOs don’t have a legal mandate to maximize shareholder value.
I should say that I'm referring to publicly traded companies here, private companies have different incentives.
Directors, including the CEO, don't have a mandate to increase shareholder value, no, but under UK, and as far as I can see, US law, there are many rules around things like "actions prejudicial to a minor shareholder" and what is actually in the company's interests, that the shareholders can, and do, sue both the directors and the companies for actions that do not increase shareholder value, especially as companies often hold their own stock on their balance sheets. They can do this because of the way both statutory and case law has formed. If statutory law, at least, made it that companies had a duty of care to their staff, could not lay off or reduce payments to more than some small percentage per year, and had to pay the costs of remidiating their environmental and societal damage as they inflicted it, these cases would largely vanish, and directors would be incentivised to optimise for those things instead.
Basically, if you make getting rich as a shareholder or CEO easier to do without screwing people over than by screwing them, CEOs and their boards will be less willing to screw everyone over in their pursuit of wealth.
Public corps are incapable of macro action. They can't see past their next few sets of financial statements.
Their incentives are all fucked up for one thing, the way they do comp. But it's not just that. It's the tragedy of the commons on a more massive scale.
Musk made a comment when cornered on this subject a few weeks back, he didn't have an answer because he's an idiot, but he did mention a book. I think that's the book they've all read, that presents what they expect to happen. And, I expect is hand-waving bullshit.
I can't find the post. Does anyone remember what book he referenced?
EDIT: Maybe this was it:
On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “Read this book and give it to all your friends.
“Survival of civilization depends on it!”
The book in question is titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad.
The explanation on Amazon reads: “What happens when a society elevates victimhood to a virtue and decides that punishment is cruel? You get the disease Dr. Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. And the West may be terminally infected… The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline.
“Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.”
Sounds like an Ayn Rand tribute act. The right is always looking for an intellectual justification for being selfish juvenile assholes.
Other people do nice things and it makes me soooo uncomfortable
The rich and GOP would read that as coddling minorities and immigrants, since they are automatically criminals in their eyes.
When in reality the book is talking about the rich and GOP who are literally criminals and rapists.
Even Gad Saad recognizes that protecting the children rapist Epstein class is leading to the end of the civilization! Let's bring out the guillotines!!
If the answer is a mass die-back of the bulk of the population who constituted the now economically unnecessary labour class, where will the genetic diversity come from to prevent the handful of owning families (and the retinues of explosive-collared servants they retained for tasks that can’t be automated) from speedrunning Habsburg Syndrome? They’d need some kind of biodiversity preserve in which sufficiently large numbers of people are kept alive to provide suitable candidates for outbreeding, and some means of ensuring that this captive population never poses a threat.
"Technology will solve that, too." ~Techbros, probably.
I mean, they're fully expecting functional immortality to save them from death. Them specifically, not us.
Singularity is technopian bullshit. These guys have their head so far up, whose ass? idk. But no, you can't transfer your self to a computer. It's preposterous on several levels, the first being, the brain is not binary. It's vastly more sophisticated. Then if you copied it, you would not be that copy. And so forth.
But the rich will never stop chasing after the fountain of youth.
I actually don't think that would be an issue, considering the rich are already into eugenics via IVF.
oh god this sounds like one of those books that's gonna get really popular and then end up predicting the future (looking at you, 1984)
They don't care about selling to people who don't have money. They are only focused on those who have money, or spend it as if they have money. The demographic that has money is shrinking, but they also have more money than ever, so let's get some.
I’m pretty sure unemployment percentage, much before 90, causes revolts and rebellions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
The tragedy of the commons is the idea that when a resource is shared and can benefit the individual at a cost to the community, it is rational for the individual to overuse the resource, even though this collectively leads to the depletion of the resource for everyone
Except it's not rational.
Countries with socialized health care systems do have abusers, but they are a tiny minority of the population, because most people don't want to spend their life in hospitals.
Roads are socialized everywhere but you don't see many people just driving around to make sure they get their "fair share" of road using/wearing out of their taxes.
Depending what we talk about, overusing resources does not translate in increased comfort or quality of life.
Easy: no one, while the other 90% of people make stuff people actually want!
That wouldn’t even be an economy at that point.
Maximization of profit is all fine and dandy until you realize that the wages you've been suppressing was the lubricant keeping the economy's gears turning.
If you siphon off too much, the machine screeches to a halt.
B2B is already a massive segment of the economy.
They’ll sell to other businesses until there’s only one left.
It’s like dreaming of finding a mountain of gold. Instead of riches you would end up devaluing gold into worthlessness.
As always someone elses problem
I thought whitepeopletwitter is about dunking on white trash takes. This isn't white trash 👎
kiana is also not white lol she is iranian
Ah the rare Caucasian
This argument is copium, because large companies are already transitioning to more reliance on business-to-business sales
And business just work for themselves? There's no persons in the line-up, right?
/S
