THEY ROBBED US: The Terrifying New Version of Society We Must Avoid

People are experiencing the steepest and fastest ever slide into poverty, just as one tech billionaire after the next parades through The Diary of The CEO podcast to tell us how AI will “eventually” make us all rich – while they, become trillionaires way before “eventually” arrives. I guess “eventually” in this case means: after many of us are dead, the rest of us have become unemployed objects of state control, and tech parasites have become so ridiculously rich that, we will be grateful if they spare a moment away from sniffing horse tranquilizer to go out into their glass tower balcony and sprinkle some stale leftover crumbs down to us. Crumbs that they didn’t work for: they embezzled it by feeding public knowledge and stolen personal data into apps that exploited us, slop that manipulated us, and AI agents that replaced us. They monetized publicly available information. They stole our brains and sold them back to us piece by piece for a fucking subscription fee. It is worse than theft, and worse than slavery. It is what happens when capitalism demolishes the very last semblance of ethics that remained.

The level of inequality we are about to witness because of AI can only be compared to the early industrial revolution when, just like today, new technologies were so ruthless, unsupervised and unregulated that those who owned them became filthy rich, and those who operated them died on the job from work accidents, no insurance, and abject poverty. Today as AI data centres turn real rivers into a trickle, the slow-moving desert creek of trickle-down economics that used to sustain an otherwise finished post-colonialist West now sizzles in the heat before it can even leave its source. Hundreds of millions of jobs are being replaced by ChatGPT, an app that has sucked up all the knowledge of working people through the ages and spits it out supposedly for free, but at the financial benefit of corporations who save millions on new hires, yet still want to us to pay full price for their new AI-mediated services – services that are now performed by ChatGPT based on stolen, human knowledge. Do you get me? This is the biggest daylight heist of all time. We’ve been robbed.

So while much of AI is “free”, the work it produces is productised, monetized, and converted into profit at shameless margins you don’t even want to know. In this new terrifying world we are about to inhabit, most everything will be free to produce, sold at almost 100% margin by the seller, yet still charged at a premium to the end user. This is not automation, nor is it the dawn of “the age of abundance”, as the technobroligarchs have christened it. It is the beginning of the end of the illusion of social cohesion, and a swift ushering into an age of inequality the level of which humans probably last experienced during the worst of the feudal era. And while the production of goods and services gradually uncouples itself from the labour market, it becomes a weapon of extortion. Because guess what is NOT free: Eggs. Electric light. My rent. My existence. When will ChatGPT pay me for all the knowledge it stole from me? Unless we do something very soon about this illegal consortium between AI and the technobroligarchic parasites who own it, these technotyrrants will suck society through a straw, compress it into a microchip, and eat it.

But while ordinary people across the world may finally be admitting that we are living through end times, even some collapsitarians are deluded: they are waiting for a system crash that never comes. They are waiting for a trigger that will spark a revolt, but the most likely scenario is that everyone will be too brainwashed in this gulag to even bother crawling out of the Instagram vortex. I hate to tell you this but, although the climate is crashing, the global system is not crashing: it is being replaced by a barely liveable dystopia. In fact, it is seamlessly transitioning: it is mutating from a system where each of us used to be a participant, to one where we become the snacks for a new predator: this chimeric monstrosity between the technobroligarchy and AI is reminiscent of the alliance between early industrialists and their factory machines. You are just a cog, they used to say. Now you’re not even that. You are the lubricant between the cogs.

At least there is some new clarity. This capitalist system, which for decades effectively sold itself to us as a social support structure that feeds prosperity, is now unashamedly telling us that it was a parasite all along. The mask is off, and even your Boomer pension won’t save you this time, because the parasite has stopped giving handouts long ago. Its new strategy is to completely dissolve social strata and take away all our power as we become workless, penniless versions of ourselves living in government-provided cubicles with free, ad-sponsored wi-fi. In this new concentration camp, whatever was left of your individual freedom will be completely vaporised, much like the last water droplet data centres get their copper cables on.

However surprising all this may be for some of us, it was long ago predicted that capitalism would lead to fascism and overshoot, and that the blonde bikini models on advertising posters would eventually shed their pretty, flawless skin, transform into poison vipers, and crawl down from their highway billboards to eat us all. Marx had predicted that in the final stages of capitalism the system would begin to consume the structures of society, before consuming itself. What he didn’t predict was that “the system” will no longer be administered by humans, but by non-biological, autonomous algorithms optimizing the monetisation of the death of everything, and the transition from a DNA-based species to a post-biological unreality. I named the “change management” authority profiting from the funeral of civilisation and nature “Necrocapitalism” 3 years ago – delighted to discover that the term actually pre-existed, coined by someone else before me.

As necrocapitalism aggressively monetizes the last scraps of resources, blood, sweat, and tears, compassion becomes a volatile gas. It has already escaped into outer space. There has never been a time in human history when compassion has been this absent, because there has never been a time when we have been so divorced from our humanity. Families are borrowing money to feed themselves, college students are studying for jobs that have been replaced by AI, and meanwhile, entire nations are subjected to genocide as the rest of us prefer to get lost inside our phone screens to forget our mounting bills, abusive bosses and boring, miserable reality that simply fails to compete with the TikTok version. We are being mentally genocided by a system imposing a yellow perimeter around us the size of a smartphone screen. In this dystopia we are all alone, and we all want to be left alone. Oversaturated with our own real and imaginary problems, there is simply no room anymore for another person in our life, for a community.

THIS IS WHAT THEY WANTED ALL ALONG. Assimilation into the algorithm is complete. Prepare for next stage: termination.

We need to realise that WE are the system. The system is what WE make it, what we allowed it to become. I’m not offering hope. I’m suggesting the only way out: wake the fuck up. I’m not ranting, overstating, or writing dystopian poetry here. I’m trying to explain to you the repercussions that this has on everything: from our standard of living to democracy, to personal freedoms. The algorithmocracy has arrived.

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