Part of this has been a long-standing move by every industry to prioritize business-to-business sales as opposed to consumer sales simply because businesses have money and consumers don’t, because businesses are pocketing all the profits and refusing to pay their employees (consumers) a living wage, let alone a thriving wage.
It’s been a long time coming for the PC industry, because it’s been a general trend for at least two decades as sales to business have become more profitable over consumer sales ever since the late 90s.
It’s just more evidence that the bottom 90% of earners are just being priced out of anything but bare subsistence and the wealthy do not give a single fuck about it, in fact, they’re embracing it.
Top 10% owns 93% of stocks and accounted for 55% of market activity in early 2025, before tariffs and mass layoffs and an unnamed recession. They’re probably at 60 -65% of revenue now. You’re absolutely right. The rich have been working to remove us from the equation for decades. In our buying power, and in our labor power with AI.
Let’s be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it’s not actually “thinking” and doesn’t actually know what it is doing. It’s much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.
It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.
AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but “general purpose AI” is a joke that isn’t going anywhere realistic at the moment. Especially if we have to burn down our planet burning up fossil fuels to power software that is only doing a best guess of what the next string of text should be.
I always hated that fucking saying. No, you vote with YOUR VOTE. If you vote with your dollars the man with a billion dollars has a billion votes more than you do.
I am so glad to see someone else talking about this. Yeah, We’re going back to feudalism… And only the upper ranks of society will be able to afford goods and be able to engage in trade.
I mean, it’s very arguable that we’ve just been doing “feudalism with extra steps” for a very long time anyway.
To be less US/Europe-centric than my original post, the majority of the world has been in the “priced out of anything but bare subsistence” basket for most of the history of modern capitalism. Only the citizens of the Imperial Democracies of the Western world were benefiting while the majority of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres were simply locked out from being beneficiaries either through trade embargoes or outright exploitation via not paying foreign workers the home-country equivalent, and instead paying them a much lower “localized” rate.
It’s really that the Imperial Boomerang has finally made it’s way home to the citizens of the West.
The whole economy reminds me more and more of the decline of the Roman Empire. Their biggest problem was that there were no consumers left to keep money in circulation and the economy afloat. You either owned lots of land and slaves that provided pretty much everything you need or you were a slave, meaning the only one you could trade with were merchants from outside the empire but as the empire expanded, those became harder to reach. War expenses spiraled out of control while the economy declined until it ceased to exist.
Now mega corps only trade with each other and threaten to replace all workers with AI and robots. Meanwhile the economy becomes stale, people buy less while politicians around the globe cut down the social sector, meaning people will have even less money to spare. Money won‘t circulate as much, slowing things down even further.
There are ways out of this spiral of decline but billionaires won‘t give up so easily. You can say many things about them but they are persistent as hell.
You can say many things about them but they are persistent as hell.
That persistence is a type of sociopathy, though. It’s an antisocial personality disorder. Sure, they’re persistent, but they’re persistent at pursuing absolutely terrible things for personal gain that effectively means nothing considering they already have enough power and money to make Solomon blush. It’s a mental disorder where they need more and more and more while they have more than they could ever use in their entire lifetimes and in their grandchildren’s their grandchildren’s lifetimes.
So even that is honestly a negative thing, there’s literally not a positive thing you can say about them, because everything they do is couched in being the most selfish, proud (for no good reason), and narcissistic fuckers alive.
Part of this has been a long-standing move by every industry to prioritize business-to-business sales as opposed to consumer sales simply because businesses have money and consumers don’t, because businesses are pocketing all the profits and refusing to pay their employees (consumers) a living wage, let alone a thriving wage.
It’s been a long time coming for the PC industry, because it’s been a general trend for at least two decades as sales to business have become more profitable over consumer sales ever since the late 90s.
It’s just more evidence that the bottom 90% of earners are just being priced out of anything but bare subsistence and the wealthy do not give a single fuck about it, in fact, they’re embracing it.
This is an important point in general. The old story of “voting with your wallet” is now more and more obviously mathematically absurd.
Top 10% owns 93% of stocks and accounted for 55% of market activity in early 2025, before tariffs and mass layoffs and an unnamed recession. They’re probably at 60 -65% of revenue now. You’re absolutely right. The rich have been working to remove us from the equation for decades. In our buying power, and in our labor power with AI.
Let’s be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it’s not actually “thinking” and doesn’t actually know what it is doing. It’s much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.
It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.
AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but “general purpose AI” is a joke that isn’t going anywhere realistic at the moment. Especially if we have to burn down our planet burning up fossil fuels to power software that is only doing a best guess of what the next string of text should be.
I always hated that fucking saying. No, you vote with YOUR VOTE. If you vote with your dollars the man with a billion dollars has a billion votes more than you do.
I am so glad to see someone else talking about this. Yeah, We’re going back to feudalism… And only the upper ranks of society will be able to afford goods and be able to engage in trade.
I mean, it’s very arguable that we’ve just been doing “feudalism with extra steps” for a very long time anyway.
To be less US/Europe-centric than my original post, the majority of the world has been in the “priced out of anything but bare subsistence” basket for most of the history of modern capitalism. Only the citizens of the Imperial Democracies of the Western world were benefiting while the majority of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres were simply locked out from being beneficiaries either through trade embargoes or outright exploitation via not paying foreign workers the home-country equivalent, and instead paying them a much lower “localized” rate.
It’s really that the Imperial Boomerang has finally made it’s way home to the citizens of the West.
The whole economy reminds me more and more of the decline of the Roman Empire. Their biggest problem was that there were no consumers left to keep money in circulation and the economy afloat. You either owned lots of land and slaves that provided pretty much everything you need or you were a slave, meaning the only one you could trade with were merchants from outside the empire but as the empire expanded, those became harder to reach. War expenses spiraled out of control while the economy declined until it ceased to exist.
Now mega corps only trade with each other and threaten to replace all workers with AI and robots. Meanwhile the economy becomes stale, people buy less while politicians around the globe cut down the social sector, meaning people will have even less money to spare. Money won‘t circulate as much, slowing things down even further.
There are ways out of this spiral of decline but billionaires won‘t give up so easily. You can say many things about them but they are persistent as hell.
That persistence is a type of sociopathy, though. It’s an antisocial personality disorder. Sure, they’re persistent, but they’re persistent at pursuing absolutely terrible things for personal gain that effectively means nothing considering they already have enough power and money to make Solomon blush. It’s a mental disorder where they need more and more and more while they have more than they could ever use in their entire lifetimes and in their grandchildren’s their grandchildren’s lifetimes.
So even that is honestly a negative thing, there’s literally not a positive thing you can say about them, because everything they do is couched in being the most selfish, proud (for no good reason), and narcissistic fuckers alive.