The Innovation Myth: How AI reveals the lie at the heart of Capitalism

We hear it all the time: Capitalism drives innovation, and rewards innovators. Efficient Market Hypothesis claims that Capitalism ensures that capital is directed to the most innovative products and services, that rational actors in both the investor and consumer buckets make choices that reflect all information to reward and promote the choices that reflect the most utility.

This is the given raison d’etre for the rush to build AI products, these bleeding edge, futuristic fantasies of helpful robots and thinking machines that lead us to a life of ease and I’m just kidding, it’s literally all just vaporware created to generate child pornography and dismantle reality so that one ketamine snorting mass murderer can hoover up all the money.

We need to be very clear here. Capitalism rewards one thing: access to capital. The point of capital is to get more capital. The massively inflated market cap and wealth numbers are a scorecard for narcissists incapable of human feeling. Based on the hysteria of fanbois and delusional hype men. None of it is real. Read literally any other piece from us and you’ll see the inescapable arguments.

Let’s first of all talk about the nonsense marketing term that is “AI”. We’re largely talking about Large Language Models and Image/Video generation tools. None of these do anything resembling sentient thought, of course. They are complex algorithms that collate existing information, and restructure it in a way that resembles cogent communication, but in the way that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe.

We can certainly accept that “AI” is an innovation, I suppose. So why do we say is this a lie, aside from the fact that this is the fever dream of emotionally disabled lunatics raised on /pol and r/jailbait, and delivers literally none of what has been promised to either consumers or investors?

Necessity is the mother of invention. Not any profit motive. People innovate to solve problems. Then other idiots come in to exploit that innovation for huge wads of cash rarely enjoyed by the actual innovators. That’s why the CEO of Pfizer has mansions and the team that actually developed Viagra do not.

This shows the lie at the heart of Capitalism. The only problem Capitalism solves is “really shitty people don’t have all the money”. Capital does not, cannot, innovate. Capital’s “innovations” are things like “strike breaking” “company towns” and and “steal elections for Nazis to get tax breaks and reduce regulations”.

The truth is that “AI” doesn’t solve a single problem faced by actual human beings. It is not a necessity, it is enshittification. It takes existing systems and just makes them worse. Art? Worse. Music? Worse. Customer service? Worse. Information transmission? Worse. The surveillance state? Worse. It’s all just shittier versions of the things we have already innovated.

Imagine spending ten years and untold trillions on a product that is a hundreds times worse than “one human person on the phone”. What absolute fucking psychos.

When we look at the problems faced by humanity as whole, we see that not only does this vampiric industry not help, it speedruns the problems towards planet-killing finales. Does “AI” improve housing? Not only does it not improve housing, it has, via various apps that show landlords how to collude to set rents at the very top of the market, made it far more expensive. And that’s the point. It’s there to replace expensive, needy humans so they can make more money. That’s the entire point of this garbage.

Does “AI” allow us to more efficiently use our increasingly limited water sources? Or track pollution in our water supply? Of course not, it makes the problem a million times worse with toxic, heat and chemical spewing “data centers” required to keep these idiot machines going. Is “AI” being used to map out the best places for wind farms or solar farms? Is “AI” being used to map out food deserts in urban areas so residents can have access to healthy food?

Is “AI” being used to monitor global poverty, global disease, global conflict, to best direct humanitarian aid to thos who most need it? No. Of course not. Instead, 8Chan pedogooners generated millions of CSAM images for fun while destroying one of the largest humanitarian aid organizations on the planet so that their mass murdering Nazi master could feel like a big boy and get more tax breaks on his weekend ketamine binge.

This shouldn’t be rewarded with literal trillions. This should land you in The Hague.

But this is how capital operates. Literally the only problem capital has is that it never has enough capital. That’s the only form of innovation to which it responds. That’s why the “health and wellness” industry is three times the size of “Big Pharma”, itself an industry that shows that unless it makes money, they won’t develop it, regardless of how many lives it can save.

We had a hot minute where capital was begrudgingly addressing the climate crisis, inequality in both economics and sociopolitical sphere, and we were making progress on labor, housing, medicine, and other actual fucking problems that, if left unresolved, are going to be exinction-level events. And then a bunch of emotionally disabled dipshits decided it was just easier to go full avoidant, model their entire identities on a sundowning narcissist, and blame non-whites and egirls for their sad fee fees, and became full on fascists.

This is the dream of “AI”, a tech circlejerk that is actively destroying everything it touches, with the same trillion dollars changing hands from delusional shitbag to delusional shitbag, as they give somber talks at Davos, sure that their bunkers and super yachts will keep them safe from the apocalypse they’re causing.

And this is the dream of Capitalism that demanded literal slavery as an “innovation” so they could sell sugar and rubber. The dream of Capitalism that, instead of investing in new housing, simply made securities out of a debt crisis, and crashed the global economy. They don’t care. Because they don’t care about your problems.

“AI” was never built to solve your problems. It was built to solve theirs. And those are the only innovations Capitalism cares about.