At one moment in its history, the KKK was called an “invisible empire”. A similar empire or its imperialist members now reside in the national government, where even the GOP has been colonized, sadly adopting a culture of racist and sexist delusion. Our economy is propped up by numerous invisible, asymmetric decisions driven by a tech sector in the guise of military budgets required for wars of choice. Trillionaires birthed from the trillion-dollar MIC budget.
The various components of a rump GOPhascism reside in the technocratic desires of techbros, their ‘freedom cities’ and private islands. Authoritarianism never had it so good.
GOP administrations have generally lived off deficits and we see that manifest in the distractions of Trump’s built DC indulgences, The structured along with avaricious rent-seeking, are constructed on a promise of capital growth but as we have always known are the ravings of the self-proclaimed, bright orange “king of debt”.
They can only be stopped next week by GOTV. Elsewise things like an AI financial bubble might burst, affecting the global economy. We need to acknowledge that AI is still about capital and its financialization and that unlike financial firms with their hedge funds and investment banks, they aren’t too big to fail.
It’s always about real estate, as we have seen with our current foreign policy led by realtors rendering ‘foreign service’ a running joke like ‘Saddam Hussein’s Cheesecake Factory’.
The reality of such a domestic land rush is that it applies to data center siting which now is resisted by a public that knows such facilities free-ride on community resources and utilities. Land capitalists are attracted to rural siting and favoring network optimization and profit rather than community development.
On social media there have been calls to nationalize the holdings of a treasonous entrepreneur and to deport him because he actually violated immigration laws. No one would mistake Elon Musk for Emma Goldman, but he is no less a threat to a deluded American republicanism. Like ‘Bad Lieutenant‘ there is a ‘bad (right-) libertarianism’ that will come to an end with a change in political leadership in nine days.
The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in U.S. history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet. http://www.wsj.com/economy/the-…
Remember when us phil-tech types said effective altruism was just utilitarianism taken to its worst possible extents? This is what we meant: Real harm for unquantifiable potential benefit."…'we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology….'"
Invisible decisions made by AI companies, like which sources are used and maintained, are having an increasing impact on our information flows. @klonick.bsky.social and @noupside.bsky.social explain how this invisible source skew happens and its impact on the information ecosystem.
The rise of AI capital thus points to a further acceleration of the shift from order to chaos in the human social metabolism with nature endemic to capitalism. What Karl Marx conceived of as the metabolic rift, now operative on a planetary scale, is visible in heightened entropic disorder in the Earth System, presenting a habitability crisis for global humanity and life itself. Capitalism, Marx emphasized, is a social order marked by an uncontrollable drive to accumulation: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” It accepts no boundaries to its expansion, even those posed by life itself.2 It is not the new hyperscale digital technology, representing new forces of production, that is proving so extremely dangerous in the present historical moment, but rather this same technology when combined with the social relations of capital—representing a system committed to accumulation without end.
…Today’s alienated AI capital constitutes an irrational shift from order to disorder in human ecological and social relations on the local, global, and planetary levels. Not only does computational capitalism promise to disrupt the entire work environment, pointing to growing joblessness and increased exploitation, exacerbating class and imperial polarization on a global basis, but we are seeing, even more ominously, a further rupture in the human relation to the earth of which humanity is itself an emergent part.
Querine Kommandeur, Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez, Maria Kaufmann, Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers, Varieties of Anticapitalism: A systematic study of transformation strategies in alternative economic discourses, Ecological Economics, Volume 227, 2025,
The confluence of multiple crises has prompted a growing recognition of the need for transformations. Economic systems, including patterns of consumption and production, play a key role in sustainability transformations. The notion that capitalist systems are at the root of current ecological and social crises has led to the emergence of different alternative economic discourses, that seek to address the indirect drivers of unsustainability. In this article, we aim to contribute to moving the debate beyond critiques of capitalism by focussing on the paths of transformation towards alternatives. To this end, we analyse several alternative economic discourses in order to show the breadth of the debate, and to better understand the roles and strategies of various discourses in societal transformation. Seven discourses are included, of which Buen Vivir, Degrowth and Wellbeing Economy are analysed in-depth. This is done through a systematic analysis of literature published between 2015 and 2022, using an enhanced conceptual framework based on the works of Wright (2019) and Chertkovskaya (2022). Our analysis suggests that the discourses represent different modes of transformation, and that these differences exist both between, as well as within the different discourses. We argue that transformations cannot be achieved through single discourses, or modes of transformation. Rather, concerted efforts of different discourses aimed at addressing indirect drivers of unsustainability can provide the multi-faceted processes of societal change, in which they can support and reinforce one another through alliances and mutual learning.
