The tech giants behind the AI boom have become too big to fail and are using their position to mount an assault on labor.
The most on point headline I have seen in a hot minute.
Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract — laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity. In short, these are political choices masquerading as technical necessities, AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.
The growing share of white-collar workers rendered precarious or redundant by capital’s technological drive form a new surplus population or a pool of disposable and downwardly mobile workers used to depress wages and normalize insecurity. They are not external to capitalism but internal to its reproduction.
We are rapidly approaching the seemingly inevitable transformation of capitalism into tech-feudalism.
For the " AI is jUsT a ToOl" folks, yeah, a tool for the owners to keep workers destitute and miserable and compliant.
That IS all tools! It’s why the Luddites smashed looms in textile factories. It’s why Marx said the workers need to own the means of production.
AI is a tool and it wouldn’t be a problem if workers owned the ai tools instead of capitalists.
A CEO once said to me “there wouldn’t be layoffs across the industry if the tools didn’t work”
I said “the people doing the layoffs aren’t the ones using the tools. They have no idea if they work, they are just justifying layoffs”
I don’t think I changed his mind but he certainly didn’t have a rebuttal
The working class won’t revolt if you lean juuuust far enough where they’re complacent. Amazon I think has a system like this on pushing a person just before they would actually leave.
the working class isn’t going to revolt bc they’re too busy getting stupid watching TikTok and some are too poor to worry about this BS they’re just trying to put food on the table
Not just labor, but also utilities. Combined with existing housing and rental market and unstable tarrifs and trade, it’s the perfect storm of class warfare.
