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We are in the middle of one of the largest bubbles in history, and it’s getting ready to pop. Maybe. All economic bubbles are irrational, but there’s something different about the AI bubble that may allow it to defy economic reality (temporarily), and it’s not clear how dangerous this will be. What happens if a bubble bursts but then keeps inflating anyway? Presumably nothing good.
Let me set the stage for you here, and please bear in mind I am no Paul Krugman. I’ll do my best to be a huge nerd, though. :)
OK, the tech giants are betting big on AI. This, we all know because they won’t shut the fuck up about it. What you might not be aware of is that they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, many many hundreds of billions, in a race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence. Whoever wins the race wins…everything. That’s the idea here.
The chart below shows the changes between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025 in real GDP and some of its components. Investment in information processing equipment — which at this point basically means data centers — accounted for more than half of overall growth, more than consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the economy:
That’s over $80 billion just in Q2 of this year. So far, the tech fucks have dropped $155 billion this year, and they’re INCREASING the amount of money being spent. By 2028, they’ll be blowing well over half a trillion a year on AI.
So all of the money you and I spend on movies and groceries and toys and clothes and books and eating out and and and? All of that money is being dwarfed by the tech fucks on data centers to create their alleged all-powerful AIs.
Even as our spending drops because Trump and his party of imbeciles have killed the strongest economy in half a century, the techbros are ramping up their spending. It’s a mind-boggling amount of money.
And it’s not working.
You may have noticed that Google search today, compared to just three years ago, is trash. It’s about as trustworthy as Donald Trump around a 14-year-old girl and a bottle of Viagra. But, hey, those are just vibes, right? What do we stupid civilians know? AI is obviously a game-changer for Corporate America and they’re making bank on it!
Wall Street's biggest fear was validated by a recent MIT study indicating that 95% of organizations studied get zero return on their AI investment.
Why it matters: Investors have put up with record AI spend from tech companies because they expect record returns, eventually. This study calls those returns into question, which could be an existential risk for a market that's overly tied to the AI narrative.
Driving the news: MIT researchers studied 300 public AI initiatives to try and suss out the "no hype reality" of AI's impact on business, Aditya Challapally, research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, tells Axios.
95% of organizations found zero return despite enterprise investment of $30 billion to $40 billion into GenAI, the study says.
So AI doesn’t work on the user level and…it doesn’t work on the corporate level. That doesn’t seem to be a good reason to set half a trillion dollars on fire per year.
Then there are big picture issues of energy and resources. AI requires massive amounts of electricity to run, and the systems the tech fucks are planning far exceed what the grid can handle. Even as they race to build nuclear power plants to power their bloated data centers, AI will chew up an increasingly larger amount of what IS available, increasing the cost of electricity for everyone else:1
Individuals may end up footing some of the bill for this AI revolution, according to new research published in March. The researchers, from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, analyzed agreements between utility companies and tech giants like Meta that govern how much those companies will pay for power in massive new data centers. They found that discounts utility companies give to Big Tech can raise the electricity rates paid by consumers. In some cases, if certain data centers fail to attract the promised AI business or need less power than expected, ratepayers could still be on the hook for subsidizing them. A 2024 report from the Virginia legislature estimated that average residential ratepayers in the state could pay an additional $37.50 every month in data center energy costs.
“The recipe for chocolate pudding is milk and four pounds of mud.”
Oh, and don’t forget the fresh water data centers guzzle. They’re draining it faster than Fox News drains the IQ points of its audience. That’s going to be unsustainable in the long run as fresh water becomes scarcer due to the climate change the tech pricks are making worse.
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Alright, so the tech doesn’t work right, it requires too many resources to be practical, and the return on investment is all but non-existent. Also, it’s possibly the most expensive technology ever developed, and it is almost single-handedly propping up the economy.
This is the definition of a bubble and the press and the market are starting to sour on it:
What happens next? Normally, the bubble pops, the economy crashes and we all get very mad at immigrants. Just kidding. Sort of.2
But these are not normal times.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll probably have some idea that the tech fucks are, quite literally, insane. They believe, REALLY believe, that they will become immortal digital gods and the rest of humanity can fuck off and die as long as they achieve their goal of silicon life eternal.
Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year and we’ll get through together.
Émile P. Torres and Kate Willett do a far better job of digging into the religion/cult of Silicon Valley, but for the purposes of this article, it’s important to understand that this religion/cult is very widespread in the tech world and has a very tight grip on a lot of very powerful people.
The key to all of their beliefs is the birth of true AI. It’s literally their messiah. True AI, a program that is truly intelligent, not just programmed to carry out tasks faster than humans, will, the theory goes, be able to create more advanced AI. That more advanced AI will create an even more advanced AI, and so on until we have a super-intelligent AI beyond anything humans can possibly comprehend. This event is called “The Singularity,” and it’s what the techbros are feverishly working towards.
A super-intelligent AI would be able to solve just about any problem, specifically, how to make humans immortal digital gods, blablabla.
Do you see the problem here?
The billionaires who own the companies pouring hundreds of millions into a broken technology do not care about the money they are losing. They don’t care about profits. They don’t care about the economy or the environment or how many people they will harm or kill in the process.
They literally believe they are building God, and when they do, they will be rewarded with eternal life.
So, how does a bubble collapse if the people inflating it won’t allow it to collapse? This is what is freaking me out, and something I have not seen anyone discussing. The people who discuss the cult of Silicon Valley have not been discussing the economic ramifications of their bubble. The people who discuss the bubble do not appear aware of the Silicon Valley cult. I really REALLY need these two circles on the Venn diagram to overlap and figure out what happens next because I feel like the results are going to be catastrophic beyond anything I can imagine.
No bubble can stay inflated forever, and the longer the tech shits keep it going artificially, the worse the crash is going to be when they finally hit the wall of reality. Worse, when they finally run out of other people’s money to spend on their dream of immortality (God forbid they bankrupt themselves!), they’re going to face the awful truth: They will not become immortal digital gods.
What is the one thing we know about rich white men when they don’t get what they want? They lash out and destroy everything around them. So how do you think these entitled, insane, and deeply fascist billionaire assholes are going to respond when they realize that the cold, icy hand of death is going to claim them just like all of the pathetic little “NPCs” they’ve spent their lives sneering at?
Yeah, not well.
I’d rather not wait to find out what the next temper tantrum of the Silicon Valley death cult looks like. The pro-fascist human extinction tantrum we’re living through right now is more than enough, thank you very much.
When we topple the regime, and we will, one of our top priorities has to be kicking down the doors of the doomsday bunkers of all the tech fucks and putting them in prison for the rest of their lives. They need to be kept far away from their money and power, ensuring they can never inflict their diseased worldview on us again.
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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 66 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.
That’s on top of the Trump regime gutting the very renewables that could have mitigated this strain because climate change is a hoax and windmills make Orange King sad.
I worked for years as a software engineer. including at some pretty big companies, like one of the Musky ones (after he left), and everything seemed pretty normal when I first started a couple of decades or more ago (showing my age here).
It seems like they've all gone Ayn Rand on us during the last ten years or so. That mentality was probably not as latent as I might like to think it was. I remember moving to Austin from CA thinking we were gonna make Texas blue. Cue the hysterical laughter. Turned out, most of the others who joined me there were libertarian lunatics.
I've said this a million times in various venues: AI is just a big fat pattern-matching machine. It consumes all those resources in order to retrieve as many different patterns as it can, whether words or genomic protein information.
Billions and billions of them, as Carl Sagan would have said.
From there, it just builds a mathematical algorithm to evaluate a pattern best suited to a task and then delivers a modified version to you. That's it.
No true intelligence will ever pop out of that arrangement. It's impossible.
It's autocorrect on steroids.
So, as you stated perfectly well, they're blowing wads of cash and sucking our water and electricity sources dry for... nothing. For hallucinations, bad art, and, increasingly, things like teenage suicides (because of course).
Let's then give them the argument that, as Kurzweil famously said, The Singularity is Near. If that's true, all these fuckers will be out of business before it happens because of all the money they are losing ramping up on all this outdated technology, because if it does happen, it'll happen through Quantum computing, which is a completely different kind of tech.
We need to yank all the money out of their hands with an aggressive wealth tax, and we needed to do this yesterday.
I worked for years as a software engineer. including at some pretty big companies, like one of the Musky ones (after he left), and everything seemed pretty normal when I first started a couple of decades or more ago (showing my age here).
It seems like they've all gone Ayn Rand on us during the last ten years or so. That mentality was probably not as latent as I might like to think it was. I remember moving to Austin from CA thinking we were gonna make Texas blue. Cue the hysterical laughter. Turned out, most of the others who joined me there were libertarian lunatics.
I've said this a million times in various venues: AI is just a big fat pattern-matching machine. It consumes all those resources in order to retrieve as many different patterns as it can, whether words or genomic protein information.
Billions and billions of them, as Carl Sagan would have said.
From there, it just builds a mathematical algorithm to evaluate a pattern best suited to a task and then delivers a modified version to you. That's it.
No true intelligence will ever pop out of that arrangement. It's impossible.
It's autocorrect on steroids.
So, as you stated perfectly well, they're blowing wads of cash and sucking our water and electricity sources dry for... nothing. For hallucinations, bad art, and, increasingly, things like teenage suicides (because of course).
Let's then give them the argument that, as Kurzweil famously said, The Singularity is Near. If that's true, all these fuckers will be out of business before it happens because of all the money they are losing ramping up on all this outdated technology, because if it does happen, it'll happen through Quantum computing, which is a completely different kind of tech.
We need to yank all the money out of their hands with an aggressive wealth tax, and we needed to do this yesterday.
Great article. The tech bros are the biggest threat to humanity of all time.