2 posts tagged with "Economics"

Three AI companies are worth 2.07 trillion dollars this summer, on roughly 72 billion dollars of combined revenue. That is 44 Estonias of paper value on one Slovenia of income. Part one looked at what the AI wave does to your daily work; this part follows the money, because the question "how f*cked are we?" has a second reading: how f*cked is the industry selling us all this?

Take an inventory of your evening. The phone in your hand is on an instalment plan. The bike outside has a blue front tyre because Swapfiets owns it, not you. The car is private lease, the house is rented, the film you are watching lives on a server you pay monthly, and the game you will play afterwards vanishes the day you stop subscribing. Somewhere between 2010 and now, one question quietly became strange to ask: when did you last actually own something?