Are today's Silicon Valley elites following...

Editor's note: ...Karl Marx's political playbook while calling it technological progress? It appears powerful tech billionaires are concentrating wealth, data, and political influence in ways that resemble Marxist collectivism, even as they talk out of the sides of their mouths about "innovation and free enterprise." It also likens these technology oligarchs to pirates who seize digital territory and private assets, raising concerns about the future of individual liberty, private property, and economic freedom in the age of AI. Call them what they are: hyperscaler pirates. If you think about it, these digital Bolsheviks are nothing more than petty thieves. AI is a powerful technology alright, but much of the current AI revolution is driven by marketing bullshit, unapologetic hype and inflated promises, with some tech companies acting less like visionary innovators and more like petty thieves stealing wealth, data, art, music and control while selling a future that will never match their exaggerated claims. And the dark irony is that these digital Bolsheviks are bitching and moaning that China is "stealing LLMs from US frontier AI models" through a process known as distillation, which involves leveraging existing US AI models to develop competing systems.

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Tech Bros Run the Marxist Playbook

By James Rickards | July 29, 2026

Can Marxism offer a framework for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and the tech bros behind it?

This is not to suggest that Marxism is a viable economic system or a practical alternative to capitalism. It’s not. But Karl Marx was a heterodox economist before he became an ideologue, and some of his ideas are powerful tools for understanding economics, even if his overall program was a failure.

Let's use some of those tools to understand the rise of AI oligarchs and the future of AI.

We begin with Marx’s main idea: the abolition of private property. How do tech bros feel about private property? They steal it. If you can simply take private property, then it’s not private. Marx would approve.

The AI gang does this by scraping vast amounts of internet content for use in training their large language models (LLMs). That material includes copyrighted books, magazine articles, academic papers, images, music and countless other forms of intellectual property (IP).

Do tech bros pay royalties? Do they pay licensing fees? Sometimes, but often they don’t. They take what they want like internet pirates, or the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

In fact, AI models have used my nine books in their training sets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have paid me nothing. Anthropic offered to pay me $37,000 for some (not all) of my books. I accepted the offer, but I still haven’t received the payment. Maybe I’ll call my lawyer about that before their IPO.

The point is that much of the AI crowd behaves no differently than the imperialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who exploited land, resources and human capital, including slavery, while paying little or nothing in return.

V. I. Lenin called imperialism "the highest stage of capitalism." But Lenin never met a tech bro. They put imperialists to shame.

YOU Are Paying for the Boom

Marx's theory was based on the idea that the owners of the means of production (capitalists) used labor but did not pay workers a fair share of the surplus created by the production process. There are a lot of flaws in this theory.

But the tech bros have a better idea: Get rid of human labor completely.

AI allows companies to pay some workers less because a growing share of productivity comes from software rather than labor. More to the point, AI is eliminating certain jobs entirely, as seen in layoffs among software developers and in industries such as healthcare and customer service that are increasingly using AI to perform repetitive or administrative tasks.

In the AI world, capitalists don't just take more than their share; they take the entire buffet table. The tech bros' solution to mass unemployment is guaranteed basic income, a handout. This ignores the dignity of the individual, which is achieved largely through productive work.

Other examples of taking public assets for private use include massive demands placed on the electric grid to power hyperscale data centers. Towns and counties around the country could face higher electric bills as hyperscalers compete with residents and businesses for available electricity.

Please go to the Daily Reckoning to continue reading.

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Don't leave Israel out of the this tech boom, AI and heisting technology and bringing it back to Israel:

Israeli spyware firms are fueling the global surveillance state

Talpiot

The digital Bolsheviks just steal:

Apple accuses OpenAI, and former design star Jony Ive's io Products firm, of stealing hardware trade secrets in blockbuster lawsuit

A little wind and there you have it:

"See the extent of American hypocrisy:

At a port inauguration, the government covered the logo of the Chinese company ZPMC on the cranes with the American flag.

The wind blew and unmasked the farce, pulling away the flag and leaving the Chinese inscriptions exposed pic.twitter.com/JInT9uk0DU

— China Times (@ChinaTimesX) July 31, 2026