Tootfinder

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

America’s emergency oil reserve is about to hit lowest level since Reagan era as Trump’s Iran war burns through 66M barrels | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-oil-iran-us-war-crude-oil-reserves-b2993726.html

China Is Propping Up the World Economy by Importing a Lot Less Oil (Rebecca Feng/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/china-is-propping-up-the-world-economy-by-importing-a-lot-less-oil-f12d7813
http://www.memeorandum.com/260611/p21#a260611p21

In its latest attempt to circumvent state laws and regulations,
Sable Offshore Corp. is reportedly asking the federal government to seize the ground California has left to stand on — literally. 
The Houston-based oil company reportedly asked the Trump administration to exercise eminent domain to condemn and seize miles of private and state-owned land that contain its legally embattled oil pipelines. 
Sable restarted oil production in March in Santa Barbara County from its o…

managed to setup OpenID Connect (OIDC) via #dex for @… on my @… server.

In chiggis mongolia, some gas stations are empty. Some have lines with restrictions on volume. Probably a side effect of Ukraine's strikes on Russia's oil infrastructure.
#oil #UkraineWar #mongolia

Oil executives warn White House that gas prices will get worse (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/11/oil-executives-warn-white-house-that-gas-prices-will-get-worse/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260611/p11#a260611p11

That's not even getting into my perennial favorite thing to point out: civilian reliance on cars unifies the interests of the population with the military.
US military domination of other countries *relies on cheap oil.* (And also the petrodollar, so oil use globally). If your life is dependent on cheap oil, then you are more likely to support invasions that promise cheaper oil, or oil subsidizes to drive down prices.
But wait, there's more. The auto industry itself is a fungible asset for the military industrial complex. Factories that make cars can pivot to making tanks and aircraft during war time (as they have). The existence of this infrastructure increases the probability of war.

Trump says "I love the inflation" because U.S. is "taking out" Iranian oil (Kathryn Watson/CBS News)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-i-love-the-inflation-iran-oil/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260610/p70#a260610p70

Sanctioning Cuba's State-Owned Oil and Gas Company Unión Cuba-Petróleo (Marco Rubio/United States Department of State)
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/06/sanctioning-cubas-state-owned-oil-and-gas-company-union-cuba-petroleo/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260611/p131#a260611p131