Tech is increasingly pay-to-play
What’s the point in playing when no one else can afford to?
I’ve written much about the political development of wealth stratification on this weblog, but until now I’ve not explicitly linked it to information technology. I want you to take a look at a small dataset I just compiled earlier, comparing the value of several successive CPUs that occupied the same product niche at different, successive points in time:
These are AMD’s ‘pro-sumer’ flagship product variants, marketed under the Threadripper™ brand.
Two important pieces of context about these products and their prices:
The 9995WX, like most computing products now, is severely supply-starved, meaning you cannot really buy it at MSRP
The value prop measure is inverting, which is the opposite of what consumer technology has been doing for the last 80 years
And, well, you know… the street price for the current flagship outpaces that of a brand-new budget automobile in many third world markets, clocking in at a chilling $17,000. This is incredible when you consider the 2990WX’s MSRP was a tenth of that. Here’s a subset of the graph showing the prices consumers actually paid at the time each SKU was released:
This goes to show that even excluding the depreciation experienced by the older parts—which I feel strongly obligated to remind you are perfectly good parts that aren’t going to stop working anytime soon—prices are spiralling out of control. We factored out sticker price bias. We factored out depreciation. We even factored out inflation with all the current market prices! Despite this, the prices are becoming insane. We have to conclude that these new processors are intrinsically much more valuable than the previous ones, except that makes no sense whatsoever.
But wait, tech has a cover story for this! Yes, it’s um, it’s uh… it’s all that AI! Haven’t you heard about the arms race? They’re paying guys nine figure compensation packages!!!
To be clear, it’s reasonable to say the shortages are genuinely caused by the demand distortions perpetrated by tech bro spelunking. That doesn’t mean any of this is worth diddly squat to anyone else though. Tabloids have been pumping out articles like the one you see above left and right as if they were unpaid public relations specialists for the Santa Clara Valley. Just remember, this story is not for you and I, the typical American; no, it’s for the Gen X bureaucrats and functionaries who think, “wow, if they’re shelling out nine figure signing bonuses, it must be the real deal! No one would front money in a confidence scheme to get one over others at that price!” Mediocre nepo babies kicked upstairs in pantsuits are all nodding along blankly to this cover story crafted by some of the most disgusting psychopaths to disgrace the nation since the Chicago Outfit. They’re so out to lunch they’re practically giving the country away like that’s what doing a good job really means.
Sure, nine figures sounds super real as long as you forget that they’re goading every John Scumbag in Congress to sign over $500 billion to them on the public’s dime. It sounds super mysterious and awe-inspiring until you remember that their ‘arms race with AI’ is a rat race with the Chinese Communist Party to permanently ruin the Internet as a public commons because it makes these elites feel like the undeserving pieces of shit they often are. The tech is very cool until you notice that its main utilities are for copyright infringement, human and civil rights violations, and generating unfathomable amounts of bot SPAM online to crowd out human interactions. AI seems so fresh until you remember cryptocurrencies, which enriched many of the same criminals behind AI at public expense before already.
So what are you gonna do, huh? Or maybe you think this sounds like a big load of sour grapes. Oh yeah, I’m just jealous that I don’t get to participate in tulip mania 2.0. That’s the exact kind of shit-eating mindset that got our society into this mess in the first place. Did you know there was a time when money wasn’t everything? Don’t take it from me; it’s an indictment authored by one of the richest men of 20th century television:
Yeah, not only was money not everything, but the real decider for who’s who was—get this—how cool your job was. Have we not utterly broken that sort of discourse for the last 30 years? Zuckerberg is a natural supernerd, yet he has licence to go make a jackass of himself on Rogan wearing a chain and looking like a Vanilla Ice ripoff.
Nobody benefits from this kind of shit. It’s little more than a performance to degrade all of us, because him doing that demonstrates how totally and exclusively money has come to denominate every form of value in modern life.
But here’s the bigger problem: even if you reject that toxic philosophy and do everything in your power to distance yourself from it, you can’t really get away from it entirely, and to whatever extent you do, you will continue to slowly lose ground to it. This is not a problem any of us get to run from. The more money they steal from everyone else—the more things that get ‘killed by Google’—the more that open standards and open source only exist to feed these very same burgeoning corporations—the less we have to work with to tend to our own things, the more helpless we are at the mercy of this force, and the more trivial it is for them to roll us up and throw away everything we’ve worked for in the space of an afternoon. You have to stand and fight this, some way, some how.
I opened this article with a very sober graph showing how increasingly unaffordable basic computing resources are for essentially everyone who isn’t in the mob. I’m going to close it with a reminder: their future doesn’t include you. Don’t believe me? Take it from one of them:
If his remark about ‘coming out on top’ didn’t make it obvious, I’ll give you a hint: this isn’t some phenomenon like the Internet or global warming. It’s a concerted effort being perpetrated by a short list of human beings with names.