"Who benefits from what this technology does?"

In a recent piece, Christopher Butler does a great job of putting into words how AI can, if left unchecked, enable the worst tendencies of late-stage capitalism.

The technology industry went from being a mechanism for dismantling silos to one that manufactures them. From a diverse and competitive jungle of hungry innovators, we've found ourselves in a beige desert, where enormous corporate interests quarrel in the distance like Kaiju while the rest of us seek shelter in the dust.

I want to recapture the spirit of cooperation and mutual benefit that paved the way for today's distorted takes on technology's true potential. Technology should be a force for connecting and providing, not segregating and exploiting. It's those positive manifestations that I admire and enjoy, so it’s what I tend to look for when I explore.

My goal right now is to keep my tech stack nimble enough to pivot seamlessly as these giants grumble and quake around us. I want to be able to take my business to the highest bidder (in terms of delight, productivity, innovation, philosophy, etc.) in any given category without feeling beholden to their predecessor. I’m willing to weather some discomfort, change some habits, and explore some new paradigms along the way.

Nothing I do is so critical that it can’t survive a bit of disruption, and I find that occasionally shaking up my patterns helps me grow.

Here's what I highlighted:

We now exist in what people call “late-stage capitalism,” where meaningful competition only occurs among those with the most capital, and their battles wreck the landscape around them. We scatter and dash amidst the rubble like the unseen NPCs of Metropolis while the titans clash in the sky.

The much-lauded “democratic” technology of the early internet has given way to systems of surveillance and manipulation so comprehensive they would make 20th century authoritarians weep with envy, not to mention a fear-induced appeasement to the destruction of norms and legal protections that spreads across our entire culture like an overnight frost of fascism.

AI accelerates this process. It centralizes power by centralizing the capacity to process and act upon information. It creates unprecedented asymmetries between those who own the models and those who are modeled. Every interaction with an AI system becomes a one-way mirror: you see your reflection, while on the other side, entities you cannot see learn about you, categorize you, and make predictions about you.

Liberty in the age of AI requires more than just formal rights. It demands structural changes to how technology is developed, deployed, and governed. It requires us to ask not just “what can this technology do?” but “who benefits from what this technology does?”

To think about AI without thinking about capitalism, fascism, and liberty isn’t just incomplete — it’s dangerous. It blinds us to the real stakes of the transformation happening around us, encouraging us to focus on the technology rather than the systems that control it and the ends toward which it’s deployed.

As AI advances, we face a choice: Will we allow it to become another tool for concentrating power and wealth? Or will we insist upon human dignity and liberty? The answer depends not on technological developments, but on our collective willingness to recognize AI for what it is: not a force of nature, but a product of flawed human choices embedded in vulnerable human systems.