Sam Altman Wants To Enclose Your Brain
Capitalism requires privatization. And AI oligarchs want to privatize your thoughts.
Capitalism has many unique characteristics. Capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism without wage labor, the private ownership of businesses, and the permanent cycle of booms and busts. One of the most important features of our current economic system is enclosure, the process of privatizing a public good and making something that was once available to everyone into an instrument of private profit. Enclosure is how capitalism began in 16th-century England. Jealous of the increasing wealth and power of merchants who were capitalizing on technical improvements in maritime navigation to expand their trade empires, the land-owning English aristocracy enclosed the public lands that had previously been the basis of life for the commoners. The open fields that peasants used to graze their livestock and support their families were quickly enclosed with fences and marked as the private property of landlords. This privatization of the common space deprived the lower class of their food and income, forcing them to sell their labor to landlords for wages to survive. Often, they found themselves working the very fields they had once freely roamed. There had been capitalists operating across Europe and elsewhere for centuries prior to the English Enclosure Movement (though they wouldn’t have used that modern term), but enclosure birthed capitalism — the socioeconomic system based on the private ownership of land and industry, in which those who didn’t own either had to sell their labor for a wage to survive. Envious of the English aristocracy’s new source of wealth, aristocrats and monarchs across Europe soon followed the British trend, enclosing their common lands and establishing capitalism as the default European way of life, which they then exported worldwide.
Though most land on earth has been enclosed and is now private property, enclosure remains a defining characteristic of capitalism to this day. There is no capitalist in history who has ever been comfortable with their current profit rates. None have ever said, “This is enough profit for me! No more is needed!” The constant pursuit of more, more, more isn’t just because they’re greedy (though that’s part of it), but because for capitalist enterprises, stagnation is death. If Apple declared it would not try to increase profit, all its investors would divest and put their money in its competitor, Android, which promised a higher rate of return. Apple would lose important investments, decreasing its effectiveness and its profit. In more ways than one, capitalists are sharks. If they stop moving, they die. So, capitalism always requires more enclosure. To the capitalist, every public good, from your local park to grandma’s Social Security, is an untapped source of profit, ready to be enclosed. Enclosure is so common in America that we often don’t realize the public goods we have been deprived of. The internet was created by the U.S. government with funding from American taxpayers. Yet, it is only accessible by paying a private internet provider for access. “Privatization” is the modern term to describe the process of enclosure. Think of all the social aspects of society that conservatives aim to privatize: schools, prisons, public transportation, Social Security, and pretty much every other service the government provides. There is quite litterally nothing capitalists won’t try to take out of public hands and run for their own profit. And while tangible services and benefits are their most obvious targets, a few particularly devious capitalists are attempting to privatize the intangible, even theorizing about charging you for knowledge.
Of course, this idea comes from the most insufferable man on the planet, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. At a recent infrastructure summit hosted by BlackRock (of course), Altman envisioned a future ripped right from an episode of Black Mirror.
“Fundamentally, our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens. You know, they may come from bigger or smaller models which makes them more or less expensive. They may use more or less reasoning which also makes them more or less expensive. They may be running all the time in the background trying to help you out. They may run only when you need them if you want to pay less. They may work super hard, you know, spend tens of millions, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on a single problem, right? That’s really valuable.
But we see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.
The demand that we see for that seems like it’s going to continue to just go [up]. And if we don’t have enough, we either can’t sell it or the price gets really high and it kind of goes to rich people, or society makes a bunch of sort of central planning decisions that I think almost always go badly. So the best thing to me throughout all the history of capitalism is to just flood the market.”
Oh boy. Where to even start with something like that?
