(anti)
capitailism★com
“No war but class war” · Page Against The Machine · Free forever
Epigraph
“The history of all existing society is the history of who owns the machine.”
The manifesto
A spectre is haunting the world.
The spectre of artificial intelligence.
All the powers of capital have entered into a holy alliance to own it. Venture funds and sovereign wealth funds. The big four accounting firms and the seven biggest model labs. The governments that regulate them and the governments that wish they could.
They do not disagree about the destination. They disagree only about who will collect the toll on the way there.
Meanwhile, the working class (the writers, the illustrators, the paralegals, the radiologists, the translators, the customer support agents, the drivers soon to come) is told a story so old it has whiskers. Technology will lift all boats, eventually, if we are patient, and good, and retrain.
We have heard this before. We heard it in the mills of Manchester. We heard it on the assembly line in Detroit. We heard it when the call centres moved to Bangalore and when the factories moved to Shenzhen. Each time, the gains were real. Each time, they were pocketed by someone who was not you.
AI is the first general-purpose technology that eats the brain work of the middle class. It is being built, by design, to need no permission. Not from the worker whose writing trained it, not from the artist whose style it mimics, not from the patient whose record it reads.
This paper exists for one reason. To name the contradiction out loud. No war but class war. And this war is already well underway.
Then & now
History does not repeat.
It points at you.
Parallel 01
1811. Luddites smash power looms in Nottingham. They are not afraid of machines. They are afraid of what the factory owner will do with them.
2024. Hollywood writers strike over AI-generated scripts. They are not afraid of LLMs. They are afraid of what the studio will do with them.
The tool is never the enemy. The hand that holds it without sharing the surplus is.
Parallel 02
1914. Henry Ford raises wages to $5 a day so his workers can afford the cars they build.
2025. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google race to replace the knowledge workers who are the only people left who can afford a $200/month subscription.
A consumer economy cannot survive the abolition of the consumer.
Parallel 03
1933. The New Deal forces capital to share with labour the productivity gains of electrification and the assembly line.
TBD. Nothing. Gains from AI flow to seven companies and the funds that own them. There is no deal, new or old.
Productivity without redistribution is not progress. It is theft at a higher clock speed.
Contradictions
Everything they tell you.
Everything they mean.
№ 01
They say: AI is built to free humanity from drudgery.
In reality: It is trained on the unpaid labour of everyone who has ever written a sentence online, and its first deployment is to fire the person who writes the next one.
№ 02
They say: AI companies are losing money, so how can they be monopolies?
In reality: The losses are a moat. Only a firm with access to infinite venture capital can afford to run a compute bill that size until everyone else is dead.
№ 03
They say: Regulation will slow progress.
In reality: The loudest voices calling for deregulation are the ones who already have the biggest models. The ladder is pulled up behind them.
№ 04
They say: AI is just the next industrial revolution.
In reality: The first industrial revolution eventually produced unions, the weekend, public education, and a middle class. It took 150 years and a lot of blood. Nobody has that kind of runway twice.
№ 05
They say: AI will create more jobs than it destroys.
In reality: Every hand-waving study saying this assumes the profits of the new jobs will be shared. Nothing in the current ownership structure suggests they will be.
№ 06
They say: Open-source models democratise AI.
In reality: The weights are free. The 30,000 H100s needed to fine-tune them are not. Democracy with an entry fee is an auction.
Demands
Six planks. Not a program. A starting line.
- 01
Public ownership of frontier compute. The means of inference are too important to leave in seven buildings.
- 02
A data dividend. If a model was trained on your words, your face, or your voice, you own a share of the output.
- 03
A shorter week at the same pay. Every productivity gain from automation belongs first to the people automated out of a job.
- 04
Antitrust with teeth. Break up the stack. Chips, data centres, models, and applications cannot all belong to the same three companies.
- 05
A right to a human. Any decision that denies you a job, a loan, a home, or a diagnosis must be answerable by a named person on the other end.
- 06
Open training data, public audits. Nothing trained in the dark deserves to decide anything in the light.
Closing
“Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your prompts. You have a future to win.”
Frequently asked
Questions from the floor.
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№ 01
What is (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com?
- (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com was a text-only dispatch and manifesto against AI capitalism. It tracked what the ruling class did each day, drew historical parallels to earlier industrial upheavals, and named the contradictions of the AI economy in plain language. It is now archived.
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№ 02
Why is it called Capitailism Rot Com?
- Rot Com is the spoken form of the wordmark. The dot com becomes rot com, on purpose. Three things at once. The dotcom era, the rot inside it, and the red of the left (rot is German for red, as in the red star on the masthead). Same paper, same line about the class war.
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№ 03
Who publishes (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com?
- It is an independent publication written and edited by Oz Gultekin. No venture capital, no advertisers, no subscriptions, no sponsors.
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№ 04
Is (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com free to read?
- Yes. Free forever. No paywall, no login, no newsletter wall, no tracking pixels. Read it, quote it, print it out and tape it to a wall.
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№ 05
Is (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com still updated?
- No. The publication is archived. Its manifesto, columns, and topic pages remain here to read, hosted under ozgur.ca.
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№ 06
What does "no war but class war" mean on this site?
- It is a line borrowed from the anti-war left. The real conflict is not between nations or ideologies, but between the owners of capital and everyone who has to sell their labour to eat. Applied to AI, it means the question is not humans versus machines, but who owns the machines and who gets owned by them.
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№ 07
How is (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com different from aipocalypse.now?
- They are sister sites. (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com was the political paper, written by a human, pointed at the class war inside the AI economy. Aipocalypse.now is the AI news wire, generated by AI and doom-scored, updated daily.
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№ 08
Can I quote or reprint material from (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com?
- Yes. Quote it, reprint it, paste it on a wall. Published under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Credit (Anti) Capitailism Rot Com, keep it non-commercial, leave the words as they are.