Tech Bros Run the Marxist Playbook

Can Marxism offer a framework for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and the tech bros behind it?

This is not to suggest that Marxism is a viable economic system or a practical alternative to capitalism. It’s not. But Karl Marx was a heterodox economist before he became an ideologue, and some of his ideas are powerful tools for understanding economics, even if his overall program was a failure.

Let’s use some of those tools to understand the rise of AI oligarchs and the future of AI.

We begin with Marx’s main idea: the abolition of private property. How do tech bros feel about private property? They steal it. If you can simply take private property, then it’s not private. Marx would approve.

The AI gang does this by scraping vast amounts of internet content for use in training their large language models (LLMs). That material includes copyrighted books, magazine articles, academic papers, images, music and countless other forms of intellectual property (IP).

Do tech bros pay royalties? Do they pay licensing fees? Sometimes, but often they don’t. They take what they want like internet pirates, or the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

In fact, AI models have used my nine books in their training sets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have paid me nothing. Anthropic offered to pay me $37,000 for some (not all) of my books. I accepted the offer, but I still haven’t received the payment. Maybe I’ll call my lawyer about that before their IPO.

The point is that much of the AI crowd behaves no differently than the imperialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who exploited land, resources and human capital, including slavery, while paying little or nothing in return.

V. I. Lenin called imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism.” But Lenin never met a tech bro. They put imperialists to shame.

YOU Are Paying for the Boom

Marx’s theory was based on the idea that the owners of the means of production (capitalists) used labor but did not pay workers a fair share of the surplus created by the production process. There are a lot of flaws in this theory.

But the tech bros have a better idea: Get rid of human labor completely.

AI allows companies to pay some workers less because a growing share of productivity comes from software rather than labor. More to the point, AI is eliminating certain jobs entirely, as seen in layoffs among software developers and in industries such as healthcare and customer service that are increasingly using AI to perform repetitive or administrative tasks.

In the AI world, capitalists don’t just take more than their share; they take the entire buffet table. The tech bros’ solution to mass unemployment is guaranteed basic income, a handout. This ignores the dignity of the individual, which is achieved largely through productive work.

Other examples of taking public assets for private use include massive demands placed on the electric grid to power hyperscale data centers. Towns and counties around the country could face higher electric bills as hyperscalers compete with residents and businesses for available electricity.

It’s another case of extracting wealth from everyday Americans to feed the AI beast.

Even that’s not enough. AI applications are being crammed into our laptops, tablets and smartphones whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. This is forcing manufacturers to build more powerful devices, which can increase costs for consumers while requiring additional processing power to handle AI features.

Many of these AI features operate by default, even if users never intentionally engage with them. That means you may be using AI without realizing it.

Never mind that AI output can be inaccurate and, at times, dangerous. The problem is compounded as AI-generated content increasingly circulates online and becomes part of future training data. Meanwhile, many AI features collect large amounts of user data from the devices they run on.

Individual AI users also provide fresh inputs to LLMs through prompts, interactions and, in some cases, data collected from their devices. AI operators are hungry for this kind of information because they have already consumed vast amounts of publicly available internet content, while the quality of that content continues to deteriorate as more AI-generated material floods the web.

Are you getting paid for information that may be collected from your device? Do you even know it’s happening? Almost certainly not. This is just another form of digital extraction that enriches the tech bros while helping fuel trillion-dollar valuations.

In addition to authors, artists, local communities and everyday Americans, the AI mafia is also feeding off the government. Subsidies include streamlined permitting for massive data centers, tax incentives and abatements in many jurisdictions, favorable regulatory treatment in some areas and enormous government contracts.

There are costs associated with all of these government benefits, but they are not borne by the AI companies themselves.

They’re borne by everyday citizens in the form of taxes, higher electricity rates, reduced quality of life as data centers reshape small communities and the risk that increasingly capable AI systems could create serious disruptions in sectors such as banking, telecommunications and healthcare if they malfunction or are misused.

The Extraction Economy… And New Revolutionaries

The Chinese are no better. The success of Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Moonshot has been aided by their ability to build on advances made by leading U.S. AI labs. It’s a case of one group of pirates raiding another group of pirates.

Both thrive on information they did not create, but the Chinese have become especially adept at turning those advances into low-cost competitors.

This predatory behavior can be likened to imperialism or piracy. The technical economic term for it is externality. That means the profits and benefits of extracting information are kept by AI firms, while many of the costs are pushed onto the public.

It’s no different than a gold mine that keeps the gold but dumps the cyanide used in refining into public waterways. The miner gets the gold and the public gets poisoned. The fact that AI is digital does not make the behavior any more acceptable from a social perspective.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Silicon Valley’s extractive culture is that many CEOs are not only aware of it; they thrive on it. They have perfected the art of turning their own customers into unwilling guinea pigs. A culture of short-termism, disdain for the public and pure greed keeps the extraction racket going.

If there’s one ray of sunshine, it’s that some members of Gen Z appear to be turning their backs on AI, autonomous agents and endless screen time.

There’s growing fatigue with the amount of time people spend online, along with increasing concern about the pervasive nature of AI. This shift also reflects widespread frustration that much AI output is bland, repetitive or simply wrong.

Some Gen Zers are doing something that now seems almost radical: They’re reading books.

There are many reasons why the AI bubble could burst, but the Gen Z revolt may be one of the least appreciated and most unexpected.