And meanwhile, buildings packed full of #GPU hardware being diverted away from their intended purpose (i.e. rendering graphics) are being run to exhaustion, eating up precious electricity and burning through expensive semiconductors, for no better purpose than to keep alive a huge number of speculative mini-economies, sustaining a massive population of gambling addicts. There's nothing the least bit "productive" about any of this #cryptocurrency nonsense. It's a wholly destructive "industry", but one which can be sold to dull-witted tech geeks as "productive" merely because it generates splashy headlines about large quantities of money—ever-growing "wealth" which is merely ever-accumulating debt.

But #capitalism quietly regards debt as a source of guaranteed income. The holder of debt hopes to bleed that debt into perpetuity, always collecting interest on it. Why do you think right-wing politicians get so furious at the idea of debt forgiveness, e.g. on college loans? It's because, to their corporate allies, debt is the ideal asset, a generator of infinite "wealth" without the expenditure of a single lick of effort on the part of the creditor.

That is to say, holding onto debt in perpetuo is "productive", according to the accepted standard of "productivity".

Indeed I'm going so far as to suggest that the #software "industry", which I'm not sure should be called a true industry because it's a fundamentally non-productive one, comes pretty close to being something that #capitalism quietly regards as ideal, although of course you'll find no capitalist who will actually admit this: the corporate software biz is almost the ideal anti-industry. It consumes extraordinary and ever-increasing quantities of resources and produces absolutely nothing of lasting value to anyone...but it causes heaps of #money to accumulate, and that is accounted as "productivity" by people in the #tech sector.

Nothing has made that fundamentally destructive quality of corporate software more obvious, in recent years, than the two most recent "innovations" of the tech sector: #cryptocurrency and "generative #AI" (i.e. "AI" devoid of intelligence.) As it happens, both of these things are very low-effort in terms of technological innovation, relying chiefly upon bulk to achieve results.