What's a capital strike? That tends to be the question I get in response to this rant.

You know what a labor strike is, right? It's wielding labor as power, by witholding it, as a bargaining tactic.

A capital strike is the same thing, except with capital.

But, you have to understand what capital actual is. It's not money. Money is a loose proxy for capital, but that's all. Really, capital is control over economic resources. Raw resources, sure. Big industrial machinery, sure. Networks of transportation and communication, yes. And labor.

Money is kind of the exchange medium for all of that. But capital isn't the money, and it's not the resources. It's the power to distort how those resources are used and applied to suit your own interests, at the expense of the other people involved.

That's part of what makes a capital strike non-obvious, if you don't already know what it looks like. It's not just sitting on the money and refusing to spend it. Because that's the one thing you literally can't do with capital. If you leave those resources idle, especially labor, it just goes and does its own thing. You lose control over it. If you just fire everyone, they eventually start working for themselves.

So, to conduct a capital strike, you have to direct the capital toward useless things. Or actually destructive things, if you can manage it.

And thus, AI had "basically zero" effect on the GDP. Because it's economically worthless activity for the purpose of keeping all the resources occupied so they can't be put to any other use.

@zeank @jenniferplusplus

My understanding is that was less wasting wealth, more a jobs program to give laborers income during the agricultural off-season. Like unemployment insurance, it spread money around so people wouldn't starve.

Whereas all this "AI investment" is channeling more and more money into fewer and fewer hands.