That's some *next-level* underpants-gnomery:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

The thing that worries me about billionaires' AI psychosis isn't concern for their financial solvency.

2/

No, what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once and *implode*, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.

My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn't that workers will suffer *directly*.

3/

Despite all the *Wonderful Life* rhetoric about your money being in Joe's house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin's house, the reality is the median US worker has *$955* saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers' pockets:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

4/

No, the thing that has me *terrified* about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds *fascism*.

There's a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who's currently sending masked gunmen into the streets.

5/

The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who'd been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who'd sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin' emptor, baby.

6/

Back in America, Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he "foamed the runways" with everyday Americans' mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country's worst slumlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

7/

Americans were understandably not entirely happy with this outcome. So when Hillary Clinton replied to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" with "America is already great," her message was, "Vote for me if you think everything is great; vote for Trump if you think everything is *fucked*":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

"Austerity begets fascism" is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there's a good empirical basis for believing it.

8/

In "Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right" four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:

https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

Here's how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that "public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards."

9/

Good public services are the basis for "the social contract between rulers and the ruled" - pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.

When public services go wrong, people don't always know who to blame, but they *definitely* notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray.

10/

They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they "withdraw their support" for the system.

Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed.

11/

So when you can't get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about "undeserving migrants" who've taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to "deserving natives."

12/

(This is grimly hilarious, given that the wizened, decrepit rich world is critically dependent on migrants as a source of healthy, working-age workers who pay massive amounts into the system while barely making use of it, many of whom plan on retiring to their home countries when they do reach the age where they're likely to extract a net loss to the benefits system.)

13/

Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population "going private," so when the NHS declines, *everybody* notices (what's more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it.

14/

There's "a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding." That's because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

15/