Parallel Series (Bonus Mini Post)
Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Sort of. More of an afternoon footnote that got interesting.
I found out about it scrolling Mastodon. Someone posted the PC Gamer article.
Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a speech this week warning that the AI industry is a bubble headed for a 2008-style financial crisis. She says AI companies will need to generate roughly $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. In 2025 they generated $20 billion. One percent.
Which is funny. And also not funny at all. AI has so thoroughly colonized the PC hardware space that the GPU benchmark site is now where the financial collapse warnings live. Makes sense when you think about it. The DRAM shortage had to come from somewhere.
Turns out the speech wasn't a one-off. Warren's been running her own series. January: a letter directly to Sam Altman asking under what circumstances OpenAI would seek a taxpayer bailout. January: pressing the Financial Stability Oversight Council — the body created after 2008 specifically to catch systemic risk before it lands — to open a formal investigation. March: Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator publishes the academic underpinning, a paper literally titled After the AI Crash. April: the speech that finally breaks into the general feed and ends up on a gaming site.
Different angle, same structure, built piece by piece since January.
Which means this isn't one senator sounding an alarm. It's a senator, a policy research center, a gaming publication's hardware beat, and a blog about user-hostile tech design all arriving at the same place without coordinating. I ran the burn rate numbers in April. Sam Altman published a 13-page plan to save capitalism the same morning Ronan Farrow dropped 18 months of receipts about him. The mechanism Warren is describing has been running in the open for a while now.
That's not a political opinion. That's a pattern.
Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social. The series is here.