AI’s Grand Circus

We inflate markets, deflate possibility, and call it progress.

“They knew. They knew the taxpayers would bail them out. They weren’t being stupid; they just didn’t care.”
— The Big Short (2015)

There is a scene in The Big Short that still feels like prophecy. As the housing market collapses, a banker turns to the camera and admits that the whole thing was built on faith — faith that the numbers meant something, faith that the system couldn’t fail because it never had. It was a con of belief, not math.

That same fever — first mortgages, then modems — now burns beneath the rhetoric of artificial intelligence. The same hunger that once promised homes for all — and later, connection for all — now promises intelligence for all. Every era sells its miracle: the mortgage, the modem, the model. And each time, we are told that this one will redeem the last. Strip away the language and reality begins to melt — speculation takes the shape of salvation, hype hardens into strategy. Once, Wall Street packaged our homes; now, Silicon Valley packages our intelligence. Both sell the same illusion — that if we just believe hard enough, the system consuming us will somehow set us free.

There is a strange miracle in what we call the market. Every dollar, every share, every speculative bet represents something vast and human: our collective labor, our choices, our potential. The money that moves through Wall Street and venture funds is not abstract; it is the summation of our past labor and the collateralization of our future. It is our time, our creativity, our hopes — rendered tradable, then molded by those with the wealth to decide their worth.

When capital chases “intelligence,” it practices a new kind of alchemy: transmuting human thought into speculative gold. Each model is trained on our collective past — our voices, our labor, our words — and returns as something that claims to surpass us. The miracle, we’re told, is that machines can think. The truth is simpler and stranger: they only think because we already did.

We hear from Democrats and Republicans alike that the problem is greed — a moral failing, they say, rather than a structural design. But what system have we built other than one that glorifies it? The billions pouring into AI are not “new money”; they are the residue of our collective labor, recycled into a machine that promises efficiency while eroding the meaning of work itself. Something of value will emerge from this frenzy — just as the dot-com bubble left behind the infrastructure of the modern web — but we should be honest about what these manias are. They are moral decisions disguised as market logic: our shared labor repackaged as profit, our common future traded for someone’s gain.

And yet, without this latest speculative boom, our economy might already be in recession. The market’s vitality depends on its next story, its next frontier — and so we inflate another balloon. In 2024 alone, private U.S. investment in artificial intelligence reached roughly $109 billion, according to Stanford’s AI Index Report 2025, and major firms are now committing hundreds of billions more to AI infrastructure and data centers in 2025. For comparison, researchers estimate that ending homelessness nationwide would cost on the order of $9–30 billion a year; clearing the public-transit repair backlog would require about $140 billion; and cancelling student debt for millions of Americans could cost anywhere from $300 billion (for a $10,000 per-borrower plan) to over $870 billion. These are not impossible sums; they are simply directed elsewhere. The problem is not that we invest in technology — it’s that we do so to avoid investing in one another. We could rebuild public transit, deliver universal healthcare, cancel student debt, end homelessness — all projects of collective possibility — but instead we feed the circus. We reward those who promise salvation through algorithms while punishing those who simply demand dignity through policy. And if AI spend is today’s growth engine, it is also today’s concentration risk — a stimulus routed through a handful of firms, data centers, and supply chains.

The defenders of this frenzy will tell us to look forward — to think of the productivity gains that will surely justify today’s excess. It is, they insist, short-sighted to critique the future before it arrives. But history is not a ledger that balances itself. Productivity gains are not moral gains; they are distributed, like everything else, according to power. The Industrial Revolution doubled output but also deepened inequality. The internet democratized information yet concentrated ownership. Efficiency rose; bargaining power fell.

None of this means progress is futile. Real advances will come from AI — in medicine, in research, in the dull work of bureaucracy. But we should not mistake output for outcome. The measure of progress is not how quickly we can produce, but how fully we can live. Productivity is only liberation when it frees time for care, creativity, and collective flourishing. Otherwise, it is just acceleration — movement without direction, growth without meaning.

Beneath the tent, the showman smiles and tells us we’re having fun — that the chaos is part of the magic. But behind the applause, a quieter feeling lingers: this isn’t wonder; it’s surrender.

I am no Luddite. I believe deeply in using technology to make our lives better — to shorten the distance between people, to relieve us from drudgery, to open time for meaning and care. But that’s not what this is. What Silicon Valley calls “progress” is often a reshuffling of burdens — a promise of liberation whose costs are borne by everyone but the liberated. AI is not inherently the enemy. The enemy is our inability, or unwillingness, to direct its fruits toward the collective good. It is not the code that corrupts, but the context that consumes it.

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani captured this tension perfectly when he told a crowd in New York:

“We have been told that change is not yet quite possible, that it’s not yet our turn… My friends, we are not afforded the luxury of waiting, because too often to wait is to trust those who delivered us to this point.”

What Mamdani calls for is more than political imagination — it is a politics of refusal, of faith made action, of people reclaiming the power to decide what the future is for. The ruling class has merely changed its costume. The bankers became venture capitalists; the venture capitalists became visionaries. The same men who built temples to debt now build temples to data, learning that belief is more valuable than truth. Yesterday they sold us the dream of universal ownership; today, the dream of universal intelligence. Each collapse births a new faith; each failure is repackaged as the next frontier. They call it innovation. We call it déjà vu.

But faith is not imagination — it is surrender disguised as hope. The question before us is not whether AI will “change everything,” but whether we will allow the same forces that profited from the last collapse to define what change means. Capital always finds its next frontier: land, labor, data, currency, cognition. What it cannot reproduce is will — the collective will to direct progress toward the public good rather than private gain.

For all the talk of transcendence, today’s machines are not thinking in any meaningful sense — they are pattern engines, fluent mimics trained to predict what sounds right, not what is true. They interpolate within the past but cannot imagine beyond it. What we call “intelligence” is mostly scale: more data, more parameters, more power drawn from the grid. The result is not cognition but compression — a mirror polished by our own reflections. Yet on this fragile scaffold of imitation, an entire economy of faith has been built, trading comprehension for confidence, and verification for valuation.

And what have these miracles yielded? A torrent of synthetic content and algorithmic noise — tools built less to enlighten than to extract, refining the art of persuasion into a quieter advertising, a subtler surveillance, mining not only what we see but what we think.

Once, technology was sold with the promise of leisure — shorter days, lighter work, freedom from drudgery. No one says that anymore. The language of emancipation has vanished, replaced by the rhetoric of disruption, regulation, and fear. We are told that artificial intelligence might end civilization or save it, depending on who controls the narrative. The result is the same: a politics of panic that consolidates power in the hands of those already trusted to manage risk.

The dot-com boom promised liberation through connection; the financial bubble promised security through ownership; the AI boom promises transcendence through intelligence. Each framed its miracle as inevitable. Each was built on the same moral deficit — the refusal to imagine a world where progress is measured not by valuation, but by how well it meets our common needs.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

The task, then, is not to resist technology but to reclaim possibility — to treat innovation not as spectacle but as stewardship. The resources exist; every crisis proves that when the will is found, the funds appear. The question is not how we will pay for it, but who it will serve.

In the end, every bubble bursts, every circus folds. What remains is the work — the unfinished labor of turning faith into will, and will into the common good.

CommonBytes

This column explores a central question: What should technology’s role be in a world beyond capitalism? Today’s technological landscape is largely shaped by profit, commodification, and control—often undermining community, creativity, and personal autonomy. CommonBytes critiques these trends while imagining alternative futures where technology serves collective flourishing. Here, we envision technology as a communal asset—one that prioritizes democratic participation, cooperative ownership, and sustainable innovation. Our goal? To foster human dignity, authentic connections, and equitable systems that empower communities to build a more fulfilling future.