Long before journalist Matt Taibbi self-cancelled because of woke and landed on the same ice floe as Louis CK, Russell Brand, Armie Hammer, et al, he wrote a great book with a great title. 

Griftopia, published in 2010, was a forensic analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and the bailouts that followed. He placed the blame, rightfully so, on a “tiny oligarchy of extremely clever criminals and their castrato henchmen in government."

Some critics derided the book as being hyperbolic but those critics were what is known as “morons.” Hyperbolic refers to dramatic exaggeration. If anything, Griftopia was dated by its naive underselling of the scope, scale, and seriousness of the wholesale fraud that now comprises the entirety of the U.S. economy. 

No, really.

The U.S. economy, in 2026, is a Stage 4 cantaloupe-sized tumor on the verge of going septic. You wouldn’t know that by looking at our GDP, which tops the scales at $32.38 trillion. But that’s a fantasy number buoyed by the AI ponzi scheme. Remove AI and you’re looking at a flat line. Not good for a capitalist economy that depends on infinite growth. Flat lines are associated with death for a reason. 

Is it fair to paint the entire AI industry as a ponzi scheme? Yes, it is. It’s not just that AI loses money. A lot of our biggest tech companies lost money at first. The problem is that AI loses MORE money the more you scale it up. That’s bad. When more users means less profit, it’s impossible to grow yourself out of a hole. 

And yet that’s exactly what they’re ostensibly trying to do. Thus the data centers. Data centers are loathed for good reasons. They kill small towns, drive up energy costs, further damage an environment that already baking humanity into oblivion, they’re fucking ugly as fuck, they make horrible noises, but worst of all, they don’t actually do anything worth a damn.

Why don’t we have nuclear fusion plants? Because the energy put into making them, then running them, is greater than the energy they produce. And so it is with data centers. They are necessary to scale up AI but they also make AI prohibitively expensive. And every new data center widens that gap. 

They also make AI less desirable. Young people loathe AI. Hate it. And data centers are a big part of why that is. Corporations, meanwhile, after aggressive early adoption and sweeping layoffs — because fuck the working man that’s why — are suddenly realizing what should’ve been obvious to anyone who’s ever had a Google search ruined by Gemini’s bullshit: AI is more expensive and less productive than actual human employees. Oops. 

So what was all that bullshit? A big dumb mistake? A dangerous gamble made by greedy idiots? Well, yes and no. Because a lot of the industry’s worst perpetrators knew just as well as you and I that AI wasn’t for shit. But they also knew they could convince a LOT of people to invest heavily in it if they made enough ridiculous empty promises with a straight face. So that’s exactly what they did. 

You’ve seen that biopic about the tech CEO, right? You know, the one where a young hustler touting a paradigm-breaking disruptive technology makes a shit-ton of money super fast but then it turns out the technology was bullshit and they go to jail for fleecing investors? You know the one I’m talking about, right? 

No you don’t because I could be referring to one of several dozen biopics released since the mid-00s. And yet nothing has changed. This is just how business works now. There’s nothing real left to sell. So fortunes are made by selling nothing for as long as you can before getting caught. 

No one embodies this approach better than the World’s Richest Man, Elon Musk. His offensively large net worth is owed entirely to him making empty promises he well knows he can’t deliver on. Tesla, for instance, is an unprofitable third-tier car manufacturer with declining sales, no new products, and a rogue CEO who insults his core customers daily on the social media platform he owns. And yet its valuation dwarfs that of real companies that make real cars that people actually want to buy, such as Ford Toyota, etc. Huh? What? How is that even possible? Because said rogue CEO has convinced investors that he’s a Tony Starkian billionaire genius who’s going to dream up some paradigm-breaking disruptive tech, even though that’s not something he’s ever done before, and it’s going to make them infinite profit. What is that paradigm-breaking disruptive tech, you might ask? Don’t worry about it. Maybe it’s a robot. Maybe it’s Mars something-something. Just know that it’s coming, eventually, some day, and you’ll be the first to know about it when it’s ready to go. 

Elon makes the tech grifters from all those mid-aughts biopics seem almost noble. At least they had names for the fake products they were grifting people with. Elon meanwhile has managed to get by with “trust me, bro.” And I’ve yet to hear anyone offer any explanation as to why. 

My theory is that admitting Elon is a fraud would mean admitting that EVERYONE is a fraud. There are no real companies anymore, at least not ones that are experiencing actual growth. Capitalism has hit its ceiling and all that is left are the lies we tell ourselves. The lies are the thin line between staying afloat and complete collapse.  

AI is the current lie du jour, but it’s not the only lie. Remember Crypto? Prediction markets? NFTs? Subprime mortgages? POGs? None of these things had any value beyond the fact that people could be convinced they had value. Well, except POGs, because you could at least play a game of bottle caps with POGs. What game can you play with crypto? Count the fake money in the fake bank? 

But the fraud goes beyond economics. That hip indie band everyone is talking about? Nepo babies buoyed by store-bought social media manipulation. The Tiktok trend that your annoying alpha kids won’t stop talking about? Strategic data mining dreamed up by marketing companies. The hip young politician promising to fix this broken system? Bought and paid for by PACs and lobbyists.  If you’re not cynical, you’re not paying attention. Or maybe you don’t want to pay attention. Maybe you’d rather eat that steak dinner with Cyper while the AI nanobots turn your flesh husk to goo. I mean, I get it. But at the same time, I don’t get it. We’re not helpless. We’re not batteries yet.

Maybe lean into the cynicism for a change.