Caitlin Johnstone

Jun 10, 2026

Reading by Tim Foley:

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One reason AI is being pushed so hard is because it’s the last “humanity can capitalism its way out of all its problems” narrative that has yet to be fully discredited.

The idea is that if we can just create AI gods and let them come up with the effective-yet-profitable innovative technological solutions to our various existential crises that our own fleshy brains have so far failed to produce, then we don’t need to dismantle the socioeconomic system we built that is destroying our biosphere and driving us to our doom.

Embedded in this logic is the same baseless assumption that has been plaguing us this entire time: that there are effective-yet-profitable solutions to be found. That we can simply let the free market deliver us desirable products that will both (A) cause us to stop cannibalizing our ecosystem and (B) create billionaires and trillionaires. Capitalism hasn’t provided any innovations that have allowed us to consume our way out of our problems thus far, but because we’ve got these complex new AI technologies now, we can allow ourselves to move this entirely faith-based assumption into the purview of our new gods.

But that’s just it: it’s an assumption based on blind faith. There is no reason to believe we’ll ever come up with technologies that are conducive to human and environmental thriving which also happen to generate shareholder profits. Generally profits are generated by producing and consuming more products, which is exactly what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

What this means is that capitalism has no ability to solve the problems we’re coming up against as a species. There is no way to compete and consume our way out of the hole we dug through competition and consuming.

We need new systems. Human behavior cannot continue to be driven by competition and the pursuit of profit. We need to move into collaboration with each other and with our biosphere if we are to survive into the future as a species, and we will be unable to do this if we are excluding all possible solutions that don’t generate revenue for the capitalist class.

AI is for many people just a psychological box that allows us to avoid facing this uncomfortable truth, because as Mark Fisher said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It’s easier to imagine billionaire tech companies creating AI gods who will serve us up magical solutions to our urgent existential dilemmas which also facilitate continued economic growth than it is to imagine moving into collaboration-based systems where human behavior isn’t driven by the pursuit of profit.

But that’s just a sign of how insane our species has become. It’s a symptom of our collective madness.

We need to wake up. We need to get real. It’s adaptation or extinction time for us as a species, and that fork in the road is approaching very quickly.

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