AI Is Rabies for Capitalism

On AI, Labor, and the End of the Moat

Consider the frothing grimace of a raccoon in your headlights.

Maybe you stop. Maybe you don't. But the visage of the raccoon — the white-hot rage in its eyes, the white froth teasing the corners of its mouth? That part you remember.

And most importantly, you remember that if you have symptoms of rabies, you're already dead. You just don't know it yet.

The capitalist system, in an ironic twist of fate, has become so unstable that it now fights anything that gets close to it. Like the raccoon in your headlights, you're saddened, but you knew it had to come sooner or later.

AI is rabies for capitalism.

Let me explain.

For millennia, the currency that powered society was labor.

Someone needed to make the butter to feed everyone. Someone else needed to make the guns to protect everyone. The sum of all human trade systems — from the ancient rite of kings to modern market-based capitalism — has been about the division of labor.

Humans are primates with more complexities and depression. Our needs must be met: we must eat, sleep, feel safe, self-actualized — pick your pyramid and your theorist, the answer is the same: labor is expensive.

The other thing about people is that we're absolute shitgoblins when it comes to doing things equally. We find ways to distinguish "value" — cleaning a toilet? Not valuable. Building the right app at the right time? One of the most valuable things a human can do in capitalism.

And it's been a good system, overall. It took us to the moon. It ushered in an industrial revolution that gave us the highest average standard of living human beings have ever known. And it got us Pokémon, and iPhones, and a fight about what pizza is legitimate. All in all, a win.

Has it been equal? No. But it got results. And now we can all see the foam at the edges of its grin, the anger, the hydrophobia. The zombie-ness of it all — that nothing will stop the rich and powerful from putting the boot on your neck. After all, they have the people and resources to bury you.

But AI breaks a core assumption of the market: that labor is necessary and, furthermore, expensive.

A rabid animal does not go gentle into that good night.

A mammal infected with rabies becomes compelled to do everything in its power to spread the virus as effectively as possible. Hydrophobia keeps the animal from swallowing, pooling virus-laden saliva in the mouth and increasing the chance of infection from bites. Hallucination and aggression — caused by the virus eating your prefrontal cortex — encourage the mammal to fight against anyone who tries to help them.

It thrashes.

It bites.

It infects.

A rabid animal doesn't know it's dying. It just knows something is wrong and it needs to bite harder.

That's what I see when I look around.

Platforms locking down APIs. Studios suing over training data. Publishers tightening licensing on works that weren't selling anyway. Communities clamming up to protect their own artists. Companies laying off thousands while posting record profits. Everything getting more expensive while the cost of production craters.

There is no strategy. There is only rabies and ruin, all the way down.

Here's the thing nobody in an economics class will tell you.

The people running the systems — the executives, the boards, the institutional decision-makers — they were trained in a world where scarcity was the law. Where you got rewarded for locking things down. Where "moat" was the highest compliment a business model could receive.

So when the ground shifts under them, they don't pivot.

They double down.

More extraction. Tighter control. Higher walls. Bigger legal teams.

Not because it works. Because it's the only move they know.

I'm a writer. I've watched the publishing industry for years.

For a brief moment on the internet, having a keyboard and something to say could make you a good living. I had many friends who made their living in the early blogging era as journalists, content writers, sensitivity readers, podcasters, chief-happiness-officers, the whole nine.

And then: enshittification. We stopped caring about caring, and started caring only about extraction.

Every industry does this. Every single one.

The cost of production drops
Incumbents tighten control instead of adapting
Extraction increases even as value delivery decreases
Small players route around the walls
The walls get higher
The routing gets easier
Eventually the walls don't matter

We're somewhere around step 5 right now. Maybe step 6.

It occurred to me this weekend that I haven't "played" with a new app or computer thing in about a year. Which for someone like me, who grew up with a keyboard under their fingers, feels strange to say.

But it's true. Computers are no longer interesting to me. They're trucks I use to shovel context into and out of LLMs.

Why would I think of anything else? Why learn someone's app when the LLM can get me 90% of the way there? And if I want something, I build it. Custom, built to order. Like the bad old days, when you could program little apps to help you do basic things like "Roll 7000 dice and produce a probability table."

This Is Why Everything Feels Predatory

You ever notice how every service you use got worse at the same time?

Streaming services raising prices and adding ads. Social platforms choking organic reach to sell it back to you. Banks charging fees on money they're already lending out at interest. Insurance companies whose entire business model is finding reasons not to pay.

It's rabies, friend. Rabies and enshittification and loneliness and a deep feeling that something is wrong, rotten at the heart of it all, and you can never put your finger on it but it itches your heart and shakes your bones.

When your moat starts draining, you don't build a better castle. You charge more for the drawbridge.

Here's where it gets ugly.

Rabid systems don't just extract more. They start eating their own.

Companies laying off the people who build the products. Platforms banning the creators who drive their traffic. Industries lobbying for regulations that protect incumbents at the cost of the market they depend on.

It's auto-immune. The system attacks itself because it can't tell the difference between a threat and its own body anymore.

This feels like a zombie movie, right? But let me leave you with some hope.

Rabies is terminal.

Not in a dramatic, overnight, everything-collapses way. But in a directional, structural, the-math-stops-working way.

You can charge more for the drawbridge. But if someone builds a bridge next door for free, eventually people stop crossing yours.

You can lock down your API. But if someone builds an open alternative, your lock becomes your prison.

You can sue over training data. But you can't sue physics. You can't sue math.

What Comes After Rabies

I keep getting asked this. "Okay, capitalism is breaking. What replaces it?"

And I keep giving the same answer: I don't know.

Nobody does. And anyone who tells you they do is selling something — probably a subscription.

But I know what it feels like on this side of it. It feels like building things that shouldn't be possible. It feels like one person doing the work of ten, not because they're exploited, but because the tools are that good. It feels like the gap between "idea" and "thing" shrinking to almost nothing.

It doesn't feel like a revolution.

It feels like the revolution already happened and most people haven't noticed because they're still arguing about the drawbridge.

Look at the discourse.

"AI is stealing jobs." "AI is plagiarism." "AI is the end of creativity."

Those aren't arguments. Those are bite marks.

That's the sound of a system that built its entire value proposition on scarcity realizing that scarcity is evaporating — and lashing out at the thing making it evaporate instead of asking the harder question.

Some of us are worth a lot. Our taste, our judgment, our ability to see what matters — that doesn't go away when production gets cheap.

Some of us were only worth what the gate charged.

And that's the part nobody wants to say out loud.

I'm building for a world where access isn't the product. Where my ideas are worth their weight in gold because the barrier between idea and execution is a couple of markdown files.

Where value comes from what you do with the tools, not from controlling who gets to use them. That's where the future comes into focus.

The system isn't dying gracefully.

It's going rabid.

More extraction. More control. More walls. More lawsuits. More fees. More friction. More of everything that used to work, applied harder, faster, and more desperately.

And on the other side of all that thrashing?

People are quietly building things. Shipping things. Creating at a scale that makes the walls irrelevant.

The rabies will run its course.

What comes after isn't a new system imposed from the top. It's a million people who stopped waiting for permission — building the future in the gaps between the bite marks.