this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Uber's value-add wasn't in putting black car services on the internet. It was in operating as a universal middleman for transactions between riders and cabbies.
Similarly, Spotify found a way of scamming both media content creators and advertisers at an industrial scale, while propagating a bunch of far-right influencers for the benefit of anti-tax / anti-environment / anti-LGBTQ conservative groups.
It's worth interrogating what the real business model is for any of these services. If you get under the hood of AI, what you're going to find is a lot of CYA applications - the military can cheaply exploit AI to produce fountains of "This guy is a terrorist" data points that help justify the next airstrike, call centers can churn out convincing scam calls more quickly and cheaply than ever before, visual arts studios can rapidly and covertly plagiarize professionally produced media.
These are legalistic tools for evading bureaucratic oversight. They aren't value-add to the retail customer in any way that matters.