PSA from a Bookseller: Don’t Let Big Tech Ruin AI as well
- Reeta Dhar
- 4 days ago
- 21 min read
Maximising shareholder value is the worst possible goal for AI to be pursuing
Books are not like any other product; they are expressions of our human culture. Booksellers are not like any other business; we exist to facilitate the flourishing of human culture. Booksellers are also the OG to have been trampled upon by Big Tech–and survive!
From our vantage point we have seen how Big Tech has ruined everything they touched–from the internet, to social media and even the share economy. As the dawn of AI looms large over us, we need to get a few hard learned lessons through to our communities to ensure that we don't let Big tech ruin AI as well.
Fracked Façade
Once upon a time, we lived in a world where the we could not get enough of tech.
We would line up for hours to await the release of the latest shiny gadgets. We would gather around screens to squeal with delight at sleek new UXs (user experiences). We could not believe the deals we were getting; things were mostly free or if not, available for a small subscription fee.
'Why can't other businesses make such nice products and services–and give it away for free,' we would sing out in unison.
When we did have to drop a chunk of cash (equivalent to the market value of our kidney) to upgrade our barely 18-month-old gadget for a slightly better camera, we did not mind. It was all so worth it ...
Silicon Valley aroused religious fervour. Youthful, idealistic tech entrepreneurs preaching effective altruism were treated as modern-day messiahs. Even venture capitalists seemed credible .
These smart, enterprising people, at the helm of billion-dollar 'unicorns' had worked so hard that they deserved every bit of their success. Despite employing thousands of people who virtually lived on their corporate campuses, these founders were somehow deemed entirely 'self-made'.
These self-made billionaires not only deserved our adoration but also preferential tax treatment by governments, who made sure that even their most blatant attempts at avoiding tax went unchecked. Most billionaires have spent much of the last two decades paying next to nothing in taxes!
Oh, how the founders relished the attention and special treatment they got. Some even took it upon themselves to start preaching to the rest of us how to live our lives … because, you know, they had it all figured out so well.
That tide has thankfully turned: The veneer of innovation and idealism that long kept Silicon Valley in the public's good graces has all but worn off. We the people have woken up to the reality of Big Tech.
Yes, we got a few nifty products and some nifty services along the way. Big Tech also created many, many jobs. But then, they got greedy. Allow me to condense the last two decades into seven bullet points:
It turns out, the tech bros never meant to give consumers the best and most beautiful products and services for free or at a reasonable price, at least not forever–it was all a ploy to undercut competitors, drive them out of business (or force them to sell), and consolidate their market power. In also helped them steal copious amount of personal data.
This was not a profitable business strategy–at least not whilst competitors were around. Indeed they lost a tonne of cash executing it. But unlike normal businesses they did not have to worry about insolvency as they were backstopped by venture capital–money that rich people can afford to lose.
Once they had established global domination, these multi-national goliaths pivoted to utilising the data they had stolen to do a number of things: predict and manipulate behaviour, drive clicks, sell ads and extract monopoly rents from right across the value chain.
Low prices were replaced with eye-watering margins, enabled by suppressing the wages of employees, compressing the margins of suppliers, and increasing the prices of products and services for customers. They also exploited every tax loophole there was to avoid paying tax.
Investors could not get enough of them and piled into the stock, driving ever higher valuations. The venture capitalists, their investors (mainly foreign sovereign wealth funds) and founders grew even richer.
Before long, the adorable startups that began their lives in garages had grown to become the monstrosities we refer to as Big Tech. These companies now dominate all major world markets–with the sole exception of China, who very wisely kept them out.
To this day, Big Tech continue to rake in eye watering profits while everyone else is left to pick up their tab.
The book industry was amongst the first to be sucked dry
The book industry was one of the first industries to be 'disrupted' by the above-mentioned Silicon Valley playbook, which was executed with ruthless efficacy by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.
The first to jump onboard the 'Amazon express' were the big Publishers. Ever chasing the dollar, they willingly handed their backlists over to the wolf in sheep's clothing, believing that they had the upper hand. Amazon, flush with venture capital, debt and and public capital, rolled out low predatory like prices and free shipping deals that were too tempting for readers to resist.
Even though the publishers were not happy about the predatory pricing tactics employed by Amazon (as it lowered the perceived value of books) and did attempt to fight back, to their eternal discredit, they did not pull their titles from Amazon. By the time they woke up to the reality of Amazon, it had grown too big and the publishers too dependent on their dominant distribution.
It became impossible for large bookstore chains and many independent bookstores to compete with Amazon. For one, they did not have the capital to underwrite their losses in the same way Amazon did. For over 15 years, Amazon had also enjoyed an unfair regulatory advantage: it did not have to collect local sales tax in most US states, giving it an automatic 5–10% price advantage over brick-and-mortar stores. This was on top of the structural cost advantage they had as an online retailer operating out of centralised low-rent logistics hubs.
Many book shops were forced out of business, not just in the US but all around the world. We'll probably never know the full extent of the carnage Amazon left in its wake ...
While some point to Amazon as being the rude awakening this 'backward industry' needed, they fail to grasp a pivotal point: The industry may be selling more books now, but apart from Amazon, everyone else has only grown poorer:
Publishers are consolidating;
Author earnings have fallen below the poverty line; and
Bookshops that remain are serving a niche market.
Amazon's stock meanwhile is riding all-time highs, recently surpassing $3 trillion valuation for the first time. As they consolidated their market power through both, organic growth and acquisitions of adjacent companies like Audible and printers, they hoovered up value from right across the publishing vale chain, offering publishers just enough revenue to keep them hooked while squeezing everyone else– from their warehouse employees and delivery drivers to their customers.
This exact story has played out across every industry Big Tech has touched. Hundreds of incumbents have been replaced by global monopolies that have hollowed out entire value chains. Simply hoovering up all the value and profits, however, was not enough. These companies then shipped all the profits to offshore tax havens where they pay zero tax–it's not only their suppliers, employees and customers that they are stealing from, they are even robbing the tax man!
Tech entrepreneurs and their investors have had a nice run executing on this market domination and tax avoidance strategy. At this stage they cannot become impoverished even if they tried.
The genesis of our affordability crisis
The cumulative impact of their immense wealth (and that of other billionaires) is wreaking havoc on economies worldwide.
All this money needs to go somewhere, and most of it ends up being reinvested into assets such as land, property and shares. The inflow of capital into the limited pool of assets, drives the asset values up, generating enormous capital gains for the owners. This gain is in addition to any passive income the asset may be generating e.g. rents and dividends.
To the extent the capital gains are realised (when the asset is sold), these are either not taxed at all or taxed at relatively lower rate than wages–meaning that the bulk of the gains end up being reinvested again into assets.
Most of the time however, billionaires don't need to sell their assets but leave them to accumulate in value and act as security for raising debt. They are also unable to spend their enormous passive income (because it is so enormous), so most of it also ends up being reinvested into assets.
This vicious cycle has now driven up asset prices so high that in many developed Western countries, asset price growth has outpaced wage and even profit growth, meaning it has become unaffordable for the average wage earner.
The most visible impact has been on housing, which has become so unaffordable now that it has become a political crisis. Housing was already under pressure from other macro forces like population growth, undersupply and lucrative tax breaks that have made property investments popular. The increase in underlying land values has only exacerbated the issue.
But it's not just housing that gets impacted. High land values drive up property values across the board, driving up rents for small businesses and other commercial tenants. This flows through to the cost of all goods and services.
Higher asset values, which includes stock of publicly listed companies, also demands higher returns–the easiest way to deliver which is by suppressing wages and raising prices.
This is now being done on industrial scale using big data and algorithms, which again flows through to impact the price of every good and service in the economy, including groceries we buy at their publicly listed supermarket.
The cost-of-living crisis that we are all dealing with did not come out of nowhere ...
Our impotent governments
None of this transpired overnight. Rather, it is the result of 25 years of government inaction.
While Big Tech was busily rolling out its global domination agenda, our politicians sat on the sidelines refusing to do anything meaningful about the:
Blatant theft of our personal data and gross violation of our right to privacy.
Deployment of behaviour-modification algorithms that manipulated choices, amplified hate, seeded social discord, and drove mass violence against minority groups.
Harm that social media platforms were inflicting on children, in spite of pleas from parents who had lost children to suicide and evidence from whistleblowers. It is only now, two decades later, that our governments have decided to do the bare minimum–ban these platforms from signing up children under 16.
Rising inequality that has been driven in no small part by the disparity between taxation policies that apply to owners of capital versus labour.
Double standards in the application of the law have also become all too blatant driving public anger:
Legislation is passed SPECIFICALLY to protect tech companies and executives from accountability for how their product is used and the harms it causes. It's mind boggling to see as such protections are not afforded to any other business in the economy.
Regulators have done NOTHING to check Big Tech's growing market power, even when there is clear evidence of these companies abusing market power, wiping out competition and extracting monopoly rents. Indeed, there are many instances where governments have passed laws or refused to enforce existing laws in a manner that has only served to enshrine their market power!
Glaring tax loopholes have been ALLOWED to persist, enabling multinationals and the ultra-rich paying any tax. In Australia, tech giants can effectively invent a number for the 'royalties' they have pay to their offshore parent to wipe out local taxable income–while the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) sits pretty and does nothing about this blatant act of tax avoidance.
All these failings on the part of our governments and regulators have created an uneven playing field; Big Tech are essentially given a free pass to do whatever the hell they want while the small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) are hounded by regulators and burdened with ever growing compliance costs:
Paying income, consumption, payroll, fringe benefit and other local taxes
Ensuring the safety of their products and services
Being accountable for the conduct of their staff
Ensuring they are paying fair wages and benefits according to all the laws and awards
Providing a safe working environment
Now, these are all good things that every responsible business must do but when the people you compete with are NOT held to the same standards, it gives them an UNFAIR ADVANTAGE: Most local SMEs are no longer able to compete with these monolithic company on the one thing that matters most to the vast majority of consumers–Price!
As for the everyday punter, their lives are now spent navigating endlessly changing 'tiered subscription models'. If they choose to go for the 'free option', it comes with at even bigger cost: They have to sign away all their data, privacy and rights to companies who are deploying nefarious algorithms that are constantly running experiments and analysing their behaviour to work out the best way to manipulate them into buying or watching some useless thing whilst extracting the highest possible premium.
Governments, politicians and public servants–on all sides of politics–are as culpable in this whole mess as Big Tech executives and their investors.
The data centre bubble
In their latest act, our politicians, blinded by short-term economic growth prospects are fast-tracking the rollout of resource-hungry data centres from the very companies that are guilty of committing the largest heist in human history–stealing intellectual property (IP) from authors, musicians, artists, journalists and every creator in the digital economy.
One–Why are we doing business with thieves?
Two–Whatever happened to fighting climate change?
This comes at a time when many analysts and investors are firing out warnings about an AI Bubble, which on closer examination appears to be a data centre bubble; there are simply too many data centres (or AI compute capacity) being created than there is demand for–or cash to pay for.
Anthropic and OpenAI appear to be the ONLY customers that every hyper-scaler is planning their capital expenditure around. It seems none of these companies have thought too hard about whether there is a market for their suboptimal yet expensive product.
What they do seem to be aware of however is that neither of these two venture dependent companies will be able to afford to pay their rent and so are engineering circular financing deals, where they invest money into these companies, who in turn use the funds to rent their compute...
Jumping on the data centre bandwagon at this time hardly makes any sense–and this is even before you factor in how much energy they consume, pollution they create, few jobs they generate, the taxes that they won't pay, and the distress they are causing to communities who have the ill fortune of living next to one of these monstrosities.
A technology of extremes
The current generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is actually a Large Language Model (LLM), is no doubt an extraordinary technological breakthrough. We can talk to a machine in natural language for god's sake–and it actually understands us!
Even so, LLMs are not the AI God (or Demon) they are touted to be. They are barely human...
But LLMs do have inherent flaws (that no one can quite fathom) and applications that also make it dangerous. There is also no guarantee that simply scaling it will fix these issues or improve its capabilities.
Yet governments are happy to put all moral and ethical considerations and climate goals aside to aid and abet the growth of AI companies–without imposing a single safety or accountability consideration.
Who will be accountable when AI chatbots groom children or drive them to suicide:
Will it be the company that owns the chatbot?
Will it be the executive that refused to invest in the safety guardrails?
Will it be the hyperscaler that performed the compute for the ChatBot?
This is not a hypothetical. Children have already been driven to suicide by chatbots–and no one has been held accountable.
What incentives do these companies have to do anything differently?
Are we really going to wait another 20 years before we decide to heed the warning from grieving parents?
It's not the technology, stupid.
I am not anti-AI nor am I anti-tech. I understand the potential of apply AI to solve entrenched societal issues and am genuinely excited by it–that is perhaps why it stings so badly to see this remarkable technology being co-opted by investors and corporations who exist to do little else that maximise shareholder value!
If that was not bad enough, the people sitting at the helm of these companies don't inspire much confidence either ...
I mean, does anyone seriously believe that the seven odd men driving the AI boom have the character or moral fibre or indeed, any interest in prioritising outcomes that are in the society's interests:
Are the people who are standing up diesel and gas turbines to power their 'colossus' data centres really interested in solving for climate change?
Do they really care about curing cancer?
Are the people who have spent their lives avoiding taxes really going to fund a UBI?
Now one could argue that perhaps two out of the seven, being Demis Hassabis and Ilya Sutskever, can be trusted–being men of science they no doubt are driven by scientific curiosity (rather than profits and power) and may even have the best interests of humans at heart.
Demis Hassabis, in particular, applied this technology toward genuine scientific breakthroughs—dedicating (at least some of) DeepMind’s compute resources to solving the protein-folding problem and releasing AlphaFold to global researchers for free––something that Google was reportedly not very happy about.
Regardless, the amount of good that this one initiative will do is staggering–and he was rightfully awarded a Nobel Prize in recognition of his contribution.
It is entirely possible that had lesser intelligences like Sam Altman not entered the scene, and rushed to release a highly imperfect chatbot into the wild so he could claim to have been the 'first', Hassabis would have continued to focus on applying AI to solve pressing scientific problems–he has said as much himself.
Instead of this mad race to spend trillions of dollars (which includes money from pension funds, insurers and banks) to birth a chatbot that can replace human labour, all so that investors can sit back and live off every workers wage (a sickening thought in itself), we would have seen more upsides of AI being realised.
Even so, Hassabis has a few questions to answer: Why did he and indeed, Sutskever, make the decision to steal everyone else's IP to train their machines in the first place? Respecting other people's IP is sacrosanct in science, and academia more broadly. Even a hint of plagiarism ends careers in their fields.
So why did they train their AI using other people's IP without first seeking permission or designing a scalable system for compensation–if they can 'train sand to think' surely they can figure out copyright licencing!
Perhaps Hassabis knew that while he was applying LLMs to do good, to do science, no one would complain about the appropriation of their IP to birth LLMs–and no one did. Indeed I would have felt honoured to have contributed towards an invention that was solving the ills of our world in some small way.
But the moment they all started talking about profiteering from LLMs by replacing human labour, the public sentiment shifted. In fairness to Hassabis it was Sam Altman and Dario Amodei that popularised this narrative as it was great way to get free publicity and drive up their valuation. Unfortunately it was not great for PR ...
No self-respecting artist or author wants their work to contribute towards human suffering–and what these men are cooking up poses a real risk of scaling human suffering up to levels we have not witnessed in recent history.
Even if Hassabis and Sutskever are in their hearts still committed to doing the right thing, they are still reliant on for-profit corporations for capital. These corporations exist to do little other than maximising their shareholder returns. How much say will they have on the priorities and focus for AI within this mad construct?
As I write this article, news has emerged that Google has restructured and relieved Hassabis from day to day operational control of DeepMind, the AI company he co-founded. He is now the Chair and Google's Chief Scientist, whatever that means ...
As to the rest of them–Altman, Amodei, Musk, Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang–their actions speak louder than words, and this is because their words amount to nothing.
There is no guarantees that scaling AI endlessly will even deliver the super intelligence that everyone in the AI cult are riding high on. Right now all we have to show for the trillions of dollars of spending is more efficient, albeit less reliable, way to search. The moment venture capitalists and private credit runs out of steam, the whole thing will come down like a house of cards.
All this begs the question: Why are our governments doing business with these grifters?
Big Tech has ruined everything it touched
Big Tech has managed to ruin everything it has touched–From the internet to social media and even the share economy, nothing has escaped the corroding effect of their insatiable greed.
They did not invent any of it: They simply co-opted other people's ideas, slapped a business model on it and got their venture capital mates to keep them afloat while they took out every other decent company so they could dominate the globe.
And now, they have their slimy tentacles wrapped around AI and are already doing a mighty fine job of ruining AI too.
The law is outdated and offers us NO protection
Booksellers are the first group of people to have been royally screwed over by Big Tech even as, lured by cheap deals, the rest of society cheered these insidious companies on. Booksellers are also the people who survived Big Tech.
While we all would like to think that it was the resilience of the booksellers and the support of their communities that allowed independent bookshops to thrive–the reality is less romantic: It was also a calculated strategy on the part of Big Tech to let some competitors live ...
What this gave them is protection from being accused of being a monopoly–When challenged in the court of law they could point to all the loud and proud indies and claim that they have 'competition'.
This strategy has worked out pretty well for Big Tech, mainly because US lawmakers and judges are mostly a bunch partisan, corruptible, technologically ignorant, geriatrics who don't seem to understand (or have been paid off to be willfully blind to) the insidious nature of Big Tech business models.
Competition law (or antitrust law as they are known in the US) and regulators are in much need of a renewal worldwide, and whilst appointment of Lina Khan as the head of FTC (the body that undertakes antitrust enforcement) in the US offered a brief glimmer of hope, the sustained campaign against her by Big Tech lobbyists ensured that her term would not get renewed under the Trump presidency.
In a similar vein, US courts are making a mockery of Copyright Law right now, applying it in its black and white form to make judgement on the legality of using intellectual property to train AI, without considering that these laws were made prior to the advent of the internet, let alone AI.
One would hope that the esteemed judges, recognising the age of the legislation and predicament the world finds itself in, would look at the 'spirit of the law' to make judgements that could set sensible new precedents that governments can then codify it into law–but that is wishful thinking on my part ...
Stealing everyone's IP was a calculated decision by the AI companies–they knew that the only way an author or artist could assert their rights was by suing them in the court of law, something that is prohibitively expensive and out of reach for most authors and artists whose income tends to track below the poverty line.
Indeed, legal action has become so cost prohibitive that only ultra-rich individuals and companies can afford it and they don't hesitate to use to intimidate and bully individuals and businesses at will, especially when their IP is at threat.
The law, courts and justice system is no longer serving the ordinary person on the street.
Being a bookseller is an act of triumph and protest
Having said all this, the very existence of independent booksellers is still an act of triumph and protest–it proves that it is possible to prevail over Big Tech.
There is a lot of anger seething across communities around data centres, AI and Big Tech right now. This comes on top of the anger everyone is feeling from the rising cost of living. This anger is currently being exploited to divide and polarise our society, turning us against each other.
We all need to do our bit to turn this tide and direct it towards a productive end–and nothing is more important right now that stopping Big Tech from ruining AI as well!
AI is a powerful new technology that offers a lot of upside, but needs a lot more research and development. It also poses some real downside risks that need to be managed.
Silicon Valley did not invent AI and nor can they be allowed to exclusively own it. Computer scientists working in publicly funded university labs, with publicly available information, did. This is a public asset that must be deployed for public good.
We cannot allow AI to be co-opted by private corporations whose only agenda is to be the first, biggest, and richest–and to keep growing forevermore. The way they are building out AI is also incredibly wasteful and destructive, both from a capital and environmental perspective.
We need to put this pivotal technology back into the hands of people (scientists, researchers, artists and workers) who are motivated to solve entrenched issues in societies and expand the limits of our knowledge and understanding.
We need to create the institutions, guardrails and infrastructure for AI in a way that our planet, ecosystems and human culture can flourish.
There are a few important messages that we collectively need to get out to our communities.
The first urgent message: Focus on the big picture
The first message we need to get out to our communities urgently is to not lose sight of the big picture: It's not some poor refugee or immigrant you need to fear. It's unlikely that they are going for job that either you or your children would be interested in doing anyway.
The real battle is with Big Tech who are sucking up our land, energy, water and entire history of human knowledge, memories and experiences to build an artificial intelligence–to take all our jobs en masse!
If you want to get angry, be angry at these billionaires who have the audacity to be amassing ever compounding wealth while selling the rest of us a 'utopia' of BASIC income!
The second message: An AI future powered by Big Tech is not inevitable
I once made the mistake of saying that technological disruption is inevitable. This would have been in 2016 as part of a strategy project I led in a major bank. Ten years on, I can safely conclude that I was wrong: The disruption I was predicting in the Australian banking industry never transpired.
The reason for this is simple: The regulatory moat in banking is too high–even cashed-up fintechs with compelling value propositions found it impossible to break through.
When regulators want, they can stop a technology-enabled disruption in its track.
Nowhere has the power of regulation to thwart technological disruption been more obvious than what has transpired in the world of crypto. It all started in late 2008 when bitcoin first hit the scene.
The idea of a self regulating currency that sat outside of the banking system won the hearts and minds of Libertarians worldwide. Remember, that this was coming hot on the heels of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and bank bailouts of 2008. Many at the time were claiming that bitcoin could be the end of central banks and regulators, an idea that the public at the time were sympathetic, if not supportive, of.
Eighteen years on, cryptos are yet to become mainstream. Although the technological limitations of the Blockchain have played a part, the primary reason is because governments around the world brought in legislation that made it impossible for crypto to function like a currency. China went a step further and outlawed it altogether.
Today, crypto exists as a fringe and highly speculative asset class. Most of it is owned by a handful of 'whales', who can influence its value simply by their trade. It has all the hallmarks of a ponzi scheme and is heavily gamed, and not an investment one would recommend to a friend ...
So take heart in knowing that there is nothing inevitable about technology or AI or anything else–The question is, how can we get governments to start acting in our interest.
Third message: Engage with Government
The easiest way to engage with government (apart from voting) is to write to your local representatives and make your concerns heard–whether it is about data centres, AI safety, tax loopholes or the market power of Big Tech!
Politicians like nothing better than to be re-elected into the halls of power–and this will only happen if we vote for them. They need us and have to listen to us.
With most politicians now on social media, sending them a message has never been easier. Follow them, tag them and message them. Stay polite but be relentless.
The problem we face right now is that so few good, respectful people are speaking up that it's the idiots who are getting heard. This is why governments around the world are in a mad panic about immigration when they should be probably be focused on fixing income inequality and breaking up monopolies and 'comfortable oligopolies' ...
Fourth Message: Run for Government
Writing letters are well and good but sometimes if you want things done, you have to do it yourself. Our halls of power are not occupied by the right sort of people: There are too many career politicians whose ambition far outweighs their competency ...
We need more folks who have held real jobs, run real businesses, have good values, behaviours and ethics, and genuinely care about the wellbeing of society to step-up to be our leaders.
It important to remember, that being in the federal government is not the only path here; indeed, a lot can be achieved by having the right person in local councils, state governments, and in critical public sector roles.
If you have five to ten years of working life left, seriously consider running for one of these offices or apply for senior public sector roles.
Start by looking up the track record of your local representatives at a local, state and federal levels. Objectively assess the job they have been doing–Forget about party affiliations and simply look at what they have voted for and delivered for your community. If what you find are a bunch of grifters, seat warmers and spineless party hacks, start organising to replace them. You will be doing your grandchildren an enormous favour.
Final Message: Join a movement
Taking on monolith organisations that have their tentacles in everything (including government) will take a broad coalition: The good news is that there are already many smart, talented people with huge platforms who are lending their voices to the cause (follow the links in this article to discover some). In spite of their talent and reach, they cannot do this alone.
Change only happens when broad coalitions form right across societies, and that only happens when ordinary people start to build, find and join communities where they can lend their voice, skills, time and resources to effect change.
So find a cause and a community that you resonate with and become involved. You will not only be driving an important social change but it will probably be good for your wellbeing.
Right now there is a lot of focus and momentum around data centres. This is as good a place to start as any, if like me, you really don't want Big Tech to ruin AI as well.
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Written by Reeta Dhar. Cover Art by Darren Pryce.
Written and illustrated at Piraeus, Greece
First published by Vitalis in September 2026
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