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‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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I mean certain parts of this article indeed seem stupid, but some minor statements give away the game in ways I wish were more clear to every day people.
This shit should be shouted from the fucking rooftops even without AI in the picture. Our entire economy is a house of cards built on rent-extracting through introduction of pain points that may not have previously existed. Creating a problem and selling a solution.
It's honestly laughable because it means on some level the investors reading this are absolutely aware that this is what they do and they are fucking fine with it. They think making things harder and extracting money from people for it is a good thing. Fucking ghouls.
Doordash isn't rent extraction though, and is a system that benefits from a singular platform. That doesn't mean Doordash is the best implementation of that service, but the example isn't good.
Doordash absolutely is rent seeking, though. Restaurant operators are paying the rent—for being furnished with SaaS services that used to just entail calling the restaurant and placing a takeout/delivery order. Nevermind the SaaS platforms restaurants have to pay for in order to integrate their SCM software with the ordering apps.
We used to call to order a pizza. Now, both the restaurant and we—the consumers—pay various abstracted-away "fees" to have a middle man do the same fucking thing.
The restaurant doesn't "own" the software, and it doesn't "own" the data produced by its day-to-day operations. They pay to have third parties warehouse and manage their sales data for them, and sometimes even sell that data back to them for additional fees.
Delivering food has a cost and is a service. Before things like doordash you could only get delivery from select locations, by creating a network of drivers you can now get delivery from most restaurants.
Does doordash exploit people and restaurants, yes. However, providing a delivery service is not rent seeking there is something being offered.
What fucking stupid, late stage capitalist, Pollyanna codswallop. Wow.
DoorDash doesn't provide a delivery service. They don't pay delivery drivers to deliver, they don't provide vehicles, benefits, or even consider drivers employees. People pay DoorDash for access to use their software/platform to receive requests from customers for delivery services. DoorDash offers a series of contract plans in which a driver pays fees for various tiers of DoorDash acting as a payment processor, can opt for a per-job rate reductions to guarantee a "base job rate" (without any guarantee of jobs assigned), and are otherwise uncompensated for "non-active" time.
The exploitation comes in the form of a monopolized rentier platform. In the same way that you might pay a landlord for access to a space to rest your pretty little head at night, restaurants and drivers pay premiums for access to a digital space to market services to one another. DoorDash doesn't make anything other than software, and you can't even "buy" DoorDash's software.
Instead of creating value through the production of goods, DoorDash acts as a digital landlord that extracts surplus value (rent) from both restaurants and laborers by controlling the digital infrastructure necessary for exchange.
Just like a landlord, DoorDash owns the digital "land" (i.e. the application, algorithm, and user interface) connecting customers, merchants, and workers.By controlling this infrastructure, DoorDash acts as a tollbooth. It charges restaurants a high commission fee (ranging from 15% to 30%+) for every order. This fee is a form of monopoly rent, where DoorDash takes a portion of the restaurant's profits simply for allowing them to access customers, similar to a landlord extracting rent.
DoorDash does not cook the food or directly employ the delivery workers as staff (again, they're "contractors", which DD has lobbied heavily to ensure). The restaurant produces the value (the food), and the driver performs the labor of delivery. They are a glorified phone service, however convenient or "neato" you might think they are.
Right, I agree that DoorDash is a bad example, I was just pointing out that the article makes some clear points about how our economy is organized and the investor class panicked not because they realized our economy is a house of cards built on unnecessary friction, but rather that they might have that house of cards taken from them.
It's rent seeking from their own agents by having them take care of the depreciation on their vehicles instead of the corporation. Still not a perfect example, but it's still a type of exploitation