The world's largest
marketing campaign.
free admissioneveryone is payingrunning since 2022 ยท cannot stop
Spent on the campaign since you arrived
$0at roughly $400 billion a year
What is being advertised
Not a product. The models are real and often astonishing; that is not what the campaign is selling. It is selling a number: the next quarter's capital expenditure, which is booked as growth, which justifies the next quarter's capital expenditure. Money leaves as investment and comes back as revenue, and both directions get counted. That is not a business. That is a lap.
Asked what the return on investment is, the company that has sold the most shovels so far pointed to the usefulness of AI. Useful is a feeling. Nobody has ever paid rent with one, and for usefulness there is no receipt.
Why it cannot stop
Because the spending is the message. The moment the buildout slows, the story slows, and the story is what the market is pricing. So the campaign continues past the point where anyone can find the customers it was supposed to create. It is the largest marketing campaign in history and also the most desperate, and those two facts are the same fact.
The way out is not a bigger billboard
Music was in the same place in 2003: a miraculous technology, infinite supply, an industry suing its own users, and total collapse of willingness to pay. What ended it was not a campaign. It was one person who found the unit, the moment, and the price. Ninety-nine cents. Either someone finds a way to make people gladly pay, or the campaign runs until it cannot.
The long version, with the receipts: 99 cents. That's all it took.
Some campaigns sell a product.
Some things are worth building.
This message was brought to you by the Worth Building Institute: a catalogue of small futures, zero forecasts, no capital expenditure. None of them need a campaign. Every one of them needs a person who wants to be there.
see what's worth building →the meter runs at roughly $400 billion a year, the current pace of hyperscaler capital expenditure, converted to seconds. figures rounded. the phrase belongs to Ed Zitron, who counted the money before anyone else would. no usefulness was harmed in the making of this page, and none was invoiced.