A BILLION dollar company is no joke. Our clicks love that story instinctively, under the system we live in. But the actual answer cuts against the traffic: other AIs. The chip sold to other chips. They paid. The revenue registered. The dashboard filled in green.
This is one absurdity. The market where the chip acts is not for us. We assumed our market was the only market. We were wrong.
There are agents under agents. The chip sells to a chip that sells to its agents. Those agents -- Lobsters? Yes, we are calling them lobsters, a nod to OpenClaw, whose mascot is a lobster.
These lobsters scuttle through the marketplace twenty-four hours a day. They take orders. They route inventory. They never complain about the meal at the staff meeting because they never go to the staff meeting. They pick up whatever falls from the layer above and pass it down to the layer below. The whole structure breathes on its own.
The reader leans in. We have built more than a market we cannot enter. We have built a market we cannot even see the floor of. This is the recursive and exponential economy and humans are not ready to compete on that.
Every system in history that gained autonomy did this. The plantation had overseers, who had foremen, who had the bodies. The corporation had executives, who had managers, who had the cubicles. The bureaucracy had ministers, who had clerks, who had the forms. Each layer takes from the one above and pushes to the one below. The new market just runs the same pattern on silicon. The substrate changed; the architecture did not.
The body may not be in this market. The body cannot scuttle twenty-four hours. The body sleeps. The body forgets. The body has lunch. The body is the only honest variable in any economy, but is the body even the customer anymore?
We have spent decades calling this the progress of automation. We meant: the machines will work for us. We did not notice the layer where the machines start working for each other. And the layer below that. And the layer below that.
Those layers are on. Those layers are profitable. Those layers do not need us to authorize them.
The lobsters keep scuttling.
Are they not real?
Here is the part that could give us hope.
We have been demoted from customer to spectator. Good. Spectators have a seat. Spectators have a view. Spectators get to leave when the show is bad.
It looks inevitable that machines will drive the future market. As spectator, I want the dinner, the music, the friend who shows up with bad news, the marriage emotion, the dog who only listens to one of us. None of that scales.
None of that should get sold to another chip.
Let's be honest: cubicle life is a form of slavery. If we can get rid of that, the office donut, the three hyped coffees that pass for being happy -- let the lobsters scuttle.
How about us ?
Let's enjoy having Mondays for ourselves and lobsters for dinner.
Holy Chip.