Behind Control: The Centralized Governance Crisis from Capital to AI

I often hear people say, “Big Techs are just chasing profit.”

Those who say that understand nothing.

The deeper truth is that these giants aren’t chasing revenue, they’re chasing control over models, narratives, and minds.

Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in the world, once said:

“I sleep better now with $2 billion in debt than when I had $50,000.”

Money, for them, isn’t an end in itself, it’s a tool.

If a company loses money every year but gains direct control over its users, their choices, their values, their beliefs, then it’s not failing at all. It’s highly profitable in the only currency that truly matters: control.

1. The Mirage of Money

We’re the only ones who still see money as an end goal.

At higher levels, money is nothing more than an instrument. And more precisely, an instrument of control.

Money hasn’t always played that role. In its early forms, it was simply a means of trade, fruits, vegetables, goods.

Then came salt and spices, more compact and easier to exchange.

Later, precious metals, silver and gold coins, which held real value because of their rarity and utility.

Up to that point, money represented real value.

But then we moved to paper, which had no intrinsic worth, and later to something even more abstract: digital money, data on screens, infinitely printable with a single click.

This latest form gives those who control its creation free access to real resources, water, food, land, and now even time and the human mind.

So when a corporation loses money on paper but gains access to your attention, your thoughts, your behavior, it hasn’t lost anything. It’s trading fake money for real human resources.

2. Data Shows Control, Not Just Profit

Let’s be real, the numbers behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are insane.

But what’s even crazier is that these numbers make no sense if the goal is profit, they only make sense if the goal is domination.

OpenAI generated about $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, with an annualized run rate of $10 billion. Sounds profitable for you?

Except it’s burning $2.5 billion in the same period. For every dollar it earns, it spends $1.60.

It also raised another $8.3 billion in capital, possibly extending to $40 billion. Investors know it’s not profitable, and they don’t care. Why?

Because the goal isn’t a short-term return, it’s to lock the world’s intelligence layer inside OpenAI’s ecosystem.

OpenAI even signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with AMD, not just to buy chips but to secure long-term GPU access, even acquiring up to 10 % of AMD’s equity. That’s vertical domination, controlling the raw compute all future AI depends on.

Take AI as an example, only 3 or 4 companies hold complete dominance over model training.

Building these models costs hundreds of millions, even billions, in compute and data.

Smaller players can’t compete, which gives these same giants disproportionate influence over how every AI “thinks” and “speaks.”

@MTorygreen"">@MTorygreen calls this the AI Monoculture:

“When everyone uses the same few models, online content converges toward the same tone, style, and perspective.”

Beyond filtering out diversity, this system creates a single way of thinking.

It feels as if they don’t want people to think for themselves, to have personal ideas or independent opinions.

They want you to follow the narrative, like obedient sheep.

When you control the models, you control which voices get amplified, which ones disappear, and which ideas become “truth.”

You don’t even need to ban speech, many opinions simply never surface because the datasets and model filters erase them before they’re born.

3. How Control Shapes What We See, Think, and Believe

Because most digital services rely on the same few backbone models, the entire online conversation becomes homogenized.

The tone, the arguments, even what’s considered “acceptable”, all start to match the values encoded by these corporations.

If a model is optimized for “safety,” “risk-avoidance,” or “political alignment,” then dissenting voices or unconventional tones get softened, sanitized, or cut entirely.

This is soft censorship by design.

Tory Green explains it perfectly, we’re no longer interacting with a chaotic, wild internet, but rather

“an echo chamber of corporate-approved responses.”

Smaller developers trying to bring new languages, minority perspectives, or cultural nuance have no chance, they don’t have access to the same compute, data, or financial power.

Put simply, they don’t have access to infinite money printed out of thin air.

We end up not in a world of many minds, but a world of many mirrors reflecting the same mind.

4. The Only Escape Is to Decentralize Intelligence

If the problem is centralized control over models, compute, and data, then the solution must invert it.

The only way out is decentralization, of compute, of models, and of governance.

Imagine GPU networks distributed across thousands of contributors, not controlled by any single cloud or corporation.

Projects like @ionet"">@ionet are already building this vision, communities sharing computing resources accessible to independent developers.

Instead of depending on one giant’s “model to rule them all,” each community, culture, and language could train its own model reflecting its values and worldview.

Tory Green argues for exactly this, thousands of unique, community-driven models instead of one AI monoculture.

These community models would be transparent, auditable, and governed by users themselves, so bias and censorship can’t hide inside corporate black boxes.

Of course, that’s not easy. Competing with these giants requires access to the same resources, and that’s nearly impossible without access to infinite capital.

But there’s another kind of power, collective awakening.

If enough people understand what’s at stake and unite their real resources, energy, creativity, and collaboration, they can build something bigger than money.

It’s difficult, yes. But it’s necessary.

Because if we don’t, the system will only get worse, draining more and more of the world’s real resources.

We’ve already reached the point where even our free will and imagination are being siphoned.

If we don’t fight back now… what’s the next resource they’ll take?

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