I’m not a Leninist by any means. But on a mass scale, the need to grow for a Capitalist economy? Manifests itself in ways Lenin described as “Capitalist Imperialism”. If you only reach one chapter, the author says that’s Ch7, which becomes a short essay.

Lenin Argues against Carl Kautsky’s assertion that such a prospect looks like grabbing Land. Lenin argues that Capitalism needs no such political arm directly, only ownership of the economy by a foreign body. Eventually investment capital runs out of fertile ground at home and must find new markets to control.

As Russia’s economy stagnated, and the room for investment dried up, much of Putin’s moves were to open other countries to Russian Finance Capital. When that failed, taking new land became the fallback for having new oil and shipping investments. Not just land, but resources as Kautsky discussed.

And here Doctorow breaks down how that looks for single firms in monopoly or oligopoly, specifically in the tech sector, and its drive to constantly " invent new markets". A perfect compliment.

That’s what these data centers are - Empire. They will swallow your ability to compute. Moderate it. Control it. Direct it towards only their ends. Because at the end game, the most value extraction comes from not simply selling you a product, but selling you as a product to other businesses. Enshittification will continue until you can out-bid the corpos for your data sovereignty. Reverse Centaurs are easy to train, replace, and shift. Centaurs? Require actual investment, giving the worker some power.

The need for control? Emerges organically from the consequences of noncompliance. In both the puppet-state in response to its international industrial overlords, or its alternative in direct management by a foreign state. The money must flow, the growth must happen, or the party is over for much broader than their own dinner table.

The growth must happen, or the very laws of a market crush the entire society down to well below this peak. No more growth stocks in growth industries, just cutthroat competition from the same corpos that keep out upstarts… Until some shock ruins somebody’s bag, and we get a chance at something interesting like the tech sector used to be.