1.5 trillion gone up in smoke: AI discovers that value cannot be decreed

According to Mediapart, more than $1.5 trillion in stock-market value tied to artificial intelligence has evaporated in two days. The paper sees the "third warning from the markets" about a possible AI bubble, and notes that the tech giants are not spared, which particularly worries investors. The dispatch does not detail which stocks were hit, the precise causes of the fall, or any possible rebound. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First remark: "evaporated". The word is convenient. It suggests a weather phenomenon, when these billions were never cash in a vault, but expectations of future profits, capitalised by buyers of shares. This is what the Marxist tradition calls fictitious capital: a title of ownership over future revenues, whose price floats according to bets. When the bet changes, the displayed value changes too. We are told that markets are "worried" or "punish" companies; this is classic fetishism, where things do what people, fund managers, banks and shareholders, decide they should do.

Second remark: the core question is not the fall, but what preceded it. Companies in the sector have invested colossal sums in computing and production capacity, in the hope that demand would follow. If it does not follow fast enough, we arrive at the mechanism described as the tendency to overaccumulation: each competitor produces and invests more than the market can absorb at a satisfactory rate of profit. We are not saying this is what is happening here; the data is lacking. We are saying it is the right question to ask, rather than "investor sentiment".

Third remark, the most useful: who pays? In the history of crises, the bill rolls downhill. Wealthy shareholders lose figures on a screen, often after having pocketed capital gains; employees, for their part, risk restructuring, wage freezes and redundancy plans. The profit of the tech giants rests on labour, that of engineers but also, less glamorously, that of content moderators, delivery riders and data-centre workers, part of whose time goes unpaid. It is this surplus value that must then be made to justify inflated valuations. When it is not enough, the adjustment passes through jobs, and the threat of unemployment is then used to discipline those who remain.

We should therefore watch less the next index than the next announcements: layoffs after a "disappointing" quarter, public investment to cushion the shock, calls for wage moderation. If the state rushes to the rescue of balance sheets, the socialisation of losses will have been, as so often, faster than the socialisation of profits.

For now, the only solid fact is this: 1.5 trillion in promises has receded in forty-eight hours. The work that fed them, meanwhile, has not disappeared.