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As best I can tell, the über-wealthy believe the world as we know it is ending, that there wont be enough to go around, and that this means they need to accumulate as much money and land as possible in order to position themselves for the end of days. The way they do that is with an induced form of disaster capitalism, where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening right now: Use tariffs to bankrupt soybean farmers, who have to foreclose on their farms so that a private equity firm can purchase the farmland as a distressed asset, then hire the farmers who used to own and work that land as sharecroppers. The über-wealthy, in collaboration with the current White House administration, are engaged in a controlled demolition of this civilization because they realize the pyramid is collapsing and they dont have faith that there will be enough left to feed and house everyone. The best they can do is earn a ton of money, buy a lot of land, control an army, and get people accustomed to seeing that army deployed. Thats what were watching on TV and on our city streets. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/adus-labs-16x9-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/anduslabs.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Douglas Rushkoff and Andus Labs.","dek":"Keep up to date on the latest trends on how AI is reshaping culture and business, through the critical lens of human agency.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.anduslabs.com\/perspectives","theme":{"bg":"#1a064b","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420531,"imageMobileId":91420530,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} It’s no coincidence that AI is emerging at this same moment in our civilizations history. As Lewis Mumford observed, new technologies are often less the cause of societal changes than they are the result. Culture is like a standing wave, creating a vacuum or readiness for a new medium or technology. If we really are at the end of capitalismthe end of this 800- or 900-year process of abstraction, exploitation, and colonialismthen we would also, necessarily, be at the end of the era of employment. I will get to why I think that may ultimately be a good thing, but lets go through the scenario thats running through everyones heads right now, and then find our way through to what I think are better days. The spreadsheet people Yes, AI is coming for our jobs. Not the super-creative ones, or the high-touch human ones, but the ones that maintain administrative control over everything. The majority of your jobs, dear Fast Company readers. All the people in the mortgage departments, the insurance companies . . . the spreadsheet people, the PowerPoint people. Doomers say its 90% of jobs, but lets say its just half of office jobs taken by AIs and, of course, blue-collar jobs taken by robots. The problem with that, from a business perspective, is if you have no employees earning money out there in the world, then who will be your consumers? Even Henry Ford, despite his enthusiasm for fascism, understood that workers commoditized by his own assembly lines still needed to earn enough money to buy a Ford car. But how are AI billionaires going to continue to make money if there are no gainfully employed people capable of buying AI services from themor at least buying products from the companies that do purchase AI services? And this is the weird part; in their vision, it won’t be by selling products to people, but selling stuff to the AIs themselves. It’s a tricky idea, but once you wrap your head around it, it all makes perverse sense. In today’s economy, a small number of wealthy people and corporations employ us and sell to us. They don’t really need to care what species we are, or whether we are human or android, as long as we are producing value for their companies and then purchasing products from them. We already see how AIs can replace us as workers. But how could AIs also become the new population of consumers? They dont have time off to spend money. What do AIs need? To do their jobs better. The humans dont matter Instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AIs so that they succeed in their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AIs will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks, and then spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function. As far as the owners of the companies are concerned, there’s no difference between a population of human employees with whom you have no contact and a population of artificial employees with whom you have no contact. The only game that matters is the competition with the other big companies for the agents business. The humans don’t matter. So, assuming this tech-bro dream comes true, we end up with a small elite of big-business owners living in luxury with a small number of human servants, and a huge population of AIs doing the work and consumption. And, of course, in their vision for how this plays out, the rest of us humans become so disenfranchisedespecially the ones who live in citiesthat we will need to be kept under control until we presumably die out. We are simply not needed. The good news Sounds like a nightmare for most of us, but it also offers clues to an emancipatory vision for the end of employment. So lets consider that good option: For close to 1,000 years, growth-based capitalism has depended on real human beings doing work while a small elite extracted value from that work at ever greater degrees of leverage. In order to get that leverage, capitalism abstracted again and again and again. Each level of abstraction further removed from the people and places actually providing or creating the value. There’s a mineral in the ground. There’s a company mining the mineral, and another company selling the mineral. There’s yet another company investing in the company selling the mineral, there’s a stock company leveraging that investment, there’s a derivative on the stock, and a derivative on the derivative, and a platform trading the derivatives, and so on. Or, more simply, there’s a person who needs to live in a house, but they just rent from someone who owns the house. Thats called the rentier. But the rentier has a mortgage on the house, and pays up to the bank, which pays up to another investor that owns the security, and so on and so on. Thats the pyrmid of capitalism, with each investor or participant trying to move further up and away from the mineral or labor or living person into the abstraction of pure financial instruments. And this pyramid has simply grown too top-heavy to support itself. Theres only so much one can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down. Total abstraction AI, at least theoretically in the minds of crazy tech billionaires who believe AGI is genuinely around the corner, allows them to move on from the employment, exploitation, and colonialism of people, and simply level up in what they believe is a simulation anyway. We humans are discarded as capitalism moves up into a layer of total abstraction. It becomes the video game it was destined to become, with the humans replaced by non-player characters represented by digital icons or NFTs instead of flesh-and-blood mammals. Our real-world economy only had so much stuff anyway. We matter-based entities cant scale as much as they need, so they leave us behind while they move into a layer of total and absolute abstraction. They live in a realm made entirely of digital representations, themselves manufactured by digital agents in exchange for digital currencies. It works because at least the AI agents value that crypto as much as the billionaires need them too. Instead of just 9 billion human customers, they get trillions of AI customers. We are not required. But this is a good thing. Its akin to an enslaved population being released by the owners who no longer have use for them. We were not born to be their employees. As Ive explained in some of my books, the whole concept of employment was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy. In the late Middle Ages, right before this capitalism was invented, people in Europe were starting to do really well. They learned how to make and trade stuff at local markets. They were doing so well that people were only working two or three days a week, and got taller than at any time until the 1980s. Thats when the aristocracy came up with the idea of a chartered monopoly, and made it illegal for people to be in business for themselves. They had to become employees of one of the chartered companies, or face a penalty of death. Thats when we started working for companies instead of ourselves, and ended up in an economy built to favor those monopolies over small businesses. A moment of transition So the end of this scheme is not necessarily a bad thing. We simply have to return to the real economy that isnt worth capitalisms attention. Human commodities like food and housing are no longer asset classes worthy of their time, so theres no point in making growth-based markets for them. We can instead look at them as the commons-based resources they areoptimize for distributed flourishing instead of extraction and profit. Yes, there will still be competition for energy. The AI economy would probably end up needing a bunch of nuclear power plants and better ways of dealing with all those spent fuel rods (if any of that AI scenario even becomes a reality). The current state of the technology doesnt fill me with hope for much more than a fierce market correction. To me, its less important whether it happens than that we take advantage of this moment of transition. The ultra-rich have accepted the end of capitalismor at least the end of capitalism that depends on human labor and consumption for its survival. So its time we accept we are no longer valuable to the capitalist extraction machine and begin to look instead at how we are valuable to one another. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/adus-labs-16x9-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/anduslabs.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Douglas Rushkoff and Andus Labs.","dek":"Keep up to date on the latest trends on how AI is reshaping culture and business, through the critical lens of human agency.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.anduslabs.com\/perspectives","theme":{"bg":"#1a064b","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420531,"imageMobileId":91420530,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
In 2023, Pop-Tarts changed the world of brand mascots forever when it sacrificed the life of a Strawberry Pop-Tart and fed its remains to the Kansas State football team as a reward for winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl game. The weirdly macabre stunt got 4 billion media impressions, and in the eight weeks following the game, parent company Kellanova sold 21 million more Pop-Tarts than in the eight weeks before the game. Riding on that success, the brand upped its ambitions and brought three flavors to the Pop-Tarts Bowl last year, letting the winning teams MVP choose which one was toasted and eaten (Iowa States quarterback, Rocco Becht, picked Frosted Cinnamon Roll). Now Pop-Tarts has announced that its dramatically expanding its edible mascot lineup for the next big game, scheduled to be played in Orlandos Camping World Stadium on December 27th. Six edible Pop-Tarts mascotsthree on Team Sprinkles and three on Team Swirlswill be up for mass consumption, with fans voting ahead of time on which team should be sacrificed. For Pop-Tarts, its a significant jump in both sacrificial anthropomorphic breakfast pastry and the stakes for its brand stunt strategy. Many viewers will undoubtedly be giddy at the prospect of doubling the number of mascots involved, but there’s a cost to escalating the premise so much in such a short period of time: Pop-Tarts is now entering into an unnecessary arms race with itself. When I posed this theory to the brands VP of marketing, Leslie Serro, she didn’t agree. Expanding from three to six edible mascots this year isnt about an arms race; its about evolution, she says. Serro tells me that they concluded after last year’s success that fans have an “insatiable appetite for the playful and unexpected nature of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.” Thus, the doubling down from three to six mascots and “raising the stakes.” To be fair, will I be looking for social clips from the game on the 27th, in that dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s? Sure. Serro’s got me there. But will I feel as sick as if I ate six Pop-Tarts rather than just one (or even three)? Yes. Let me explain why Pop-Tarts, which so brilliantly spoke to the culture two years ago, risks toasting all that goodwill. Mascot Power Its easy to see why Pop-Tarts would want to crank up the mascot machine and get even more brand characters into the game (albeit to kill and eat them). A 2021 whitepaper by the Moving Picture Council found that long-term campaigns featuring a character increased market share 39.2%, compared with 29.7% for campaigns without a character; it also boosted profit gain 34.2% (versus 29.7%). A report by System1 found that 2025 Super Bowl ads with brand characters performed better than those featuring celebrities. For example, an M&M’s 2023 Super Bowl spot starring Maya Rudolph underperformed because people didn’t make the connection between Rudolph and the brand. As a celebrity, she could’ve been selling anything. Scores then soared once the M&Ms characters returned in a second spot. Mascots arent just cute and fun. They create a faster route to being memorable, and being memorable tends to directly influence what we buy. Two key factors in any successful mascot are longevity and consistency. Just think about the lifespan of some of the most iconic mascots: The Michelin Man was created in 1898! Tony the Tiger was born in 1952. Mr. Clean’s mascot came around in 1957. Chester Cheetah of Cheetos fame first dropped in 1986. And the Energizer Bunny started banging that drum in 1989. Both the Aflac Duck and Geicos Gecko have been flogging insurance since 1999. Even Duolingos Duo, often considered a new-wave TikTok darling brand mascot, has been around since 2011. These are brand assets built for the long game. Pop-Tarts is attempting to do something similar. Six months before the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl, the brand unveiled its new cast of characters, the “Agents of Crazy Good, as an update to characters from its Crazy Good ads of the early 00s. The Agents were described as representations of the beloved toaster pastries brought to life, including Frosted Strawberry, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, Hot Fudge Sundae, and a squad of Bites. The ingenious crew come fully frosted and ready to challenge expectations for where the brand can show up next. Funnily enough, in tying the Agents back to the Crazy Good doodle characters from 20 years ago, Pop-Tarts is at least trying to conjure a new history of consistency. (Side note: Bring these ads back!) Beyond Breakfast The original goal of introducing Pop-Tarts as edible mascots, and even sponsoring the college bowl game in the first place, was to expand our purchase intention beyond breakfast and into the rest of the day. To go from breakfast to snack. The brand saw college football as the perfect vehicle to take that message. The edible mascot came about as the brand knew it had to contend with a laundry list of branded College Bowl games, each with their own brand mascot gimmick (Dukes Mayo dumping mayonnaise on the winning coach, or Kellanova sibling Cheez-It’s mascot Ched-Z officiating a wedding during a game time-out). 100% real love at first bite!Congrats to our newlyweds for tying the knot! #CitrusBowl pic.twitter.com/jhHq1H3nd7— Cheez-It Citrus Bol (@CitrusBowl) December 31, 2024 According to Serro, last years Pop-Tarts Bowl drove nine times more share of voice than 20 other non-Kellanova Bowl games combined, a 275% increase in social engagements versus 2023, and the highest brand search in more than 15 years on game day. The brand also sold millions more Pop-Tarts in the month following the game than the month before it. The brand could have stuck with the single edible mascot for a few years, then slowly, methodically, year after year, started adding more characters and concepts. In my opinion, this would build more familiarity, anticipation, and, by extension, enthusiasm. But where do we go from here? If its 6 edible mascots this year, do we jump to 10 or 12 in 2026? When will the numbers game cease? Maybe it goes full Bud Bowl, and we have two full football squads of Pop-Tarts on the field playing for the right to be enthusiastically toasted and devoured. Glorious. To be clear, I love this idea, and it’s a prime example of a marketer cleverly finding “white space” in a saturated marketing landscape and eventizing something, seemingly out of nothing. In that way, it’s kindred to FanDuel’s “Kick of Destiny” work in the last three Super Bowls. It also turned things up a notch, going from Rob Gronkowski as a single kicker during a live commercial break to Peyton and Eli Manning facing off in a special pregame show. Both 2024 and 2025 attracted about 2 million participants on FanDuel, so the evolution appears to have worked. With Pop-Tarts, the edible mascot barely became a tradition before it was hurriedly super-sized and multiplied. As a result, Pop-Tarts may have just bitten years off the gimmicks lifespan by so quickly feeding into our cultures insatiable appetite for newer, bigger, now now now. Its a reflection of a broader issue in brand culture, where marketers are churning through ideas so quickly that nothing is given the time to become truly iconic. Its also possible the brand needs to cash in its Bowl hype on a short timeline, given it signed a one-year title sponsorship deal for 2023, then exercised its two-year extension option last year. Serro wouldn’t provide details on whether the brand will extend its Bowl investment beyond this year. “While we cant share much just yet, lets just say we love football and the way it brings fans together,” she says. But based on its popularity so far, and if they play their breakfast pastry cards right, the horizon for edible mascots could be incredibly long. They could star in ads, and then dip into real life as pop-culture nomads, showing up at any given extravaganzastate fairs, movie premieres, music festivals, the Super Bowluntil the end of time. Lets face it, with a yearslong legacy like that, the people would . . . ahem . . . eat it up, and we’d have the Energizer Bunny of deliciously suicidal brand mascots.
Category:
E-Commerce
This week, politics, memes, and protest movements kept colliding with the economy, turning everything from Black Friday shopping to stock charts into a referendum on power and attention. Investors who spent the last couple of years riding AI and crypto gains are getting a reminder that gravity is still in charge, as once-screaming-up charts now introduce terms like death cross and profit-taking. Retailers are heading into the holidays knowing that some shoppers are planning not to spend at all, on purpose. And on the cultural front, a single insult from the president is now ricocheting around social networks, while a local New York election is being framed as a national story about socialism, faith, and economic justice. Here is what actually moved the week in business. Housings long plateau: Moodys maps a decade of flat real home prices Moodys Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi expects the U.S. housing market to spend the next decade slowly working off the excesses of the pandemic era, with prices rising roughly in line with inflation and no real gains once you adjust for it. After the massive run-up in prices and the mortgage rate shock, he sees existing home sales staying frozen for years as affordability gradually improves. Moodys projects nominal home prices will climb about 23.5% between December 2025 and December 2035, with modest declines likely in parts of the South and West and more stability in the Northeast and Midwest. Zandi also points to long-term headwinds like restrictive immigration that could limit construction labor, and to higher Treasury yields that may keep mortgage rates closer to 6%. Quiet, Piggy turns into a meme war the president cannot control A clip of President Donald Trump saying Quiet, Piggy to Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force One went viral and quickly turned into a memetic insult aimed right back at him. Users on Bluesky and X are now quote-posting Trump and his allies with the phrase, often pairing it with unflattering photos or AI-generated images of Trump as Miss Piggy or yelling at Miss Piggy. The reaction taps into Trumps long record of calling women pigs, dogs, and slobs, and his years of attacking journalists in order to discredit negative coverage. That history makes this latest jab feel especially juvenile and very on brand, fueling frustration that fellow reporters did not push him harder in the moment. XRP sinks as profit-taking and macro fears hit crypto again XRP, the token tied to Ripples XRP Ledger, has dropped to around $2.13, more than 26% below where it was three months ago and well off its July peak of $3.65. The decline comes even after the launch of three XRP exchange-traded funds, including Canary Capitals XRPC, which has already fallen about 11% as large holders reportedly sold 200 million XRP within two days. Analysts say the pullback is part of a broader risk-off mood as investors worry about a possible tech and AI bubble, economic uncertainty, and the odds of future rate cuts. Bitcoin is under similar pressure, recently flashing a death cross that has reinforced bearish sentiment and wiped out its gains for 2025. Epsteins Bubba email becomes NSFW merch and a headache for platforms The release of more than 23,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate documents has spawned a wave of NSFW Trump-and-Clinton-themed merchandise on Etsy and Amazon. Sellers are zeroing in on a 2018 email in which Epsteins brother jokes about photos of Trump blowing Bubba, a line that has sparked online speculation about the two former presidents, even as both deny any wrongdoing and the documents do not explicitly implicate them. The email has become fodder for T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and other items built around suggestive slogans and winks at Big, Beautiful Bill. A few designers have pushed into more creative or graphic territory, including artwork styled after the film Brokeback Mountain. Netflixs 10-for-1 stock split shocks casual chart watchers, not investors Netflix shares appear to have fallen more than 90% on some charts, dropping from over $1,100 to around $111. But the move comes from a 10-for-1 stock split rather than an actual collapse in value. For existing shareholders, nothing fundamental has changed, since each old share was simply divided into 10, and holders received nine additional shares for every one they already owned. Netflix says the goal is to make shares more accessible to employees in stock purchase and option programs, where a four-digit price can be a psychological and financial barrier. Lower nominal prices can also make the stock more approachable to smaller retail investors who balk at four-figure tickets. Holiday boycotts aim to turn non-spending into a political weapon Two overlapping campaigns, Mass Blackout and We Aint Buying It, are calling on Americans to sit out Black Friday and the surrounding shopping days to protest Trump-era policies and corporate alignment with them. The Mass Blackout boycott urges people to stop shopping, streaming, and even working, if they can, from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through the day after Cyber Mondaywhile still supporting small, local businesses with cash. The We Aint Buying It boycott focuses on Target, Home Depot, and Amazon, citing everything from DEI rollbacks to alleged cooperation with ICE and tax cut lobbying. Organizers frame the actions as economic noncooperation in an economy where the wealth gap keeps widening and the system works for the wealthy by design. Bitcoin’s death cross deepens anxiety, makes token roughly flat for 2025 Bitcoin has fallen from October highs above $124,000 to around $94,000, giving back its year-to-date gains and putting the token firmly in bear market territory. The slide has been accompanied by a classic technical warning sign known as a death cross, when short-term moving averages drop below longer-term ones on a chart. That pattern has added to fears that the current downturn could deepen, even as some analysts note that previous death crosses have lined up with local bottoms rather than full-scale collapses. Other cryptocurrencies are followingsuit, with a major market index down in line with Bitcoin over the past week. The broader backdrop is a mix of profit-taking by long-term holders, institutional outflows, and macro worries that make speculative assets a tougher sell. Zohran Mamdani becomes conservative medias new favorite villain New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has not taken office yet, but conservative media has already cast him as its latest symbol of everything wrong with the left. Commentators on Fox News, Newsmax, and elsewhere have called him a communist, a Marxist, and a jihadist sympathizer, often blurring the line between socialism and communism while attacking his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and his Muslim faith. The New York Post ran a string of attention-grabbing covers about him ahead of the election and is now monetizing those images as merch, further cementing his role as a polarizing figure. Right-leaning outlets describe Mamdani’s agenda as fundamentally at odds with American values, while progressive watchdogs say he is being used much like Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were before him, as a stand-in for the entire Democratic Party. Verizon cuts 13,000 jobs to reorient around customers Verizon is laying off more than 13,000 employees, roughly 20 percent of its non-union management workforce, as part of a major push to streamline operations and free up money to invest in customer experience. In a memo to staff, new CEO Dan Schulman said the companys cost structure has become a drag, creating friction that slows Verizon down and frustrates customers. The carrier reported about $33.8 billion in third-quarter revenue and continued growth in prepaid wireless subscribers, but it is losing higher-value postpaid lines and facing intense competition from AT&T, T-Mobile, and others. Alongside the layoffs, Verizon plans to sharply reduce outsourced labor and has created a $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund to support affected workers. Techs roller-coaster week leaves investors dizzy Thursday turned into a full roller coaster for tech investors. Nvidias blowout earnings pushed its stock up nearly 5% early in the day and briefly lifted the entire Magnificent Seven, thanks to better-than-expected revenue, strong profit, and a bullish fourth-quarter forecast. But fears of an AI bubble and fading confidence in a December Fed rate cut quickly erased those gains, sending the major tech names and the Nasdaq composite into sharp intraday swings. By Friday morning, rate-cut odds had risen again, and several of the big players were inching back into positive territory, even as Nvidia slipped.
Category:
E-Commerce
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