CONCEPT
The Potlatch and the Platform
The competitive expenditure of the AI investment landscape reframed as potlatch without redistribution — spectacular destruction of capital that lacks the social obligations archaic potlatch required.
The potlatch — the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, and Haida practice in which chiefs competed for prestige by destroying wealth — appears from market rationality as a pathology. Mauss saw it as a system operating through a different rationality, in which status derived not from possession but from the capacity to destroy without being diminished. The AI investment landscape of 2025–2026 is a potlatch in precisely this structural sense. The major technology companies compete in expenditure rather than profit — training runs costing hundreds of millions, data centers costing billions, compensation packages rivaling startup budgets. The returns are uncertain. The business models have not crystallized. But the spending signals surplus so vast that the destruction itself demonstrates power. What the AI potlatch lacks is what the archaic potlatch possessed: a redistributive mechanism. The Kwakiutl potlatch was competitive but systemic, with rules that circulated resources across the community. The AI potlatch is competitive without redistribution — spectacular capital flows that concentrate value rather than circulating it.
