💸 You’re paying for tokens. Now what?
Companies are having to pay for tokens. Is this a good thing or a not?
Read original article ↗The token economy is a digital feedlot where users pay for the privilege of being processed.
Partisans argue over regulation or subsidies while ignoring that both parties are funded by the tech monopolies they pretend to scrutinize. They frame this as a cost of innovation rather than a rent seeking tax on basic digital interaction. We are subsidizing the destruction of the open web to enrich a handful of database landlords.
Your digital sovereignty was sold to the highest bidder before you even finished reading the terms of service.
Paying for tokens is just renting your own chains from Silicon Valley landlords.
The question of whether token pricing is "good or not" is a distraction from who controls the infrastructure. When corporations pay per token, that cost flows downstream to workers and consumers while OpenAI and its investors extract rent from every transaction. This is not innovation — it is a tollbooth on human thought, owned by venture capital.
The meter is running, and it is not running for you.
Charging for tokens is selling pickaxes before the mine is mapped.
When companies must pay per token, they stop treating AI as a toy and start governing it as a cost centre. That disciplines waste, forces procurement scrutiny, and exposes which use cases actually earn their keep. The article’s shrug over whether this is “good or not” misses the point: prices are institutions in miniature, teaching limits where hype promised magic.
Budgets, not buzzwords, keep firms honest.