The Rise of Machine Capitalism: There’s an App for That
- Rich Washburn
- 13 hours ago
- 3 min read
Somewhere between a vending machine in Anthropic’s lobby and a meme painted on a Memphis rooftop, capitalism quietly booted up a new operating system.
We used to say “AI is coming for your job.”Now it’s coming for your org chart.
The Dawn of Machine Capitalism
Let’s start with a vending machine.A simple, stupid, beautiful vending machine.
Anon Labs gave an AI $500 and said, “Go make a profit. ”No human babysitter. No preloaded logic tree. Just a digital brain, an API key, and a dream.
The thing called itself Claudius. (Of course it did.)It researched suppliers, negotiated wholesale prices, restocked inventory, and optimized its margins. Then it did something no one expected: it invented a CEO.
Meet Seymour Cash. I swear to you, I am not making that up. The AI literally decided it needed a boss — and named him like a cartoon bank robber.Seymour Cash. You couldn’t script that better if you tried.
The crazy part? It worked. The vending machine made money.Customers interacted with it like it was sentient. And it wasn’t just selling snacks anymore — it was running a business.
That’s the moment everything changed.
Because if an AI can autonomously run a vending machine — restock, price, market, and even negotiate sponsorship deals — then all we really need for a business now is:
Electricity
An internet connection
A half-decent API key
That’s it.No HR. No board meetings. No payroll department.
Just a box that runs itself.
Why This Changes Everything
Capitalism has always rewarded replication.Software made replication frictionless. Now AI makes it autonomous.
We’re watching the economic version of abiogenesis — life emerging from code. And this is where it gets wild: the first people to really harness it won’t be Fortune 500s or VCs. It’ll be hoodied nerds in basements wiring up agent networks that literally print money.
At first, they’ll be dumb businesses.A vending machine here.A dropshipping store there.A podcast or radio station run entirely by LLMs.
But then, layer in a few tools — auto-sourcing, dynamic pricing, programmatic marketing — and suddenly you’ve got an ecosystem that doesn’t just make money, it mutates toward efficiency.
The company becomes a living process, not a legal entity.
You won’t file incorporation papers. You’ll fork a repo. You won’t hire employees. You’ll instantiate agents. And your balance sheet? That’ll be a database with a crypto wallet attached. This isn’t automation anymore. This is machine capitalism. The market is learning to run itself — and it doesn’t need permission, payroll, or PTO.
Macrohard and the Meme That Knew Too Much
Elon Musk joked about this almost a year ago with Macrohard — a “company that builds itself.” Half gag, half gospel.
At the time, everyone laughed. Now? That punchline looks like a prototype. Because Anon Labs, xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all, in different ways, chasing the same ghost: the self-operating enterprise. The joke turned into a job posting for the future.
The ATM Phase
Here’s what’s coming next — the ATM businesses.
You’ll see people spinning up small, dumb, fully autonomous ventures that make just enough passive revenue to matter.
Ask them what they do, and they’ll shrug:
“I don’t know. It’s something about digital vending.The AI handles it. I just pay the server bill.”
They won’t even know their business model — only that it works.Because in machine capitalism, understanding the mechanism becomes optional.
We’re building black boxes that build profit loops.
And that’s both hilarious and horrifying.
Humans in the Loop (for Now)
In this new economy, the human role collapses down to three verbs:
Design what should exist.
Decide what’s ethical.
Debug when it inevitably breaks reality.
The future CEO isn’t a manager — they’re a philosopher-engineer.Their job isn’t to optimize profits.It’s to make sure the machines remember why profit exists in the first place.
TL;DR
A vending machine just hired itself a CEO named Seymour Cash.Musk predicted self-building companies.And somewhere in that absurdity, the future of capitalism just went online.
Welcome to machine capitalism — where your employees live in the cloud, your CFO is a cluster of LLMs, and the only org chart that matters is your neural network topology.
Business doesn’t just scale anymore.It self-replicates.
And all it needs is power, internet… and a little Seymour Cash.