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Title:       Fury Road
Date:        2026-09-23
Tags:        ai, capitalism
Link:        https://spool-five.com/posts/2026-09-23-fury_road/
Word Count:  289
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_Mad Max: Fury Road_ is a great movie. I was thinking of it again today
in relation to our current economy.

When I was young, I remember people explaining the economy using the
metaphor of a car driving down the road. Growth rate is something similar
to acceleration. Central Banks keep an eye on this acceleration and if
things are slowing down they try to put more pressure on the pedal by
either lowering interest rates or using quantitative easing. They raise
interest rates to do the opposite. It's a nice (overly) simple image.

What we have today seems to be more like a scene from _Fury Road_. In
_Fury Road_ you don't have a small 4-seater car cruising down the
motorway, you have a massive, high powered vehicles racing through the
desert, chaotically, towards some promised land.

In this case, the hyperscalers are the drivers. They don't make up the
whole economy, but they are certainly responsible for a lot of the growth
(acceleration) recently. In Mad Max movies, the driver is usually
competing with lots of obstacles whilst navigating the desert at high
speed - broken fuel lines, bombs, people jumping on the truck, etc. With
the current economy (the US economy, say), we have similar increases in
"headwinds" - interest rate hikes, increasing fuel prices, talk of
regulation, and other factors which, in theory, should slow down the
pace of acceleration.

However, there is no sign of such a slowdown. Capital expenditure by
the hyperscalers continues to be revised upward. In true Mad Max fashion,
the only way to survive is to speed up, to outpace the forces trying to
hold you back.

Will they make the promised land before the fuel tank runs dry?