A One Percent Tax on Nothing

The kid at the next table was showing his friend images his phone had shit out. Not taken. Not drawn. Shit out. There’s a difference, whether anyone under thirty remembers it or not.

“Look at this one,” he said, like he’d actually made something. Like he’d stood in a room with paint under his fingernails and wrestled with a canvas until three in the morning. Like he’d spent years learning how light falls across a face, or what grief looks like when you can’t name it yet.

He’d typed. That’s what he’d done. He’d typed “cyberpunk cathedral” or some nonsense into a box, and the machine had vomited back a thousand stolen brushstrokes from a thousand dead artists who never got a check, a credit, or a goodbye.

I went back to my eggs. They were cold anyway.

Then Mike Pepi showed up with an idea so sensible it almost hurt.

Pepi’s a technologist who apparently still has one foot in the human world. He wrote a piece in The Guardian proposing what he calls a “slop tax.” One percent. Just one goddamn percent on any company that hosts or furnishes this generative sewage. Take that money, stick it in a public fund, and give it back to the institutions and people the machine ate alive. Artists, researchers, museums, libraries — the ones whose work became training data for trillion-dollar companies that now charge subscription fees for what amounts to a funhouse mirror of human expression.

It’s elegant in the way a broken bottle is elegant. Simple, sharp, and probably DOA in Washington.

The numbers aren’t small. AI companies are valued in the trillions now. One percent of that kind of money doesn’t just buy a few extra gallery openings. It buys whole decades. It keeps the lights on in places where real humans still make real things that don’t autocomplete themselves.

Pepi calls what’s happening a “malicious manipulation of human cognitive labor.” I call it strip-mining with better PR. The extraction industry used to wear hard hats and leave holes in the ground. Now it wears hoodies and leaves holes in culture. Same game, different costume. At least the coal companies sent a ham at Christmas. OpenAI sends you a rate limit and a pricing page.

The beautiful thing about one percent is that it’s not enough to scream “punishment.” It’s surgical. It’s the difference between burning the casino down and quietly taking a single chip from every winning hand to pay for the streetlights outside. Less rebellion, more reckoning. The companies can still get rich. They just have to kick a little back to the neighborhood they robbed.

For years the narrative has been that human creativity just needs to “adapt” or “find new models.” As if the problem isn’t that a handful of server farms are monetizing the collective output of the species without paying rent. As if every collapsed newspaper, every broke musician, every shuttered theater is just a natural part of progress, like telephone operators or horse-drawn carriages.

It’s not progress. It’s enclosure. It’s the commons getting fenced off and sold back to us by subscription.

There’s a woman who plays guitar outside the library near my apartment. She’s there most afternoons, even when it’s cold enough to make the strings hurt her fingers. She plays originals. I’ve never heard one of her songs on a playlist because they aren’t on playlists. They exist in the air for a moment, then they’re gone, and the only payment she gets is whatever people drop in her case. Some days that’s five dollars. Some days it’s twenty. Most days it’s pocket change and stares from people who think she should learn to code.

The slop tax wouldn’t fix everything for her. But it might mean a grant exists somewhere. A residency. A program that buys her a winter coat and a month in a studio where she doesn’t have to busk in the sleet to survive.

That’s the human angle, and it’s always the human angle. Not the benchmarks. Not the token counts. The woman with frozen fingers playing something the machine couldn’t generate if it had all the GPUs in the world, because the machine has never been cold, or hungry, or terrified that nobody cares what it has to say.

I finished my eggs. The kid and his phone had moved on to some other miracle. Probably a video. Probably generated too. Outside, through the window, I could see the library steps where the guitar case would be in a few hours, weather permitting.

One percent won’t fill that case. But it’s the first idea I’ve heard in years that admits the case exists.