Every infrastructure technology before AI followed the same pattern. The question is if AI will continue or break it.
Threadbaire is an independent research practice publishing structural analysis of AI infrastructure economics. The work is grounded in direct experience building with these systems (both open and proprietary). Current focus: the economic forces that push AI toward consolidation, the institutional conditions that historically prevented it, and what their absence means now.
By Lida Liberopoulou· All research CC BY-SA 4.0
Available for advisory, research collaboration, and expert consultation.
Every major infrastructure technology before software followed the same path: massive capital, consolidation, capture. The personal computer, independent software, and the open internet broke that pattern because specific institutional decisions opened the substrate before anyone could close it. Part 2 traces the escape and asks what held the ladder in place.
19 June 2026
AI's costs are industrial. Its revenue mechanisms are dissolving. The collision between these two forces is pushing the most transformative technology in a generation toward regression, through infrastructure dependencies, venture capital, startup absorption, and the capture of open source. Part 1 of a series on the economic forces shaping AI.
27 May 2026
The post-transaction layer is where the deepest capture in agent commerce occurs: not through security, payments, or model training, but through the record a service keeps after the agent has acted. The risk is that the vendor becomes the only party that can explain how the work was done.
9 May 2026
The analytical framework centres on the tech infrastructure double bind. It is the combination of the industrial infrastructure costs that cannot be avoided with value dissolution caused by the technology that erodes the revenue base funding the buildout. The work traces this mechanism through historical infrastructure industries (railroads, electricity, telephony) and applies it to AI's current trajectory, mapping how circular financing, platform capture, and institutional voids produce the concentration patterns visible today.
The foundational argument is in the thesis. The blog extends it through the Silicon Industrialists series (a tetralogy on the economic forces shaping AI), the agent web triptych (credential, commercial, and memory capture), and standalone analyses of model commoditisation, labour market effects, and software category economics.
The research is produced using an open methodology for AI workflows (portable context, model-agnostic setups, and receipts-based decision tracing across tools). The method is documented publicly and the templates are free. If you work with AI across multiple models and want your reasoning traceable and your context portable, the method page explains how it works and the templates are on GitHub.
