P106/4 The post on X
P106 In the countdown, week 5
#6on SlopHits
End the Markup
“Aonic: An AI-Native, vertically integrated Amazon - we welcome agents, and are up to 5X cheaper.”
- By
- @maxjmeier on X ↗Max Meier
- Views
- 3.2M views on X
- Length
- 2:28
- Posted
- Oct 15, 2026
- Duels
- No duels yet
P106/2 Lyrics & meaning
What it’s about
An advert in song form for Aonic Club, set in a 1971 supermarket. A shop announcer greets shoppers with 36-cent gas and a jetpack on the shelf, and recalls a time when one paycheck bought a house and the dollar was tied to gold. Then "something happened in seventy-one", shown with Nixon on a wall of TVs and a gold window marked temporarily closed. The chorus blames the markup: thinking got a thousand times cheaper, yet milk keeps getting dearer and self-checkout kiosks ask for tips. The answer is to let the machines do the math. On screen an agent terminal negotiates with suppliers and a receipt shows a markup of zero. The closing card says Aonic introduced Aonic Club on 13 October.
Video by @anabology for Aonic. Posted on X by @maxjmeier.
Names and terms
- Aonic Club
- The post describes Aonic as an AI-native, vertically integrated Amazon that welcomes agents and is up to 5x cheaper. The video's closing card says Aonic introduced Aonic Club on 13 October, signed "End the markup."
- Gas is 36 cents
- The average US retail price of regular gasoline in 1971 was about 36 cents a gallon. The sign in the video shows 36.4 cents.
- Good as gold
- Under the Bretton Woods system, foreign governments could exchange US dollars for gold at 35 dollars per troy ounce. The video's caption "$1.00 = 1/35 oz" refers to that rate.
- Seventy-one
- On 15 August 1971 President Richard Nixon suspended the conversion of US dollars into gold, ending the dollar's link to gold. The video shows Nixon on TV screens and a shuttered gold window marked "temporarily closed".
- We were promised flying cars
- A common complaint about the gap between mid-century visions of the future and what arrived. Founders Fund put it in 2011 as "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
- Too cheap to mark up
- A play on "too cheap to meter", from a 1954 speech by Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, about electricity from nuclear power. The video shows that headline crossed out and rewritten as "too cheap to mark up".
- Where we're going
- Back to the Future (1985) ends with Doc Brown's line "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." The video adds the film's 88 mph and a gauge at 1.21 gigawatts.
- We're all gonna make it
- Internet slang from crypto communities, often shortened to WAGMI, meaning everyone will come out ahead. Here it follows "we took the future back".
End the Markup: lyrics
IntroAttention shoppers, it's 1971.
Gas is 36 cents and the sky is blue.
These prices expire in a minute or two.
Verse 1Blue sky over the parking lot.
Bubblegum from the penny slot.
A jetpack waiting on the shelf.
A future you could buy yourself.
One paycheck bought a house, I'm told.
Back when a dollar was good as gold.
We were promised flying cars.
Then something happened in seventy-one.
ChorusEnd the markup, it doesn't add up.
Let the machines do the math.
Take the future, take it back.
Verse 2The kiosk's got no hands but wants a tip.
There's more air in the bag than chips.
Thinking got a thousand times cheaper.
So why's the milk still getting steeper?
BridgeAttention shoppers, welcome to Aonic Club.
Where we're going, there's no markup.
ChorusEnd the markup. Too cheap to mark up.
Let the machines do the math.
We took the future back.
We're all gonna make it.
Too cheap to mark up.
End the markup.
OutroAttention shoppers, your dollar is a dollar again.
Transcribed from the video and checked by ear. Words we could not make out are marked [unclear]. Made this song and want the text off this page? Tell us and it goes.
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