It seems like the rent seeking class is just moving to selling you access to LLMs in data centers by the token. In the past, the "rent-seeking class" being described here was at least part of the middle class. Now a few billionaires are going to capture all of the value, but the rent-seeking isn't going away.
Since the article is largely about open weights models, I think the argument is that this is the "last gasp" and soon doing inference at home will be common.