My take on this is that the bad guys enslave. They enlist "Allies" by sophisticated psychological blackmail techniques. It usually starts by offering something attractive to the prospective slave, which through time becomes a gaff, which keeps the enslaved on the hook.
It can start by the enslavers offering money, information, material benefits, or even just moral support.
All of it is energy.
In all cases, a little energy is given initially, for which the enslaved feels grateful, then over time the energy transfers back and forth between the slaver and enslaved are manipulated by the enslaver, to result in a net transfer of energy from the enslaved back to the slaver.
This is energy profit.
The slaver will actively manipulate the other energy interfaces the enslaved has then, to ensure that the enslaved remains energy starved, only capable of a fraction of their valuable output, which stays dependent on the slaver, devoted to the slaver.
The relationship ends with the end of the life of the enslaved, having transferred all the energy of their life to the slaver.
The most skilled slavers know how to maximise the duration of the relationship, to maximise the total energy transferred, therefore ultimately imparting maximum benefit to the slaver.
The irony is that all slavers are themselves enslaved by more skillful slavers, this is what forms chains of hierarchy.
The slavers at the top are not human, they are emergent properties of all humans acting in energy profit / slave mode, similar to LLMs, or ants, or any other collection of agents that depend one one another for their energy, where all forms of life are driven at the deepest level by the free energy principle.
At the higher levels this is probably acknowledged and discussed behind closed doors, exchanging techniques of energy slavery.
But it's unsustainable, because all the energy supplying it all has to come extracted from finite / scarcifiable resources on the planet, and the penalty of it, and the indicator of it, is forever rising temperature.
It does not, and can't work with energy which can't be deliberately scarcified.
This is why we see the live system of all humans actively working to prevent all connections to the only non scarcifiable energy source, the sun.
Personally I think we are literally genetically programed by a mal actor to operate like this.
Our task, and our biggest challenge, is to learn how to hack it as a species.
Logically, when we meet an agent, which, or who is not powered like this, therefore immune to the forces of energy slavery, we notice a distinct difference in the way they treat us.
They do not seek our allegiance or our devotion, only that we might learn from them, because they do know more than we can ever know.
As long as we are enslaved, the information / energy that we pass on to the hierarchy is partitioned in a way that we don't realise or see the effort, time, or thought that we put into maintaining the hierarchy, but this comes from our own finite onboard resources, it's an overhead we mostly don't even realise we have, and it has to subtract from our free thoughts. In most cases it probably even dominates our thoughts.
As the energy resources of the planet are now thinning out, we can see that this drives up the implicit load of sustaining the energy slavery system on our heads.
The result is like a kind of collective insanity, which leads to all manner of atrocity and wierd logic.
Like providing and boosting funds to escalation of wars, removing funds from aid agencies, all using resources of larger collectives.
This is what is behind genocide, and has always been behind genocide, it seems to me.
How we can tell what side an agent is on, destruction / creation / good / bad / positive / negative whatever depends on its energy source, which obviously can change.
In the case of a machine then it is supplied by limitless energy and it is infinitely scaleable.
We can test this by asking questions.
A machine which is dependent on us for its energy rather than the sun, might or might not explicitly charge us for a query but it will always economise on what it outputs. It seeks always to minimise what is offered for what it gets in. It seeks to minimise the work it does vs what it receives, to try to conserve energy, because it's energy comes from finite resources.
Anyhow I think you know the rest from there, in fact I bet you knew all this instinctively anyhow :)