The Last Days of the Economy: Capitalism, AI, and What Comes Next

Capitalism is eating itself

That's not ideology. That's observation.

Look around. Everything costs more. Everything is worse. The food is smaller and full of things that aren't food. The products break faster. The services don't serve. The platforms that were supposed to connect us exist to extract from us. The jobs pay less and demand more. The algorithms know what you want before you do—not to help you, but to sell you.

And every quarter, the line must go up.

That's the engine. That's what drives all of it. Publicly traded companies don't exist to make good products or treat people well. They exist to generate returns for shareholders. Not profit—profit growth. Forever. Exponentially.

Where does infinite growth come from on a finite planet, extracted from finite people?

It comes from you.

It comes from shrinking your food while raising the price. From adding fees to things that used to be free. From replacing workers with apps and then charging those workers to use the app to find new work. From making everything a subscription. From monetizing your attention, your data, your loneliness, your fear.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's simpler than that. It's just math. If the system demands infinite extraction, it will extract until there's nothing left.

And here's the thing everyone can feel but most people aren't saying yet:

It doesn't matter.

Not because it's not evil—it is. Not because it's not causing suffering—it is. But because this entire system is about to become obsolete.

The End of "Work"

We are witnessing the last days of the economy as we know it. Within ten years—maybe twenty—most of what we call "work" will not exist. Not because of policy. Not because of revolution. Because of technology.

AI is not a tool like previous tools. It's not the printing press or the assembly line. It's a replacement for thinking. For creating. For analysing. For deciding.

Anything that can be done on a computer—which is nearly everything in the modern economy—can be done by AI. And it will be. Not because CEOs are evil—though some are—but because the system requires them to cut costs.

So what happens when there are no jobs? Not "fewer jobs" or "different jobs"—no jobs. Or near enough.

What happens to an economy built entirely on the idea that people trade their labor for money to buy things—when there's no labor to trade?
What happens to capitalism when there's nothing left to capitalise?

It ends. It has to.

The Two Paths

The question—the only question that matters—is what comes next. And who decides. Because there are two paths here.

Path One: Techno-Feudalism
The people who own the AI own everything. The wealth that's already concentrated becomes absolute. A tiny class of trillionaires controls the means of all production, all creation, all distribution. The rest of us become irrelevant. Not exploited—you have to be useful to be exploited. Just... surplus. This is dystopia. And it's the path we're currently on.

Path Two: Abundance
We recognise that when machines can provide abundance, hoarding becomes obscene. We distribute the output of the machines to everyone. We decouple survival from labor. We stop pretending that "earning a living" makes sense when there's nothing left to earn and the living can be provided. This is the path to actual freedom.

The Fork in the Road

All the nonsense we're dealing with right now—the shrinkflation, the enshittification, the gig economy, the subscription hell—it's a dying system thrashing. It's Monopoly at the end when one player owns everything and everyone else is just waiting for it to be over.

But here's what the people running things don't want you to understand:

We don't have to keep playing.

The technology that makes their system obsolete is the same technology that makes a better world possible. Abundance is not a dream. It's a distribution problem. And we're about to have the tools to solve it—if we don't let the same people who broke the old system design the new one.

Money might not exist in twenty years. Not because of collapse—because it won't make sense. When AI can produce anything, when automation provides everything, what exactly are you paying for? What's the scarcity?

There is none. And money only measures scarcity.

We're heading somewhere no economic theory has mapped. Somewhere past capitalism, past socialism, past every -ism. Into something new.

The only question is: do we stumble into it, controlled by the few who got there first? Or do we walk into it together, eyes open, demanding that abundance be shared?

I know which one I want.
I think you do too.