In a wage-based consumer economy, the producers need us as much as we need them. If we collapse, they collapse with us. You cannot have one without the other.
A system built on wages cannot function if there are no wages left to earn. Modern economies depend on circulation. Workers earn wages, wages become consumer spending, consumer spending sustains businesses, businesses sustain markets, markets sustain tax revenue, and tax revenue sustains the institutions that uphold civilization itself. Remove broad-based wages without replacing them with another form of broad-based economic participation, and circulation begins to collapse. An economy cannot remain healthy if the population producing demand no longer possesses the means to participate in the system they are expected to sustain.
A wage economy without wages is like a body without blood circulation. It does not merely struggle. It dies.
The wealthy cannot actually isolate themselves from this reality because elite wealth only has meaning inside a functioning civilization. Stock valuations, property portfolios, intellectual property rights, corporate ownership, and financial assets all depend on stable governments, functioning courts, enforceable contracts, maintained infrastructure, productive populations, consumer demand, and broad social consent.
Extreme concentration of wealth becomes self-destructive once too few people retain meaningful purchasing power.
You cannot sell products to consumers who cannot afford them.
You cannot rent apartments to people with no income.
You cannot sustain functioning markets without circulation.
You cannot maintain luxury behind walls forever while the world outside those walls collapses.
You cannot eat stock valuations.
What most people are currently failing to understand is that we are at an inflection point in the growth of automation, robotics, and the development of intelligent technologies. They once lived only in our imagination or in the pages of books found in the science fiction sections of our favorite bookstores. And even those have largely faded into the digital realm. We have literally and somewhat ironically burned our books with that technological wonder aptly named Kindle.
And though no one could have opened a calendar and pointed to a day, month, or year, we all knew the change was coming. The event horizon had been visible long enough for people to write about it, but relatively few were reading those books about the future with a hopeful utopian end. Most imagined the future not as liberation, but as dystopia. Hollywood rarely sold hopeful technological futures because no one would buy those tickets when fear proved more profitable than optimism. So while humanity quietly continued to build the machinery of abundance, we psychologically prepared ourselves for collapse instead, and the corporate entities that held the technological assets behind the walls of patent law continued putting the profits in their pockets.
But reality rarely announces the turning of an age while we are living through it. Civilizational transitions are almost never experienced as clean breaks between one world and another. More often, they arrive disguised as convenience, efficiency, novelty, and incremental change until eventually the old assumptions beneath everyday life can no longer bear the weight being placed upon them.
And so that is where we currently stand, a path not marked by a sudden, cataclysmic event or a grand proclamation that made the evening news. Instead, it was a quiet, cumulative fading. It was the precise, invisible threshold where “the future” stopped being a distant, gleaming destination we were rushing toward, and silently became the room we were already standing in.
Suddenly, the technologies that once felt like magic became as mundane as plumbing. The ambitions that defined a century mutated from what can we build? to how do we live with what we’ve made? We look at old photographs now, from the eras of paper maps, disconnected silences, and unquantified lives, not just as history, but as an entirely different mode of being human.
We can’t point to a single moment when the old world ended, because it has been fading for some time. But we are now feeling the draft from the door closing behind us and beginning to taste the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. Some of them will be bitter to some, and others quite sweet.
And I believe the reason people are unable to wrap their heads around this change and the kind of financial system and equitable distribution of assets that will be woven into this new tapestry is that they don’t realize that, for all intents and purposes, the current game being played is Monopoly. They don’t understand that in this new future, the rules of the game will need to change. The board can stay the same, but the game’s goal and rules will need to be rewritten. A new economic constitution, if you will.
Monopoly vs. The Commons. A new age and with it, new rules.
In this new scenario, this new game, we will no longer be playing for the victory condition of Monopoly, where one player accumulates nearly all the assets while the rest collapse into bankruptcy.
The Commons will operate differently. The objective will not be concentration, but circulation. Not domination, but participation. Citizens themselves become stakeholders in the technological infrastructure of civilization through shared ownership of the systems increasingly responsible for generating abundance. Automated equity or techno-feudalism. Those are the two roads now diverging before us.