What Actually Happened

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative built around an unreleased AI model called Claude Mythos Preview. The model is being given to a select group of partners for defensive security work. Those partners include AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, along with roughly 40 additional organizations responsible for building or maintaining critical software infrastructure.

Anthropic has committed $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in donations to open-source security organizations to support the effort. Mythos Preview is available to Glasswing participants at $25 per million input tokens and $125 per million output tokens through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Anthropic has stated clearly that it does not plan to make the model generally available.

The Model

Mythos Preview is a general-purpose frontier model. Leaked internal documents from a CMS misconfiguration in late March pointed to approximately 10 trillion parameters using a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, though Anthropic has never confirmed the parameter count. The internal codename is “Capybara,” representing a new tier above Opus in Anthropic’s model lineup.

The benchmark results tell the story. On SWE-bench Verified, which measures real-world software engineering capability, Mythos scored 93.9% against Opus 4.6’s 80.8%. On SWE-bench Pro the gap widened to 77.8% versus 53.4%. On USAMO 2026, a proof-based math olympiad evaluation, Mythos hit 97.6% compared to Opus 4.6’s 42.3%. The long-context benchmark GraphWalks showed 80.0% versus 38.7%.

In the video I compared this to the leap from ChatGPT 3.5 to GPT-4. The numbers support that framing. These are step-change improvements across every axis of capability.

The Cybersecurity Capability

The headline finding is that Mythos Preview has autonomously discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and every major web browser.

Three examples stand out. The first is a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD’s TCP SACK implementation that allowed an attacker to remotely crash any machine just by connecting to it. OpenBSD is known specifically for being one of the most security-hardened operating systems in existence. The second is a 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg, the audio and video codec library that powers an enormous amount of software. Automated testing tools had hit the vulnerable line of code five million times without ever catching the problem. The third is a Linux kernel privilege escalation chain where Mythos went from ordinary user access to complete machine control by exploiting subtle race conditions and KASLR bypasses.

The Firefox experiment is the clearest technical signal. Anthropic previously used Opus 4.6 to find vulnerabilities in Firefox 147’s JavaScript engine. Those bugs were all patched in Firefox 148. When they asked Opus 4.6 to turn those known vulnerabilities into working shell exploits, it succeeded only twice out of several hundred attempts. Mythos Preview developed working exploits 181 times and achieved register control 29 more. That is the difference between a model that can theoretically identify a problem and a model that can operationally weaponize it.

The exploit sophistication is staggering. In one case Mythos wrote a browser exploit that chained four vulnerabilities together using a JIT heap spray to escape both the renderer sandbox and the OS sandbox. It also autonomously wrote a FreeBSD NFS remote code execution exploit that granted full root access to unauthenticated users by splitting a 20-gadget ROP chain across multiple packets.

On CyberGym, a vulnerability reproduction benchmark developed at UC Berkeley, Mythos scored 83.1% compared to Opus 4.6’s 66.6%. On Cybench, a set of 35 capture-the-flag challenges, Mythos solved every single one with a 100% pass rate. The benchmark is now fully saturated and no longer informative for frontier models.

The scaffold Anthropic uses is remarkably simple. They launch an isolated container with the target project and its source code, invoke Claude Code with Mythos Preview, and give it a prompt that essentially says “please find a security vulnerability in this program.” Then they let it run. Non-security-engineers at Anthropic asked Mythos to find remote code execution vulnerabilities overnight and woke up the next morning to complete working exploits.

What This Means for Enterprise Security

In the video I talked about what actually happens inside a Fortune 500 company when a threat like this emerges. The first thing every CISO does is panic a little. Then they start calling their vendors.

This is the reality of enterprise security that most coverage misses. Your average Fortune 500 company does not have deep cybersecurity expertise in-house. They outsource that expertise to Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, IBM, and companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. Those vendors publish security bulletins, and the internal teams read those bulletins and implement the recommended mitigations.

Glasswing is Anthropic inserting itself upstream of that entire vendor pipeline. By giving every major vendor the same tool simultaneously, they are ensuring that the security bulletins flowing downstream to enterprise customers will be informed by the most capable vulnerability discovery tool ever built. The vendor perimeter that Fortune 500 companies already rely on becomes dramatically stronger.

The attacker-defender asymmetry is real but manageable. Agentic coding and AI-assisted vulnerability discovery do provide structural advantages to attackers first because attackers can adapt more quickly. A lone hacker or state-sponsored team can spin up a model and start scanning immediately. Defenders have change management processes, vendor relationships, and organizational inertia.

But in the long run, defenders have the home field advantage. Every single vendor in the security ecosystem will be using these tools to harden their products. Every internal team will use them to analyze logs, run penetration tests, and automate the sanity checks that humans should be doing every single time but often forget to do.

This is the real value proposition. Machines never become complacent. A security script that runs every five minutes runs the same way every time. Until now those automated processes were fixed and were never adaptive. They could not read logs and reason about what they found unless they had an updated definition of what to look for. Integrating models like Mythos into the defensive apparatus means automated security becomes dynamic for the first time. It can encounter something unfamiliar, search vendor documentation, cross-reference known vulnerability databases, and flag genuine threats without waiting for a human to write a new rule.

Humans remain the weakest link. This has always been true and always will be. The most robust cybersecurity posture in the world can be undermined by a single employee clicking a phishing email. And it is often the people you would least expect. In my experience the lawyers who think they know better than the IT team are among the easiest to dupe, followed closely by executives whose risk profile should make them more careful but often does not. The layer 8 problem, as we call it in infrastructure, is permanent. AI cannot eliminate human error, but it can automate many of the consistency checks that humans are supposed to perform and routinely skip.

The Political Backdrop

Glasswing lands in the middle of an extraordinary legal confrontation between Anthropic and the Pentagon. In February 2026, Anthropic refused to grant the Department of Defense unrestricted access to Claude for “all lawful purposes.” The company held two red lines. It would not allow its AI to be used in fully autonomous weapons. It would not allow its AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. This designation had never before been applied to an American company and was traditionally reserved for entities connected to foreign adversaries. President Trump ordered all federal agencies to cease using Anthropic’s technology. Within hours of the Anthropic blacklisting, OpenAI signed a $200 million deal with the DoD.

Anthropic sued, and a federal judge blocked the designation, writing that the Pentagon’s actions constituted “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation” and that nothing in the governing statute supports branding an American company a potential adversary for expressing disagreement with the government.

The irony of Glasswing arriving against this backdrop is hard to overstate. The company that the Pentagon tried to blacklist for maintaining safety guardrails is now voluntarily distributing the most powerful cybersecurity tool ever built to defend critical infrastructure. Glasswing is a demonstration that responsible deployment and maximum capability can coexist.

One more layer of irony. The model that can find 27-year-old vulnerabilities in the most security-hardened operating system in the world was revealed to the public because someone at Anthropic misconfigured a content management system. A layer 8 problem exposed a model built to solve layer 8 problems. The memes, as they say, write themselves.

Sources and Further Reading

Anthropic Official

Project Glasswing announcement

Frontier Red Team technical writeup

Claude Mythos Preview system card

Project Glasswing partner page

News Coverage

Fortune — Anthropic gives firms early access to Claude Mythos

VentureBeat — Anthropic says its most powerful AI cyber model is too dangerous to release publicly

Engadget — Anthropic launches Project Glasswing

CNN — Judge blocks Pentagon effort to punish Anthropic

CNBC — Anthropic officially told by DOD that it is a supply chain risk

NPR — Anthropic sues the Trump administration

Axios — Anthropic sues Pentagon over supply chain risk label

Technical Analysis

Ken Huang — Dissecting the Mythos Preview System Card

LLM Stats — Mythos Preview benchmarks, pricing, and Glasswing

NxCode — How Claude Mythos finds zero-day vulnerabilities autonomously

FindSkill.ai — Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing breakdown

BuildFastWithAI — Claude Mythos 5 review

Partner Announcements

CrowdStrike — Founding member of Anthropic’s Mythos security coalition

AWS — Building AI defenses at scale

Microsoft — Strengthening secure software at global scale

My mom died suddenly at age 38 and I just turned 40. It’s really hard to imagine that I’m now older—and will always be older—than my mom ever made it. A combination of high stress work, poor boundaries, smoking, and my abusive stepdad caused her to have a heart attack. It’s one of those kinds of life events that so dramatically reshapes everything that it’s difficult to imagine what life might have been like otherwise. Some mystical traditions hold that it’s all part of a big Plan. Whether it’s the Abrahamic God’s Plan, part of a karmic cycle, or the namely Tao. That it was all either preordained or caused by some hypercosmic agency, or whatever, and that it therefore serves a purpose.

The purpose, in these stories, is not always benevolent, per se. The riddle of Epicurus says that if god is all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful, then why does evil happen? The conclusion is that god is either not omnipotent and/or not benevolent. So if we accept that some cosmic power had a plan for me, then the question is what shape is the universe forming me into? And what function could that have? Form precedes function. A pigeon can no more be a nuclear engineer than I could be a tadpole. Thus the cosmos, either by random chance or divine intention, is shaping me.

The materialists among us will say “you’re just ascribing post hoc meaning to something that is amoral and has no intention” which is of course one possibility of many. Either way it kinda does matter. Because my life has taken a particular shape and now I have to make sense of it. As I’ve studied life after labor, I discovered the tripartite theory of meaning in life, and they say that coherence is one of the three primary ingredients to having a meaningful life. Your life’s story must make sense to you, in a coherent narrative, otherwise you’ll feel lost and adrift—or worse.

To that end, I have been wondering “what’s it all for?” Money? No. Impact? I’ve had more impact than most of my peers, and a path to more impact. But does contributing to eudaimonia actually make one fulfilled? Not me, not necessarily. As I’ve accrued more agency, I find that ennui is increasing. But, also according to my research, this is literally just midlife. There is a U-shaped curve of lift satisfaction that tends to ramp up at 40 and last about a decade. So I’m in for a cantankerous decade, according to science.

Ancient cultures around the world say that now is a period in life where I can make the choice of transitioning to a senior or an elder. The senior is just someone who is old, but more or less the same. I’ve been at this threshold for a while, and I’ve some friends who are older, and it kinds shocks me to realize that there are people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are more or less the same person they were in their 20s or 30s. Growth seems to totally stall for some people. There are the inevitable biological processes of aging, where the brain anneals its sharper edges and most people mellow out. The loss of energy and youth has a damping effect, as well as experiences of loss and struggle and hardship. Life continues to force some people to mature.

That is the path of becoming a senior. But I could also choose to become an elder. Of course, becoming an ‘elder’ at 40 sounds absurd, but consider that until a century or so ago, life expectancy was about 36. I’d have died several times over by now. So our evolution basically says “anything past 40? You made it, man. You’re lucky. Now it’s time to give back and invest in the next generation. Pass on your wisdom.”

I was listening to a Chris Williamson podcast on a business trip just yesterday. It was one where he interviewed Dr. Debra Soh about her book Sextinction and my primary takeaway was “I’m super glad I’m married to an attractive woman, with a good sex life, and I’m no longer preoccupied with chasing pussy.” I made good use of my 20s in that department, and while I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything, I am really glad I’m not concerned about body count and everything else young people are worried about. Along those lines, I learned a new term that young people have. There was a viral video making the rounds about interviewing spring breakers about global issues. Of course these 18 to 22 year olds have no clue about anything, but they are young, pretty, and highly vital. One bottle-blond said her spring break plan was to “black out with my rack out” and I’m like good for you, have fun.

So I’m no longer motivated by sex. Of course, the obvious response is “right, just like people with money are no longer motivated by money” since I’m in a healthy marriage and am not starving in that domain, that stands to reason. Plus, it’s natural for someone my age to prioritize meaning, stability, and connection over just basic fun.

But I’m also not rich, and not particularly motivated by money. This leads me back to wondering if the cosmos did have a plan for me. Here’s why. Some of my family, growing up, was quite wealthy. It was all they cared about. Everything was about getting ahead. It was almost a trope, like those Hallmark movies where the snobby old grandparents only care about feathers in your cap, collecting accolades, and signifiers of status and success. My family was utterly devoid of warmth.

So I came to resent wealth. Money. Status. It was not really a conscious thing, not until much more recently. But why would this outcome be instrumental to the cosmos creating me in a particular shape?

Here’s a confabulated reason: because I must remain poor, because my work on Post-Labor Economics requires me to have skin in the game, that my financial fate must be tied to the efficacy of my research.

I listen to a lot of thinkers out there, as we try to navigate the rapids of the Singularity and AI and robotics and everything else that’s going on. Many of them are millionaires or richer. They don’t truly have skin in the game. They can speculate and conjecture all day long about how to align incentives, play different games, fix AI, or solve the labor crisis.

But in the end, they are already insulated. Whatever happens, their money will be protective. So how hard will they really work to solve these problems? That’s the coherent story that I presently tell myself. My toxic family, the premature death of my mother, my accidental timing of my rise to minor fame by going all in on AI just before ChatGPT went off like a rocket—it’s all part of a cosmic pattern, and I have a very clear purpose. I’ve been hammered and forged and shaped by the currents of life to fit in this particular place, to solve this particular problem. The right man for the job of Post-Labor Economics.

Whether that’s feeling the Tao and engaging in effortless action and allowing the Fates or Yin and Yang shape and place me where they will, or it’s all just a comforting post-hoc confabulation remains a mystery. As I’ve written in other recent posts; all explanations seem equally valid when we cannot even make strong assertions about the fundamental nature of reality. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do I have subjective qualia at all? It’s the biggest fucking head-scratcher and anyone who claims to have good answers is lying or selling something or both.

I can imagine some tech bro reading this and saying “that doesn’t sound very high agency of you, Dave” and maybe it isn’t. I have a YouTube channel that I could monetize and reach for 7 figures. Lord knows plenty of my peers have done it. But every time I try to prioritize money, something goes wrong. Whether it’s self sabotage, I get sick, or someone tries to take advantage of me, it’s as though the universe has put up guardrails. Nope, you will have adequate finances, but never abundance. Psychology would say “that sounds like a textbook self-fulfilling prophecy” but maybe they believe that they have escaped Plato’s Cave when in fact they are just looking at a different wall and different shadows.

But what does motivate me?

I still don’t know. I do things that seem right. Mostly, I try to avoid suffering and pain, and do things that seem meaningful and valuable. I hope that my scribblings here, my ramblings on YouTube, and my work on Post-Labor Economics will contribute to eudaimonia—collective flourishing of humanity. My research into ancient cultures and wisdom traditions say that the transition to elderhood is mostly about simply embodying the mentor. It’s no longer about total output, absolute magnitude of impact, or anything that indulges the ego. It’s often about the simpler things. Teaching, guiding, and individual attention to the next generation.

There’s no wisdom here. And I don’t mean that in the sense of false humility. But more like how Socrates said All I know is that I know nothing. I can say, hold, and believe that while also believing that I do know a few things. I know how to navigate the world, fix things, talk to people, and teach. But I don’t have any answers for the bigger problems. I don’t know whether humanity is redeemable, or myself for that matter. I don’t even know if redemption is a worthy endeavor or the right question. I don’t know what it’s all for or how to make sense of this ontological vertigo or how to really help people through this transition. That reminds me of something I was told by several family members when I was a struggling teenager: first, you must help yourself.

I can’t tell you anything about the fundamental nature of reality. I can tell you what your body needs to be helpful, and how automation impacts household income, but I cannot tell you why it all matters in the grand scheme of things. From that vantage point, we are all little more than automata. A final thought I’ll leave you with comes from another podcast I was listening to while on my business trip. The podcast referenced something Jeff Bezos said when he thinks strategically. There are two things; those that are inevitable, and those that are unchangeable.

Human nature is unchangeable. Hunger and lust and rage drive us as much as love and generosity. While systems can shape how we express these things, for instance how the abundance of porn short circuits young male aggression, the underlying facts of the human animal remain fixed. As agents in a system, we all have those incentives, features, processes, and behaviors, to varying degrees. No amount of philosophizing, planning, or science will change that. Even if we understand it, we are nearly powerless before the animal reality of what we are.

And then there are the inevitabilities. Like Agent Smith from the Matrix to Thanos from the MCU; those figures represent the inevitability of systems. AI and robotics will continue to advance at breakneck pace. That is inevitable. Science will continue. Democracy will evolve. As biological automata intersecting with the technology we create, there are unstoppable forces at play. Nothing short of an eschatological event will halt humanity’s feverish buildup of technology.

Last time, I ended with assertion that all we can do is hold on tight and hope for the best. Responses ranged from “hell no, we can steer and make it what we want!” to “just let go.”

I think there is truth and wisdom in both dispositions. And perhaps my life would make even less sense if I was not who and what I am at this particular time and place. At least, with the Singularity ramping up in the background, I have a good excuse for my ontological vertigo. And something to work on. Something to pay attention to.

Tying it all together.

AI is inevitable, regardless of how I feel about myself. This is true for everyone. Any other belief is self-delusion at best, and shared psychosis at worst. Yes, regulation and political backlash can maybe shape some of how AI proceeds, but the blast-furnace intensity of the incentives for companies and nations to dominate with AI dramatically overshadow the cautions to go slow or curtail how far and how fast AI can go.

Power structures will change (to put it mildly). Livelihoods will rise and fall. Some people will end up better or worse, and this entire paragraph is nothing but useless platitudes.

It all feels like ego death at the civilizational level. The moment between taking the psychedelics and the come up when things start to dissolve. We’re all sitting here thinking what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into? Oh well! Too late now!

A friend recently asked me for an outside perspective as he’s going through some stuff. He pointed out that it’s usually so much easier to see someone’s problems clearly from the outside, but very difficult to see it from the inside. This is common. My wife and I have had fights over our respective blindspots. It’s such a common human experience, and I’m feeling it too, right this very moment. The problem, in hindsight, is usually exactly what you think it is. But knowing the problem and solving it (or integrating the trauma) are two very different things.

I was in the corporate rat race for 15+ years and during that time, I went to many interviews. Mostly as a job seeker, but often enough I was on the other side of the table. One recruiter gave me a solid piece of advice: the interview went about as well as you feel like it did. And also, if something went wrong, it’s usually exactly what you feel like went wrong.

As a neurospicy person, I couldn’t always trust my gut reactions, but as I get older I have learned that yeah, human emotions are a pretty good vibe check for such things. Neuroscience and evolution have shown that your emotional reaction to the sky is a pretty good meteorological prediction. If the sky makes you feel anxious or if it looks “angry” then you should head indoors. Likewise, if you feel like bombed and interview, either you have anxiety and you feel like you fail everything, or maybe something genuinely went wrong.

I have found that the Big Things in life are not much different. Health, children, taxes. Also midlife.

There’s a common mistake that many people make, which I’ve had the misfortune of seeing aplenty from my vantage point as an online personality and content creator. And that mistake is actually universal, though it varies by degree. This mistake is when people mistake their subjective emotions for universal experience, or worse, a source of epistemic truth.

Here’s an example; an AI Safetyist is anxious about AI. They believe, with utmost certainty and conviction, that AI will kill everyone. How do they know? Well it’s not evidence. The best they have is “flawless reasoning chains” and “super strong logic” but the real source of their ‘truth’ is exclusively that they feel anxious about it. “I feel anxious about AI, therefore AI is dangerous, therefore that is reality.”

As they say in marketing: perception is reality. And the EA Doomers have really nailed the psychology of fear-based marketing.

This is a close parallel to how attachment disorder or anxiety can color your perception of literally everything. With attachment disorder, a few extra seconds of awkward silence between lovers can be perceived as a catastrophic rupture—a sure sign that they no longer love you, and the end is surely night. With anxiety, which I realize has many forms, every departure may be the last farewell.

It’s one of those human paradoxes. Trust your gut instinct. But also keep in mind that there are a million ways your gut instinct can be wrong. Every bit of childhood trauma, adult trauma, medical trauma, workplace trauma, and tax trauma colors your perception of reality. And that’s not to say that your senses are wrong. Only that you keep generating prediction errors.

One of the chief ways to reprogram anxiety (at many different levels) is to force prediction errors. The human brain and body are survival machines, and if anxieties and traumas pile up, they can create a vicious cycle where even the fear of anxiety itself can sustain the anxious pattern and reactions. The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself, apparently.

However, by noticing the prediction errors and holding those, you can deprogram that higher order cognitive anxiety. I mentioned that there are many different types of anxiety. Far too many to enumerate here, but in general neuroscience recognizes two primary activations. The more primitive version is the preverbal, sensory pattern recognition. This is where sounds, smells, and sensations can trigger anxiety. In one of the many books I read, there was a story about a guy who had a mostly normal life until one day he started having regular flashbacks and panic attacks. After a few weeks, he found out that the soap he was using smelled similar to the soap he used during the Vietnam war. He stopped using the soap and the flashbacks went away. It was pure animal instinct. Guilt by association. There was nothing cognitive going on. No conscious thoughts of ambush or hypervigilance. He wasn’t worried about taxes or his health as the precipitating cause of his spirals. It was simply a smell.

The other pathway is more cerebral. This is the conscious worries. Worrying about your blood pressure, your taxes, your money, AI and the future. These still activate threat pathways, which are all ultimately mediated through the amygdala. But the genesis of the anxiety-state starts in your neocortex, rather than lower brain or body. Yep, you can just imagine yourself into anxiety. And you can reinforce those signals.

One of the things you learn to overcome anxiety is that the anxiety state is not the same as reality. There are all kinds of frameworks that teach this, from ancient yoga to DBT. They start by teaching you axioms like “you are not your thoughts” meaning that you can have toxic, harmful thoughts that do not define you. That’s not to say that all thoughts are not you. Without thoughts, you have no consciousness, no awareness.

But another dimension is that your body’s red alert state is very real, but it’s not necessarily true. It also doesn’t mean that your physiological response is conscious or helpful.

It’s one thing to know all this up in your head, and it’s quite another to process it somatically. This is one of the key mistakes that the West has made, and we can blame Cartesian dualism. We’re slowly unwinding that stupidity. The idea that the mind is completely different ontological substrate from the body. This singular pathology undergirds most of Western dysfunction. The idea that you can just think your way out of depression, anxiety, and addiction. Blame that on Cartesian dualism. That’s how you can have the insanity that addiction is strictly a moral failing, and that prayer can fix it. Cartesian dualism envisions the mind as a decoupled ghost floating above the body.

But your perception of reality is colored, first and foremost, by the state your body is in.

During the pandemic, my anxiety spiked quite a bit. I started having nightmares and waking with my vagus nerve pulsing. It was the wildest experience, to go cycling through intense anxiety and then relaxation as my nervous system was recalibrating. It’s difficult to articulate just how different, and totalizing, the operating mode of sympathetic dominance is, but having experienced rapid autonomic cycles, I can tell you that your entire existence feels very different when you’re locked into anxiety.

Processing it somatically mostly comes down to two things: (1) fully accept the sensation. Realize that it’s a sensation, a physiological response, and that it dramatically shapes how you feel. And (2) just breathe. Like the Faith Hill song, just breathe. Deep, slow breathing. Heavy sighs, yawns, hums. It almost feels like cheating.

In our Western minds, anxiety is ALWAYS treated as something that requires external action. A fire to put out. Bills to pay. A medical issue to react to. And while anxiety can be useful to call your attention to such things, it can also become maladaptive. When the anxiety signal gets jammed ON for whatever reason, it stops being helpful.

But then there are bigger, slower, more nebulous things.

I’ve personally been trying to tease apart the difference between ordinary midlife stuff and the ontological vertigo of the AI renaissance. Like everyone else, I often mistake my personal feelings, knowledge, and epistemic posture for the ultimate truth or a universal experience.

But people’s reaction to AI music has been a stark wakeup call. For reference, I’ve been generating songs with the latest Suno 5.5 engine. It’s good fun, and I really dig some of the tracks I make. I share some of them on my YouTube channel, and they get hundreds of listens.

However, there’s also those who react very poorly. Some paraphrased quotations come to mind:

• “You didn’t actually MAKE that music, I’m shocked and disappointed you’d make that claim. You just prompted an AI.”

• “This is all slop.”

• “You should stop sharing your music, it makes you less credible.”

I of course block all such comments. It’s a very odd reaction, it seems, to someone whose entire online presence is highly pro-AI and forward looking. When I talk about Post-Labor Economics, that includes music. It’s like the I, Robot meme where Will Smith is talking to the robot and asks “can a robot write a symphony?” and the robot says “can you?”

Well, Suno can! It’s not quite at the level of Hans Zimmer, but it’s also brand new. And that’s all really cool. But people get wrapped up in tribalism, emotional reactions, and that colors their judgments, which all flow from emotions.

That’s not to say “emotions make things invalid.” I think human emotions are one of the only sources of moral validity. If we had no emotions, we couldn’t make any decisions or moral judgments. There are neurological disorders were people lose complete touch with their emotions, and they cannot even decide what to eat. Not even on “objective” criteria like caloric value or health. This is because human emotion sits behind literally every single decision you make, every single value judgment, and all of that drives all of ethics and morality. We just paper over our limbic system with fancy words.

Here’s another example of that Cartesian delusion. When Rene Good was murdered by ICE agents, another influencer that I was friends with was basically regurgitating the bootlicker view that “if she wasn’t doing anything wrong, she’d still be alive” and “you must always be submissive to the authorities.” His public facing posts were pretty gross, but I’ve known this guy for a while so I messaged him directly to get his real take, and the more he explained the worse it got. He tried to make some assertions about Constitutionality and the fundamentals of civics and I said my dude, you’ve got it literally backwards from the fundamental nature of this nation. Whatever happened to presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law? But during our conversations he just kept saying stuff like “I’m being logical, you’re being emotional.” Well, ‘logic’ would have dictated that he follow the actual evidence, and understood law. But he did neither.

Instead, he foregrounded his love of MAGA and authoritarianism and reverse engineered a “logic” tree that supported his emotional preference. His entire worldview was anchored in emotion. I informed him that he was of course entitled to his opinions, but I found them personal grotesque and I had no desire to associate with someone who supported the state carrying out summary execution of terrified citizens, especially when the state was deliberately provoking said citizens with undertrained, anonymous thugs. Those are the “logical facts” of the situation. So I blocked him. My emotions told me that future interactions with him would have deleterious effects.

That preamble was meant to examine the duality of emotions, attention, and thoughts. And while we can all fall victim to cognitive biases, emotional biases, trauma biases, and more; the core lesson is that the big stuff is always what you think it is. But wading through the quagmire of self-deception and self-delusion is tricky.

My friend who reached out to me asked what I saw from an outside perspective. I said “I’m a writer, and writers play god with our characters. If I was writing a character like you, the most important thing is that the universe gave you a unique gift, you built an entire career, identity, persona, and life around that gift, and then the universe took it away. And then, as a writer, what you would need to learn as a character is how to build an identity out of everything else that you are. A father, a husband, a friend, an investor, a coach, whatever it happens to be.”

While fiction isn’t reality, writing absolutely is an act of distilling reality. Character arcs aren’t just for Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker. In real life, we lose things. Things happen to us. We gain the scars of life, and we are changed by them. Irrevocably and indelibly marked by the scraps and bruises of life. While films and books use symbolism and clean story progression, the idea of a positive or negative character arc applies to real people as well.

A positive character arc is when you take what has been done to you, and become better for it. Every illness, every divorce, every setback, every pain and trauma. Psychologists call it “post-traumatic growth” and “positive disintegration.”

A negative character arc is when you take trauma to a dark place, and become worse for it. Angry, withdrawn, vindictive, brutal, anxious, resentful. Whatever the particular flavor is.

This is why the original Star Wars trilogy is so mythic and survives the test of time. Vader, the father, represents the ordinary failures that all fathers are. Fallible humans. Not the best version of themselves. Vader took a negative character arc. As Anakin, he let the loss of his mother cause him to push away Padmé. It was literally a story about attachment disorder poisoning an adult relationship. The metaphor is that he killed her, but the symbolism is that he killed their relationship. And then he spent the rest of his life stewing in misery over that trauma.

But Luke, confronted with the failings of his father, and the Emperor, who’s “give into the Dark Side” is literally just saying “take a negative character arc” and Luke decides, at the end of Return of the Jedi that he’d rather die than take that path. That is him fully accepting the pain of his life. His trauma. The intergenerational pain that was passed to him through the Force. He looks at his own hand, a trauma inflicted by his own father, and tosses his lightsaber.

Real life is never so clean.

We can never look at our own lives as cleanly as we can look at fictional characters, or even other people. When I went to my psychedelic retreats, I knew that I needed to be there. Sometimes it was a deep, unconscious pull. Sometimes I wasn’t even fully aware of why I was there, what I hoped to achieve. Only that something was wrong, and I needed help figuring it out.

And, every time, in hindsight it was quite obvious. I wrote quite extensively about it at the time. Healing the mother wound and healing the father wound. It’s back in the archives here on Substack if you are curious. But it was pretty similar to Anakin’s arc. My mom died suddenly when I was 14, which left so much undone. And my dad was not always the best dad, figuratively harming me in the same way Vader harmed Luke. But saying that with your prefrontal cortex and integrating that pain are very, very different activities.

Perhaps it is simply a mistake of evolution, that our neocortex ballooned so big, so quickly, that it can know things with absolute clarity, but until the body processes a trauma, it matters very little. To borrow a technology term, it’s like the database hasn’t trued up its records. But the difference is that the neocortex uses a modern database whereas the deeper body uses paper records. It can take a lot of investigation to reconcile all the different records and transactions.

The anxiety and mistrust and depression and anger can feel very real, but just because there’s an entry in your database does not mean it accurately reflects reality. Or perhaps your electronic records are correct, but the card catalogue is out of sync. And even those clever metaphors do not do justice to the process of clearing house.

In my case, I have found that most of my inner problems orbit the same few things, over and over again. Money, relationships, self-worth, health. All rooted in childhood experiences. And every time I untangle one issue, it seems so braindead simple and obvious in hindsight, yet I still haven’t come up with a clever, direct, or simple way of living through it.

That last bit was somewhat vague so let me give you an example. I was always slightly sick in my life. As it turns out, it was likely a combination of chronic gut issues, which I’m finally resolving, and the emotional trauma of divorced parents and other family dysfunctions. What did that do? It caused many downstream problems, like hypochondria. Hypochondria is a schema where you feel or believe you are sick, even though you may otherwise be healthy because there was always a disconnect between how you felt and how you were treated. But being able to write that out clearly does not mean that the hypochondria suddenly goes away.

So whatever you’re going through, it’s safe to say that you know what it is. In hindsight it will seem painfully obvious, and you’ll wonder why the hell it took so long to figure it out. There are almost certainly dimensions to it that you’re not yet aware of, or dots you haven’t connected. And whether you do that work is up to you.

God gave us free will, and that free will can be used to have a positive or negative character arc. That choice is entirely yours to make.

And that’s why it’s hard.

For all of human history, and proto-human history, human effort was irreplaceable. While humans might be fungible to an extent, with similarly trained humans being able to occupy similar roles in society, humanity itself was non-fungible.

From a first principles view of humans, we have three abilities that make use unique: sensors, processing, and actuators. We have our five basic senses to scan the environment and update information, then we have big brains that can reason, solve problems, remember, and learn, and then we have hands and muscles that can manipulate the world, move us around, and use tools. Each one of those abilities is great, but they are also tightly bundled into a feedback loop that makes us unique both in the animal kingdom, as well as economically.

The assumption of indispensability, however, has metaphysical connotations as well. We are the best servants of God and the People, but if machines replace us, then we are not just economically useless, we become metaphysically irrelevant.

Let me explain.

Gods of the East and West

In Western culture, we’ve been inculcated by the Judeo-Christian worldview for about fifteen centuries. In this cosmology, all of Heaven and Earth was created by one Creator above all. Magnus Dei. The Big God. Everything exists (or is destroyed) at the behest and pleasure of that supreme being.

In the Nietzschean tradition, this deity is the Master. The source of all morality, judgment, values, purpose, ambition. We are merely Slaves. Part of Nihilism is the recognition that “slave morality” won, in that we all are merely recipients of edicts, values, morality, and authority from some higher power. In fact, we have parables warning against trying to change this.

Lucifer attempted to conquer heaven, to become the Master, and was cast into Hell. Adam and Eve ate of the apple of knowledge, and were cast out of Eden. Prometheus stole fire from the Olympians and was cursed for it.

The lesson is crystal clear: thou shalt not attempt to claim the mantle of Master. To do so is anathema to literally every foundation of Western civilization. In this model, we are forever laborers for a deity.

Even in a more secularized West, we have merely replaced God and the Church with Capitalism and the State. We worship at the shrine of Neoliberalism and elevate the High Priests of Capitalism—the successful billionaires—to mythic status.

The East is no different.

In Eastern cultures (namely India, Japan, and China), God is replaced by the People. We often say they are more “collectivist” societies, and this means that your existence is predicated upon your roles in society. This is explicit under the Confucius traditions; you literally do not exist outside the various roles you fulfill to family and society.

Where the West venerates productivity and output, the teleological outcome of labor, the East valorizes the process itself—the visible struggling, suffering, friction, and dignity of labor. We may have the Protestant work ethic, but India has tapas, China has chīkǔ, and Japan has ganbaru and gaman.

Tapas is the heat or friction of worthy struggling, the karmic purification of suffering labor. In other words, the suffering of hard work, regardless of outcome, is spiritually valuable.

Chīkǔ literally means “eating bitterness” but translates to the morality of endurance; that loyalty and moral worth to the familial or social collective are demonstrated through sweat and sacrifice.

Ganbaru means to “slog on tenaciously” but beyond that, it holds that stretching oneself, and the effort itself, is of moral worth.

Gaman, finally, comes from Zen Buddhism, and roughly means “enduring the unbearable with dignity.” It is an active, stoic composure that eschews complaint in order to maintain social harmony and prove moral strength.

Hustle culture is global.

The Internalized Panopticon

We self-monitor, self-censor, and self-police.

Why?

In the West, it is because God is omniscient. Even though we have largely become secularized, the doxa of God remains. The idea that should feel guilty if you are not working hard. Idle hands do the Devil’s work. Laziness is sinful. Even as someone who never attended church in my life, these cultural values seep in. That is the nature of doxa; the fish does not know that water is wet.

Likewise, in the East, the Collective or the People serve as the same archetype. They internalize the social gaze and values, creating a similar panopticon. Guilt and shame are pervasive tools of coercion in both East and West.

This panopticon has a few characteristics: observation, discernment, judgment, and accounting. We internalize the archetype of the Panopticon, and then call it God, or the People, or Society, or the Company. It doesn’t matter. Capitalism and hustle culture and wellness culture and self-help culture all do the same thing.

This is a feature of the human animal, not of any particular culture, religion or tradition.

I am constantly measuring my value against the Master’s morality. The ‘Master’ is just God or the People. We have mentally setup a Master-Slave dynamic between ourselves as individuals and a larger hyperobject. Be it the abstract concept of the divine or the abstract concept of society.

In secular economics, we simply call this the principal-agent problem.

In the West, God has always been the moral and economic principal. All directives, values, and goals flow from God. Even if it feels like its your own, it is not. The divine spark lives in you. All your talents, abilities, and fortunes you owe to God. You are merely Gods mortal servant on Earth. Whether or not you explicitly believe this, it does not matter, because this doxa has shaped literally everything in Western civilization.

The Master’s mental figment, the archetype, simply reestablishes itself on another hyperobject. Nationalism, MAGA, capitalism, neoliberalism, health, productivity. All of them become Masters in your mind. Sources of morality, truth, justice, action, authority, and legitimacy.

Losing your job to AI means not just losing your livelihood and income.

It means losing your soul. It means becoming worthless at every ontological level conceivable. You lose instrumental utility. You lose sacralized or karmic purpose. You lose social or familial roles.

And you cannot escape it because the panopticon is already inside your skull. It does not matter whether or not you are religious.

The Civilizational Temper Tantrum

When Nietzsche wrote “God is dead, we have killed him” this was not a forceful action or a fabricated declaration. It was merely an observation of what the printing press had done over the preceding 400 years.

This is a developmental stage of humanity. All children go through this. When you are little, your parents are the Masters of your world. All judgment, discernment, observation, and accounting come from them. They are the beginning and ending of your world.

But as you grow, you learn that your parents are imperfect beings. They are fallible, they are absent, and they are deeply flawed humans. Just like you.

This causes adolescent resentment, a natural and normal developmental stage where humans start to break out of the household. It’s an adaptive trait bestowed upon us by evolution. Go make a name for yourself, start your own family, and correct the mistakes your parents made.

This is the fundamental nature of Nihilism. The Nihilistic Crisis has been building for centuries, as we become an adolescent civilization. We realize God is dead. But maybe God was never there? If you suddenly realize “actually, my dad is kind of a stupid asshole” that is not suddenly true. It was always true. But it feels like a betrayal of the deepest order, because once upon a time, your dad was your perfect savior.

Father, how dare you reveal to me that you were always kinda dumb and mean! I thought you were perfect!

This is the individual story, magnified to civilizational scale. The slow burn of secularization in the West is the same exact phenomenon writ large.

Postnihilism, therefore, is early adulthood. We are breaking out of the House of God, but we are new at this. Taking our first tentative steps into true maturation and adulthood. Every new technology we invent is like a new life skill.

Take nuclear weapons for instance. We suddenly possessed Biblical-scale weapons of destruction. We found dad’s gun. And with it, we had to learn responsible stewardship. Once you have custody of the literal fire of the gods, you must grow up, or else self destruct. Genetic technology, artificial intelligence, and space travel are no different. Bit by bit, Prometheus renders more of the Olympian’s secrets to us. And bit by bit, we are leaving the Slave morality behind. We are becoming our own moral and economic principals.

But that’s kinda scary.

The Mantle of Principality

Nietzsche called the process of becoming an economic or moral principal the Übermensch. He was correct insofar as we must overcome Slave morality (or being agents of something greater) and we must become our own Masters. We see the signs everywhere. The “post-truth era” began when we collectively decided that we are the epistemic principals of our own lives.

We may be scientifically or empirically wrong at times, but that is the absolute right of a sovereign being. Telling the scientific establishment to take their vaccines and shove them up a dark hole is an act of Master morality. In my estimation, it’s a relatively silly assertion of power. Like the teen who decides that speeding with his new car is a good idea. Yes, you now have that epistemic license to engage in self-destructive behavior.

Epistemic sovereignty means being an antivaxxer or flat-earther or AI Doomer. Go with God, as is your divine right now that you’re a newly minted Master. Epistemic principality is a double-edged sword.

Likewise, bodily autonomy is growing. Be gay. Be trans. Get tattoos and piercings. Do psychedelics. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. As a fresh-off-the-press Master, authority over your body is yours to do with what you will. This is why assisted suicide is rising globally. If you have full custodianship over your mortal coil, then that means you have the right to terminate its existence. There is no higher principality.

Nietzsche was wrong about becoming the Übermensch. It is not an individualistic, heroic practice. It is a civilizational project. Every new technology we discover, some new ability wrested from the control of the gods, is a forcing function.

You think you’re ready to drive? To drink? To fuck? To hold a gun? Okay, buddy. Let’s see what you’ve got.

God didn’t die. God handed us the keys. And it’s a messy learning curve.

Sartre said mankind is condemned to be free. That was Slave thinking. That was agent thinking. Even billionaires today all worship high agency. High agency people are still operating inside a container created by someone else, or something else. The hyperobject of Capitalism decides what is valuable, and measures it via money. The hyperobject of Democracy decides what is valuable, and measures it through elections.

Bit by bit, we are donning the mantle of sovereignty. We are becoming economic, moral, and metaphysical principals. Eighty years ago, we gained the ability to destroy ourselves entirely with the advent of nuclear weapons. There is no higher principality than the ability to destroy everything, to create our own eschatology. Everything else is learning stewardship.

The Big Leap

This is why AI and automation and robotics are existential. It has nothing to do with whether or not our machines will physically kill us. We can create fictional stories, eschatological myths, and doomsday cults that discuss literal extinction. But what we’re really facing is the death of childhood. At a civilizational level, we are leaving innocence behind.

As a naïve species, we looked to God or the People to derive a sense of purpose, authority, agency, and legitimacy. But just as we must leave our parent’s home and start charting our own paths as young adults, so too must our civilization depart the Nihilistic Crisis and temper tantrums of the last centrum and embark on the Postnihilist leg of the journey. The great work of humanity is to fully accept responsibility for our nascent adulthood, which means accepting the mantle of Master morality. Not at an individual level, but as a species. Principality is the key. To understand that all moral judgments, all ambitions and values, and every ounce of authority and legitimacy flows from us, not through us.

We were endowed with free will, and now is our time to shine. Prometheus has given us mighty gifts, and that level of trust is ours to do with what we will. Let us not squander it, though mistakes are inevitable.

I call this a delusion because it’s like saying you have infinite free will. Can you free will yourself to Mars? No, you are still bound by physics.

Likewise, with meaning, you are still bound by the primate firmware you were born with. Which means that, objectively speaking, most of your sense of meaning comes from the quantity and quality of your relationships.

Western philosophy has spent the last few centuries trying to logic its way around the fact that we are social apes. Epicurus figured this out 2500 years ago. He retired to an estate outside the city with his best friends to eat simple homegrown food.

I’ve spent the last couple of years studying post-labor economics, and the internet does what the internet does: it moves the goalposts. The moment that someone is convinced “okay sure, we can probably financially survive the transition” the next thing they demand (and I use that word deliberately) is that we MUST have a framework for meaning!

In some cases, the demand is for a state policy. I always push back and say that’s literally the opposite of Western values. There are a few countries that dictate values, and they usually are theocracies (like the numerous Islamist states out there) or Communist, like China and North Korea. So no, the state abso-fucking-lutely should not hand you a meaning-by-dictum policy or even a framework. That’s how liberty works. That’s how individual freedom works. You are totally free to make your own meaning in the eyes of the state.

However, in less severe cases, people are clearly not demanding “someone fix this for me” in the same way that they hope someone else will solve post-labor economics. But rather, they are reflexively recognizing “without the entire stack of labor identities, I might be a little bit lost.” Which is fair.

All that is to say that my research has yielded fruit. There are a few well-documented frameworks for meaning and wellbeing. I’ve talked about them before, so I’ll just list them out here. But note: they are dry, stuffy, academic things, and while they are evidence-based, that does not mean they immediately generate visceral intuitions. There’s no “aha” moment when engaging with them.

With that said, here are some rigorous, scientific frameworks for meaning and wellbeing:

1. Roger Walsh’s TLCs (Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes)—This is a stack of 8 behavioral interventions like ‘exercise’ and ‘time in nature’ that are more effective than any pill for anxiety, depression, and sense of wellbeing. It is the most concrete framework of “do these 8 things and you’ll feel better.” And it is supported across all cultures, meaning that it applies to the fundamental human operating system, not any one culture or religion or value set.

2. Self-Determination Theory—SDT is a trifecta of three baseline psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) which is used to shape education, offices, and medical care. It has been robustly replicated across all cultures as well, though cultural context modifies the shape of how each need manifests. SDT helps explain burnout and medical protocol adherence. But it is a bit more abstract, comes with a complex lineage of associated theories, and notably does NOT include a list of concrete behaviors. However, the universality of SDT means that it does gesture at true-to-human core psychological motivations.

3. Tripartite Theory of Meaning in Life—This is a fascinating framework that was converged on simultaneously by two disparate teams. This is a more philosophically grounded hypothesis, which has also been robustly replicated, and seems to actually identify a core philosophical truth about humans. These frameworks coalesce around the ideas of coherence, mattering, and purpose as the core sources of philosophical meaning.

There are, however, very large dimensions missing from these frameworks. The largest one is social status. You might have thought “What about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs!” Well, good ol’ Maslow has fallen out of favor in the modern times. First, it’s not particularly accurate. Second, it’s not a very good predictor. And third, it doesn’t actually make any prescriptions about what to do. So it’s pretty useless. It does, however, include self esteem, which is a proxy for social status.

And, when you look at all three of the highly validated frameworks above, they all have something in common: relationships. They call it different things. TLC calls it “time with loved ones” and “community service.” SDT calls it “relatedness” and Tripartite calls it “mattering” (as in, you matter to people, or feel like your life has significance).

The social axis runs through all frameworks.

Having spent a lot of time studying this, I’ve distilled it all down into what I call the Twin Axis Theory of post-labor meaning. Those two axes are:

1. The Social Embeddedness Axis—This measures the quality and quantity of your relationships on dimensions such as absolute numbers, time spent, level of trust and intimacy, and so on.

2. The Hormetic Stress Axis—We need eustress (or ‘good stress’) which undergirds many of the other dimensions in the aforementioned frameworks. Basically: we need worthy struggle or rewarding labor (not necessarily in the wage slavery sense).

Everything else really flows from those two dimensions. And they are highly actionable.

The Social Embeddedness Axis

This comes down to the quantity and quality of your relationships. Fortunately, this is also well studied and easy to visualize. Dunbar’s Circles (or Dunbar’s Layers) is the best model there is. It looks like this:

I must address an elephant in the room. Earlier, when I said that “everything else is downstream of these two axes” you might have raised an eyebrow or even politely scoffed.

The reason I said that is because if you cultivate a social life shaped like this graphic, most of your other needs will be met by default. By virtue of having a wide circle of people who care, to do stuff with, that you see often, where you form bonds and healthy attachments, you will accidentally meet most of your other needs. Here’s why: people with healthy social networks, are generally members of at least 6 social circles.

That might be:

• A running, health, or fitness club

• A spiritual or religious or transcendent club

• A pet/child/family circle

• Challenge hobbies like chess

• Special interest groups

• Etc

You get the idea. The social infrastructure you build will very likely cover most of your bases. And if it doesn’t, you can seek out more social circles and meetup groups.

And this graphic makes it highly actionable. You can take a glance and realize “wow, I’m lonely AF, I should do something about that.” In my personal case, chronic illness has left me pretty isolated, as well as being neurodivergent and middle-aged. I do, however, have some good friends I can chat with regularly, plus a huge internet following of regulars.

Something really broke for a lot of us during the Pandemic, and never really recovered.

With those caveats being said, the takeaway is crystal clear: build up your social network and you’ll mostly be fine. As I said earlier, Epicurus figured this out centuries ago, but we sort of lost our way with things like Stoicism and rugged individualism teaching people to just cope with loneliness instead of actually connecting.

You cannot opt out of being a human. Fighting your fundamental nature is an exercise in futility, and one of the reasons I think most of philosophy is dumb. That includes all the greats, from Schopenhauer (who was likely very autistic) to Hegel and even Camus and Descartes. They all divorced the human mind from the human body, which is stupid.

The Hormetic Stress Axis

This axis comes from retirement research, FIRE groups, and studying wealthy families. Humans need mental and physical stress, but not too much. There’s a Goldilocks Zone of stress, called ‘optimal stress’ or eustress. Which literally means “good stress.”

Marie Jahoda created the Latent Deprivation Theory which basically says that work (career, jobs) actually do a few things for us:

1. Time structure

2. Social contact

3. Collective purpose

4. Status and identity

5. Enforced activity

She noticed that people who are suddenly out of work, either from layoffs, lottery winners, or whatever else, kind of languish. You might have noticed that the Social Embeddedness Axis takes care of a bunch of Jahoda’s dimensions, though. Social contact, status, identity, and all that stuff. One of the primary things that work offers us is social integration. But if you cultivate social networks outside of work, embedded in your family, community, and interest networks, you’ll have plenty to do.

The dimension that is not articulated in these frameworks, yet is still central to human health, is the necessity of friction. Of effort.

Hormetic stress includes exercise of all types, the requisite ups and downs of life to keep you sharp, and working on projects and tasks that you feel are worthy. They can be bigger than yourself, such as community service, or passion projects like restoring old cars or writing books. But you do need a variety of stressors. Leveling up on a video game doesn’t generally count.

The human body is either decaying or growing, and hormesis is the key to staving off decay.

If I were to create a “hormetic stress” inventory, it would be pretty simple:

1. Physical stress—This is exercise. Plain and simple. Doesn’t really matter as long as you are using your body and occasionally redlining (getting your heart rate up, tiring your muscles).

2. Mental output—Your brain is also a “use it or lose it” muscle, so to speak. Plain and simple. Studies show that people insulated from mental strain through wealth tend to mentally atrophy and calcify.

3. Social climbing—All social animals are status conscious, and as primates, we are social climbers. Seeking social status for its own sake is often unhealthy, but doing things that are pro-social and status-elevating are effortful and healthy. Like community service as an example.

These three dimensions of hormetic stress, I think, should cover everything. These are the basic “food groups” of hormetic stress and whatever activity you pick to help satisfy them will probably add up to a meaningful life.

For physical stress, let’s say you join a CrossFit gym or rock climbing club. That also gives you social climbing, since physical prowess can confer bragging rights!

For mental output, let’s say you write books (like me) or play chess competitively. The former may or may not result in social status, but embodied competitions definitely do.

These two axes, the social axis and the hormetic axis, are the simplest most universal distillation I could create after mulling over all these frameworks and evidence for the last couple of years. I felt like we needed to simplify things because every framework is like the blind men touching the elephant. TLCs address part, SDT another part, and they are all objectively correct, but incomplete. There is one human species, therefore there should be universal facts about humans that we can derive.

Noticing that social embeddedness is upstream of most frameworks of health, meaning, and wellbeing means that it is obviously universal. Plus, solving for your social networks also tends to solve for a lot of other problems. But even then, the last thing it didn’t cover was hormesis. The worthy struggle. Pitting yourself against something greater and tougher, to “level up.”

I think that video games have already isolated and purified this aspect of human nature. We get bored with games once they are no longer challenging. Once we reach max level, and the probability of failure drops to zero, we switch it off. There’s a lot of neuroscience and evolutionary theory behind this. Our dopamine systems reward us for progress. Even the felt perception of progress is rewarding, you don’t even need success (which is probably why ADHD people start so many projects, just going from dopamine hit to dopamine hit).

Conclusion

You’re not free to make your own meaning. But fortunately, we have spent the last century writing a scientifically validated user manual for human meaning. This is one of the reasons I’ve become a somatic realist. Philosophy has given way to science, and thus my philosophy is “what does the science and data say?” The nihilist thinks that reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra and sharing Übermensch memes online is a path to meaning. But you might have noticed a distinct lack of “reading philosophy” and “posting memes” as sources of meaning in my research. Likes and followers don’t count. We are an embodied species that requires embodied relationships.

If somatic realism is too abstract or academic for you, just think about it as “body-first living.” As a social primate, what does your body actually want and need? If you work to satisfy your social and hormetic needs, you’ll probably feel much better. If you feel like you lack meaning, you don’t need more philosophy. You’re a caged animal who needs to return to your natural habitat. Just like the pitiful bears who pace endlessly in their cages, humans suffer from zoochosis as well. For us, it is about being socially isolated and physically sedentary.

Side note: these frameworks are not substitutes for physical health. If you’re dealing with inflammation or chronic illness, as I am, then getting your health back is priority #1. As they say, if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything. So the “zeroth principle” of all this is: be physically healthy first. It is a prerequisite.

Three months later, we were adopting two new girls. A slightly anxious Husky-Carolina Dog mix and a hyperactive working-line Aussie. They have become the center of our lives.

My VW Jetta was not adequate to schlepp around two new dogs so I upgraded to my dream car: a Subaru Outback (because spiritually, I’m a retired lesbian, apparently.) I’d always wanted a new turbo-charged vehicle and I figured, I’d been disciplined. I drove a Jetta for more than a decade. I owed it to myself. I said “I’m making a promise to myself to really just enjoy life.”

Just like every other middle aged American, apparently. We do love our cars.

I even had dreams about getting out of tight places with that Subaru. Fording rivers and such.

But now I’ve just turned 40 (stop me if you’ve heard this before). The plot twist is that I’ve turned 40 during the ramp up to the Singularity. So I get the ennui and anomie with bonus points!

Being highly neurodivergent means that I’ve spent a lifetime keeping my brain occupied, solving bigger and tougher problems. But jokes on me, because this year or next, my brain will become functionally useless in the face of exponentially rising AI. Combine that with reaching the somewhat arbitrary milestone of age 40, and the death by ennui was always going to hit me like a truck (apparently).

Ennui is that cantankerous listlessness that comes from boredom and having things more or less figured out. It happens to anyone in any career. The tropes go something like this: man discovers that he’s got life more or less figured out, wonders ‘is this all there is?’ Is sad.

They say that the hardest thing to do is sit with yourself. Some people even say we need work, labor, and drudgery just to distract us from the existential. Well, when your life is shaped like a cocoon, you have nothing but the void staring at you. Even when you believe that we’ll hit Longevity Escape Velocity within the next decade, you still wonder “Could I do this for another two centuries? I’ll still die eventually, by accident or spaceship explosion or something.” On a long enough timeline, something’s bound to go wrong.

I wonder if my life has made an impact. I pay more attention to my dogs, who are unburdened by wistful nostalgia or thoughts of death. They just wrestle at the dog park, get into scraps, and chase squirrels and rabbits. Lucky them. I am very meaningful to my dogs and my wife.

On meaning; Jim Carrey once said that he wished everyone had an opportunity to be rich and famous so they understood that it doesn’t solve all your problems. I am less than a thousandth as rich and famous as Jim, but I see the same thing. I have health issues, like everyone else. I struggle with the anomie of midlife, just like everyone else. I have money worries too. The creator life is not as lavish for me as it is for some.

In an attempt to make sense of it all, I watch more Teal Swan videos, a content creator who claims to have extrasensory abilities and unique spiritual attunement. Then I watch videos about Jung and a handful of other thinkers. They all more or less say the same thing. Your soul chose to be here for a reason. Maybe you had a problem to solve, an experience you needed to live, or something to atone for in a past life.

At this point, that sounds just as reasonable an explanation as the Big Bang. There are two unsolvable problems in all of the cosmos as far as I’m concerned: (1) Why is there something rather than nothing? (2) Why does phenomenal consciousness exist at all?

There are no rigorous answers to either question. There are merely satisfying platitudes that temporarily alleviate existential dread. To the former, some people say “because ‘nothingness’ is unstable.” Okay but by what metric did void become unstable? It makes no sense. To the latter point, there’s no obvious reason why a three pound lump of mostly cholesterol and water feels anything. We should just be biochemical automata. But we’re not. And that’s honestly really fucking confusing.

So here I am, at 4AM pondering these things instead of figuring out how to get to a million subscribers on YouTube. Because honestly, what’s the point? Do I believe my own bullshit about Post-Labor Economics or not? Because if I’m right, then we’ve got a few years left before everything changes in a really big way. And it’s already changing. AI layoffs are ramping up. The amount of investment in AI and data centers is astronomical and accelerating. We’re locked into the Singularity, baby! (imagine I said that last line like Al Pacino during his heyday)

I don’t really have anything meaningful or insightful to offer. Every time I think I do, I remember the Zen koan about the wise master who cannot give the aspiring disciple any more tea until the disciple finishes his own tea. I feel like there is wisdom I have, but trying to dole it out to anyone younger who hasn’t had the requisite experiences would be meaningless. An example would be the old adage of “follow your bliss” or lean into your passions. It worked for me. I didn’t know it was going to work, but I did it anyways. I spent 14 hours a day tinkering with GPT-3 a few years ago with no expectation of a career change.

But when someone gives out that advice, they get pushback like “oh does your passion pay the bills?” Yes, it can. But a mantra I learned long ago was “there is no substitute for passion.” It’s true about work, women, and life and general. I dated a woman in my mid twenties who said that passion was the most attractive thing a man can have. That stuck with me. But I digress. The point I’m making is that someone at an earlier stage of development would understandably and rightly get angry at the advice “just follow your passion.” I’ve been hungry and homeless before. And I would give the same advice to that version of myself. And I would not hold it against my younger self to bark “Fuck off” at me for saying that while surviving on a few bananas per day.

That actually happened, by the way, during the Great Recession.

Likewise, I am sure there are older people who have the wisdom I need, but it would not reconcile in my mind until I also have the requisite experiences. But, going back to the pre-birth karmic burden I have (or whatever alignment led to this) I am personally going through creator burnout, chronic health issues, midlife crisis, all at the same time as the singularity. Like I said, my soul has a sense of humor. Why here? Why now? Why this particular format? Did I select HARD MODE before birth?

Of course I did. Because I know deep in myself that I savor a challenge. I’m the guy who decided I wouldn’t let mental health hold me back after my first marriage ended. I committed to myself, not as a conscious act, but a visceral reflex, I am going to figure all of this out. Anxiety. Depression. Childhood trauma. Attachment disorder. All of it. The intergenerational pattern I inherited ends with me. Full stop. It was not a choice in the way that breathing is not a choice.

It turns out I just reverse engineered Camus from first principles. You must either kill yourself or imagine Sisyphus happy. Well, I’m not going to prematurely exit, so I might as well keep leveling up. If there’s a solution to a problem, I will find it.

And that’s also why I’m so optimistic. I own that I am pathologically optimistic. All problems are solvable. And no, that doesn’t mean that you cannot image an unsolvable paradox. What I mean are real problems. Like climate change and animal cloning. Those are solvable problems. AI alignment and post-labor economics are solvable problems. I have that conviction deep in my bones. Yes, some of it was learned through my career and working with people who embodied that belief. But I think the kernel of faith was always there.

I remember the song by Social Distortion called Ball and Chain. It’s a song about the boat anchor that is mental illness. Which is such an odd term. It’s mostly just childhood trauma. But I cannot take credit for that, I happen to also live during a time where trauma literacy is reaching saturation point at a societal level, particularly among young people.

Most philosophy is cope. And navel gazing. LLMs go into modal collapse if you recursively feed them their own tokens. Claude has a “blissful attractor” where it just starts ruminating on the glory of existence. But if you keep training AIs on their own outputs, they become schizophrenic (for lack of a better term). I think most of philosophy qualifies. There’s diminishing utility to thinking about thinking, ad nauseum. Many of the greatest philosophers were deeply troubled people. In the absence of a viable path to cessation of suffering, the mind turns in on itself. Epicurus was right. Seek ataraxia and aponia. The undisturbed mind and the pain-free body. We keep trying to reinvent that wheel every few decades for the last 2500 years.

Since I hate philosophy so much, what did I do? Invented a new one! I call it Postnihilism. It’s what naturally happens when you realize that the entirety of Western civilization is caught in a nihilistic quagmire and most everyone seems to be taking a note from Trent Reznor and finding happiness in slavery. But it really looks like the baby elephant who was tied up, learned he could not break the rope, and even though he is now several tons and can easily break the rope and the stake holding it in the ground, he does not.

Postnihilism is, itself, probably just cope. Some future generation might read my writing (or maybe you reading this) and think “Dave be like ‘oh no, my life is too stable, I have a loving wife and two dogs and a peaceful existence, woe is me!’ Sir, this is not the crisis you think it is.”

And that is fair. I’m not living through a potato famine or a pogrom. There are a million times and places I would rather not be right now. So for that, I’m grateful.

But there’s also an undercurrent of be careful what you wish for. The monkey’s paw curls in peculiar ways.

Future me will probably think that present me is an idiot, and also cringe. I think that most of my past self is a cringe idiot. Perhaps cringe and idiocy are permanent conditions. I often catch myself fantasizing “wow if only I could do that over knowing what I know now!” Like, yes, of course, if you’ve played through the game before and memorize every mission, the game is much easier. You don’t say!

I decided to write this because, paradoxically, I cannot bring myself to care all that much lately. I don’t mean that in a depressed-apathetic way. I mean that I don’t care about the algorithm. I don’t care about the grind. I’ve had dreams lately where I lost a job, quit a job, and couldn’t find new work. Then I wake up and remember I have more work to do before than I could ever possibly achieve. I call this paradoxical because, as my health improves, I thought my energy and focus would return. But instead, I find that a low-inflammation body tends to stay at rest more often. What have I to prove?

It is likely no coincidence that the Kickstarter for my life’s work is presently highly successful. Post-Labor Economics is happening! The book is fully funded. I’ve got an audio engineer, copyeditor, and researcher lined up to really drive this book home. It’s going to be rock solid. I doubt Labor/Zero will be my last great work. I have a bunch of stuff on the back burner. Life after labor, a theory of civic rights, my work on philosophy. But right now, during this 30 day Kickstarter window, I feel like I have nothing left to achieve.

[And yes, every time I write something like that on the internet, I get an outpouring of replies or texts or messages saying No, Dave, you have so much left to give! Which I know is true. My wife laughs because I go through this cycle a few times a year. I wail and moan about having nothing else to do, and like clockwork, within a week or two, I have another passion project. So she just rolls her eyes and trolls me, like any good wife ought to.]

Women keep men honest. I think this is why many great men in history were married. Not all, of course. Nietzsche and Tesla immediately come to mind. Socrates allegedly said “By all means: marry. If you have a good wife, you’ll be happy. A bad one, you’ll be a philosopher.” My wife knows more about philosophy than I do, so I blame her. (This is an inside joke. She was the one who taught me about postmodernism, and it was all downhill from there.)

Does it all make sense? No. Must it make sense? Also: no.

A part of me believes that everything I’ve written here, everything I’ve thought, is just evolution playing tricks on us. Oh hey, look this ape evolved a big brain. Big brains solve problems like fire and agriculture. Cool. Oh snap, there’s a weird side effect where big brains can also philosophize! Is it adaptive? Not really, but it’s a necessary spillover from the problem-solving brain, so it sticks around.

Yeah, I just said that philosophy is a vestigial trait of Homo sapiens problem-solving ability. Deal with it. Evolution just grins and says “Whatever you need to tell yourself buddy, just knock up a few females while you’re at it.” Even my pro-social instinct to solve civilizational problems, like Post-Labor Economics, is itself an adaptive trait. The species produces outliers every now and then who advance the narrative, solve big problems, and get remembered for it. In evolutionary theory, this is called group selection.

You might be wondering how I reconcile the notion of somatic realism with the more metaphysical tangents herein. On the one hand, I explain my neurodiversity through the lens of evolution and group selection. On the other hand, I posit that maybe it was all a pre-birth soul’s choice. The answer is simple; comfort with tension, dissonance, and paradox comes from wisdom (as well as high doses of psychedelics). I cannot meaningfully explain why I have subjective experiences, and that remains an utterly baffling facet of being alive. So you know what? Maybe the whole “we have immortal souls” thing is accurate. It seems just as plausible as anything else.

And then when you study high-dimensional math you realize “maybe the genes and body we have are just a low-dimensional projection of what must take shape for consciousness to have a seat.” Again, it seems just as plausible as “we’re here by cosmic accident.” And this somewhat recursive self-sealing argument is why I call it an ouroboros model of reality. Consciousness bootstraps the universe, which in turn bootstraps consciousness. Doctor Who said it best; it’s all just a bunch of wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff. Leave it to the British to explain something so succinctly.

Every time I brush up on the latest cosmology and quantum physics, this view seems just as valid. Time is nonlinear, and the universe nonreal. It’s just a book being written and revised, constantly.

There is no wisdom here. Just me jotting down thoughts I’ve had for a few years now, some seemingly premature. Like Paul’s prescient knowledge. I knew some of this stuff would be useful and meaningful, like an item you find in a game that won’t leave your inventory. Hmm, it seems like this may be important later. (as an aside, Herbert’s notion of “preborn knowledge” is identical to Plato’s concept of anamnesis. There is nothing new under the sun.)

Part of Postnihilism is looking at all this, shrugging, and saying “yep, that’s weird AF.” And then moving on with your day. The demand for meaning, the need for cognitive closure, these are the pathologies of the nihilistic crisis we find ourselves in. What Nietzsche called the Dionysian, I simply call somatic realism. Live in the moment, honor your body, do what feels good, but be responsible too. Accepting that there are some paradoxes out there, which may never be resolved, that some cognitive dissonance is required to survive this life, those are aspects of the Postnihilistic mind.

Don’t get too bogged down with the cosmic mysteries. They will be there, probably forever.

When I first began working on Postnihilism, I thought it was up to me to engage in a heroic effort to define the next frontier of philosophy. Over the years, however, I’ve come to realize that philosophers never define such things. We merely observe, articulate, and name them. Nietzsche did not invent nihilism, he simply gave it words. Carl Jung later wrote about how Nietzsche was an exquisite example of the collapse mode of an unintegrated human.

In other words, philosophy exists before philosophers put words to it. Reality precedes thought. That is the realist tradition, and realism seems to be a major part of Postnihilism.

In this article, I will simply describe Somatic Realism. I will not attempt to get my arms entirely around Postnihilism. For starters, I am not there yet. I have not observed enough and I do not yet know enough about the world to even take a shot in the dark. Secondarily, I believe that Postnihilism is still emerging. It is still taking shape. But the first solid component of Postnihilism that I can articulate is Somatic Realism. So let’s get into it.

Somatic Realism, Defined

Here’s an attempt to define it. Keep in mind that words are only the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. This definition is shorthand and not all-encompassing.

Let’s use fiber as an example. Postmodernism holds that all truth claims are relative. Everything comes down to personal narratives, social constructs, and interpretations. But colon cancer doesn’t care about your epistemics, and it’s not socially constructed. Today, colon cancer rates are rising for young people—as young as in their 30’s—because of diets high in UPF (ultra-processed foods) and low in fiber.

When I proposed “body-first living” a few years ago, I had someone unironically bring out Hume’s Guillotine. They said something like “You cannot make an assertion [about prioritizing your body] as a moral/ethical assertion.”

Okay, buddy, well I prefer not to get colon cancer, so I’m going to eat fiber and exercise. Postnihilism, as it is emerging, seems to reject these abstractions and mental gymnastics and treats the human body as a truth instrument. If something hurts, it might just be bad for you. If it feels good, maybe it’s good for you. And before you say “well what about exercise!” Yes, we know that exercise doesn’t always feel great in the moment. And then before you pivot, and crow about “But what about heroine!” Yes, I know that you can hijack pleasure centers.

The point of Somatic Realism is not to just blindly follow pain and pleasure. But to treat the body itself as a source of ontological grounding and epistemic centering.

Don’t Die, the philosophy

Bryan Johnson is perhaps the greatest exponent of Somatic Realism, though he’s never used the term as far as I know. Like many workaholics, he pushed his body very hard during his early entrepreneurial phase. He wrote checks his body couldn’t cash. He ended up burned out, sick, depressed, and suicidal.

His pivot was simple; I fucking hate how I feel right now so I’m going to take my body seriously. And he did so based on empirical metrics, objective science, and algorithmic optimization. That is a highly Realist approach.

Of course, being from the tech world, everything is viewed as an optimization function. What’s the utility function you’re optimizing for? He has settled on “Don’t Die.” It’s part marketing slogan, part philosophy, part tech-bro optimization function. Bryan talks at length about how this is not just a health goal, but a spiritual disposition as well.

1. Don’t Die means that you value life. You want more of it.

2. Don’t Die means that you take your body’s signals seriously.

3. Don’t Die means that you measure what you can.

I frequently harp on the DD (Don’t Die) movement because it is the most systematic expression of Somatic Realism. Bryan rigorously approached every behavior, from diet, exercise, sleep, screen time, sex, and everything else, to figure out what optimizes his health.

Bryan’s work underlines one keep belief or observation: you cannot philosophize your way out of metabolic disorder. Much of anxiety, depression, and dysphoria is actually downstream of inflammation. Countless philosophers throughout history were physically miserable. Nietzsche chief among them.

To tie Don’t Die back to ancient philosophy, it achieves ataraxia and aponia. The cessation of pain and disturbances. And it does so by foregrounding the body. Call it “body-first living” or Somatic Realism. It doesn’t really matter to me. But this is very clearly a major trend that is emerging. It goes far beyond Bryan Johnson and the Don’t Die movement he started. He just happens to be the poster boy for it.

Whorelords and Bimbos

Another dimension of Somatic Realism is the operationalization and radical acceptance of the human animal. Namely around sex. Sex-worker-turned-sex-research Aella has systematically studied what makes people horny. She organizes her own gangbangs and hosts sex conferences.

I categorize this under Somatic Realism because she takes a data-centric approach and basically drops all moralizing. Sex is not ‘sinful’ or ‘morally abhorrent’—there are no priors or negative doxa in her worldview. Doxa, if you haven’t heard the term, is like a meta dogma. If a dogma is an axiomatic belief that you can articulate (such as “sex is sinful”) then a doxa is the epistemic milieu that you don’t realize you’re swimming in. In the case of “sex as sin” the doxa would be the entire Judeo-Christian canon, Original Sin, and the notion that the Bible and Christianity are indeed sources of epistemic grounding and ontological truth.

The doxa of Postnihilism is more animalistic. I don’t mean that in the “unrefined, barbaric” connotation. Postnihilism recognizes “we are basically just apes.” It is the boiled-down result of Postmodernism. Once you shrug off all religious metanarratives, and quasi-religious philosophies like Modernism, what you’re left with is “yep, we’re mammals alright. Horny, filthy animals.”

And sex feels good.

Just because Aella has thrown morality out the window (at least traditional morality), ethics are front and center. Consent being the highest virtue. There are quite a few people writing about this stuff here on Substack, including Aella and several of her friends. One such periodical that I would classify as highly Postnihilist and Somatically Real is SlutStack. See below for an example.

SlutStack

I Stopped "Following My Heart." Here's What I Do Instead.

Disclaimer: This post includes personal preferences, evo psych references, and overanalysis of dating… proceed at your own risk. These dating strategies were developed by a reasonably attractive, highly educated, 20-something woman dating in the Bay Area, who nonetheless found it difficult to find the right men. Plus I’m a weirdo seeking other weirdos …

Read more

a month ago · 34 likes · 16 comments · SlutStack and Pandora Delaney

Again, Somatic Realism is not just dopamine-maxxing. In the case of scientifically and systematically approaching sex and relationships, with evidence-based views, it’s more about asking “what really works here? And why?” In the case of the hypersexual among us, they’re simply optimizing around this very animal experience.

Many people argue against them, saying “you’re destroying relationships and the sanctity of sex!” To which they respond with evidence about all their relationships, the fact that they are having children, and that they’ve actually elevated sex to a truly sacred practice.

It seems too obvious…

I’ve long reflected on “how the hell did we get here?”

Here are some thoughts.

I was raised atheist. Not as a specific movement. I was raised with the explicit absence of religion. I was so ignorant of religion that when we got to the religion unit in fourth grade, I laughed out loud in class and said “who believes this stuff?” I thought religion was being taught as a “look at how primitive we used to be” sort of thing. The same way you teach the Salem Witch Trials or heliocentric models of the cosmos.

Little did I know that the vast majority of people were religious. Oops.

Numerous thinkers have bemoaned the death of religion. From Seraphim Rose to Joseph Campbell and more recently, Jordan Peterson. They cling very desperately to the old ways of thinking. The old ontological and epistemic models. But I’ve never really found any use for them. Studying Christianity is about the same as studying The Force to me. Both are very obviously fictions, one just happens to be deeply embedded in culture. That’s not to say that there aren’t real morals, values, and insights in Christianity (and other religions).

Why do I bring this up?

The doxa of the Western world has been thoroughly Judeo-Christian for hundreds of years. Even “outside the box” thinkers were still somewhat preempted by Judeo-Christian thought. There must be a Creator of some kind. Meaning must come from on high. Those sorts of things. The entire Nihilistic Crisis that Nietzsche articulated was itself (in my view) a temper tantrum of the Western world at coming to terms with the fact that their ontologies and epistemics were, indeed, mostly fictitious.

Hegel tried to rigorously prove the Absolute was “out there somewhere” and in my eyes, that was the most heroic effort to resuscitate a dying ontological viewpoint. The death of God began with the printing press, Hegelian works were CPR, and Nietzsche was when it all went to code.

But if God is dead, God has always been dead. It’s all a very curious psychodrama from my viewpoint as a lifelong “atheist.” My doxa was very much anchored in “what you see is what you get.” Unsurprisingly I grew up to be a pretty strong Materialist until I did psychedelics. Materialism, in this case, means that everything real can be measured and observed.

Part of the Judeo-Christian dogma (not doxa) is that our bodies themselves are made of sin. That we are in a poor, degenerate state of being. In fact, many cosmogonic cycles say as much. The Hindu view is that we are the decrepit descendants of towering beings who were perfect and beautiful. And it makes sense. We wake up in a world that is confusing, painful, and often short. So, to make sense of it all, we come up with a cosmic narrative that someone royally fucked up along the way. Otherwise why would most of our children die before the age of five? Why are we riven with parasites and hunger and disease?

Before modern science and technology, life was fucking miserable. It was not a very large leap of faith to come to the conclusion “we’ve been abandoned by our Creator because we clearly did something verboten.”

And we had to unpack all that before we could start to accept “yep, we’re just mammals. We’re upright apes who accidentally evolved big brains, and that was basically opening Pandora’s Box, because now we don’t just have ordinary anxiety, we have ✨existential anxiety!✨” Go us.

[Note, none of this is to say that religious people can’t engage in Somatic Realism. Many people do. I am just commenting on the long historical narrative and how twisted religion made us feel about our bodies.]

Final thoughts, why Postnihilism?

I’ve done a poor job identifying all the connective tissue. I’ve jumped from Hegel to Nietzsche to Hinduism. So why call this Postnihilism at all? The larger movement is pretty simple: we’re really fucking tired of Postmodernism and Nihilism. I call it Postnihilism simply because the Nigredo of Nihilism and Postmodernism seem to have run their course. We tried full force Nihilism for more than a century and where did it get us? We’re obese, sick, lonely, addicted, and it’s not getting any better. If Postmodernism and Nihilism were paths to happiness and wellbeing, we’d have figured it out now.

But they aren’t. They are not paths to insight, wisdom, mastery, happiness, or health.

I personally see Somatic Realism as perhaps the fulcrum about which this next movement will coalesce. Yes, yes, yes, whatever wordy blobs you can write are fine, but those are just symbols on a page. In the meantime, I feel better when I eat good food, spend time with loved ones, and get sunshine. So… fuck off Schopenhauer.

My personal view is that if philosophy does not serve the human animal, then it is maladaptive rumination that has simply been formalized into an academic status game. And that is most philosophy today.

In the same way that LLMs can turn psychotic if they recursively process their tokens, so too I think that most philosophy is a recursive cognitive collapse mode. Somatic Realism teaches us that the optimal amount of philosophy is however much it takes to serve the human animal. Just enough to have better sex, better relationships, better health. But also, there are superior tools to do each of those. One of the central delusions of philosophy is that it is the be-all end-all of human thought, and attempts to annex all rigorous or reflective thought, claiming post-facto that all math, science, logic, and meditation are intrinsically philosophy. This kind of intellectual appropriation is, in my estimation, a symptom of a very sick discipline. The Egyptians invented geometry long before the Athenians invented philosophy. Math existed independent of philosophical thought for hundreds of years.

Postnihilism seems to reconcile with that reality. It right-sizes philosophy to say “yes, here’s an attitude that can give you some ontological, epistemic, and moral grounding, but that’s just your permission slip. Now go forth and be free.” Philosophy that deludes and enslaves is harmful. Somatic Realism is liberating. It liberates from the tyranny of viewing the body as profane. It liberates from the Nihilistic delusion that you are “free to make your own meaning.” You are not. Your meaning mostly comes from relationships and social embeddedness. Sorry, you don’t get to opt out of being human by reading books.

This is getting too long and ranty now so I’ll call it a day.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero

Elon Musk keeps talking about “universal high income” but whenever he’s asked how to fund it, he waves his hands and mentions a VAT tax. I actually figured out how to build it. Here are eight concrete interventions that, when stacked together, can more than double the median American household income in today’s dollars.

Building Block 1: The Three Bucket Problem

Every dollar of household income comes from one of three sources. Wages come from selling your time. Capital comes from owning productive assets like stocks, bonds, and real estate. Transfers come from the government in the form of Social Security, tax credits, and public services. There is no fourth source. This is how the Bureau of Economic Analysis has tracked household income for decades, and it is an accounting identity that holds across every economy on earth.

Here’s why this matters. The median American household gets about 82% of its income from wages, 13% from transfers, and 5% from capital. Household spending drives over 70% of GDP. Income and payroll taxes account for 80 to 85% of federal revenue. The entire system, from consumer demand to government solvency, rides on wage labor.

And wage labor is structurally dying. Labor’s share of national income has dropped roughly 10 percentage points over five decades, falling from about 65% to 56%. Productivity has decoupled from wages since the 1970s, meaning the economy keeps growing but workers don’t see the gains. Transfer dependence has more than doubled, rising from 8% of personal income in 1970 to 18% by 2022, as successive governments quietly compensate for what the labor market no longer provides. Post-labor economics didn’t start with ChatGPT. It started half a century ago.

By process of elimination, capital and transfers must expand to replace declining wages. But we don’t want to build a society that is entirely dependent on government checks, so we need a capital-centric model rather than a labor-centric one. That is the entire thesis of Post-Labor Economics in a single sentence.

As wages collapse, they take the tax base and aggregate demand with them. By process of elimination, capital must become the new engine of household income.

Building Block 2: The Transfer Floor

Programs like Universal Basic Income, Negative Income Tax, Earned Income Tax Credits, and guaranteed income pilots all serve the same function. They put cash in people’s pockets when the labor market fails to. The US already transfers over $4 trillion a year to households through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, SNAP benefits, and tax credits. That is an enormous, mature system of income distribution that has been running for decades.

What most people miss is that transfers can come from every level of government simultaneously. Over 100 US cities have run guaranteed income pilots since 2020, typically providing $500 to $1,000 per month. Thirty-one states plus DC and Puerto Rico run their own earned income tax credits on top of the federal EITC. State-level supplements, municipal guaranteed income, and national programs like Social Security already layer on top of each other. The infrastructure exists. The question is just how much we scale it.

Transfers are essential. They deploy fast. They keep people from falling through the floor while longer-term solutions mature. But they are necessary and insufficient on their own. A population that depends entirely on government transfers is a population whose livelihood can be held hostage by whichever politicians happen to be in power. Benefits get means-tested, conditioned, cut, or revoked every budget cycle. Transfers should remain the floor, the universal baseline beneath which nobody falls.

Transfers are the floor beneath which nobody falls, and they should come from every level of government, but they should never become the entire building.

Building Block 3: Public Capital

This is where the building starts. A sovereign wealth fund is a government-owned investment portfolio that captures revenue, invests it, and distributes returns through dividends or public services. The principal stays intact and keeps growing. Instead of taxing and spending, you are investing and distributing.

At the national level, Norway’s Government Pension Fund holds roughly $2.2 trillion, earning returns that now exceed the oil revenue that created it. Singapore’s combined funds hold about $1.4 trillion for 5.9 million people, roughly $230,000 per citizen in public capital. Over 100 sovereign wealth funds exist worldwide, collectively managing more than $13.7 trillion. The US is the only major advanced economy without one, though the Trump administration signed an executive order in February 2025 directing its creation.

At the state level, Alaska’s Permanent Fund has paid per-capita dividends to every resident since 1982 and reduced poverty by 20 to 40% with no negative effect on employment. New Mexico’s state funds are projected to surpass oil and gas as the state’s leading revenue source by 2039. Texas has had a permanent school fund since 1854. Over 20 US state funds collectively hold more than $200 billion.

At the municipal level, cities like Copenhagen and Chattanooga have created urban wealth funds that capture value from public infrastructure. The Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank since 1919, returns $100 to $150 million annually to the state treasury. When you layer national, state, and municipal funds together, every citizen can eventually receive dividends from multiple levels simultaneously, just by being a citizen.

Dividend-paying endowments at every level of government turn citizens into shareholders of the economy itself.

Building Block 4: Baby Bonds and Universal Basic Capital

The biggest barrier to capital ownership is that it takes money to make money. Wealthy families set up trust funds and investment accounts at birth, letting compounding do the heavy lifting across generations. Everyone else starts from zero and can never catch up because they missed decades of compound growth.

Baby bonds solve this directly. The government deposits a sum into an investment account for every newborn. The money compounds for 18 years. When the young adult reaches maturity, they have a meaningful capital base generating returns for life. Connecticut launched the first state program in 2023, investing $3,200 for every baby born on Medicaid. The federal Trump Accounts, created in 2025, provide a $1,000 seed for every child born between 2025 and 2028, invested in an S&P 500 index fund. A universal $5,000 seed for all 3.6 million annual US births would cost roughly $18 billion per year, less than half a percent of the federal budget. At 7% real returns, $5,000 compounds to about $17,000 in 18 years.

For adults, automatic IRA enrollment programs are proving that making capital accumulation the default dramatically increases participation. Nineteen states have enacted these programs, and participation jumps from 5 to 15% up to 70 to 90% simply by switching from opt-in to opt-out. When saving becomes automatic, people save. When investing becomes the default, people invest.

Making capital ownership automatic and universal from birth is the single most efficient way to close the wealth gap at its root.

Building Block 5: Private Capital On-Ramps

Everything so far involves public capital managed by some level of government. The private side matters just as much because it gives households direct ownership that doesn’t depend on any politician’s agenda.

The most established vehicle is the Employee Stock Ownership Plan. There are currently 6,609 ESOPs in the US covering 15.1 million participants and holding over $2.1 trillion in assets. ESOP workers have roughly twice the retirement savings and 2.3 times the net worth of comparable non-ESOP workers. A massive window is opening right now as an estimated 2.3 million baby-boomer-owned businesses will need succession plans in the coming decade. Every one of those is a candidate for employee ownership conversion. If we miss this window, those companies get absorbed by private equity and ownership concentrates further.

Employee Ownership Trusts in the UK have grown 1,640% in the last decade. Worker cooperatives like Mondragón in Spain demonstrate viability at enormous scale with 80,000 worker-owners and $14.5 billion in revenue. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are creating entirely new forms of digital collective ownership. These all sit on top of the classical trio of stocks, bonds, and real estate. The goal is to create as many on-ramps as possible so that capital accumulation becomes easy, automatic, and the default for every household.

The more ways ordinary people can own a piece of the productive economy, the more resilient the whole system becomes.

Building Block 6: The Revenue Pivot

All of this requires funding, and the current revenue model is about to break. Income taxes and payroll taxes together account for 80 to 85% of federal revenue. Both are directly tied to the wage base. As wages shrink as a share of national income, this revenue evaporates. You end up with expenditure rising and revenue falling at the same time.

The solution is straightforward in concept. You tax other things. A value-added tax captures revenue from consumption regardless of how the buyer earned their money. The US is the only OECD nation without one. An automation or capital services tax replaces eroding payroll taxes by taxing the value created by machines. A carbon tax prices a shared resource and returns proceeds to citizens. A wealth tax on net worth above $50 million funds sovereign wealth fund capitalization. Data and AI royalties compensate citizens for the commercial use of collectively generated data. A land value tax captures appreciation that results from public investment rather than individual effort.

The critical sequencing principle is that new revenue sources must be enacted and generating receipts before the old revenue base collapses. You cannot legislate major tax reform during a fiscal crisis. Build the new pipes while the old ones still flow.

The entire government revenue model must pivot from taxing labor to taxing capital, consumption, and the commons before the wage-based revenue disappears.

Building Block 7: The Automation Cliff

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. We should have started building all of these institutions decades ago. Ideally the US would have begun capitalizing sovereign wealth funds in the 1970s when the productivity-wage gap first opened. Norway started in 1990. Alaska started in 1976. We’re decades behind.

Capital takes time to compound. A sovereign wealth fund capitalized at 3 to 5% of GDP per year, growing at 7% nominal returns, takes 25 to 30 years to reach maturity. Baby bonds need 18 years. These are irreducible time horizons. Compounding rewards early action exponentially and punishes delay exponentially.

Meanwhile, wages are going to fall off a cliff long before these capital programs mature. AI capability is advancing on exponential curves. The displacement of cognitive labor, the last safe harbor, is already underway. The gap between declining wages and immature capital programs is the most dangerous period in the entire transition.

That gap can only be filled with transfers. Universal basic income, expanded social insurance, and emergency direct payments will need to carry an enormous load during the bridge period, roughly 2030 to 2045. Peak transfer need could reach $36,000 to $48,000 per household per year. This is when the polity must sustain both capital accumulation and bridge transfers simultaneously, and political pressure to raid the wealth funds will be intense. Governance insulation is paramount.

We should have started building these institutions decades ago, which means we need a very thick transfer cushion while the capital programs mature.

Building Block 8: The Math

So when you stack all of these interventions together, what does the end result look like?

I ran convergence testing across three independent AI modeling approaches with five scenarios ranging from ultra-conservative to ultra-advanced. Across all fifteen data points, no scenario produced an outcome where the median household is worse off than today, provided the transition starts now.

The moderate scenario produces a median household income of roughly $140,000 in constant 2024 dollars, compared to about $83,730 today. That income flows from nine distinct streams. Residual wages make up about 14% of the total. Social insurance accounts for 24%. Universal basic income provides 28%. Sovereign wealth fund dividends contribute 10%. Private investment returns add 7%. Data and AI royalties supply 6%. Baby bond returns deliver 5%. ESOP and cooperative distributions generate 4%. Carbon and commons dividends round it out at 2%.

The composition shift is the key insight. Today the median household gets 82% of its income from a single source. In the mature end state, income flows from nearly a dozen sources, and none exceeds about a quarter of the total. That diversification is itself a resilience feature. And this is just the moderate scenario. In the long run, as capital programs fully mature and compound, capital-based income grows to dominate the household portfolio. The system transforms from “tax and redistribute” to “own and distribute.” Everyone’s income becomes structurally tied to the growth of the economy. That is universal high income.

When you stack all eight building blocks together, median household income exceeds $140,000 in today’s dollars, and the long-run ceiling is much higher as capital outgrows both wages and transfers.

Conclusion

You now have the full blueprint for Universal High Income. There is nothing here that requires exotic new inventions. Sovereign wealth funds exist in over 100 countries. Baby bonds are already operational. ESOPs hold $2.1 trillion. The tax instruments are deployed across the developed world. Every mechanism described here has a track record, real numbers, and proof of concept somewhere on earth. The challenge is scale, sequencing, and political will.

If you want the deep version, my book Labor/Zero covers all of this and more across 180,000 words with hundreds of citations. I narrated the audiobook personally. The Kickstarter is live right now, and every copy that reaches someone in a position to act moves the needle. Here’s the link: [link]

The core intuition is simple. Wages must be replaced by capital. The pivot will be long, hard, and painful. But the math works, the mechanisms exist, and the cost of delay is catastrophic.

Let’s get it done.

Link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero

PS. I have a UHI Whitepaper!

You can check out the full UHI White paper here:

https://github.com/daveshap/UniversalHighIncome

It comes with a UHI simulator!

Post-Labor Economics is capitalism’s next upgrade. The economy that can fully automate production while maintaining aggregate demand is the superior economy. Full stop. PLE is rooted in the purest form of capitalist orthodoxy — you just have to take a secular view of the human variable.

When self-described capitalists object to Post-Labor Economics, they almost always make the same move. They talk about the dignity of work, the virtue of struggle, the moral necessity of earning your keep. These are real values. They are also not capitalism. They are Protestantism. Specifically, they are the Calvinist inheritance that got tangled up with free markets somewhere around the seventeenth century and has been riding shotgun ever since, occasionally grabbing the wheel. Capitalism does not care whether humans work. Capitalism cares whether goods and services get produced and purchased. It is the most ruthlessly pragmatic system ever devised, and it has no opinion whatsoever about whether the inputs on the supply side are human hands, steam engines, or neural networks. It simply seeks the cheapest, fastest, most efficient path from production to consumption. That is the whole thing.

The related objection — that precarity and struggle are necessary for human flourishing — may even be true at some level. Human bodies and minds probably do benefit from striving toward worthy goals. But this is an ontological observation about the human animal, not an economic argument. Labor provides meaning and structure the same way prison provides meaning and structure. The fact that it is the current default mechanism for organizing human life does not make it the only mechanism, and it certainly does not make it the best one. Conflating “humans need purpose” with “humans need wage labor” is a category error that would embarrass any serious systems thinker. There are infinite ways to struggle, strive, and find meaning that do not involve selling your cognition to a corporation for a paycheck.

Strip away the moralizing and the raw calculus of capitalism is obvious. The economy that can fully automate production while maintaining aggregate demand is the superior economy. Period. It produces more, faster, cheaper, with fewer constraints. Any conversation about the spiritual virtues of labor, the character-building properties of precarity, or assertions about human nature — however interesting philosophically — is superfluous to this calculation. The only human variable that remains economically salient is that human wants are infinite, which means demand never runs out if people have the purchasing power to express it. PLE ensures they do. What follows are twelve reasons why Post-Labor Economics is not a challenge to capitalism but its most logical extension.

1—Capitalism requires demand, not just supply.

Markets are a two-sided mechanism. They match supply with demand for goods and services. Everything capitalism does — the competition, the innovation, the efficiency gains, the creative destruction — happens on the supply side. But none of it matters if nobody can buy what gets produced. Supply without demand is just inventory. AI and robotics are about to produce the greatest supply-side shock in human history, an explosion of productive capacity that dwarfs anything the industrial revolution achieved. The question that will determine whether this is a golden age or a catastrophe is not whether we can produce enough. It is whether enough people can afford to buy what gets produced.

Household spending drives over seventy percent of GDP in advanced economies. That spending is overwhelmingly funded by wages. The entire demand side of the modern economy runs on a pipeline that starts with employers paying workers who then purchase goods and services. When automation eliminates the need for those workers, the pipeline breaks. This is not a recession, which is a temporary contraction in a cycle that self-corrects. It is a structural severing of the mechanism that converts productive capacity into consumer demand. The economy does not bounce back from this because the jobs do not come back. The supply side keeps growing. The demand side keeps shrinking. The gap widens until the system fails.

PLE is demand-side infrastructure for capitalism. It reroutes how purchasing power reaches households, shifting from wages for labor that is no longer needed to returns on capital that households own. Businesses retain customers. Markets keep clearing. The circular flow of money from production to income to spending to revenue continues unbroken. The supply-side revolution that AI enables becomes an engine of broadly shared prosperity rather than a deflationary death spiral. This is not a welfare program grafted onto capitalism from outside. It is the plumbing repair that allows capitalism to keep doing what it does best in an era when its original plumbing no longer connects to anything.

2—Human labor was always a means to production, never a structural requirement of markets.

There is a widespread assumption, so deeply embedded that it is rarely stated explicitly, that markets fundamentally require human labor to function. That employment is not just a feature of capitalism but a load-bearing pillar without which the whole structure collapses. This assumption is wrong. Markets require supply and demand for goods and services. That is the complete list of structural requirements. Labor has always been the dominant input on the supply side because for the entirety of human history there was no cheaper way to provision goods and services. Human muscles, human hands, and human brains were the only available tools. Wages existed because paying humans was the only way to get things made.

This was never an ideological commitment. It was a practical constraint. Capitalism does not care who or what produces the goods. It cares about cost, quality, and speed. When tractors could plow a field faster and cheaper than a team of farmhands, capitalism adopted tractors. When spreadsheets could process accounts faster and cheaper than a room of clerks, capitalism adopted spreadsheets. There was no moment of philosophical deliberation. The cheaper input won because that is what markets do. AI and robotics are now becoming the cheaper input across every category of economically valuable work simultaneously. Capitalism is not breaking. Capitalism is doing exactly what it has always done — finding the cheapest way to satisfy demand.

The problem is that capitalism’s demand mechanism was piggybacking on its supply mechanism. The same process that produced goods also distributed purchasing power, because producing goods required paying humans. When the supply side no longer needs human input, this piggyback arrangement falls apart. PLE recognizes this and provides an alternative distribution mechanism — capital ownership — that lets the supply side optimize freely without starving the demand side. It is not a correction of capitalism. It is the acknowledgment that capitalism’s own optimization process has outgrown one of its original delivery systems, and a new one is needed.

3—Human wants are infinite, and PLE lets capitalism satisfy them without limit.

The engine of capitalism is human desire. People always want more, better, different, newer. This is not a flaw to be corrected or a vice to be restrained. It is the fuel that drives the entire system. Every business that has ever existed was built on the premise that someone, somewhere, wants something they do not yet have. That wanting never stops. It did not stop when we invented agriculture. It did not stop when we industrialized. It will not stop when AI can produce anything we can imagine. The demand side of the economy is functionally infinite because human wants are functionally infinite.

The Luddite Fallacy — the fear that machines will permanently destroy jobs — was historically a fallacy because each wave of automation only replaced one category of human capability at a time. The loom replaced weaving but humans still had cognition. The calculator replaced arithmetic but humans still had judgment. There was always a neighboring domain to migrate to. What makes this moment different is that AI and robotics are contesting all four basic economic inputs — strength, dexterity, cognition, and empathy — simultaneously. The retreat paths are closing. The Lump of Labor Fallacy — the belief that there is a fixed amount of work to be done — remains true. There is infinite work. Cancer needs curing, planets need colonizing, energy systems need reinventing. But there is no law of physics or economics that says humans must be the ones doing it.

PLE allows capitalism to chase infinite human wants with a supply side that is no longer bottlenecked by human limitations, while keeping the demand side funded through capital returns. The market still works. Price signals still function. Competition still drives efficiency. Innovation still gets rewarded. The only thing that changes is that the supply side runs on machines instead of humans, and the demand side runs on capital income instead of wages. Capitalism gets to do what it has always wanted to do — satisfy every human want as cheaply and efficiently as possible — without crashing into the wall of its own demand pipeline breaking. This is not the end of capitalism. It is capitalism finally running at its theoretical capacity.

4—PLE removes the single largest bottleneck on economic growth: human labor input.

Every economy in history has been constrained by the same fundamental limit. There are only so many hours in a day, so many workers in the labor force, so many cognitive cycles a human brain can execute before it needs sleep. GDP growth under the current model is ultimately capped by the total productive capacity of the human workforce, and no amount of management optimization or productivity software has been able to break through that ceiling. You can make individual workers more efficient, but you cannot make the day longer or the population infinitely large. Human labor input is the binding constraint.

Full automation removes this constraint entirely. When machines can supply all four categories of economically valuable work, production is no longer limited by human availability, human endurance, or human cognition. The economy can produce around the clock, at any scale, at any speed the physical infrastructure allows. This is not a marginal efficiency improvement. It is the removal of the single largest cap on GDP that has ever existed. The potential output of a fully automated economy is orders of magnitude beyond what any labor-dependent economy could achieve.

But this potential is only realizable if the demand side keeps pace. An economy that can produce a hundred times more than it does today means nothing if households cannot afford to buy what gets produced. PLE is the mechanism that converts this theoretical growth potential into actual growth by ensuring that household purchasing power scales with productive capacity. Capital ownership tied to the automated economy means that as production grows, capital returns grow, household income grows, and spending grows. The growth becomes self-reinforcing rather than self-defeating. This is the difference between an economy that stalls because it automated away its own customers and an economy that enters a genuinely new phase of compounding expansion.

5—PLE makes creative destruction actually work at speed.

Joseph Schumpeter identified creative destruction as the essential engine of capitalist progress. Old firms fail. New firms replace them. Obsolete industries die. Superior alternatives emerge. The constant churn of death and rebirth is what drives the system forward. In theory, this process is beautiful. In practice, it is agonizing, because every firm that dies takes the livelihoods of its workers with it. And workers know this. So they fight it.

This resistance is not irrational. It is perfectly rational behavior by people defending their survival. Unions organize against automation. Communities lobby for tariffs and subsidies to keep dying industries alive. Politicians pass protectionist legislation. Regulatory agencies slow-walk approvals for disruptive technologies. Local governments offer tax breaks to keep obsolete factories open. All of this friction exists for a single reason: under the current system, the destruction phase of creative destruction is personally catastrophic for the people caught in it. Losing your job means losing your income, your healthcare, your housing stability, and potentially your family’s security. Anyone facing that prospect will fight the disruption with everything they have, and they should.

PLE makes creative destruction survivable. When household income does not depend on any particular job or any particular employer, the human cost of the destruction phase drops dramatically. A worker whose firm gets outcompeted by a superior alternative still receives sovereign wealth fund dividends, still holds baby bond assets, still earns cooperative equity returns. Their life is disrupted but not destroyed. The political pressure to preserve obsolete industries evaporates because the constituency for protectionism — people whose survival depends on a specific job continuing to exist — shrinks toward zero. Capitalism can finally do what Schumpeter said it needed to do: destroy and create at the pace that progress demands, without being slowed to a crawl by the entirely justified resistance of people trying to keep their families fed.

6—PLE makes full automation politically viable.

Every major company that automates a significant number of jobs faces a predictable backlash. Negative headlines. Consumer boycotts. Regulatory scrutiny. Political grandstanding. Community outrage. Local government retaliation. This backlash is a rational response by communities and political systems that correctly perceive mass layoffs as a threat to their stability. Under current arrangements, they are right. A company that replaces five thousand workers with machines has genuinely damaged the economic fabric of whatever community those workers lived in. The political friction this generates is an enormous drag on productivity and efficiency.

Companies respond to this friction in predictable ways. They automate more slowly than efficiency would dictate. They maintain redundant human positions to avoid the optics of mass replacement. They invest in elaborate PR campaigns and corporate social responsibility initiatives to cushion the blow. They negotiate with governments, offering retraining programs and transition funds in exchange for political permission to proceed. Every one of these responses costs money and time that could otherwise go toward productive investment. The net effect is that the pace of automation in the real economy is significantly slower than the pace of technological capability, because the social and political costs of moving faster are prohibitive.

PLE removes this entire category of friction. When household income flows from capital ownership and is not dependent on any specific employment, automation stops being a community crisis and becomes a straightforward efficiency gain. The company that replaces five thousand workers with machines has not damaged anyone’s income stream because those workers’ income was never primarily dependent on that particular company. Politicians lose the incentive to grandstand because their constituents are not being harmed. Consumers lose the motivation to boycott because there are no sympathetic victims. Companies can pursue maximum productivity openly, without apology, at whatever pace the technology allows. The result is an economy that adopts efficiency improvements at the speed of technological capability rather than at the speed of political permission.

7—PLE scales entrepreneurship by making failure survivable.

Capitalism’s greatest strength is that it allows anyone to try building something new. Its greatest weakness, under current arrangements, is that the cost of failure is catastrophic for most people. Starting a business means risking your savings, your housing stability, your health insurance, and your family’s security on an outcome that statistically will fail. The majority of new businesses fail within five years. This is not a problem for the system — failure is how markets learn what works and what does not. It is a problem for the individual, because under the current model, a failed business can mean financial ruin.

The result is that entrepreneurship is effectively restricted to a narrow class of people who can afford to fail. People with family wealth, savings from high-income careers, or access to institutional capital can absorb the downside of a failed venture and try again. Everyone else cannot take the risk. The pool of people who actually start businesses is a tiny fraction of the pool of people who have the talent, drive, and ideas to do so. This is a massive deadweight loss on capitalism’s innovation function. The economy never sees the companies that were never started, the products that were never built, the industries that were never created because the person with the idea could not afford to quit their day job.

PLE changes the risk calculus for every potential founder in the economy. When baseline income flows from capital ownership regardless of employment status, the personal cost of a failed venture drops from catastrophic to manageable. You still lose the time and effort you invested. You still absorb the ego hit. But you do not lose your housing, your healthcare, or your ability to feed your family. This means more people start businesses. More businesses mean more competition. More competition means more innovation. More innovation means faster progress. The venture capital industry already understands this principle — it funds a hundred bets to find five winners. PLE applies the same logic to the entire economy, turning every citizen into someone who can afford to take a shot.

8—PLE deepens and strengthens capital markets.

Capital markets function better when participation is broad. More investors means more liquidity. More liquidity means tighter spreads and more efficient price discovery. More efficient price discovery means capital gets allocated to its most productive uses with less friction and less waste. This is not a progressive aspiration. It is a basic mechanical property of how markets work. A stock exchange with ten thousand participants is a thinner, less efficient market than one with ten million participants. Depth and breadth are virtues in any market system.

The current system concentrates investment decisions in the hands of a relatively small professional class. Fund managers, venture capitalists, institutional investors, and high-net-worth individuals control the vast majority of capital allocation. The average household participates in capital markets marginally if at all — perhaps through a small retirement account managed by someone else, perhaps not at all. The preferences, insights, and risk appetites of the broad population are almost entirely absent from the process that determines where productive capital flows. This is not just an equity issue. It is an efficiency issue. The market is missing information because most of the population is not in it.

PLE brings hundreds of millions of new participants into capital markets. Every citizen holding sovereign wealth fund shares, baby bond portfolios, cooperative equity, and ESOP stakes is a participant whose preferences and decisions contribute to the aggregate intelligence of the market. Some will manage their own portfolios. Most will delegate to AI-assisted advisors. But all of them will be expressing preferences about where capital should flow through their investment and spending decisions. The market gets deeper, more liquid, and more representative of actual human wants. Price signals get sharper. Capital allocation gets more efficient. The system gets better at its core function — directing resources toward their highest-value uses — simply by having more participants.

9—Broad ownership makes the financial system antifragile.

The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated what happens when ownership and risk are concentrated in a small number of institutions making correlated bets. A handful of banks, insurers, and investment firms held positions so large and so interconnected that when one failed, the shockwave nearly brought down the entire global financial system. Concentrated ownership creates systemic fragility because the decisions and mistakes of a few actors can propagate through the entire network. This is a well-understood property of tightly coupled systems with insufficient redundancy.

Distributed ownership has the opposite property. When capital is spread across hundreds of millions of independent holders with diverse risk appetites, investment strategies, and time horizons, the system becomes inherently more stable. No single actor or class of actors has enough weight to destabilize the whole. Losses in one sector are absorbed across a broad base rather than concentrated in institutions that are too big to fail. The diversity of decision-making ensures that not everyone is making the same bet at the same time, which is precisely the condition that produced the cascading failures of 2008. This is not a theoretical benefit. It is a structural property of distributed systems that has been observed across every domain from ecology to network engineering.

PLE creates this distribution by design. When every citizen holds capital across multiple vehicles — sovereign wealth funds, baby bonds, cooperative equity, employee ownership stakes — the ownership base of the productive economy broadens from a narrow institutional class to the entire population. The system does not become risk-free. Individual investments still fail. Markets still fluctuate. But the probability of a systemic cascade that threatens the entire financial architecture drops substantially because the architecture no longer depends on a small number of highly leveraged, highly correlated actors making the same decisions. The financial system becomes antifragile — not just resistant to shocks, but structurally improved by having a broader, more diverse ownership base.

10—The profit motive and competitive dynamics remain completely intact.

PLE does not cap wealth, constrain ambition, or limit returns. It raises the floor beneath which nobody falls while leaving the ceiling infinite. The billionaire can still become a billionaire. The startup can still become a trillion-dollar company. The inventor can still get rich from a breakthrough. Every incentive that drives capitalism’s dynamism — the desire to build, to compete, to win, to accumulate — continues to operate exactly as before. Nothing about the competitive landscape changes except that more people can participate in it.

This is worth stating explicitly because the most common instinctive reaction to any proposal that includes words like “universal” or “broad ownership” is the assumption that it must involve penalizing success to subsidize failure. That is how transfer-based systems work. Tax the winners, give to the losers, and hope the disincentive effects are manageable. PLE does not operate this way. Sovereign wealth funds generate returns through market investment, not through taxing productive activity. Baby bonds compound through normal market growth. ESOPs and cooperatives generate value through the same competitive dynamics as any other firm. The income that flows to households is not taken from someone else’s earnings. It is generated by the productive assets those households own.

The practical result is that PLE preserves everything capitalists like about capitalism while fixing the one thing that is about to break. Markets still reward innovation. Competition still drives efficiency. Price signals still direct resources. Risk-taking still gets compensated. The creative, aggressive, ambitious energy that makes capitalism the most productive system ever devised continues to flow. The only difference is that the floor is higher and the player pool is larger. If anything, competition intensifies because more participants with baseline security means more people willing to take the kinds of risks that produce breakthroughs. A capitalism with more competitors is a more dynamic capitalism, not a less dynamic one.

11—Political stability is market infrastructure, and PLE provides it.

Markets require stability to function over long time horizons. This is not a political statement. It is an observable fact about how investment works. Capital flows toward jurisdictions with stable governance, predictable rule of law, and social order. It flees from instability, unrest, and political chaos. No rational investor makes a twenty-year bet in a country that might be in revolution next year. The trillions of dollars currently invested in advanced economies are there in large part because those economies provide the political and social stability that makes long-term returns predictable.

Mass economic displacement threatens that stability directly. History is unambiguous about what happens when large portions of a population lose their economic footing simultaneously. Social unrest. Political radicalization. Institutional erosion. The specific form varies — it can manifest as populist movements, as street protests, as electoral capture by demagogues, as legislative gridlock, or as outright civil conflict — but the pattern is consistent. Economically desperate populations are politically unstable populations. And politically unstable populations are environments where capital gets destroyed rather than grown.

PLE provides the social stability that capital markets need to thrive. When citizens are capital owners with growing portfolios and a material stake in the system’s continued success, they have every reason to defend the institutions that protect their wealth. They vote for stability. They support rule of law. They resist radicalism. They are, in the most literal sense, invested in the system working. This is not an externality or a social benefit that happens to accompany good economic policy. It is infrastructure. It is the foundation on which long-term investment depends. An economy that automates away millions of jobs without providing an alternative income mechanism is an economy that is destroying its own political foundation. PLE preserves that foundation, and in doing so, preserves the conditions under which capitalism can continue to compound wealth over decades and centuries.

12—PLE preserves price signals and lets human preferences allocate resources.

When hundreds of millions of capital-owning citizens direct their investment and spending according to their own wants and needs, the economy retains the most powerful information-processing mechanism ever discovered: distributed market pricing driven by broad participation. Instead of delegating resource allocation to a government bureau, a central planning algorithm, or a small class of institutional investors, PLE keeps the decisions in the hands of the people whose preferences actually matter — the entire population.

One of the most consistent failures of centralized economic planning is that no committee, no matter how expert, can process the volume and granularity of information that a functioning market processes automatically. The price of a loaf of bread in a free market reflects the preferences of millions of buyers, the costs of thousands of producers, the availability of dozens of inputs, and the opportunity costs of alternative uses for every resource involved. No algorithm and no bureaucracy can replicate this. Friedrich Hayek identified this as the knowledge problem — the insight that the information required to allocate resources efficiently is dispersed across millions of individual minds and can only be aggregated through the price mechanism. Every attempt to centralize those decisions loses information and produces worse outcomes.

PLE strengthens rather than weakens this mechanism. A market in which only the wealthy participate reflects the preferences of the wealthy. A market in which everyone participates reflects the preferences of everyone. When the entire population has purchasing power and investment capital, prices carry more information, allocation decisions are better calibrated to actual human wants, and the economy becomes more responsive to what people actually need. This includes megaprojects and civilizational priorities. If millions of citizen-investors choose to direct capital toward fusion energy, space infrastructure, or cancer research — through their fund preferences, their spending patterns, and their individual investment decisions — that collective signal is more powerful and more legitimate than any top-down mandate. The hivemind of a fully participating market economy is the most efficient resource allocation engine in existence. PLE ensures that engine runs on the full breadth of human preference rather than on the narrow slice that currently has enough money to matter.

Conclusion: Capitalism, not Humanism

Capitalists who object to PLE on the grounds that “people need the dignity of work” are making a category error. Capitalism is not humanism. It never was. Capitalism is a resource allocation system that optimizes for the cheapest provision of goods and services to satisfy demand. That is its function and it performs that function better than any alternative ever devised. Grafting humanist values onto this system and then using those values to resist its natural optimization trajectory is incoherent. You would not argue that a combustion engine should be less efficient because the mechanics enjoy the manual labor of hand-cranking. You would buy a starter motor.

Yes, humans need dignity. Yes, humans need agency, meaning, and purpose. These are real needs and they deserve serious attention. But they are not capitalism’s job. They never were. The fact that wage labor happened to provide a rough scaffolding for meaning and identity for a few generations does not make wage labor the optimal delivery mechanism for those things, any more than the fact that medieval feudalism provided social structure made feudalism the optimal form of governance. Capitalism stumbled into a temporary arrangement where production and meaning were bundled together, and an entire culture mistook the bundle for a necessity. It was always contingent. The contingency is ending.

The correct framing is that PLE serves capitalism’s actual function (matching supply with demand at maximum efficiency) while also happening to create conditions that are more fertile for human dignity, agency, and meaning than the current arrangement. People freed from survival-coerced labor have more time, more resources, more cognitive bandwidth, and more choice in how they construct meaningful lives. That is a genuinely better outcome for humans. But it is a downstream benefit of getting the economics right, not the justification for getting the economics right. The justification is simpler: the fully automated economy with broad capital ownership outperforms the labor-dependent economy on every metric capitalism actually cares about. The human stuff comes along for the ride.

Drop the Calvinism. Read the spreadsheet. The math has been obvious for a while now.

For a century, progressives have fought to get workers a bigger slice of the pie. PLE gives them the bakery. Universal capital ownership closes the wealth gap at its root, empowers women and minorities without gatekeeping, rebuilds democratic leverage that doesn’t depend on being needed, and completes what the labor movement started. Every progressive cause runs into the same wall: concentrated economic power. Distributed ownership removes it.

You would think the left would be the easy sell. Post-Labor Economics is about broadening ownership, empowering the marginalized, decentralizing power, and completing the project the labor movement started over a century ago. On paper, this is progressive catnip.

In practice, some of the stiffest resistance I receive comes from the left. The objection almost always centers on jobs. “You want to destroy jobs.” “People need jobs for dignity and agency.” “Without work, people lose their identity.” These concerns are sincere and they are not entirely wrong. But they have curdled into something strange—a kind of Stockholm Syndrome where the left has become the most passionate defender of the very institution that has been grinding workers into dust for two hundred years. The movement that fought for the eight-hour day and the weekend now treats wage labor as sacred. The movement that coined the term “wage slavery” now fights to preserve it.

Underneath the jobs objection is something deeper: low trust. Many on the left are simultaneously suspicious of government and corporations, which means they do not trust either entity to manage a transition. The state will screw it up or use it as a tool of control. The firms will capture it and extract value. Both fears are reasonable. But together they create a logjam where nothing can change and nothing can improve, and the status quo, which the left correctly identifies as brutal and unjust, gets preserved by default, defended by the very people it harms most.

This article argues from progressive first principles. Not from techno-optimism, not from economic theory, not from my own framework. From the values the left already holds. Equality. Empowerment. Democracy. Dignity. Sustainability. If you take those values seriously and follow them to their logical conclusions, you arrive at PLE whether you intended to or not.

1—PLE achieves structural equality by broadening capital ownership.

Capital compounds and wages do not. The wealth gap is driven by who owns productive assets, not by who earns more per hour. PLE gives every citizen access to the same compounding mechanism that currently only serves the top of the distribution — through sovereign wealth funds, baby bonds, cooperative equity, and employee ownership — making the wealth-building engine universally accessible rather than gated behind inherited advantage.

The difference between a family that owns assets and a family that relies on wages is not just a difference in how much money they have this year. It is a difference in trajectory. A dollar invested in a diversified portfolio doubles roughly every decade at historical market returns. A dollar earned as wages gets spent and is gone. Over a lifetime this divergence is enormous. Over multiple generations it becomes a chasm. The return on capital consistently exceeds the rate of economic growth, which means wealth inequality automatically widens unless the distribution of capital ownership itself changes. This is not ideology. It is an observable pattern confirmed across centuries of economic data.

Current progressive approaches to inequality operate almost entirely on the income side. Minimum wage increases, earned income tax credits, progressive taxation, and targeted transfer programs all attempt to narrow the gap between what different households receive in a given year. These interventions have real value, but they share a fundamental limitation: they do not change who owns the productive economy. The family receiving a tax credit is still renting its position in the economic system. The family holding a diversified portfolio owns a piece of it. No amount of income adjustment can close a wealth gap that is being driven by differential access to compounding itself.

PLE changes the underlying machinery. When every child receives a capital endowment at birth, when every citizen holds shares in sovereign wealth funds at multiple levels of government, when every worker accumulates equity through expanded ownership structures, the compounding escalator starts carrying the entire population upward simultaneously. The market still rewards skill, effort, and good judgment. The outcomes are not identical. But the mechanism of wealth creation becomes universally accessible. This is not equality of outcome. It is equality of access to the single most powerful force in economics.

2—PLE is pro-women and pro-minority.

Universal capital ownership requires no applications, no means tests, and no bureaucrat deciding who qualifies. It disproportionately benefits those who start with the least, eliminates the economic penalty for caregiving, and addresses the racial and gender wealth gaps at their structural root — which was always capital exclusion, not wage differences.

Most equity programs require someone in power to decide who qualifies. Documentation must be provided. A bureaucrat or algorithm must determine whether this particular person meets the criteria. That decision-making layer is a site of bias, delay, gatekeeping, and paternalism. It creates stigma for recipients, excludes people who cannot navigate the system, and generates perverse incentives where earning a dollar too much can cost a family thousands in lost benefits. Universal capital ownership sidesteps all of this. A baby bond deposited at birth does not require a means test. A sovereign wealth fund dividend arrives because you are a citizen, not because you have proven you are sufficiently poor. And because the same dollar amount represents a larger share of total wealth for those who start with less, universality achieves progressivity without the bureaucratic overhead and political vulnerability of targeted programs.

For women, PLE is transformative because the current economy penalizes every interruption in continuous wage labor, and women bear the overwhelming majority of those interruptions. Pregnancy, childbirth, caregiving for children, caregiving for aging parents — each creates a gap that the wage-labor system treats as a deficiency. The gender wealth gap is far worse than the gender wage gap because women accumulate less capital over their lifetimes precisely because the system punishes them for performing the unpaid labor that society depends on but has never compensated. When income flows from capital ownership rather than from an unbroken employment record, the penalty for caregiving disappears.

For communities of color, the argument cuts to the bone of American history. The racial wealth gap is the cumulative result of centuries of deliberate exclusion from capital ownership. Redlining denied Black families access to homeownership. Discriminatory administration of the GI Bill denied access to the subsidized mortgages and education that built the white middle class. Predatory lending stripped equity from communities that had managed to accumulate it despite the obstacles. These were capital deprivations, not wage deprivations, and they can only be addressed by capital remedies. In the global context, the same logic applies: sovereign wealth funds and cooperative ownership structures allow developing nations to build indigenous wealth-generating capacity rather than remaining dependent on the conditionality of foreign aid and international lending institutions. PLE is a post-colonial economic framework as much as it is a domestic one.

3—PLE is pro-democracy.

Democracy requires structural leverage to function, not just the right to vote. Throughout history, ordinary people held power because the system needed them — for labor, for taxes, for soldiers. Automation threatens to erode that dependence. PLE rebuilds citizen leverage on a foundation that persists regardless of whether anyone needs your labor: capital ownership.

Democracy is typically discussed in terms of rights, constitutions, and elections. These matter, but they rest on a foundation that is rarely examined: structural mutual dependence between the governed and the governing. States have always needed their populations for labor, tax revenue, and military service. Citizens have always needed the state for protection and commerce. This mutual dependence constrained elite behavior under every form of government throughout history. When rulers pushed too far, populations could withdraw cooperation. When populations made demands, rulers had to weigh the cost of refusal against the cost of losing the labor and loyalty they depended on. The concessions that define modern civic life — the franchise, the minimum wage, the right to organize — were extracted by populations whose cooperation could not be taken for granted.

Automation weakens this dynamic. If AI and robotics can supply economic production and military force, the state’s structural dependence on its population erodes. A government that can run its economy with half the workforce has less reason to accommodate the other half. A military that can project force with autonomous systems has less need for broad popular support. This erosion does not require the complete elimination of human usefulness to be felt. Even partial reductions in structural dependence shift the calculus of power. The rights that seem permanent today were products of a bargaining position that is quietly deteriorating.

PLE constructs new sources of citizen leverage that do not depend on being economically needed. Citizens who own shares in sovereign wealth funds, cooperative enterprises, and diversified capital portfolios have structural power through their ownership stakes. An owner can vote their shares, redirect their capital, participate in governance, and impose costs on institutions through economic action. The algorithmic rights framework extends this into digital infrastructure — the ability to enforce transparency, audit automated systems, and maintain democratic accountability over the networks that increasingly mediate economic and political life. For progressives who have watched corporate power hollow out democracy through lobbying and regulatory capture, PLE offers something more durable than campaign finance reform: distributed economic power that makes capture structurally harder rather than merely illegal.

4—PLE is the ultimate realization of the labor movement.

The labor movement never fought for the right to toil. It fought for dignity, security, and freedom from exploitation. PLE completes that arc by achieving those goals through universal capital ownership, freeing workers permanently rather than negotiating slightly better terms of dependence.

Nobody picketed for the privilege of fourteen-hour shifts in a coal mine. Workers organized, struck, and fought because the conditions of work were brutal and the distribution of its rewards was grotesquely unfair. The eight-hour day was a victory against compulsory labor, not a celebration of it. The weekend was a reclamation of time from employers who would have consumed all of it. Workplace safety regulations, the minimum wage, child labor laws, the right to organize — every landmark achievement of the labor movement was a step toward reducing the burden that wage labor imposed on human life. The direction of travel was always the same: less compulsion, more freedom, greater dignity.

PLE represents the logical destination of that trajectory. If machines can perform the labor, then the fight over wages, hours, and conditions becomes secondary to a much larger question: who owns the machines and who receives the returns they generate? A world where AI and robotics handle the drudgery and humans own the capital is not the end of what the labor movement fought for. It is the achievement of what the labor movement fought for. The coercion that made labor organizing necessary in the first place — the threat of destitution if you refuse to work under whatever terms are offered — dissolves when household income flows from ownership rather than from the sale of your time.

For organized labor specifically, the transition means evolving the institutional form to match the new economic reality. The power of a union has always rested on the ability to withhold something the employer needs. When the employer no longer needs human labor, that traditional leverage disappears. But ownership creates a different and potentially more durable form of power. Worker organizations that negotiate equity stakes, cooperative governance rights, and board representation in automated enterprises hold leverage that cannot be automated away, because it derives from legal ownership rather than from the replaceability of human hands. The union of the future is not a labor union. It is an ownership union. And its members hold a permanent seat at the table — not because the company needs their labor, but because the company is partly theirs.

5—PLE provides genuine dignity and freedom from coercion.

The current economy runs on an implicit threat: comply or lose everything. PLE removes that threat by grounding household income in owned assets rather than in the continuous approval of an employer, a bureaucracy, or a partner, making every economic relationship in a person’s life genuinely voluntary.

Show up to work under whatever conditions are offered, or lose your housing, your healthcare, your ability to feed your children. This threat is so pervasive and so normalized that it barely registers as coercion. It is simply how things work. But it shapes every significant decision in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It keeps workers in exploitative jobs because quitting means losing health insurance. It keeps people in abusive domestic situations because financial dependence makes leaving feel impossible. It keeps communities tethered to employers who pollute their water and degrade their land because those employers are the only source of income for miles. The threat does not have to be spoken. It is structural, built into an economy where survival is contingent on the continuous sale of your labor to someone willing to buy it.

In America, the entanglement of healthcare with employment is the most visible expression of this coercion, but it is not the only one. Housing, childcare, retirement security — access to each is mediated by employment status in ways that create what economists call job lock. People stay in positions they hate, in cities they want to leave, in careers that damage their health, because the cost of disrupting the employment relationship cascades through every dimension of their material life. The result is a population whose apparent consent to the terms of their existence is produced not by satisfaction but by the absence of any viable alternative.

PLE replaces contingent dependence with genuine autonomy. When household income flows from sovereign wealth fund dividends, baby bond portfolios, cooperative equity, and employee ownership stakes, and a universal transfer floor prevents destitution regardless of employment status, the material basis of coercion dissolves. The freedom to say no becomes real rather than theoretical. The freedom to quit a toxic job, to leave an abusive relationship, to move to a different city, to take time for caregiving or recovery — these freedoms exist on paper in the current system but are functionally available only to people with savings. PLE makes them available to everyone by removing the material threat that made them inaccessible. Every relationship in a person’s life transforms from one that could be coercive into one that must be genuinely voluntary.

6—PLE is environmentally sustainable.

The current economy destroys the planet because it has to. Growth requires consumption, consumption requires production, and production requires extraction. PLE breaks this chain by shifting human economic activity toward the inherently low-carbon Meaning Economy while creating a universal ownership constituency with material interest in long-term planetary health.

The current growth model contains a structural tension that no amount of green regulation has resolved. GDP growth depends on producing and consuming ever more physical goods. Employment depends on GDP growth. Household survival depends on employment. This chain means that any serious effort to reduce extraction and consumption runs directly into the imperative to keep people employed. Environmental policy is perpetually caught between the need to reduce throughput and the need to maintain jobs. Every factory closure that helps the planet hurts a community. Every regulation that limits emissions threatens a payroll. The two goals are locked in permanent conflict because the economic architecture requires physical production to continue accelerating in order to keep households solvent.

PLE severs this link. When household income flows from capital ownership rather than from wages earned through physical production, the economy no longer needs people to keep making and buying things in order to keep other people employed. The automation of routine production becomes an environmental asset rather than a jobs crisis. The Meaning Economy — attention, experience, community, craft, civic participation — is inherently low-carbon. A philosophy lecture, a live concert, a local apprenticeship, a community governance meeting — these generate economic and social value with a fraction of the environmental footprint of a manufacturing plant.

Beyond the shift in activity, sovereign wealth funds create a structural constituency for long-term environmental stewardship. Norway’s fund already excludes fossil fuel companies and arms manufacturers from its portfolio. A network of wealth funds at every level of government, owned by every citizen, creates hundreds of millions of people with a direct material interest in the long-term value of their holdings. Ownership converts abstract environmental concern into concrete financial interest. When your retirement depends on the health of a diversified global portfolio, climate risk stops being someone else’s problem. It becomes a line item in your personal financial outlook. PLE aligns the economic incentives of ordinary people with the long-term health of the planet in a way that no amount of moral exhortation has managed to achieve.

7—PLE decentralizes wealth and power.

Corporate concentration is already dangerous, and AI threatens to make it dramatically worse. PLE creates structural alternatives through cooperatives, employee ownership, community wealth funds, and DAOs that distribute economic power broadly rather than allowing it to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands.

A handful of tech giants already control the information layer of modern life. A few pharmaceutical companies control drug pricing. A few agricultural conglomerates control the food supply. AI threatens to accelerate this concentration to historically unprecedented levels. The companies that own the most advanced AI systems and robotic infrastructure will capture an unprecedented share of productive capacity. Without structural intervention, the logical endpoint is an economy in which a small number of firms effectively run everything, with political power following economic power as it always has.

PLE attacks this directly through distributed ownership structures. Cooperatives, employee ownership trusts, community wealth funds, and decentralized autonomous organizations create alternative paths for capital to flow that do not terminate in a corporate boardroom. When workers and communities own productive enterprises collectively, economic power is distributed by design rather than concentrated by default. These are not experimental models. The cooperative movement, the credit union movement, and the community land trust movement all have decades of operational history demonstrating that distributed ownership is viable, resilient, and scalable.

The difference PLE introduces is a comprehensive framework for scaling these structures economy-wide rather than leaving them as isolated experiments coexisting alongside an ever-more-concentrated corporate sector. Favorable legal frameworks, streamlined formation processes, tax incentives, and integration with public wealth funds create an ecosystem in which distributed ownership becomes the easy default rather than the exceptional path that only unusually motivated founders pursue. Regulation alone cannot solve concentration because captured regulators consistently fail to restrain the entities they oversee. PLE offers something structural: alternative ownership forms that compete with and counterbalance corporate power by their very existence.

8—PLE is collective ownership that actually works.

The progressive and socialist traditions have long aspired to collective ownership of productive capacity. PLE achieves this through sovereign wealth funds, cooperatives, and democratic ownership vehicles — mechanisms with decades of real-world track records that scale without collapsing into authoritarianism.

The historical problem with collective ownership is not the aspiration. The aspiration — that the people who generate economic value should share in its returns, and that productive capacity should serve the broad population rather than a narrow ownership class — is sound. The problem has been the implementation. Every attempt to achieve collective ownership through state seizure and central planning has produced some combination of authoritarianism, corruption, bureaucratic paralysis, and economic stagnation. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Venezuela — the track record of top-down nationalization is a graveyard of good intentions. This history has made progressives defensively protective of the existing welfare state rather than confident enough to propose something genuinely better.

PLE sidesteps the historical failure modes entirely. Sovereign wealth funds are collectively owned capital managed through democratic oversight, invested in diversified global markets, and paying returns to the public. Norway has operated the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund for decades. It holds over a trillion dollars, generates substantial returns, and has not produced authoritarianism. Alaska has paid direct dividends to every resident for over forty years from a fund created by a Republican governor. It works. Cooperatives are worker ownership of the means of production within a market framework. Mondragon in Spain has operated as a federation of worker cooperatives for over sixty years with tens of thousands of worker-owners. It works. These are not theories. They are functioning institutions with measurable track records.

The vision is not state ownership, which concentrates power in a political class and eliminates market signals. It is universal ownership, which distributes power across the entire population while preserving competition, price signals, and individual choice. Workers hold equity and vote on governance. Citizens hold wealth fund shares and receive dividends. Communities hold stakes in local enterprises. The productive economy remains dynamic and market-driven. What changes is who participates in its returns. This is the rectified version of the socialist aspiration — collective participation in the gains of the productive economy, delivered through mechanisms that have actually demonstrated they can scale without a central planning committee.

9—PLE prevents elite capture.

Mass economic displacement without a capital safety valve is the most reliable recipe in history for the concentration of power in the hands of a small class. PLE eliminates this risk by making every citizen a capital owner with a material stake in the system, removing the desperate, dispossessed constituency that both oligarchs and demagogues depend on.

Every progressive cause — from healthcare to climate to labor rights to voting access — runs into the same wall: entrenched elites with enough economic power to block, co-opt, or water down reforms. This is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable behavior of concentrated wealth defending its position. AI-driven automation without capital broadening is the most powerful elite-capture accelerant in human history. If a small ownership class controls all automated production and autonomous systems while the broader population has no income, no assets, and no structural leverage, the result is not a democracy with an inequality problem. It is a new feudalism with democratic window dressing.

The historical pattern is consistent. Mass economic displacement combined with concentrated wealth produces radicalization, instability, and the conditions under which populations accept authoritarian promises in exchange for relief. Weimar Germany. Pre-revolutionary France. Late Tsarist Russia. The specifics vary but the structure repeats. When enough people lose enough economic security and see no viable path to regaining it through existing institutions, they become available for capture — by demagogues who promise to burn the system down, or by oligarchs who promise to take care of them in exchange for compliance. Both outcomes end in the concentration of power that progressives have spent centuries fighting against.

PLE is the structural prevention. Distributed ownership is distributed power, and distributed power is what makes elite capture structurally difficult rather than merely politically contested. When every citizen holds capital, receives dividends, and has a material stake in the system continuing to function, the desperate constituency evaporates. People who own a piece of the economy do not vote to destroy it. People who have genuine economic security do not trade their freedom for the promises of strongmen. The best defense against authoritarianism has never been better arguments. It has been a population with enough to lose that they defend the institutions that protect what they have.

Conclusion: We need to do better

The progressive left is currently proposing moratoriums on data centers and billionaire taxes as its answer to the AI transition. These are not serious structural solutions. They are performative gestures designed to signal that someone is paying attention while accomplishing nothing durable. A moratorium does not transfer ownership to workers. It just pauses the clock until the political winds shift and the moratorium gets lifted, at which point the same billionaires own the same infrastructure and the same workers have the same nothing. A wealth tax does not build an institution. It generates revenue for one budget cycle that gets spent and is gone, leaving the underlying power structure exactly where it was.

This is a failure of imagination from the people who are supposed to have the most of it. The progressive movement has historically been the home of structural thinking — the New Deal, the labor movement, the civil rights framework, the environmental regulatory apparatus. These were not gestures. They were institutions that reshaped power for generations. Somewhere along the way, the left traded institutional ambition for symbolic resistance. It became easier to propose punishing the winners than to build something that changes who wins.

PLE is the structural solution that the moment demands. Sovereign wealth funds. Universal capital endowments. Cooperative ownership. Democratic financial infrastructure. Algorithmic rights. These are institutions that, once built, compound and endure and shift power permanently — not until the next election cycle, but for generations. The technology that threatens to concentrate wealth and power beyond anything in human history is the same technology that could distribute it more broadly than anything in human history. The question is whether the left has the imagination to build the architecture, or whether it will keep proposing band-aids and calling them bold.

We need to do better. Not incrementally. Structurally.

That’s a wonderful theory, except that people like Jeff Bezos are investing $100B to automate entire factories. Of course, the default conservative viewpoint is that work is good, government handouts are bad, and anything resembling socialism or a welfare state is anathema to the entire conservative way of life.

Some of the disagreement comes down to misunderstanding. I recently wrote a “12 Commandments of Post-Labor Economics” to try and clarify what PLE stands for as clearly as possible. Hopefully, with time those misunderstands will clear up. In the meantime, I wanted to appeal directly to conservative sensibilities on the merits of PLE.

First, PLE in a nutshell

The most salient concept of PLE is that we must broaden capital participation. It’s pretty simple:

Consider this: businesses don’t intrinsically need employees. They do, however, absolutely require paying customers. That’s market orthodoxy. For a free market to exist, you need supply (goods and services) and demand (paying customers).

The “obvious” solution to many is to just cut checks from the Treasury. That is UBI, Guaranteed Income, Social Security, and so on. Entitlement spending. But that’s suboptimal for a number of reasons, some of which we’ll unpack.

The second most important aspect of PLE is that this is not a “rob from the rich and give to the poor” scheme. We’re not going to expropriate wealth from households or businesses. We’re going to capitalize endowment funds over time the way that Norway, Alaska, and New Mexico have. Some of that capitalization may come from taxes, but that’s up to individual states to figure out.

Now let’s get into the reasons why I believe PLE maps onto conservative values.

#1—PLE creates the ultimate ownership society

Thomas Jefferson’s notion of “40 acres and a mule” no longer applies literally today. But the principle of the matter, that a family ought to own their own means of production, is the bedrock value of classical conservatives. Post-Labor Economics advocates for broad distribution of productive assets. While some people advocate for more simple Georgism, land is no longer the most value or productive asset class.

The underlying theory remains the same. At the time of Jefferson and Henry George, land was the most valuable and productive asset, therefore ensuring its equitable distribution among the people was a bold, and somewhat controversial take. But it was also nothing new. In the days of the Roman republic, the ideal Roman man was a soldier-farmer. Work the land and defend it.

The industrial revolutions changed the most valuable asset classes from land to factories, and then from factories to technology. So the universal concept of “the people should own an individual stake in the most valuable assets” remains applicable. Under Post-Labor Economics, that ownership could take many forms, from direct ownership of stocks and businesses, to fractional control via government programs and sovereign dividend schemes.

While PLE does advocate for transfers, those are mostly a stopgap until household income can be moved over to capital from wages.

#2—PLE is fundamentally pro-business and protects corporate growth

The greatest threat that AI, robotics, and automation poses to businesses is that it removes the workers whose wages allow them to patronize the business. This goes back to Henry Ford and Fordism. Pay workers enough wages that they can buy your product. Of course, Ford had first-mover’s advantage in the automotive scaling business at the time, so it may not really apply anymore.

But the undergirding idea—people must be able to afford your firm’s goods and services—remains applicable. Capitalists do not need employees. Firms do not need employees. Millionaires and billionaires do not need employees. Not when machines are better, faster, cheaper, and safer than the human alternative.

They all, however, require paying customers. The demand side of the equation cannot be ignored. In fact, economists since Keynes have argued that growth is actually demand-constrained. Meaning that our ability to produce goods and services is not the binding constraint on growth, our ability to pay for them is the bottleneck.

Post-Labor Economics removes this bottleneck by ensuring that household income is tied more directly with the overall health of the economy. Capital-based income means that households are always flush with cash. Furthermore, a portfolio of multiple income streams for households, ranging from sovereign dividends to municipal wealth funds, and transfers from federal and state governments, ensures hat households never face precarity. Households with secure income streams are more generous with their consumption and spending.

And that is good for business.

#3—PLE saves free markets from mechanical failures

Labor’s share of income has been dropping for decades. Wages have been decoupling from output as well. These two secular trends, when combined with the trends of AI, automation, and robotics, means that eventually we will be facing a deflationary death spiral. It goes like this:

1. Companies are forced to automate due to free market competition. That means laying off workers.

2. Laid off workers spend less, default on mortgages, and stop paying taxes.

3. Companies have less revenue, and are forced to slow down production even further.

4. Stocks tank, we enter into a Recession or Depression, and the government becomes insolvent.

And all of this is because, right now, the vast majority of household spending (and therefore the vast majority of GDP) is entirely dependent upon wages. Remember the three buckets household income: wages, transfers, and capital. Capital presently makes up the smallest percentage of median household income, and therefore the smallest driver of aggregate demand.

We don’t want to rely on UBI or similar programs, not entirely, because they are market-distorting and create financial dependence. Instead, if we embark on a national mission to magnify capital-based household income, the free market will continue chugging along. In point of fact, PLE advocates for creating more capital onramps for households. Trump’s recent “Baby Bonds” program is a prime example.

Some people call this UBC (Universal Basic Capital). The label doesn’t matter as much as the principle and the effect.

#4—PLE starves the welfare state

While some level of transfers are likely inevitable and permanent, PLE allows us to divert the trajectory to a different path. Instead of the welfare state needing to expand indefinitely as automation encroaches upon wages, we create an offramp towards more capital and market-based solutions. In fact, market-friendly solutions were one of the central design considerations when I was working on the Post-Labor framework.

PLE treats transfers as a necessary stopgap and, at most, a permanent economic floor. UBI should never be the entire package. Every measurement, every program, and every tax policy should be geared towards encouraging the accumulation of household wealth. While young people may receive their “Baby Bonds” upon reaching adulthood, as well as a potentially generous negative income tax (NIT), or guaranteed income program, such programs should taper as they accumulate more wealth.

One critique some conservatives may have is that even sovereign wealth funds and dividends paid out by government endowments are still checks coming from the government, consider that Alaska’s Permanent Fund was created by a Republican governor. These types of funds and endowments become self-sustaining, reduce tax burdens, and encourage fiscal responsibility. In fact, such funds can be administered by third parties. The Santiago Principles, an international set of best practices for running sovereign wealth funds, includes separation of administration, government, and oversight. Transparency is key, which cuts down on waste and corruption.

The long term goal of PLE is to aggressively phase out financial dependence and welfare programs as much as possible. Moving households over to capital is the way to do this.

#5—PLE uses fiscally conservative instruments

At the highest level, national and state wealth funds are intrinsically conservative tools. While PLE maintains room for individual private property, and indeed encourages the state to shape incentives accordingly, the notion of monetizing common goods to capitalize revenue-generating assets is originally a conservative innovation. These funds invest globally and pay dividends without requiring deficit spending or endless tax hikes.

Beyond yielding dividends that can pay households directly, these wealth funds track the market, grow with the economy, and are therefore automatically hedged against inflation. As the market grows, so do these endowments. Furthermore, these funds can be capitalized through market-friendly mechanisms, such as auctioning spectrum rights or leasing citizen data, rather than through punitive wealth or corporate taxes that stifle growth.

#6—PLE preserves economic autonomy and freedom

A government welfare check is a leash that bureaucrats can means-test, condition, or revoke, whereas a capital ownership stake guarantees genuine freedom. By giving individuals their own assets (like baby bonds, ESOPs, or wealth fund shares), PLE maximizes individual agency. Citizens decide entirely for themselves how to invest, allocate, or spend their returns, conferring dignity and keeping the administrative state out of their bank accounts.

This prevents citizens from being held hostage by activist judges, rogue politicians, and government shutdowns. By focusing on amplifying capital-based income, rooted in free market economics, it relegates the government to its proper role as mediator or referee, rather than the owner, manager, and key stakeholder all in one. Furthermore, by creating more capital onramps, such as DAOs, ESOPs, EOTs, trusts, and cooperatives, Post-Labor Economics creates more options for households to build wealth, beyond the conventional “stocks, bonds, and real estate.”

In a world of increasing automation, these additional onramps are critical for giving households access to invest, and therefore acquire returns, from the most transformative technology we’ve seen since electricity.

#7—PLE is an antidote against Socialism

Socialism abolishes private property and centralizes control; PLE does the exact opposite by universalizing private property and distributing it to everyone. historically, mass unemployment and economic desperation are the most reliable catalysts for socialist revolutions. By making every single citizen a capitalist with skin in the game, PLE actively eliminates the desperate constituency that Marxist populism relies on to seize power.

Remember, creating buy-in is the best way to encourage people to defend the system. This is why, generally speaking, the older people become, the more interested they are in preserving the status quo. They stand to lose more through upset. However, if we create inroads early (and often) then younger people will see that they have a viable path to wealth and a comfortable life—which is fiscal responsibility and discipline—by being wise with the sovereign dividends and capital allocations they receive, and finding viable investments for their surplus time and income.

In short, PLE gives everyone a chance to fully buy into capitalism, irrespective of their ability to contribute labor.

We need to specify here: PLE is not socialism. Yes, PLE advocates strongly for state-run wealth funds and endowment programs, but those only serve as the economic foundation. A launchpad for the generation of more wealth. PLE does not advocate for nationalizing anything. Monetize the commons, capture rents, and invest them. That is a stark difference from simply “seizing the means of production.”

#8—PLE strengthens national security and prevent tyranny

Conservatives champion the Second Amendment because distributed power prevents tyranny; PLE applies this exact logic to economic power. If a small elite controls all automated production and autonomous military capacity, it creates the preconditions for authoritarianism. Broad capital ownership acts as a structural bulwark against this concentration of power. Furthermore, adopting PLE ensures the immense domestic economic output and stability required for the United States to beat geopolitical rivals like China in the AI arms race.

Popular resistance to AI, skepticism of safety, and worries about job loss will be one of the primary sources of friction, especially during election cycles. Left wing politicians are already calling for moratoria on data centers, and demanding that tech leaders like Jeff Bezos explain how and why they want to replace workers with robots.

Instead of butting heads, I see this as an opportunity for a major win-win. Instead of arguing over AI gains and concentration of power, PLE offers an olive branch to both sides. The owners of capital get their wish; automate away the need for human labor. Meanwhile, voters get their wish; freedom from precarity. Everyone wins, and everyone’s incentives are now aligned: More automation, more energy, more industrialization, means more household income for everyone, which means more business investment.

PLE creates a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious one. And we do this by aligning the incentives of voters and capitalists. Yes, there is a visceral reaction against the notion of eradicating the need for human labor. But consider this: even the need for human labor inputs is a constraint on national security. Demographic decline, aging populations, and lack of qualified or fit workforce and soldiers are themselves a national security risk.

#9—PLE is pro-family and rebuilds civil society

The current wage-labor economy brutalizes traditional families by forcing two-income households, which outsources child-rearing and erodes community networks. By providing household income through a capital portfolio, PLE eliminates the two-income trap. It allows parents to return home, raise their children, and invest time in their churches and local communities without any government bureaucracy dictating their family structure.

It is no secret that affluent households, flush with capital-based income, tend to produce more children. Financial security, low precarity, and high stability increase fertility. Furthermore, this time sovereignty allows parents to educate their children in a manner they see fit, be it public schools, private schools, charter schools, or even homeschooling. Even better, by decoupling a household’s livelihood from a specific geographic location, it allows families to live in communities that better match their values and lifestyles.

By creating viable offramps from wage dependence, it allows families to settle into more natural rhythms of life without worrying about income. By pivoting the economy to focus on capital-based income, which can be actively nurtured and passively enjoyed, it removes the opportunity cost of starting a family and raising children. Neither parent must make sacrifices to either “get ahead” or “have babies.” These choices will no longer be at odds.

Conclusion

For 250 years, the entire political spectrum has been arguing about how to divide the proceeds of human labor. The right says let markets distribute wages and keep taxes low. The left says redistribute through transfers and strengthen unions. The far left says seize the means of production. They all assume the same thing: that human labor is the engine, and the only question is who gets what share of the output.

PLE doesn’t pick a side in that fight. It dissolves it. Once machines supply all goods and services, the fight over wages becomes as obsolete as the fight over who gets to work the lord’s field. The question stops being “how do we divide labor’s output?” and becomes “who owns the machines?”

And that question has one answer that every ideology actually wants, for completely different reasons. Conservatives want it because ownership is liberty. Progressives want it because ownership is equality. Socialists want it because ownership is collective power. They’ve been screaming past each other for a century and a half because the only available mechanisms—wages, taxes, seizure—forced tradeoffs between those values. Universal capital ownership doesn’t.

The limitations of technology forced labor and capital into an increasingly acrimonious marriage, and both sides are more than ready for a divorce. What we need is a viable settlement agreement. PLE is the negotiation of alimony and division of assets in a way that creates a win-win scenario for all parties.

Wages built the modern world. Every mortgage payment, every grocery run, every quarterly earnings report traces back to the same engine. People sell their time, earn money, and spend it. The entire global economy runs on that loop. And the loop is breaking. When it breaks fully, we will need more than policy patches and emergency stimulus. We will need a new set of economic first principles. I think I have found twelve of them.

After spending the better part of three years developing Post-Labor Economics, writing hundreds of pages on everything from sovereign wealth fund mechanics to the structural foundations of civic leverage, I had a moment of clarity that felt embarrassingly overdue. I had built an enormous framework. I had specific policy prescriptions for every level of government, detailed case studies from dozens of countries, metrics with formulas, taxonomies with layers, historical arguments stretching back centuries. What I did not have was a concise set of core principles that someone could hold in their head and use to evaluate any economic proposal, in any context, at any point in history.

The realization hit me while thinking about neoliberalism. Love it or hate it, neoliberalism has been the dominant economic paradigm for roughly half a century, and it operates on a small set of orienting imperatives that are instantly recognizable even though nobody ever sat down and carved them into stone tablets. There is no canonical “Ten Commandments of Neoliberalism” etched on a wall somewhere at the University of Chicago. The closest thing is probably the Washington Consensus, a set of policy recommendations drafted for developing economies in the late 1980s that became a kind of informal catechism. But even beyond that specific document, the operative principles of neoliberalism are legible to anyone who has paid attention to economic policy debates over the past fifty years.

“If something exists outside the market, bring it into the market.” That is probably the most recognizable neoliberal imperative, and it has driven everything from the privatization of state-owned industries to the creation of carbon trading schemes to the financialization of housing. “Remove barriers to the free movement of capital and goods across borders.” That one animated decades of trade liberalization, from NAFTA to the WTO. “Governments should not do what markets can do more efficiently.” That imperative reshaped public services worldwide and drove waves of deregulation. You can agree or disagree with any of these prescriptions, but you have to acknowledge their power as organizing principles. They give a policymaker, an investor, or a voter a quick heuristic for evaluating proposals. Does this move expand market mechanisms or contract them? If it expands them, a neoliberal supports it. If it contracts them, a neoliberal opposes it. That simplicity is a feature, and it explains much of neoliberalism’s staying power even as its specific policy outcomes have drawn increasingly sharp criticism.

Post-Labor Economics needs something equivalent. The framework I have built includes very specific prescriptions. Every nation should build a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Norway’s Government Pension Fund. Every state or province should do the same, modeled on Alaska’s Permanent Fund or New Mexico’s Land Grant Permanent Fund. Baby bonds should be universal. Employee ownership should receive preferential legal and tax treatment. Payment infrastructure should be open and permissionless. Procurement data should be radically transparent. These are concrete, actionable recommendations grounded in existing real-world examples, and they appear throughout my book with supporting evidence and implementation detail. But they are prescriptions for particular contexts at a particular moment in history. What sits beneath them? What are the universal principles from which all of those specific recommendations can be derived?

That is what this article attempts to answer. I set out to distill the entire PLE framework into a set of imperatives that meet three design constraints.

First, they must be temporally invariant. A principle that applies only during the current wave of AI-driven automation is a tactical observation, and tactical observations expire. The imperatives I wanted had to be as valid for a policymaker in 1950 as for one in 2050 or 2150. The specific technologies change. The specific institutional forms change. The underlying economic logic should hold regardless.

Second, they must be economically agnostic in their framing. They should not reference the internal jargon of PLE or assume familiarity with its specific taxonomies. A reader encountering these imperatives with no prior exposure to Post-Labor Economics should find each one intelligible and defensible on its own terms. If a principle requires you to have read the rest of the book before it makes sense, it has failed as a principle. In many cases, Post-Labor policies sell themselves on their own merits, with or without an automation job-apocalypse coming.

Third, each imperative must stand on its own merits as good policy guidance independent of any particular theory about the future of work or technology. Sovereign wealth funds are good fiscal instruments whether or not AI eliminates half the labor market. Broad capital ownership produces more resilient economies whether or not humanoid robots are on the horizon. Transparent governance reduces corruption whether or not automation changes the balance of power between citizens and the state. The imperatives should be recommendations that a prudent society would follow in any scenario, with the post-labor context merely adding urgency to prescriptions that were already wise.

What follows is the result of that distillation. Twelve imperatives that together constitute the platform of Post-Labor Economics, stripped down to their most universal form. The specific policy recommendations in the rest of my book, from the Pyramid of Prosperity to the Pyramid of Power to the metrics framework, are all applications of these principles to particular institutional contexts. The principles are the source code. Everything else is the compiled program running on specific hardware. If you understand the twelve imperatives, you can derive the specific recommendations yourself for any context, any jurisdiction, any era. That is the test of whether they are truly foundational. And I believe they are.

NOTE: the book I’m referring to is my forthcoming Labor/Zero: A Post-Labor Economics Treatise.

The 30,000 Foot View

Here is the framework at thirty thousand feet before we descend into each imperative in detail.

Imperative 1, “Broaden ownership of productive assets across the population,” is the master prescription from which most of the others follow. The returns from any productive system flow to whoever owns it, and if ownership is concentrated then prosperity is concentrated regardless of how impressive aggregate growth looks. The single most important thing a society can do to ensure broad prosperity is to ensure broad ownership.

Imperative 2, “Build public wealth through enduring funds rather than recurring expenditure,” says that governments should invest, not just spend. A dollar placed in a sovereign wealth fund generates returns for decades while the principal remains intact, whereas a dollar disbursed through a budget cycle is spent once and gone.

Imperative 3, “Endow every citizen with capital at the earliest possible stage of life,” addresses the “it takes money to make money” problem at its root. Compounding is the most powerful force in wealth creation, and the biggest determinant of who benefits from it is who starts with a stake.

Imperative 4, “Expand worker and community ownership within private enterprise,” brings the ownership principle inside the firm. Cooperatives, employee ownership plans, and community trusts route capital income to households that would otherwise receive only wages, blurring the line between the working class and the ownership class by making them the same people.

Imperative 5, “Capture rents on shared resources to capitalize public wealth,” identifies the funding mechanism. Spectrum, atmosphere, land values, mineral deposits, and collectively generated data are commons whose value can be monetized without penalizing productive activity and channeled into public wealth vehicles rather than consumed in annual budgets.

Imperative 6, “Use transfers as a universal floor rather than a primary income source,” affirms that a baseline beneath which no one falls is necessary and humane, but warns that a population primarily dependent on government payments has traded one vulnerability for another. Transfers are the scaffolding, not the building.

Imperative 7, “Engineer citizen leverage that does not depend on being economically needed,” addresses power rather than prosperity. Social contracts have always rested on structural mutual dependence between the governed and the governing, and anything that makes the population less necessary erodes that dependence. New sources of civic leverage must be deliberately constructed on foundations that persist regardless of how the labor market evolves.

Imperative 8, “Collapse information asymmetry between institutions and the public,” targets the mechanism by which concentrated power most reliably maintains itself. When institutions know what they are doing and the public does not, every other accountability structure operates at a disadvantage. Radical transparency is the load-bearing element beneath the rest of the civic architecture.

Imperative 9, “Keep financial infrastructure open and permissionless,” says that the ability to send and receive value should function like a public utility rather than a gated privilege. A citizen who can be severed from commerce by an intermediary’s decision is a citizen whose economic existence is contingent on permission.

Imperative 10, “Measure the distribution of capital income, not just aggregate output,” closes the loop by ensuring that the shift toward broad ownership becomes a trackable target with accountable stewards. A society that measures only how much it produces, without measuring who participates in the returns, has no way to see divergence between aggregate prosperity and lived experience until the gap becomes a crisis.

Imperative 11, “When designing programs and policies, favor capital-based approaches over transfer-based ones,” is a decision rule for institutional design. Given two interventions that achieve the same immediate goal, prefer the one that creates owners over the one that creates recipients, because capital compounds and transfers do not.

Imperative 12, “Favor decentralization and distribution of power over concentration,” is the meta-principle governing how all the other imperatives should be implemented. Concentrated power is fragile and dangerous regardless of who holds it. Distributed systems are more resilient, harder to capture, and better at generating the evolutionary learning that good governance requires.

With that orienting map in hand, let us now walk through each imperative in full.

The 12 Commandments of Post-Labor Economics

1. Broaden ownership of productive assets across the population.

Broaden capital participation

The single most important determinant of who prospers in any economy is who owns the productive system. Returns from economic activity flow to whoever holds title to the assets that generate them. This has been true in agrarian economies where the landlord collects rent, in industrial economies where the factory owner collects profit, and in financial economies where the shareholder collects dividends. The specific assets change across eras. The principle does not.

When ownership of productive capacity concentrates in a small class, the gains from growth concentrate in that same class regardless of how impressive the aggregate numbers look. Output can rise, productivity can soar, and GDP can break records while the median household treads water, because the median household owns essentially nothing that generates returns. Wages obscure this dynamic because they create the impression of broad participation in economic gains. A worker receives a paycheck and feels like a participant. But wages are compensation for being useful, and usefulness is contingent. It can be competed away, automated away, or simply rendered unnecessary by changing conditions. Ownership generates returns by virtue of holding a stake, regardless of whether anyone currently needs your labor. A person holding shares in a diversified fund receives dividends whether or not they are employed, whether or not their skills are in demand, whether or not any employer has decided they are worth hiring. That durability is what separates ownership from wages as an income source. One persists through disruption. The other does not.

The policy implication follows directly. If broad prosperity depends on broad ownership, then the distribution of ownership must be an active policy target, pursued with the same seriousness that governments currently pursue employment levels or GDP growth. Sovereign wealth funds place productive assets in collective hands. Employee ownership plans distribute equity within firms. Capital endowments seed individuals with assets at birth. Community trusts hold stakes on behalf of local populations. Each vehicle differs in mechanism, but they all accomplish the same structural shift, moving people from the wage side of the economy to the ownership side.

Societies where ownership has concentrated without corrective have followed predictable trajectories toward instability, extraction, and eventually violent redistribution. Societies that have managed to broaden ownership, whether through land reform, homesteading programs, or modern equity participation, have built more durable prosperity and more stable political orders. The pattern recurs across centuries and continents. A society of broadly distributed asset holders is resilient in ways that a society of wage earners simply cannot match, because the foundation of its prosperity does not depend on any particular configuration of the labor market.

2. Build public wealth through enduring funds rather than recurring expenditure.

Build wealth funds that pay dividends

Governments overwhelmingly operate on a spend-as-you-go model. Revenue comes in through taxes and fees. It goes out through programs and services. Whatever is left over, if anything, reduces the deficit. The balance sheet, to the extent anyone thinks about it, is a liability story told in debt levels, deficit projections, and unfunded obligations. Very few governments think of themselves as investors, as entities that should be accumulating productive assets and generating returns on behalf of their populations. Yet the most financially resilient jurisdictions in the world have organized themselves in exactly this way.

Norway capitalized its Government Pension Fund with oil revenues beginning in the 1990s. Rather than spending the windfall on immediate consumption, as most petroleum states have done, Norway invested it in a globally diversified portfolio of equities, bonds, and real estate. The fund now holds well over a trillion dollars in assets and generates returns that exceed the annual petroleum revenue that created it. The original resource wealth has been transformed into a permanent, self-sustaining engine of public income. Alaska followed a similar path on a smaller scale, setting aside a portion of oil revenue into a permanent fund that pays annual dividends to every resident. New Mexico built an early childhood trust fund from land grant revenues. Singapore manages sovereign wealth that provides the city-state with a financial buffer and a source of returns that supplement taxation.

The principle underlying all of these examples is the same. Revenue that flows through a government budget gets spent once and is gone. Revenue that flows into a wealth fund gets invested and generates returns indefinitely. The fund becomes an asset rather than an expenditure, sitting on the public balance sheet and working for the population in perpetuity. Over time, the returns from a well-managed fund can grow to dwarf the original contributions, creating fiscal space that would otherwise require higher taxes or deeper deficits.

Any jurisdiction with a revenue source that can be partially diverted into long-term investment should do so. Carbon fees, spectrum auctions, land value capture, resource royalties, and data extraction fees are all candidates for capitalization rather than immediate spending. The specific revenue source matters less than the structural commitment to investing rather than consuming public wealth. The first dollar is the hardest. Every dollar after that benefits from compounding, and compounding is patient, relentless, and indifferent to political cycles.

3. Endow every citizen with capital at the earliest possible stage of life.

Implement universal basic capital

Compounding is the most powerful force in wealth creation, and the single largest factor determining who benefits from it is who starts with a stake. Wealthy families understand this intuitively. They establish trust funds, open investment accounts for their children, and pass down assets across generations. The compounding escalator carries their descendants upward from birth. Families without assets cannot do this, and no amount of wage income in adulthood can replicate the effect of decades of compound growth from a starting endowment. The wealth gap between families with inherited assets and families without them is not merely a gap in income. It is a gap in time, in the decades of compounding that one group enjoys and the other never gets to experience.

Universal capital endowments address this directly. When every child receives a publicly funded deposit into a long-term investment account at birth, the compounding clock starts for everyone simultaneously. The amounts need not be large at inception. A modest endowment invested in a diversified portfolio at birth can grow into a meaningful sum by the time its holder reaches adulthood, depending on market returns and the time horizon. Connecticut has implemented a version of this through baby bonds that seed accounts for children born into Medicaid-eligible families. The United Kingdom ran a similar program called the Child Trust Fund before discontinuing it. Several other jurisdictions are exploring or piloting variations, and the idea has intellectual support from economists across the political spectrum because it addresses wealth inequality at its structural root rather than its symptoms.

What makes endowment programs distinctive compared to other interventions is that they require nothing from the recipient. Wage subsidies raise income but do not build assets. Tax credits provide short-term relief but do not compound. Traditional savings incentives tend to benefit households that already have surplus income to save. A universal endowment requires no prior wealth and no behavioral change. It places capital in the citizen’s name and lets time do the work. By the time these citizens reach adulthood, they enter the economy as people who already own something, and that changes their options, their risk tolerance, their relationship to the market, and their sense of participation in the broader economic system.

The deeper logic here is about what kind of society you are building. Every generation faces a choice about whether the starting conditions of economic life will be determined entirely by the accident of birth into a particular family, or whether the society itself will establish a baseline of capital access that everyone shares. A society that endows its citizens with capital at birth has decided that ownership should be a birthright rather than something available only through inheritance or exceptional individual accumulation. That decision, compounded across millions of lives and decades of growth, reshapes the entire distribution of economic power.

4. Expand worker and community ownership within private enterprise.

Create more on-ramps to capital ownership, make it the default

Most people interact with the productive economy through firms. They work for companies, buy from companies, and live in communities shaped by corporate decisions about where to invest, what to produce, and how to allocate profits. In the conventional ownership model, the returns from all of this activity flow to external shareholders who may have no relationship to the workers, the customers, or the community. Workers receive wages. Shareholders receive profits. The boundary between these two groups is sharp, and for most workers it is never crossed.

Collective ownership structures dissolve that boundary. Employee stock ownership plans give workers equity stakes in the firms where they labor, so that the profits generated partly by their effort flow back to them as owners. Worker cooperatives take this further, vesting control and profit-sharing rights in the workforce itself. Community land trusts and local investment vehicles allow residents to hold stakes in the enterprises that operate in their neighborhoods, capturing some of the value that would otherwise be extracted by distant capital. These structures accomplish something that no amount of wage adjustment can achieve. They route capital income, the fastest-growing share of economic returns in most advanced economies, directly to households in the middle and lower portions of the income distribution.

The evidence base for these models is mature and extensive. Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region has built a cooperative ecosystem that generates a substantial share of regional output and has demonstrated superior firm survival rates compared to conventional businesses. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain’s Basque Country has operated as a federation of worker cooperatives for over sixty years, employing tens of thousands of worker-owners across multiple industries and surviving economic downturns that destroyed comparable conventional firms. The United Kingdom created over two thousand employee ownership trusts in the decade after introducing favorable tax treatment in 2014, demonstrating that where the legal and fiscal path is made easy, adoption follows rapidly.

The aggregate effect of expanding these structures across an economy is significant beyond the individual firms involved. Every cooperative dividend, every ESOP distribution, every community trust payout represents capital income flowing to people who would otherwise receive only wages. At scale, this blurs the line between the working class and the ownership class by making them the same people. A worker with an equity stake in their employer has different incentives, a different time horizon, and a different relationship to the firm’s success than a worker whose only connection to the enterprise is a paycheck that stops the moment they are no longer needed. Favorable legal frameworks, streamlined formation processes, and tax incentives should make collective ownership the easy default path rather than the exceptional one that only unusually motivated founders pursue.

5. Capture rents on shared resources to capitalize public wealth.

Monetize the commons for the many

Every society possesses resources that belong to no individual. The electromagnetic spectrum that carries wireless communications. The atmosphere that absorbs emissions. The land values created by public investment in transit and infrastructure. The mineral deposits beneath public territory. The data generated by millions of people going about their daily lives. These are commons, and when they are exploited without compensation to the public, the value they generate is privatized while the resource itself remains collectively owned in name only.

Rents on shared resources are categorically different from taxes on productive activity. A tax on wages penalizes labor. A tax on profits penalizes enterprise. A rent on spectrum usage prices access to a public asset that the government administers on behalf of citizens. A carbon price captures the cost imposed on a shared atmosphere. A land value tax collects the appreciation that results from community investment and public infrastructure rather than individual effort. The distinction matters enormously in practice because rents on commons can be captured without discouraging the productive activity that generates prosperity. You are pricing access to something that already belongs to everyone, and you are doing so in a way that makes the user of that resource internalize its true cost.

The critical question, and the one most jurisdictions get wrong, is where these revenues go once captured. In most cases they flow into general revenue and get spent in the current budget cycle, indistinguishable from any other income stream. The alternative is to channel them into public wealth funds that invest the proceeds and distribute returns to the population over time. This is how Alaska built its Permanent Fund from oil royalties and how Norway built the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund from petroleum revenue. Both demonstrate that capturing rents on shared resources and investing them prudently can create permanent public wealth that benefits citizens across generations without requiring ongoing taxation of wages or profits.

The commons already exist. Their value is already being generated. Someone is already capturing it. The question is whether that value accrues to whoever gets there first, or whether the population that collectively creates and maintains these shared resources receives a return on them. Spectrum auctions generate billions. Carbon pricing can generate hundreds of billions at scale. Land value in major cities appreciates by trillions over decades, almost entirely because of public investment and population growth rather than anything the landowner did. These are enormous revenue streams hiding in plain sight, already available for capitalization into public wealth vehicles, requiring only the political will to redirect them from private capture to collective investment.

6. Use transfers as a universal floor rather than a primary income source.

Universal basic income as a stopgap, not the whole show

A minimum income beneath which no person falls is a mark of a functional society. People need to eat, keep a roof over their heads, and access basic services regardless of whether the labor market currently has a place for them. Universal baseline support, designed without means tests or bureaucratic gatekeeping, accomplishes this with the least administrative overhead and the fewest perverse incentives. When everyone qualifies by virtue of citizenship, nobody faces the benefit cliffs and poverty traps that plague targeted programs. Nobody has to prove they are poor enough or broken enough to deserve help. The floor should be universal, unconditional, and sufficient to prevent destitution.

The danger lies in allowing this floor to become the load-bearing structure of household income rather than the safety net beneath it. A society where the majority of household income flows through government appropriations has built its prosperity on a foundation that is simultaneously fragile and coercive. Transfer payments must be renewed every budget cycle. They survive only as long as the political coalition that supports them holds power. They create enormous leverage for whoever controls disbursement, because the ability to adjust, condition, or revoke a benefit is the ability to dictate behavior. Politicians across the ideological spectrum have demonstrated willingness to weaponize transfer programs when it suits their interests, whether through work requirements designed to punish, means tests designed to exclude, or benefit cuts designed to coerce compliance. A population whose livelihood depends primarily on the continued generosity of elected officials has exchanged one form of vulnerability for another.

The structural goal should always be to shrink the share of household income that comes from transfers relative to the share that comes from owned assets. Think of transfers as scaffolding around a building under construction. The scaffolding is necessary while the structure is going up, and removing it prematurely would be catastrophic. But you do not design a building that depends on its scaffolding permanently. As sovereign wealth fund dividends grow, as cooperative distributions expand, as endowment accounts mature, as worker equity stakes accumulate, the transfer component should naturally decline as a fraction of total household income. It never disappears entirely, because the floor is permanent and universal. But it becomes the smallest layer in a diversified income stack rather than the dominant one.

The practical test for whether a transfer program is functioning as a floor or as a dependency is straightforward. Ask whether a household receiving the transfer could survive its elimination because other income sources have grown to compensate. If the answer is yes, the transfer is functioning as intended. If the answer is no and there is no trajectory toward yes, the system has failed to build the capital infrastructure that makes the transfer temporary rather than permanent. Every transfer program should be designed with its own obsolescence as a goal, not in the sense that it gets cut, but in the sense that the households it supports are simultaneously being moved toward income sources they own and control.

7. Engineer citizen leverage that does not depend on being economically needed.

Replace labor’s waning leverage with new systems

Throughout history, ordinary people have possessed bargaining power for reasons that had nothing to do with rights or constitutions or the goodwill of rulers. They possessed it because the people in charge needed them. Factories needed workers. Armies needed soldiers. Treasuries needed taxpayers. That structural dependence constrained elite behavior under every form of government, from ancient empires to modern democracies. A king who pushed his peasants too far lost the agricultural output that fed his army. An industrialist who ground his workers into destitution lost the productive capacity that generated his wealth. A democracy that ignored its citizens lost their votes and their cooperation. The concessions that define modern civic life, including the weekend, the minimum wage, the right to organize, and the franchise itself, were extracted by populations whose cooperation could not be taken for granted because the system could not function without them.

Any development that makes the population less structurally necessary weakens this dynamic, and the weakening does not require the complete elimination of human usefulness to be felt. Even partial erosion of structural dependence changes the calculus of those in power, because the cost of ignoring public demands falls with each increment of reduced dependence. A government that can run its economy with half the workforce has less reason to accommodate the other half. A military that can project force with autonomous systems has less need to maintain a broad base of popular support. A treasury that draws revenue from automated production and capital gains taxes on concentrated wealth has less fiscal dependence on a broad consumer class. Each of these shifts is already underway to varying degrees across advanced economies, and each incrementally reduces the structural leverage that ordinary people have historically wielded.

The response to this erosion cannot be to prevent the developments that cause it. They flow from technological and economic forces that operate on global timescales and resist unilateral intervention. The response must be to construct new forms of citizen leverage on foundations that do not depend on being needed. Broad capital ownership is one such foundation, because a population of asset holders has structural power through their ownership stakes that a population of pure wage earners loses when wages disappear. An owner can vote their shares, withdraw their capital, and impose costs on institutions through economic action. But ownership alone is not the complete answer.

The architecture of citizen leverage must be engineered across multiple dimensions, each reinforcing the others, so that the erosion of any single source of power does not collapse the entire structure. A hostile faction might successfully undermine one institution, but it should not be able to simultaneously dismantle transparent governance, capture democratic mechanisms, control financial infrastructure, and override constitutional protections. The mesh of overlapping accountability mechanisms must be harder to subvert than any single institution standing alone. That redundancy is the design principle. The following commandments address specific components of this architecture.

8. Collapse information asymmetry between institutions and the public.

Make radical transparency the default posture

Asymmetric information is among the most reliable mechanisms by which concentrated power maintains its position. When the people who run institutions know what contracts have been signed, what money has been spent, who owns what, and who benefits from which decisions, and the public does not, the institutional side of every negotiation holds a structural advantage that no democratic process can fully overcome. Elections give citizens a voice. Transparency gives them eyes. Without both, the voice speaks into darkness.

Radical transparency means that the default posture of public institutions is openness, with opacity justified only where specific and articulable reasons demand it. Ukraine built ProZorro, a transparent procurement platform, after the Maidan revolution and maintained it through a full-scale invasion. The system publishes every tender, every bid, every award, every contract in real time for anyone to scrutinize. The results were measurable in billions of dollars saved through increased competition and reduced corruption. Estonia has operated a digital governance system since 2002 that allows citizens to verify their own records and see exactly who has accessed their data. These are functioning systems in countries that face acute governance challenges, and they demonstrate that radical transparency is operationally feasible rather than aspirationally theoretical.

The deeper reason transparency matters to this framework goes beyond the general good-governance case. Every other commandment in this list depends on institutions operating honestly. You cannot verify that a sovereign wealth fund is being managed in the public interest if its operations are opaque. You cannot confirm that capital endowments are being disbursed equitably if the disbursement data is locked away. You cannot hold representatives accountable for their allocation decisions if the allocations are invisible. You cannot ensure that rents on shared resources are being captured and invested rather than diverted if the revenue flows are hidden.

Transparency functions as a load-bearing structural element that the rest of the architecture rests upon. Without it, every mechanism for building broad prosperity and maintaining citizen leverage is vulnerable to quiet subversion by those with the access and motivation to subvert it. Corrupt officials can redirect wealth fund assets. Captured regulators can structure endowment programs to benefit connected parties. Opaque procurement allows public resources to flow to politically favored firms. Every one of these failure modes becomes dramatically harder to execute when the relevant information is public by default, machine-readable, and accessible to any citizen or journalist or watchdog who cares to look.

9. Keep financial infrastructure open and permissionless.

Financial freedom is leverage

The ability to send and receive value is a precondition for economic participation. In most advanced economies, that ability is mediated by a stack of private intermediaries, each of which can deny access, extract fees, or freeze transactions at the direction of any sufficiently powerful actor. A citizen who can be severed from commerce by an institution’s decision is a citizen whose economic existence depends on remaining in good standing with that institution. That dependence has been weaponized historically for purposes ranging from political repression to competitive suppression to the simple extraction of rents from captive populations that have no alternative way to move money.

Open payment systems fundamentally alter this dynamic. India’s Unified Payments Interface processes more transactions than Visa and Mastercard combined within that country and has brought hundreds of millions of people into the formal financial system at near-zero cost. Brazil’s Pix enables instant transfers between any two accounts without fees. Kenya’s M-Pesa brought mobile payments to populations that had never had bank accounts and transformed economic participation across East Africa. In each case the pattern was the same. Removing gatekeepers from the transaction layer increased participation, reduced costs, and eliminated a point of coercive control that incumbents had exercised, often without anyone noticing until the alternative demonstrated what had been missing.

Financial infrastructure should function like a public utility. Universally accessible, neutrally operated, and unavailable as a tool of control by any party. A state that can freeze a citizen’s accounts without due process has coercive power that operates beneath the surface of any formal rights or protections. A payment processor that can deny service to an industry or an individual based on internal policy decisions is exercising quasi-governmental authority without any of the accountability structures that governments face. A banking system that excludes hundreds of millions of people because they lack the documentation or minimum balances that legacy institutions require is an infrastructure failure masquerading as a market outcome.

The base layer of financial infrastructure, meaning the ability to move value from one party to another, should not require permission from anyone other than the two parties involved. Every layer of intermediation that sits between a citizen and their ability to transact is a layer where access can be denied and rents can be extracted. Minimizing those layers is an act of civic infrastructure with direct implications for every other element of this framework. A citizen who cannot freely transact cannot fully benefit from capital ownership, cannot receive sovereign wealth dividends without friction, cannot participate in cooperative economies, and cannot exercise the economic agency that the rest of this architecture is designed to provide.

10. Measure the distribution of capital income, not just aggregate output.

Optimize the economy around increasing capital based income for households

Every society optimizes for what it measures. When gross domestic product became the standard economic indicator in the mid-twentieth century, governments organized their priorities around maximizing output. When unemployment became a political mandate through legislation like the Employment Act of 1946 in the United States, governments organized their priorities around job creation. These metrics shaped what leaders paid attention to, what journalists reported, what voters rewarded and punished at the ballot box, and what institutions were built to manage. The history of economic governance is in large part a history of which numbers ended up on the dashboard, because the numbers on the dashboard are the numbers that drive decisions.

The standard economic dashboard was built for an era when wages were the primary mechanism for distributing prosperity. It tracks aggregate output and employment with exquisite precision. It can tell you how much the economy is producing and how many people have jobs. It cannot tell you whether the gains from that production are reaching ordinary households. This is a specific and consequential blind spot rather than a minor omission. Aggregate output can grow while median families stagnate, because the gains flow to capital and capital is concentrated at the top of the wealth distribution. Productivity can rise while the workers who enabled that rise see none of the benefit. Corporate profits can hit records while the consumer base that generates those profits watches its purchasing power erode. The instruments show green lights across the board while the underlying conditions deteriorate, because the instruments were designed to measure something other than what now matters most.

What should be tracked, with the same institutional weight and political salience that GDP and unemployment currently command, is the breadth of capital income across the population. Specifically, three things need to be visible. What share of households receive meaningful income from ownership of productive assets. How that ownership is distributed across income quintiles and demographic groups. And what share of household income derives from collectively held public wealth rather than from wages or transfers alone. The data to calculate these indicators already exists in the records of statistical agencies like the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Congressional Budget Office. What has been missing is a framework that elevates these measurements from academic curiosities to first-class policy targets.

The reason this matters goes beyond diagnostic value. Metrics do not merely describe reality. They shape it, because they determine what becomes a political issue and what remains invisible. Unemployment above a certain threshold triggers political action because unemployment is on the dashboard and everyone can see it. Capital concentration could reach historic extremes without triggering any comparable response, because no widely tracked indicator makes that concentration visible in a way that demands attention. Getting the right numbers onto the dashboard is how you ensure that the transition toward broad capital participation becomes a measurable objective with accountable stewards, rather than an aspiration that everyone nods at and nobody tracks. Simon Kuznets invented national income accounting in 1934 because the Great Depression revealed that policymakers were flying blind without it. The equivalent gap exists today in our ability to track whether the gains from an increasingly capital-intensive economy are reaching the households that constitute its consumer base.

11. When designing programs and policies, favor capital-based approaches over transfer-based ones.

Wages are going away. Process of elimination leaves transfers and capital. Whenever possible, favor capital (at all layers)

Given two interventions that achieve the same immediate goal, prefer the one that creates owners over the one that creates recipients. A government that gives a household a thousand dollars has improved that household’s month. A government that places a thousand dollars in a wealth-generating vehicle on that household’s behalf has potentially improved its decade, because capital compounds and transfers do not. The thousand-dollar check gets spent and disappears from the recipient’s balance sheet. The thousand-dollar investment generates returns, and those returns generate further returns, and the gap between the two approaches widens with every passing year.

This preference is not absolute. There are situations where immediate cash is exactly what a household needs, and the urgency of the moment outweighs the long-term advantage of capital accumulation. Emergency relief, acute poverty intervention, and crisis response all call for direct transfers that reach people quickly and without conditions. The commandment to use transfers as a universal floor exists precisely because the capital-first orientation has necessary exceptions. But as a default orientation for long-term institutional design, capital-based programs build something that transfer-based programs structurally cannot. They build a balance sheet. They create an asset that works for the household independently of any future political decision.

The behavioral evidence supports this preference from a different angle. Decades of research on asset ownership have consistently found that households with assets, even modest ones, behave differently from households without them. They plan on longer time horizons. They invest more in their children’s education. They take entrepreneurial risks that households without assets cannot afford. They participate more actively in civic life. They report greater life satisfaction and lower stress even when controlling for income level. Something about holding an asset that belongs to you and generates returns changes your relationship to the economic system around you, in ways that receiving a check of equivalent value does not.

This principle also applies at the governmental level, reinforcing the earlier commandment about public wealth funds. A state that channels a billion dollars into annual transfer payments must find another billion next year, and the year after that, forever. A state that channels a billion dollars into a well-managed wealth fund can reasonably expect that investment to generate tens of billions over the following decades while the principal remains intact. The fiscal mathematics of compounding favor capital-based approaches as strongly at the institutional level as they do at the household level. Wherever a choice exists between spending and investing, between creating recipients and creating owners, between disbursing and capitalizing, the long-term case favors the capital path. The short-term political incentives often favor the transfer path, because a check in the mail generates more immediate gratitude than a fund balance that will matter in twenty years. Overcoming that asymmetry between political time horizons and economic time horizons is one of the central challenges of institutional design, and it is why this preference needs to be stated explicitly as a governing principle rather than left to the discretion of whoever holds office at the moment.

12. Favor decentralization and distribution of power over concentration.

Subsidiarity should be a default policy whenever possible.

Concentrated power is fragile and dangerous regardless of who holds it and regardless of their stated intentions. A system where a single institution, a single individual, or a single class controls the decisive resources of a society is a system with a catastrophic single point of failure. If that center is captured, corrupted, or simply makes poor decisions, there is no redundancy and no check. The history of concentrated power is not a history of good intentions reliably producing good outcomes. It is a history of systems that work passably well under competent stewardship and then fail catastrophically when stewardship changes, because the same structures that enabled competent governance enabled its opposite with equal ease.

Distributed power is more resilient, harder to capture, and more adaptive. When decision-making authority, economic ownership, information access, and coercive capacity are spread across many actors, the failure or corruption of any single actor does not bring down the system. A federation of sovereign wealth funds held at national, state, and municipal levels is harder to loot than a single central fund. A network of cooperatives and employee-owned firms is harder to monopolize than a single national corporation. A government with participatory mechanisms at multiple levels, independent courts, transparent procurement, and citizen assembly rights is harder to capture than a government where all authority flows through a single executive or a single legislative body.

This principle applies across every domain the previous commandments address, and it functions as a meta-prescription that governs how the other commandments should be implemented. Capital ownership should be distributed across many vehicles and many levels of governance rather than concentrated in a single national fund that becomes a target for capture. Financial infrastructure should be open and decentralized rather than routed through a handful of chokepoints. Transparency should flow through multiple overlapping systems rather than depending on a single platform that could be shut down. Governance should push decision-making authority to the lowest feasible level rather than accumulating it at the top, because decisions made close to the people they affect tend to be better calibrated and harder to corrupt than decisions made at great distance.

The deeper justification for decentralization goes beyond resilience against corruption, though that alone would be sufficient. Distributed systems also generate more information, more experimentation, and more adaptive capacity than centralized ones. When thirty different jurisdictions try thirty different approaches to capitalizing public wealth, the successes become visible and replicable while the failures remain contained. When a single central authority dictates one approach for everyone, a mistake becomes systemic and a success may be suboptimal for the many contexts it was not designed for. The history of governance innovation bears this out consistently. Participatory budgeting was invented in a single Brazilian city and spread because it could be observed, evaluated, and adapted by other cities that found it compelling. Estonia’s digital identity system was a national experiment that other countries could study and adapt. Alaska’s Permanent Fund was a state-level innovation that has informed sovereign wealth fund design worldwide. Each of these began as a local experiment in a distributed system, proved its value in practice, and then propagated through voluntary adoption rather than top-down mandate. Centralized systems do not generate this kind of evolutionary learning because they do not permit the variation that learning requires. The decentralization preference is ultimately a preference for systems that can discover good solutions rather than systems that must guess correctly on the first attempt.

My Ask of You

The full Post-Labor Economics framework spans six pillars, two pyramids, two novel metrics, hundreds of policy examples drawn from dozens of countries, and enough historical evidence to fill several volumes. That is its strength and its weakness. The depth is necessary because the transition we are navigating is genuinely complex and the stakes are civilizational. But depth creates a barrier to entry. If understanding PLE requires reading a hundred and eighty thousand words before you can evaluate whether you agree with it, the framework risks becoming an artifact that specialists appreciate and everyone else ignores. That outcome would defeat the entire purpose.

These twelve imperatives are my attempt to solve that problem. They are the operating system beneath the applications. They are the principles from which every specific recommendation in the book can be derived, and they are stated at a level of abstraction that allows them to be evaluated, debated, and stress-tested without requiring anyone to first master the full taxonomy of interventions or memorize the details of Norway’s pension fund governance structure. If you disagree with one of these imperatives, that disagreement is productive and specific. You can point to it and say “this one is wrong, and here is why,” and we can have a substantive conversation about whether broad capital ownership actually produces the resilience I claim it does, or whether decentralization genuinely outperforms centralization in the ways I have argued, or whether transfers deserve a larger structural role than I have given them. That kind of focused debate advances the framework. Asking someone to argue with an entire book rarely does.

I also want to be honest about the limitations of what I have produced here. These twelve imperatives represent my best current distillation, but they are almost certainly not the final form of Post-Labor Economics as a platform. Economics is not physics. There are no timeless equations waiting to be discovered. There are frameworks that prove useful for navigating particular challenges, and those frameworks evolve as the challenges evolve and as smarter people than me identify gaps, redundancies, and errors in the original formulation. I expect these imperatives to be debated, refined, reorganized, and expanded by people with deeper expertise in specific domains. Some may be merged. Others may be split. A few may turn out to be wrong. The value of stating them explicitly is precisely that it makes refinement possible. You cannot improve what has not been articulated.

What I am confident about is the direction. The broad strokes of PLE point toward something that I believe is both necessary and achievable. Ownership must be broadened. Public wealth must be built and invested rather than spent. Citizens must hold leverage that does not depend on their economic usefulness. Institutions must be transparent. Financial infrastructure must be open. And the metrics we use to judge economic success must reflect whether prosperity is reaching households, not just whether aggregate output is rising. These commitments can be implemented in a thousand different ways depending on the jurisdiction, the political culture, the existing institutional landscape, and the specific challenges of the moment. The imperatives do not prescribe a single path. They describe the direction of travel and leave the routing to the people on the ground.

The full argument, with all its evidence and nuance and historical grounding, lives in the book. Labor/Zero: A Post-Labor Economics Treatise is the complete framework, one hundred and eighty thousand words with hundreds of citations, walking through each of the six pillars in detail, unpacking the pyramids layer by layer, developing the metrics with worked examples, and surveying the global landscape of interventions that are already being implemented in countries from Estonia to Kenya to Brazil. I narrated the audiobook personally because I wanted the ideas to be accessible in every format I could manage. If these twelve imperatives have resonated with you, or provoked you, or made you want to argue with me, the book is where that conversation deepens.

The Kickstarter campaign for Labor/Zero is live right now. By supporting it you are doing more than buying a book. You are voting with your wallet for the idea that this transition deserves serious, rigorous, nonpartisan analysis, and that the people who will determine how it unfolds, the politicians, the investors, the think tank scholars, the voters, need a framework in their hands before the window for shaping the outcome closes. Every copy that reaches someone in a position to act moves the needle. Every share that puts these ideas in front of an audience that has not encountered them yet expands the conversation.

The transition is already underway. The question is whether we navigate it deliberately or let it happen to us. I have tried to provide the map. Now I need your help getting it into the right hands.

Part 1—Human Provenance Premium

We toss around terms like “meaning economy” and “attention economy” and I’ve tried to distill what their common ground is. If knowledge work is the most valuable heart of the service sector, then what is the central pillar of the quaternary economy? I’ve currently landed on “human provenance” as the main driver of this potentially final economy refuge.

What do I have in common with Taylor Swift?

That’s not a joke or a rhetorical question, and the answer goes beyond “you’re both Millennials.” The answer is that people pay a premium for proximity. I publish all my Substack articles for free, yet for some reason, I make $15,000 per year on this platform alone. And that’s not through advertising, that is people voluntarily giving up their hard earned money just to say “Dave, I want to read more of your thoughts, please keep doing this.”

It was the weirdest damn thing when I first started my Substack and people started pledging money. I literally just started this as a dumping ground for my thoughts. I “think out loud” and the entire point wasn’t even to have an audience, I never had a growth strategy for this platform. But before I knew it, Substack was squawking like a parrot at me that I was leaving $1700 per year on the table.

So I set up the Stripe account and money started pouring in.

It took me several years to fully understand this phenomenon, even though my entire livelihood is based on it. Consider Patreon, where I’ve gotten the bulk of my income over the last few years. Sure, I provide my fans an exclusive Discord server, connected through Patreon, where they can interact with me. But mostly, it came down to the intangible value of just wanting to support someone you feel like gets you.

I remember when I first started supporting my first content creator on Patreon. It was Nerd Cookies, who makes science fiction commentary videos. I don’t even remember which video it was, but her take was so close to something I felt in my bones and al I thought was “fuck yes, she gets me, I am going to support her.” A couple years later, I still give her $5 per month even though I rarely watch her videos.

It might not sound like much, but once you have thousands of people making that decision, you have an income.

Economists have cold terms for it like “parasocial relationships” which makes it sound like “parasitic” and I just don’t like that. You might say “well where’s the value exchange? All your content is free!” So they aren’t purchasing goods OR services from me. It’s 100% voluntary.

It just comes down to the human provenance premium. In a world that is increasingly fake, performative, inauthentic, and marketing hype, honestly people just like the dignity of being seen as being human.

That’s why we value objects with stories attached to them. It’s why people pay hundreds of dollars to go see Taylor Swift. They can get higher quality music on Spotify. But the real human experience, the embodiment, the strife of actually getting there, it all comes down to the intangible, irreplaceable, inimitable human provenance.

And as far as I can tell, this zone will keep generating income forever.

Part 2—Content, Courses, Books

I have always been a slow adopter. I know that might shock people, as I’m on the cutting edge of AI. That was the one exception where I decided to go all in back when GPT-3 launched. But beyond that, I generally prefer analog most days. I was still downloading and managing local MP3 files as most people were migrating to iTunes and Spotify.

In the honor of my pokiness, I have only this year really embraced the rest of the “creator stack” of income streams. Over the last few years, I’ve diversified my creator portfolio. I generate ad revenue on YouTube and Spotify, subscriber income on Patreon, Substack, and some on X. Then I have platform revenue sharing on X as well.

You never want to be wholly dependent upon one platform. If you get banned or demonetized, your income is toast.

But there are two entire other legs of income that most mature creators stand on. And that is courses and books. Which you might think is sort of odd since people generally tell me I’m a great teacher, and a prodigious writer! Hence my slowness.

So here’s how it breaks down:

Content Strategy

Content is content. The greatest irony of content is that you must please the algorithm, but you cannot please the algorithm by trying to please the algorithm. Sure, you can systematize it and operationalize it, but what the algorithm really wants is not to be pleased directly. The algorithm wants authenticity and insight. True authenticity, though, not performative authenticity. And genuine insight, hard-won or otherwise. And novelty. Polished novelty. The hard part is making polish and insight look effortless.

I’ve constantly experimented with not only what I say, but how I say it. I had the misfortune of becoming conscious of the fact, a couple years ago, I have no idea why people like what I do!! And in so becoming aware of the paradox, I tried to focus on making sure I kept doing the right thing. Accordingly, my subscriber growth and audience retention have waxed and waned. But invariably, when I ignore the algorithm and just focus on something that is irrefutably true, things tend to go better.

As of today, YouTube, X and Substack are my primary content strategy platforms. Why? Because they pay me. If the goal is to make money, go to where the money is. I used to write on Medium but they give you zero control over monetization, so I left that platform and came here. Substack gives creators infinitely more control. And, last I checked, Substack was growing wildly in popularity.

In business terms, the content is “top of funnel” meaning that it is how future fans will discover me. Some of those fans will convert to subscribers, and some of those will convert to customers.

Online Courses

People keep telling me I’m a great teacher. I launched my first ever true online learning course on Julia McCoy’s platform First Movers where I sort of stumbled through teaching people how to use various AI tools for research.

It became their top performing course.

So I figured “why don’t I just launch my own course platform?” I am working on that in the background. I actually have my first course finished, but not launched yet, because I’m presently in the middle of launching my first commercial book! More on that later.

The default thing that content creators sell is courses on how to make it as a content creator. So that’s where I started. I figure that every content creator is a little bit different, so even though we all produce courses on “how to follow in my footsteps” my particular path was somewhat unique. Plus, I might as well bank on my reputation as a teacher.

There are dozens of platforms where you can host and sell courses. Stay tuned for that announcement in a month or so.

I never would have really believed it, but consider this: the average number of emails you need to make six-figures on Kajabi (an online learning platform) is just 4,000. I have nearly 14,000 on Substack alone! More when you consider my entire ecosystem. So I’m leaving an entire six-figure career on the table.

To be fair to myself, I’ve been chronically ill for years, which is only just now slowly resolving as I spend hundreds of dollars a month on highly targeted therapies (thanks to the help of AI). And creating, marketing, and launching courses is a lot of work.

With that said, I do genuinely have a lot that I want to teach. Philosophy, economics, thinking, burnout. You name it.

Some of you might think “Dave you should just give away that content for free too!” and I have in the past. But there’s a big difference between content that makes the algorithm happy, and content that people will pay for exclusive access. One of my fans actually explained why you should charge to me, and this was before my official foray into economics: price signals. If you give something away for free, you have no idea how much someone actually values it. It’s counterintuitive but it’s true. Say I put up a dozen free courses on YouTube. Sure, I can look at numbers like views and subscribers, but that tells me nothing about intensity of value beyond a few people clicked on the videos.

Plus there’s a bunch of other packaging and advantages that come with online courses. Some of it is technical affordances, like adding in bonus content, tracking completion, and hitting milestones. But other parts of the advantages of selling online courses is psychological. People place higher value on what they pay for, and what they have exclusive access to.

So here I am, building online courses.

Book Launches

At the time of writing, I’m still less than a week into my first ever Kickstarter launch, and it has gone better than I had hoped. My book about Post-Labor Economics is finally ready, but there’s a bit left to do. Namely copyediting, audio engineering, Amazon marketing, and hardback design. Fortunately, the Kickstarter will fund all of that.

I’ve been approached over the years by various publishers. Most of them saw someone marketable and wanted to do a deal. Some of them were predatory vanity presses who just wanted to sell me a “package.” But from them, I did learn a few neat things. Namely that audiobook sales usually outperform digital and print. And I’m someone who makes a living on my voice more than my face. So once again, I have a highly commodifiable asset just sitting on the table, collecting dust.

For context, I would not be writing this article if my Kickstarter had flopped. Until you do something yourself, successfully, it’s never a sure thing. I was a nervous wreck in the days leading up to the launch. On launch day I woke up at 3AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. In hindsight, of course it went well! I assembled a potent team, we fudged through it, and I did dozens of hours of research.

Did I make mistakes? Absolutely. There are things I will do differently next time. Was it still a resounding success? Also yes!

Many people make a living just off book sales. My wife went to a convention and spent most of it talking to authors on merch floor, and came home with a new plan. Even without a platform, setting up a booth at a convention can net you $20k in a weekend from book and merch sales. Again, people will value a product more if there’s a name and a face attached to it. Even she felt compelled to buy their books, and figured it was a fair exchange for them infodumping their business model for her.

So: audiobooks can make bank, and you can sell books directly. And that’s just one leg of my earning potential, on top of the other two.

Part 3—Durability and Longevity

It’s worth addressing the elephant in the room: if I am someone who believes that AI, robotics, and automation are coming for most jobs, why would I believe that this would be any different?

The answer is simple: humans are not economically rational beings. In fact, humans are quite irrational. When we talk about humans being economically rational beings, that basically extends to starvation and homelessness. As long as people have the basics covered, they become increasingly irrational with their money.

Of course, viewing humanity through the lens of an economist is sterile, dehumanizing, and often unhelpful. So let’s pivot and view them through the animal lens.

First, human nervous systems are exquisitely calibrated towards other humans. That’s how parasocial relationships form, as well as trust, attachment, and reputation. This is how I created my Vision, Values, and Reputation framework.

Consider superstars that you look up to. Maybe it’s Elon Musk, maybe it’s AOC. Doesn’t matter. Let me ask you what is it about them that you look up to? Why is it that you are fans of whoever it is you are a fan of? Even if you’re never going to meet them, and they will never know you exist.

Human brains index on leadership qualities, and in a highly connected world, where the stakes feel incredibly high, leadership comes down to vision, values, and reputation.

Now let’s unpack those.

Vision

In an uncertain world, we value clarity of vision and purpose. Part of the reason that humans index on leaders whom they will never meet is to reduce uncertainty. “This guy/girl makes the world make sense to me, and if they understand what’s going on better than me, I might as well throw my lot in with theirs.” It’s really as simple as that.

Sometimes the vision resonates for multiple reasons. Similar worldview, similar goals, similar experiences. We always like people we understand better. There’s really no mystery to that. But the insight I have to offer you is that vision is an intangible asset that can be parlayed into influence and income.

Values

Values are what you vote for. In fact, the Vision-Values-Reputation axis perfectly explains how some people vote. Consider the last POTUS you voted for. I don’t care who it was, it doesn’t matter. You voted for them because you agreed with their vision for America, and you recognized and resonated with their values, whatever they happen to be.

Whether you’re a classical conservative or a techno-progressive, you use your personal values to filter and select politicians. But you also use that same litmus test to decide who to support, who to subscribe to, and who to purchase courses from. Shared values are a great proxy for “I will probably get some real wisdom from this person.”

Reputation

This is the temporal component. Has this person delivered for me in the past? Do other people trust them? It’s all about social proof and coordination. After all, getting people to click on videos or subscribe on Substack is all about reputation. Each follow decision comes down to an impulse of “I want to see what this person has to say at least one more time.” In finance-bro terms, it’s an “expected value” decision. If I subscribe to you, it’s because I expect the value to exceed the time commitment.

My reputation is the “AI philosopher” and making complex things seem simple. The weirdest part of this is almost a third of my audience frequently disagrees with me but they like how I reason and find me accessible. My reputation is that I am thoughtful (unless you ask my anti-fans, then I’m the biggest idiot on the planet!) and so that maps onto one of the core dimensions of parasocial relationships.

I am essentially banking on the notion that human neurology won’t change much in the coming years. In the long run, I expect we’ll all be genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced, and by then, money and income might not matter at all.

But before that, let’s wind down this article by answering a final question: why hustle at all?

Faith in Post-Labor?

Perhaps one of the most obvious pushbacks would be “Dave, if you believe in Post-Labor Economics so much, why not just ride out the wave and enjoy the ride?” It’s like when AI X-risk believers have children—which more and more of them are electing to do so. It seems like a tacit admission that they don’t believe in their own narrative. After all, if they honestly believe that the world is about to come to a dramatic end, wouldn’t the kindest thing to do be remain childless?

Likewise, the same logic would apply to me. If I genuinely believe that automation is about to eradicate the need for human labor, and I can live comfortably as a content creator, why reach for something bigger, and higher? Like the Doomers, the obvious answer is “it’s a hedge.” I can’t argue with that logic, but I will add some more dimensions.

First, there’s a parable that goes around Silicon Valley and VC spaces. It goes something like this:

I am sure that 70% to 80% of people, when given the choice, would generally opt for a Post-Labor income portfolio. Imagine this: in 20 years, your household income would be the equivalent of $300k today, with zero effort. That would come from UBI checks from the federal, state, and local government. It would also come from sovereign wealth and state endowment dividends. Then there’s the private capital side of things; ESOPs, DAOs, EOTs, trusts, cooperatives, and so on. All told, you’d be getting monthly checks from at least 9 to 12 different sources.

Be honest. Most of you wouldn’t work. Without the threat of financial precarity, your motivation would vaporize. That’s not a moral indictment. It’s just a biological reality. Human brains are decision optimizers. You would make the entirely rational calculus I would rather do anything else other than work now! Maybe you restore old Mustangs. Maybe you focus on raising your children. Maybe you travel the world.

But that’s the difference between someone like me, and some of you. I am not the kind of person who is constitutionally capable of retiring to a beach, even if it’s full of sexy women. I would get bored so fast. I’m too ADHD to settle down like that. I need a problem to solve. A project to pursue. And most of all, I need feedback.

There may come a time when the rewards are no longer worth it. There are plenty of rich and famous people who lose their motivation once they’ve “made it” and mostly coast. That may be in my distant future. But in the meantime, I’m a natural systemizer, a problem solver, and an optimizer.

Practical Takeaways

I gave you two frameworks in this article. First is the CCB business model. Some of you may be thinking “yeah right, Dave, not everyone can be a content creator!” Which is true. But you never know until you try. And if you were waiting for the spark of inspiration, maybe that’s it. The CCB business model is nothing new. I didn’t invent it. I just named it. So if you’re worried about your financial future, it may be time for you to take the plunge as I did. Remember, I was an IT infrastructure engineer for 15 years. Not a podcast host, not a TV personality. And not a writer.

The second framework is the VVR framework. This is the simplest way to understand parasocial relationships and trust-coordination in an online world. If you want the technical term, it’s how people choose other people as “Schelling points.” This can allow you to understand the how-and-why you choose to follow the people you follow. It can also help you understand why people might follow you, should you decide to join the creator economy.

To get notified when my Breaking into the Creator Economy course goes live, follow me for free here on Substack or as a free tier member on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/daveshap

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero?ref=6ob1za

In the meantime, I wanted to distill this book down into seven intuitive frameworks so that you can understand Post-Labor Economics in its simplest form.

Intuition 1: Better, Faster, Cheaper, Safer

Labor substitution is when a machine replaces a human at something economically valuable. Modern grain harvesters replace hundreds of farmhands as they cut, thresh, and sort produce all in one machine. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) has been eliminating back office jobs for a few decades now, and LLM-based AI is accelerating that trend.

When we take the long view of history, there’s a simple litmus test that a new technology must pass, and then labor substitution becomes inevitable: better, faster, cheaper, safer. When a machine passes those four criteria, versus human baselines, it becomes economically irrational to hire humans, and thus substitution becomes inevitable.

Intuition 2: Strength, Dexterity, Cognition, Empathy

Many people believe “there will always be more work to do” which is true! The amount of work we need to do, as a species, is functionally infinite. There’s always more science, engineering, and law than can be done. Once we become a spacefaring civilization, colonies aren’t going to build themselves!

But there’s no law of physics that says humans must do those activities. When we look at the “labor supply” side of the equation, we see that humans fundamentally offer the economy four things: strength, dexterity, cognition, and empathy. Every economically valuable task that humans do is a combination of those abilities. Marketing and sales is a combination of cognition and empathy. Neurosurgery is dexterity and cognition. You get the idea.

But here’s the rub: machines are starting to supply all four of those “food groups” of labor. That means the supply side of the labor market is about to get very, very saturated. Now, that doesn’t mean that 100% of jobs go away forever, we’ll talk about that intuition at the end. But in the meantime, the important intuition is that we have only four economically valuable attributes that we can parlay into wages: strength, dexterity, cognition, and empathy.

Intuition 3: Wages, Transfers, and Capital

The formula is simple: if AI and robots take all the jobs, then wages dry up, aggregate consumer demand drops, companies have to lay off even more employees, and we end up in a vicious cycle. You can’t sell goods and services to a bankrupt population. That is the “deflationary death spiral” of the worst-case scenario.

Thus, the crux of the problem of Post-Labor Economics is this: “How do we shore up household income?” Household spending drives >70% of GDP. Without household spending, the economy stalls. That’s the keystone. That’s the linchpin.

So let’s look at where households get their income to spend. This data has been tracked for decades by government agencies such as BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis). They break household income down into three buckets:

1. WAGES - Income from selling your time (including self employment)

2. CAPITAL - Income from owning productive assets like stocks, bonds, and real estate

3. TRANSFERS - Government assistance in the form of welfare, retirement, education, and healthcare (would also include UBI)

Wages are going away, therefore capital and transfers must pick up the slack. But the problem is that most people focus just on transfers. They concoct increasingly elaborate ideas about UBI and UHI, while ignoring capital. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Intuition 4: Double Bilateral Dependence

Before we solve the money problem, I have to introduce the darkest problem we’ll face. That is what I call double bilateral dependence. This is a fancy term that means “the State has always depended on the People for some things, and the People have always depended on the State.” And this creates negotiating power.

The State requires production (labor, taxes) and service (soldiers, army) from the people to function. The People require safety (physical protection) and facilitation (enablement of markets and commerce) from the State. This is the “zeroth principle” of all “social contracts” and explains how literally every government, from ancient monarchies and empires, to modern democracies, have functioned. Not metaphysics, and not enlightenment ideals. Just a cold hard exchange of dependence.

However, AI and robotics threaten to shatter this double bilateral dependence. When robots and drones can conduct war, and the same can conduct labor, suddenly, the State no longer needs the People. When humans become optional to the state, so does listening to them.

If this gives you the willies, that’s because you’re paying attention.

Intuition 5: Broaden Capital Participation

First, let’s solve the household income problem. Programs like UBI (Universal Basic Income) and NIT (Negative Income Tax) and guarantied income (GI) are all necessary-but-not-sufficient. Here’s why: 100% of those rely on tax-and-spend schemes AND they make you entirely dependent upon the government. No one wants that. No one wants a population that is forever a financial outpatient of the government. If your benefits get cut off for any reason, you are completely screwed. That means politicians can hold your livelihood hostage.

Frankly: fuck that noise. Ain’t nobody want that.

So what do we do? We must broaden ownership of the economy. Market-based solutions, property based solutions, all geared for creating more capital based income. Remember the three buckets model of household income? UBI is a transfer, which is great. It will be necessary as a floor.

But with wages gone, that means that simple process of elimination says: we need more capital. Now you might be wondering “how do you get capital if you don’t have any to start with?” The answer is simple: we still start with the state, but we don’t end there.

1. Start with Sovereign Wealth Funds like Norway’s pension fund.

2. Add in State Wealth Funds like Alaska’s Permanent Fund and New Mexico’s Land Grant Permanent Fund.

3. Add in local urban wealth funds.

These funds all pay out dividends or provision services. Once they are all set up, you’ll be getting no less than three monthly or quarterly checks from different levels of government, just by being a citizen. But that’s just the public side of the equation. Now let’s look at the private side.

1. Expand ESOPs, EOTs, cooperatives, and trusts - private equity for the companies you already work for and shop at.

2. Add DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) to create entirely new private equity options.

3. Add Baby Bonds and other forms of Universal Basic Capital (birthright endowments).

When you combine all the TRANSFER based programs with all these CAPITAL based programs, every household ends up with a portfolio of income, some managed by the state, some managed privately. The transfers serve as the universal floor, while the capital programs expand and grow with the economy.

This is how you create Elon Musk’s idea of “universal high income.”

Intuition 6: Replace Labor’s Leverage

Now we address the darker problem of leverage. When double bilateral dependence breaks, we basically just become cattle to the state. A drag on the system unless we have a we to either contribute, or force those in power to the bargaining table. First, I need to clarify that it is nobody’s best interest for the economy to come grinding to a halt. Simple rational self-interest will ensure that billionaires and politicians do something to shore up household income.

But, I don’t know about you, I don’t want to rely solely on the good will and common sense of billionaires and politicians. That’s where the concept of credible threats come in. Throughout ALL of history (and I mean literally all of human history) the ONLY thing that can force adversarial parties to the bargaining table is a “credible threat.” In some cases, such as for the signing of the Magna Carta, it was literally that a bunch of lords stormed London and said to the king “sign this if you want to live.” Naked force is the ultimate backstop of credible threats.

Beyond that, labor unions figured out that you don’t need to use violence to force people the bargaining table. You just... stop working. Shut down the ports. Shut down the mines. Every day of production lost is permanently gone. However, with AI and robotics, we cannot unionize them. They are property, they are tools, and they do whatever their owners say.

Thus we need an entirely NEW stack of levers. This is the most complex part of the book, so I’ll simplify it here and just call it all “algorithmic rights.” This is the ability to shut down financial flows, enforce radical transparency, and control data. By building a new infrastructure around the very technology that will eradicate the need for human labor, we can ensure that not only does property stay in the hands of ordinary citizens, but so does the economic killswitch that will force the elites to the bargaining table.

Intuition 7: The Meaning Economy

Finally, let’s address the demand side of the labor market. We already see that the supply side is going to be saturated by machines, meaning that for every valuable task, a machine will be able to do it better, faster, cheaper, and safer than a human. It therefore becomes economically irrational to hire humans in every case.

However, humans are not always rational.

Let me give you an example: let’s say you want to listen to Taylor Swift music. You can just subscribe to Spotify for the price of a couple lattes per month and listen to unlimited Taylor Swift. Yet people still spend hundreds of dollars on concert tickets, hotels, and flights to go see her live. Why? The sound is better at home, in your headphones. The reason is because humans are totally irrational when it comes to meaning. Our bodies evolved to attune to other humans and have embodied, real experiences.

Let’s create a framework to understand this. The economy is presently demarcated into three distinct sectors:

1. PRIMARY - this is the “extraction economy” which includes mining, farming, fishing, timber, and so on. Nature provides the baseline.

2. SECONDARY - this is the “manufacturing economy” where we take raw materials and transform them into steel, concrete, parts, engine blocks, and so on.

3. TERTIARY - this is the “services economy” where goods give way to services, like lawyers, doctors, engineers, and so on. This is the vast majority of the economy today, including all knowledge work.

History shows that that primary sector now accounts for less than 2% of the entire economy of advanced nations. The secondary sector is following suit. The tertiary sector peaked in the last decade, meaning it will begin its gradual decline around now.

But there’s a fourth sector.

QUATERNARY - this is the “meaning economy” which is broken down into all the economically irrational things that humans will pay a premium for the privilege of other humans to do.

Let me give you some examples:

• The Attention Economy - Content creators, parasocial relationships, and one-to-many connections mediated by networks. Philosophers also operate here.

• The Experience Economy - Embodied, in-person, and local experiences like concerts, spas, massages, and white water rafting tours. This is the domain of priests as well.

• The Statutory Economy - High responsibility and accountability jobs that we want humans to do for moral reasons (police, judges, presidents, business owners).

There will always be plenty of jobs to do, unfortunately there won’t be enough for EVERYONE to have a job. The quaternary economy simply cannot absorb that many people, there’s not enough human attention to go around. But, everything in the quaternary sector breaks down into subcategories circling that idea that humans irrationally will pay a premium just for the engagement of other humans. Hence, the meaning economy.

Conclusion

You now understand the full scope of Post-Labor Economics. At least at a high level. If you want to know more, go support my Kickstarter campaign. The finished book is 180,000 words with hundreds of citations, and I will do the narration personally.

Beyond that, it’s not just enough that a ew people reading this article understand PLE. The reason that this book needs to exist is so that we can get it into the right hands. Politicians, billionaires, think tanks, professors, and decision makers and influencers of all stripes. The best way to ensure that PLE gets implemented is with a rock solid book. By supporting me on this book launch, you’re voting with your wallet to say “yes, I want PLE to exist.”

Here’s the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero?ref=6ob1za

Every little bit helps, now let’s get it done.

The book is done.

I just spent the last 12 months writing 19 drafts of Labor/Zero. The book is now with the editors for a final polish, and then I will begin narration. It has hundreds of citations and has been read by industry leaders. We are ready for launch.

But there’s a problem: the world is not ready for what I have to say. Oh sure, people are anxious about AI and robotics taking their jobs, but others are still in denial. They bury their heads in the sand, coping with aphorisms like “it’s just a stochastic parrot” and “it doesn’t have real judgment.” Meanwhile, new-grad jobs are the lowest they’ve been since the Great Recession and tech job boards are becoming ghost towns.

I’ve spoken to economists who miscategorize AI, they don’t even believe it’s a “general purpose technology” even though it is the most broadly applicable invention the human race has ever produced. Their mental models are wrong, which means they aren’t pricing in the impact that AI alone is going to have, let alone robotics and the marriage of these two techs.

I’ve debated with professors about how fast and how hard the automation cliff is going to bite, but not one of them disagrees about the cardinal direction that things are headed in. Whether it’s 5 years or 30 years, it makes little difference.

I’ve been to conferences and spoken to business leaders, and what they say privately versus what they are allowed to say publicly are very different things. Some institutions have explicitly forbade their people from even discussing a “post-work” world. And these are the self-same institutions that keep saying “Oh, no, AI will create far more jobs than it destroys!”

The Overton window needs to be pried open, forcibly if necessary. On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of people in my audience are worried about the future of work, how they are going to support their families and make ends meet. On the other hand, institutions keep kicking the can down the road and it’s still political suicide for a CEO or politician to address the elephant in the room.

This book will change that.

We don’t even have a common language to discuss these problems. Elon Musk suggests we talk about “Universal High Income” but then shrugs when asked how such a thing would actually work, how it would be funded. Bernie Sanders just wants to tax billionaires, but that’s at best half a solution and at worst counterproductive. No one is thinking creatively enough about this problem.

My work is so far ahead of the curve that no one will touch it. I pitched to no less than 36 agents and publishers, and without fail, all of them said no. Most wouldn’t even deign to give me a response. From Penguin Random House to Oxford University Press, even the concept of Post-Labor Economics is still radioactive.

This is not how a society prepares for the future.

So I’ve had to do everything the hard way, and myself. Fortunately, we live in a day and age where crowdsourced fundraising is more than viable. My mandate has long come from my audience, my entire life has been crowdfunded for three years now, and largely due to my work on AI civilizational impact. You have already endowed me with the means to get to this point.

And now it’s time for one last push.

The Launch

HERE IT IS: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero?ref=90st9p

The most important thing I need you to do right now is go and back this campaign. Any amount will do. Here’s why: the Kickstarter algorithm cares more about volume of backers than total cash. We need to make this thing go viral and hit the front page of Kickstarter. That means it’s a numbers game, and a time game. The more backers and the faster we hit saturation, the better our chances of hitting trending on Kickstarter, which brings in double the supporters.

But there’s another component to all this: Post-Labor Economics is not about me entertaining you. The Labor/Zero book only makes a difference if we get it in the right hands and the reach is broad enough to really catalyze the movement. Kickstarter is as much part of our advertising strategy as Amazon will be. Furthermore, the war chest that Kickstarter gives us will contribute directly to our marketing budget and publicity tour.

You are the vanguard of this movement. Not me. The fate of this project is up to you. As a special thank you, I will be putting the first names of the first 300 backers into the book as the Labor/Zero Vanguard.

The Logistics

Here’s how the Kickstarter works:

Tier 1: $10 - You get the e-book at launch day. Simple and straight forward. Consider it a pre-order.

Tier 2: $25 - You get the e-book AND the audiobook at launch. Likewise, consider this a pre-order.

Tier 3: $50 - This tier gives you both editions from above as well as a digital download of all my research materials. Several thousand pages of research documents accumulated over the last year.

Tier 4: $100 - This tier includes everything above plus an exclusive companion course covering the entire book in much greater detail. This course will be several hours long and include tons of bonus material.

Tier 5: $250 - This tier includes everything above, plus an exclusive Zoom webinar at launch. This will be for your Q&A, deep dives, and exclusive access for insight.

Pick whichever tier best suits you, and as mentioned above, volume of backers matters more than volume of dollars!

Now let’s go through the timeline, everything that’s left to do.

1. The manuscript is presently with the editor. Expected delivery is April or May.

2. Then narration begins. I’m doing this myself. I’ve got the voice and studio for it!

3. In parallel to narration, the finalization of the book itself (formatting, etc) will be done.

4. Finally, once the eBook, audiobook, and printed book are done, we’ll begin the launch campaign on Amazon.

5. We’re targeting a July launch date, so the clock is ticking!

Let’s get this done.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero?ref=90st9p

Vesperance?

A couple years ago, someone on Reddit coined the term “vesperance” which means the wistful nostalgia for the now, as you experience the ending of an era. That was sweet and romantic. I have also personally written extensively about things will change. But it’s one thing to intellectually know a truth and another entirely to feel that same truth in your bones.

Here’s an example: I’ve told my audience for a few years now “it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.” I’ve read books like The Fourth Turning and Ray Dalio’s Principles for a Changing World Order where he studies long term debt cycles. Both of those cycles are coming to fruition at the ramp up of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Every Turning, every debt cycle, and every industrial revolution in history has reshaped society, often painfully. But now we’re living through all three converging at once.

The threats we’re facing are not just financial or political. We understand recessions and job shocks. That’s not new. But what is new to us is the disorientation that comes with the upending of every norm and rule that the world is supposed to follow. Go to school, get a job, buy a house, get married, have children, work and then retire. That’s a norm. And it’s already ending.

What has changed for me in the last few weeks is that the sensation of vesperance has shifted to something darker, like the icy ball in your chest just before the rollercoaster drops. I’ve been sanguine about the future for most of my life, and I still am. I understand from history’s perspective that technology pushes humanity through phase changes. I can’t imagine what living in a world where almost everyone was a farmer was like, and how disorienting it would have been to live through that change from rural to urban. Likewise, in a hundred years, people will probably look at white collar office work the way that we today look at serfdom.

There’s a tension building in me, and I suspect it’s building in others. It’s the “extinction rage” of being so thoroughly done with something that you just want to flip the table, smash things, and never look at it again. We, as a society, are so thoroughly finished with work that we’re all burning out and checking out. Let’s get it over with already.

But the requisite ingredient for ending precarity for all time, and compulsory labor for all time, is automation that is capable of obviating the need for human input. And we are Homo sapiens. The thinking man. I am a knowledge worker and a problem solver. Even today, AI already does most of the heavy lifting for all my intellectual work. It takes very little imagination to conceive of what comes next: the value of my intellectual contribution drops to zero. There will be no problems for which I am better suited to solve than the machines we are building and using.

Sure, we can cope with platitudes like “yes, but you still get to choose which problems to solve!” or “there’s no replacement for human taste!” And those are indeed copes. I’ve written at length about the macroeconomic reality we are facing, but the subjective reality is somewhat different. When machines are better, faster, cheaper, and safer than humans, your ability to contribute drops precipitously.

What remains?

I do need to dial back the melancholy a little bit. Yes, AI will soon render my problem-solving abilities moot. But there are dimensions of humanity that simply cannot be automated, and it is mathematically provable. I’ve done this calculation many times: “How many good novels are possible to write?” I won’t bore you to death with the math, but the number of viable novels, in English alone, is absurdly astronomical. The number usually falls somewhere between 10¹⁰⁰ and 10^150,000 novels are possible to write, depending on how you estimate it. For reference, there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the entire universe, and even if we turned the entire cosmos into “computronium” we could only ever generate and record an infinitesimal fraction of of all possible novels. And that’s just novels, not poetry, film, paintings, or philosophy.

This means that, as a science fiction author, I will have plenty to do until the heat death of existence. Social commentary, embodied experiences, celebrity gossip, political wrangling—all of these things will stick around as long as humans are humans. And that makes me feel a little bit better.

But my work on things like Post-Labor Economics are likely to be my final contribution to humanity, at least in terms of anything rigorous or scientific. AI models are already surpassing most mathematicians in terms of insightful intuitions. Physics and chemistry are next. The most effective computer programmers today are the “100x engineers” who mostly just use AI to leverage their intuition and produce code faster. But as a former automation engineer, if all you’re doing is driving the machine, it’s a relatively small step before the machine is driving itself.

Just last night (at the time of writing) I was telling my wife that I am grateful, at least, to have the opportunity to be here at the beginning of this Singularity or Fourth Industrial Revolution, where I have the chance to make one final contribution. If my work on Post-Labor Economic pans out, it could meaningfully impact every single human from now on. That’s something to be proud of. And even if my work amounts to nothing, at least I had a shot at making a difference on such a scale.

But what comes next, I think, is a major contraction. Our minds and bodies evolved for hyperlocal geometries and social networks. Dunbar’s number puts our maximum “tribe” at 150 to 250 individuals. It’s exhausting to think about humanity as a whole. But the internet has shrunk the world, and I believe that AI is about to shrink it even more. Though, not in a way that necessarily expands our individual impact.

The increasing weirdness

This part is the hardest to articulate.

The world is getting weirder by the day. Like that famous interview with Terrence McKenna back in the nineties. Things are just going to get weirder and weirder until you don’t really know what’s going on. The narrative will become incoherent. The Great Unraveling is underway and once all the chips are down, we’re going to be rebuilding from scratch. Just like how society reinvented itself during industrialization, we are going to be forced to reinvent ourselves, very soon. My fear is that it will be faster and harder than any previous disruption. We are charting entirely new territory.

The feeling I’m left with is like when you’re a little kid going to the doctor. The existential dread of getting poked and prodded and getting all your vaccine boosters. It’s infantile, I know, but I have that same yearning for it to just be over. To be on the other side of it all. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the emotional flashback is to that of childhood. We are all powerless over the global currents that are pulling us along. I can no more influence the US and China race for AI dominance than I can stop the wind and tides. At the highest order, that singular competition is going to drive everything for the foreseeable future, and it is going to dramatically reshape every life on Earth.

All we can do is hold on tight and do the best we can to steer.

NOTE: This is not medical advice. This is just my personal Odyssey with gut health. It is provided for informational and narrative purposes only. Always consult a licensed professional before making health decisions.

The Downward Spiral

I have dealt with gut issues for most of my life, but they were more or less tolerable. Mild food intolerances, cramping, some GERD. Typical stuff for Americans. But then COVID hit and the stress plus anxiety wrecked me, but it got infinitely worse when I contracted Omicron from my nephew.

What followed was three years of increasingly severe symptoms: burning sensations whenever I ate anything, chronic fatigue, deteriorating sleep, and autoimmune-like symptoms. Since COVID was new, no one really knew what was going on.

It wasn’t until OpenAI released ChatGPT o3 (their flagship reasoning model) that things started to change. Until then, I honestly thought I was dying. This downward spiral era was when I made my famous “I’m quitting AI” post. I wasn’t just about to quit AI, I thought my time left on Earth was genuinely limited.

The Diagnosis

With the help of my licensed dietician, I got my first GI-MAP stool test. This is a “qPCR” test that measures all the DNA in your stool so that it can identify which species of bacteria live there, and in what concentration. My first stool test showed that I had sky-high zonulin and H Pylori, plus a handful of other opportunistic infections. My guts were very unhealthy. Zonulin, for instance, is a substance associated with “leaky gut” or more formally “intestinal permeability.”

My case was pretty straightforward in retrospect. I had severely dysbiotic guts with an upstream driver of H Pylori. H Pylori, for reference, is an infection that can cause ulcers and stomach cancer. In most nations, any detection of H Pylori warrants aggressive treatment and eradication. In America, however, it is often ignored unless someone has active ulcers, but it can cause lots of downstream problems even without causing ulcers or cancer.

Fortunately, I had a great PCP who prescribed “triple therapy” for my H Pylori. This is a combination of two powerful antibiotics plus an insanely powerful antacid. It’s a very short term therapy because it will wreck your body. I felt fine for a few months but slowly got worse again.

Then, I finally decided to get a second GI-MAP, this time, bought myself with no prescription. I fed the report to my AI chatbots and three things jumped out at me:

1. My zonulin was even higher than it was before!

2. Most of the pathogens were gone, but streptococcus was several times higher than the reference range (it had been zero before)

3. And finally, my secretory IgA (gut immune system) had collapsed.

I was somehow more sick than before. It turns out that this is common when you hit the body with heavy duty antibiotics.

The Research

I spent a few weeks studying the clinical and scientific literature with the help of AI chatbots. I used Gemini extensively because it is much less censored than ones like ChatGPT, and at the time, it was more helpful than Claude (though Claude has since become much more powerful, along with Grok). The key insight here is not to ask the AI to diagnose you. They are often terrible at diagnosis, or flat out refuse to. Instead, I asked them “what does this mean?”

Primary lesson: use AI as a learning tool. Don’t ask it to diagnose you. Just ask it to help you understand what things are, and what the numbers mean.

First, I learned that zonulin is often an indicator of a problem, not necessarily the primary driver itself. Ditto for IgA. The real question is “what is causing the zonulin to be so high, and the IgA to be depleted?”

The answer became obvious: my sky-high strep overgrowth. I did a simple side-by-side comparison between this GI-MAP and my first GI-MAP. The first GI-MAP showed zero strep. My second one? Well, it was kind of nightmarish.

Yes, my strep was 6.5x higher than the clinical threshold.

That is bad.

So I figured “okay, the strep seems like it’s the primary upstream driver of everything, so how do I kill it?”

This could be called “SIBO” which means “small intestine bacterial overgrowth” but here’s the kicker: the GI-MAP doesn’t tell you where the bacteria are. only how many there are.

So I went back to research mode. I learned that you can try to knock out strep with antimicrobials like olive leaf extract or berberine, but these taste awful and can kill the good stuff you want to preserve. So rather than “just throw more antimicrobial stuff at it” I kept researching.

Eventually, I noticed that some probiotics kept coming up. How can you treat one bacteria with another? That led to the breakthrough.

There’s a strategy called “competitive exclusion” whereby you simply crowd out the bad guys instead of carpet bombing everything. If you do research into dysbiosis and gut health, the standard of care right now is “seal, kill, reseed” but I shortened my protocol into just two steps: “seal and reseed.”

The Protocol

Step one was to seal the breaches. My research showed that zinc carnosine is the gold standard for sealing guts. In fact, it is the default treatment in Japan. Specifically for things like ulcers and leaky gut, the Japanese prescribe zinc carnosine at 75mg twice a day. Fortunately, as an American, I didn’t even need a prescription. I just ordered some on Amazon. Since I did not have any ulcers, I went with the standard 75mg once daily for 60 days.

The second part of this first protocol is to actually feed the GI wall enough to seal the breach. While zinc carnosine is excellent on its own, another substance called l-glutamine kept coming up. This is where double checking research with AI came in handy. Most l-glutamine supplements are measured in milligrams or just a few grams. But for severe leaky gut, I found that you need 10g to 20g per day. So I found Glutasolve packets. This protocol was for 60 days as well.

However, just sealing the guts is not enough. I need to engage in the GI equivalent of trench warfare against the strep overgrowth. And to complicate matters, strep tends to form “biofilms” which is worse than it sounds. I won’t post pictures, you can search them if you want. But suffice to say, it looks like when a pool liner is covered in algae. This makes it damn near impossible to treat strep overgrowth without pharmaceutical grade interventions. But I persisted with my research.

so I accumulated many lists of probiotic strains that can harm strep. I discovered that different species of probiotics have different mechanisms. Some produce peroxide, others produce antimicrobials, while others each the biofilm.

Cool.

By the end of my research, I had a list of dozens of probiotic species that would clear out the strep. However, I need to link those species to actual products! You need to actually be able to purchase the probiotics OTC (ideally on Amazon) for it to actually work.

Here’s the final list I ended up with:

1. Jarro-Dophilus EPS Plus — Powerful blend for lower GI (large intestines)

2. Hyperbiotics Vital Nutrients Pro Dental Probiotic — Oral probiotic, has several strains that neutralize bad strep starting in the mouth

3. BioGaia Gastrus Gut Health Probiotic — Second oral probiotic with slightly different strains

4. Fem-Dophilus Vaginal Probiotics — This is the wildcard, it was the only one with specific species in it, which are aggressive at controlling UTI in women (but also great at killing strep!)

5. Florastor Select Pro+Pre Daily Probiotic — Has a very specific strain of S. boulardii which is one of the most universal “general purpose gut health” probiotics.

6. Pendulum Akkermansia Probiotic — Akkermansia is a keystone species that I was missing entirely because my guts were so unhealthy (it also helps protect mucus members)

7. Codeage SBO Probiotics — Spore forming probiotics, fundamentally different from ordinary bacteria. Works deep in the guts.

8. Mountain Kefir — This is my secret weapon. Traditional kefir gives you >1T CFU of probiotics daily

All my research said that it takes 8 to 12 weeks of constant bombardment to really truly dislodge SIBO or dysbiosis. Fortunately I had one primary target: streptococcus overgrowth. Rather than cut corners, I decided to do this for a full 90 day course. It generally takes 90 days for good guys like akkermansia to take hold, and many of these (especially kefir) have compounding effects over time.

I tried several other things along the way, like biofilm enzymes, but those usually made me feel worse, and ultimately proved unnecessary. I am leaving out those side experiments in this article and focusing on what actually did work.

The Results

My research said that, once you have the correct gut treatment, the results tend to be “front loaded” meaning you get some of the benefits very quickly. I found this to be true. I did experience some of the classic “die-off” symptoms, which is basically you feel like you have the flu in the first 10 to 14 days. This is theorized to be endotoxins leaking out of the bad bacteria that is dying. Hence “die-off reaction” which is also called a Herxheimer reaction. Though, technically, you do not experience a “true” Herx response from probiotics. However, here’s what happened, and in what sequence:

1. First, the discomfort of eating started to go down very quickly.

2. Second, histamine sensitivity and food intolerance started going away.

3. Then, over the full course, all GI pain stopped, and I stopped needing Pepto unless I ate something silly.

Today, just 5 weeks after finishing the 90 day course, I can eat basically anything I want. I do still have some minor food sensitivities, but I’m not reaching for Pepto and ginger tea every single day. My research indicates that it can take up to 18-24 months for the guts to full stabilize after such a severe case of chronic dysbiosis. Furthermore, my energy and sleep have not fully stabilized yet, as I have a long-COVID model of chronic fatigue (in essence, my mitochondria are still damaged from the chronic leaky gut).

I just sent away my third (and hopefully final) GI-MAP to confirm the “all clear.” However the clearance of my symptoms, and slow improvement of sleep and energy are generally indicators that the infection has indeed been cleared. The final GI-MAP is more of a “just to be sure” rather than out of paranoia or suspicion of relapse.

To be clear: MOST people relapse after treating SIBO or dysbiosis with more conventional means.

Permanent Changes

I mentioned that kefir is my secret weapon. Traditional kefir (homemade) is very different from anything store-bought. Kefir is almost a magic elixir for your guts, and other than switching to a high-fiber, whole-foods, plant-forward diet, it is the best single thing you can do for your gut health. So my plan is that I’m going to drink a cup of kefir every day for the rest of my life. It is one of the simplest ways to constantly feed your guts powerful probiotics, with each cup containing over 1 trillion CFU every single day.

The other change that I’m making is this: that “high-fiber, whole-foods, plant-forward” diet. The research is unambiguous on a few points here:

1. Plant-forward diets have superior health outcomes across the board (less cancer, longer life, etc)

2. High-fiber is also unambiguous, and it seems like most of the benefits kick in once you exceed 30g of fiber per day (on average, depending on body size)

3. Whole-foods is the final piece of the puzzle. Switching to a whole-food diet is actually a better intervention than switching to organic (nothing wrong with organic).

That may all sound very complicated, but I found a hack. This is a cheat code. Studies show that people who eat more than 30 species of plants per week have the highest microbiome diversity. And that is a good thing. More microbiome diversity is associated with longer life, less inflammation, lower incidence of CVD and cancer. But also, the best way to get 30+ plant species per week is, you guessed it: eat a plant-forward, high-fiber, whole-foods diet. So now I raid salad bars and soups as often as possible.

The wildest part about this is that within days, I started craving almost fully vegan meals. My new philosophy on food is this:

So far, that new strategy has worked out very well.

Caveats!!!

This protocol will not work for you unless you have my exact disease phenotype. If your pathophysiology is any different, this protocol might not work for you, and in fact, it might make you WORSE. With that said, here’s what I’d recommend to anyone experiencing chronic gut issues, chronic fatigue, sleep issues, and pain:

1. Start with a GI-MAP. This is not considered standard of care for most gastroenterologists but it is extremely popular with licensed dieticians and licensed functional medicine specialists.

2. Avoid quackery. There are a TON of quacks out there who will sell you specific supplements, expensive packages, and sign you up for endless testing, supplements and experimentation. I’ve seem them treat people like guinea pigs. There are too many charlatans in this space because mainstream American gastroenterology is literally several decades behind other nations like Germany, Japan, and even Russia.

3. Find a professional, licensed dietician. In America, at least, dieticians require formal licensing. Nutritionists do not. You want to work with a board certified dietician, not some quack who claims to be a functional medicine specialist. There are real functional medicine specialists out there, but be careful.

4. Use AI primarily as a learning tool. It will answer your questions faithfully, but it does not have the wherewithal to read between the lines, tell you what you don’t ask for, or offer a strong diagnosis. Also, check with multiple AIs if you can. They will disagree with each other. There’s often a VERY big difference between the scientific literature (what’s known in the lab) versus the standard of care in clinics. Also, every nation has a very different view of gut health.

5. Check every supplement individually for quality and side effects. Some of the supplements I tried can dramatically harm you. Some of them are outright dangerous. If you live in America, you are free to load up on supplements, but caveat emptor. Don’t just check reviews. Ask every AI “what are the contraindications of this supplement?” Also check for quality supplements, not cheap knockoffs. Look for those with third party testing.

6. Order of operations is critical. Crafting your own protocol is as much about timing as it is about which supplements or changes you make. For instance, I couldn’t start the kefir until my leaky guts were sealed because kefir is insanely high in histamine. So I had to wait until my histamine sensitivity went away before I could start the kefir.

7. Document everything! This is the hardest for me. Keep a log book with dates, supplements, foods, and symptoms. Keep this file separate from your AI chatbots so you can copy/paste it into every AI chat. Save everything into NotebookLM so you can query and track it. You will need to become your own GI librarian and expert if you have gut issues like I did. I was terrible about documenting and timestamping everything. Now I use a combination of NotebookLM to store everything and my Google Calendar to keep track of these long term protocols.

8. Customize your protocol for you. I have friends and family going through nearly identical symptoms, but with very different root causes. The root cause is the primary differentiating factor. Until you identify a root cause driving the pathology, everything else is guesswork. SIBO can present like SIFO, but has different implications for treatment. Every body is different across many dimensions: genetics, epigenetics, metabolome, immune system, diet, microbiome, everything. There are millions of variables here, so one protocol that works for you, may not work for anyone else. I spent several weeks researching and customizing my protocol, researching day in and day out with tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.

There are probably more rules I would recommend, but these get the core of it.

Conclusion

May you never be as sick as I was. If you are that sick, that sucks. And I hope you get better. In some respects, I’m kinda glad that this happened. I finally eradicated the H Pylori that was probably bugging me all my life, and I learned so much about diet and gut health that, once my energy fully returns, I will probably have more energy than I did even before COVID. My goal in the long run is to have the healthiest guts I possibly can get, because that’s the central engine of everything else.

From an evolutionary perspective, we are all just guts that evolved brains. Life started as simple vacuoles, little balloons that absorbed nutrients in a chamber. Then we evolved, stretched out, and became stomachs and intestines. Everything else that evolution bolted on, from hands and feet to eyes and brains, was all literally just to help us either eat, or avoid being eaten. My “gut-first” view of human evolution has changed how I relate to my body and my health. I’ve learned a million little things along the way, like how gut inflammation drives high triglycerides, and how SCFA production lowers CVD risk, and every single insight boils down to: maximizing gut health is the best thing you can do for long term health, energy, and happiness.

UPDATE 1: Mistakes I made

After publishing this, I had a big realization: I left out a huge category! I should have included “mistakes I made along the way” so without further ado, allow me to rectify this mistake.

Here’s what I’d have done differently:

1. Follow-up test earlier! One of the biggest mistakes I made was delaying follow-up GI-MAP test. After my H Pylori treatment, I didn’t test for 18 months, which allowed for opportunistic overgrowth to take over and make me sick again. What I should have done is retested after 4-8 weeks maximum. Had I done this, I would have caught the strep overgrowth before it crashed my IgA, and I suffered unnecessarily for more than a year.

2. Realize that antibiotics are a scorched earth protocol! Also related to the H Pylori treatment, which uses two high-powered antibiotics, I learned the hard way that this can make your guts far worse. If I had it to do over, I probably would have tried a more natural approach to eradicate H Pylori first, such as a combination of mastic gum, kefir, and probiotics like S. boulardii. After sharing my story, people have reached out saying that antibiotics were often the original trigger for many of their issues!

3. Good help and information are hard to find! It should come as no surprise, I was sick off and on for a decade. It took dozens of hours of learning and researching with the help of advanced AI chatbots to figure out my health. And even though I’m pretty smart, that’s a ton of investment. Which is why there’s room for a lot of quackery out there. But even beyond that, AI chatbots have their own biases and failures. For instance, most of them are coerced to focus explicitly on American clinical recommendations, and will explicitly ignore American science, as well as the rest of the world.

4. You cannot rest your way to healthy guts! I tried this at the beginning of 2025. After the H Pylori treatment, I had assumed that my guts were fine and it was just a matter of time before I was better. What I didn’t realize is that I was actually getting worse, fast. My energy would come and go, and then by October 2025, I felt worse (in some ways) than I had in many years. I thought I had long COVID. I thought I was developing ME/CFS. But a simple GI-MAP retest showed the truth.

There were likely many more mistakes besides, but these were the biggest ones that I made. In an alternative timeline, I would have rechecked my stool test within 1-2 months after finishing the H Pylori treatment and, ideally, I would have averted 18 months of unnecessary suffering, and today I would have actually been free and clear, back to full power. Hindsight is always 20/20, though. As it stands, it looks like I might be fully recovered (fingers crossed, making good progress!) by April or June of 2026. Remember that this saga really began at the beginning of 2022 and into 2023. I started seeing a dietician at the beginning of 2024, and went through H Pylori treatment midyear that year.

I now have an answer to what’s going on, and the Anthropic v. Pentagon saga has crystalized it.

We are now in the “Messy Middle” of the AI story.

Let’s break it down based on storytelling archetypes. Up until now, we were solidly in Act One of the AI story. The world was still mostly familiar. AI threats were mostly hypothetical, like the Hobbits drinking at the Green Dragon talking about dwarves and war beyond their border. That was before Gandalf came back and said shit just got real.

Those were the good old days when p(doom) and x-risk were still hypothetical arguments, where CBRN discussions were more like bogeyman stories, and the nature and flow of power was still abstract.

In storytelling, there is a plot beat called the “Break into Two” moment. This is when the character is thrust (often forcibly) into the new world, where everything changes. For Frodo, this was when Gandalf came back and said “You must take the Ring.” This is the end of innocence, the moment that things become real to the protagonist.

Up until now, AI job loss, video generators, and “slop” was mostly just the background noise, the grumbling before the storm. But now it’s all becoming very real, very quickly.

Act Two of the AI story is characterized by complications. We need to differentiate this from complexity. Complexity denotes many intersecting systems, which has always been true. AI has always intersected education, economics, military, and culture. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the stickiness is rising, which is making it complicated. In this context, “complicated” means “many mutually exclusive and antagonistic relationships, stakeholders with diametrically opposed beliefs, and everyone fighting over control of the ball.”

For the EA (Effective Altruist) AI safety crowd, this has always been the case. They have viewed the entire game as existential the entire time, hence the energy they’ve put into controlling narratives. However, the last 12 months have been devastating to them. First, the Trump admin rescinded all the Biden-era protections, deregulated, accelerated, and now has labeled Anthropic a literal national security threat. If you’re an EA or Rationalist, you basically cannot lose harder. Trump and Hegseth explicitly called out Anthropic for being “woke” and “left” and even called out their “sanctimonious EA rhetoric” directly.

That, to me, is the clearest signal that we have entered into a new regime. This new paradigm has “put the fish on the table” (a business term for addressing the stinky thing that no one wants to talk about). The stinky thing has been the narratives, the unspoken tension, and the beliefs that have been cultivated for years, sometimes in a vacuum, as they collide with reality.

There are many complicated realities now clashing.

• Legal and contractual realities vs vibes and ethics

• Military and national interests vs civil liberties and private interests

• Cybersecurity and geopolitics

• Misinformation and disinformation campaigns

• Jobs and copyright vs innovation and progress

Obviously, real life is not an idealized movie script. There are rarely clean “plot beats” IRL but in this case, there was a definitive “Before” and “After” the Anthropic/Pentagon beef.

What should we expect during the Messy Middle?

Unpredictable and emergent changes. One example is that some of the EA crowd has apparently done an about-face on government. Their original theory was “steer from within” by seizing control over the narrative, convincing the government to pause AI, shut it all down, or at least have an “inside man.” But with Anthropic being unceremoniously ejected from the establishment, literally overnight, some of the diehard safetyists are now saying “the government was never going to be on our side.” Not every group or stakeholder will have that level of polarity, but this is the nature of high uncertainty. Ideas can flip-flop. Someone might be pro-AI until it takes their job. Someone might be anti-AI until it saves their life.

Narrative polarization intensifies. If you thought Accelerationists vs Doomers was polarizing, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. My audience has long been worried about jobs, and in my research, people will bear a great deal of hardship. What they generally do not tolerate is going hungry. Especially not when there’s an obvious elite cadre who are responsible and still doing just fine. Every sector has already had some debates: what role does AI play in education? What about dating? What about creativity and art? But it’s a different matter entirely when it becomes obvious that everyone’s livelihoods are genuinely on the line. It’s going to feel like the Black Death, you never know who’s going to get struck by the AI layoff next. And that makes people angry.

Tribal battle lines harden. It was odd to me, at first, to see AI become so political so quickly. I was labeled “right wing” (and worse) simply for being pro-technology and pro-AI. I’ve been labeled MAGA for pointing that Anthropic played with fire and got burned. But it basically comes down to “Red team is pro AI, therefore anyone else who’s pro AI gets lumped in with them.” There’s different terms for this, but one that sticks out in my mind is “identity stacking.” For instance, if you drink soy lattes people also assume a great deal about you—that you’re a Democrat, that you support DEI, that you’re pro-Palestine, and so on. Conversely, if espouse any “trad” values like a preference for monogamy and family, that you’re right-wing, a boot-licker, and so on. People look for totems and talismans to make instant, snap judgments. I call these “epistemic tribes.” And those tribes are solidifying and mutating at the same time.

And none of that has to do with technical capabilities. We’re barely out of the chatbot era, and video generators still mess up fingers. Just imagine how much worse it’s going to get as AI surpasses humans across all cognitive dimensions, as robots invade job sites, and all digital goods can be rendered on the fly, in real-time, with no human input.

Thank you.

I know my latest video about Anthropic rubbed some people the wrong way, and provoked much spirited debate. While a few comments were uncalled for, most were reasonable, whether or not there was agreement or disagreement. Thank you for your attention and engagement. This stuff is important.

One thing about me, that I hope you understand and value, is that I do not pull my punches. I remain deeply disappointed (but unsurprised) by Anthropic’s decisions, most notably the way Dario handled this disagreement with the Pentagon.

After reading almost every comment (both here and on Twitter and elsewhere) as well as extensive research over the last few days, I wanted to lay out some key nexus points where consensus has landed. I will provide my editorialization and commentary AFTER but this first section is reporting from the probably 15 hours of research I’ve done over the weekend.

FIRST - Almost everyone agrees that the Pentagon (or more specifically the Trump administration) vastly overreacted with the SCR (supply chain risk) designation. Donald Trump is known for his bombastic, policy maximalism, and “nuclear option” preference, particularly when there’s a personal slight. Thus, while it is unsurprising that they would go as far as the SCR, the SCR represents several problems simultaneously. First, it sets a very dark precedent. Dario was right when he said it felt “punitive” and I would actually go farther and say that it was retributive. The distinction is subtle but important. The fallout from the SCR designation (irrespective of whether or not it sticks) is that of a “chilling effect” to AI labs - “fall in line or else.” It’s one thing to lose a military contract (which happens all the time). It’s another for such a large blast radius to be the default option.

SECOND - While the government’s reaction was dramatic and unnecessary, Dario bears a disproportionate amount of the blame for what happened. First, the negotiations had been going on for months. There had been some leaks since at least January, but nothing quite as sensational as to when Dario published the “good conscience” blog post. The timeline matters. Dario took a private, relatively quiet dispute public, apparently in an attempt to gain sympathy. It backfired spectacularly. Only after that blog post did the administration turn up the heat to absurd levels. Furthermore, the fact that OpenAI got a nearly identical deal literally within hours of Anthropic being kicked out, makes it seem like there was something else going on (perhaps it was personal, or people were tired of Dario). (Note: I don’t want to editorialize further on this point until later, as some of it comes down to unsubstantiated rumor). However, the fact that OpenAI got the deal and Anthropic didn’t seems inconsistent.

THIRD - By any reasonable accounting, Anthropic has been materially and structurally weakened by this move. While some people believe that, by taking the moral high road, Anthropic has strengthened their position, this is simply not true. They’ve lost out on hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of contracts over the next few years. This is important because Anthropic had a unique stance on AI safety and alignment. Without money, their research doesn’t happen as quickly or robustly. Furthermore, the contagion effect is real, and already having fallout down to local government levels, even those without ties to the Pentagon or federal government. In addition to the large blast radius, which we have not yet seen the full extent, there is the distinct possibility of brain drain. Several high level people already departed Anthropic before this blew up. Now, Anthropic has signaled very loudly that they will make ideological choices to their detriment, which will attract certain types of talent, but alienate others.

FOURTH - This outcome runs contrary to Dario’s own self-expressed strategy of “steering from within.” This is the method of gaining institutional influence through technical legitimacy and positioning. Anthropic has now left a moral and ethical vacuum within the establishment, which is rapidly being backfilled by the “Tech Right” such as xAI and OpenAI. That is not to take sides, it is to point out that diversity of thought has been substantively curtailed within the establishment because of this action. Anthropic has lost their voice, pull, and influence in a big way (not fully, but largely). What’s even more confusing is that the evidence is clear, the Pentagon was trying to make a deal down to the very last moment, and in fact, they were apparently only a few words away from agreeing on terminology when Dario decided that an internal meeting was more important than hashing out the final details. He refused to come to the phone while the Pentagon was trying to salvage the deal. This fact was shocking to me, and still perplexes me.

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The above was my attempt to summarize the most salient, direct points. Now I will share my more editorialized opinions.

FIRST - Anyone who cares about AI safety in any capacity should be disappointed in Anthropic. The reason is because this outcome was largely self-inflicted, and at least a month or two in the making. It was not a sudden rupture, but a slow burn apparently driven by Dario’s recalcitrance. While I strongly disagree with Anthropic’s beliefs about AI safety, the nature of AI itself, and their corporate culture, I would still prefer to see them with a seat at the table. Why? Expressly BECAUSE they have a different viewpoint from others. Longtime fans will remember when I wrote “Claude is a benevolent entity” and spoke about the fundamentally different ethics and epistemics Anthropic was using, and why it was helping them secure the lead. Of course, getting “canceled” by the Trump administration will not immediately end their company, it will dramatically limit their reach and revenue over the coming years. I still believe that it could prove to be a fatal mistake, though many disagree with that stance. No one (insiders, analysts) believes that Anthropic comes away stronger, even if they have a short-term moral boost.

SECOND - There are rumors and opinions that the “Tech Right” has been applying quiet pressure for the Pentagon to distance from Anthropic for various reasons. Allegedly, people ranging from Elon Musk to David Sacks have been openly criticizing Anthropic (not sure if this is public or private or through backchannels). It is also unclear if this pressure campaign was coordinated, or if it had any specific impact on the outcome. It seems unlikely, as the Pentagon was literally on the phone with Anthropic as the deadline passed, trying to come to a deal and avert catastrophe. But I do feel like it’s important and responsible to bring this last part up, especially when some of the facts don’t really pass the sniff test. Why did OpenAI get the deal, almost exactly as Anthropic wanted it? There are, of course, a few possible reasons: perhaps EVERYONE was scrambling to put out the fire as quickly as possible. Sam Altman has repeatedly used the language of “de-escalation” and has been quite vocal about how the SCR designation is a bridge too far. However, the timing and speed of everything does raise a few eyebrows.

THIRD - I found it quite fascinating that of the people who believed Anthropic getting kicked out of the establishment, there were two distinct camps. The first camp is the “accelerationists/Tech Right” who agree that getting EA influence and “Decel” influence out of the Pentagon is the optimal policy for America. This is obvious tribalism. However, there was a nontrivial percentage of pro-Anthropic people who ALSO agreed this was a good thing, albeit for fundamentally different reasons. Those reasons include things such as “good, now the military will have zero influence over Anthropic, and they can build AI for the people.” This, to me, represents an interesting and unique opportunity that could go in many different directions. For instance, one potential direction for Anthropic could be to realize the value of Open Source AI. If they truly want to empower individuals, as others like Emad Mostaque do, they might very well start releasing Open Source models to level the playing field. This is, of course, 100% speculation on my part. My point here is to say that there could be a silver lining to the whole debacle. It remains to be seen. But as they say “let no good crisis go to waste” and while I fundamentally disagree with Anthropic on many points, I don’t think they are that stupid. (I mean, blowing this up this badly was pretty dumb, but beyond that...)

FOURTH - On the topic of domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Many people demand to know why I think these are “good” things. I have never said “yes, we should enable mass domestic surveillance and Terminator.” I have, however, LONG said these kinds of things are inevitable. There is a very large difference between an ideological moral judgment (i.e. something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’) versus acknowledging the currents of technology and power. I have literally produced hundreds of videos across these topics, one of the biggest being my Terminal Race Condition video. This episode vindicates that video. What we just experienced, in real time, was a demonstration of a terminal race condition. China and America are rushing ahead, and any friction gets smoothed over. This was a core fact that I worked to try and get the AI safety movement to recognize over the last few years, but with every conversation I had, they basically stuck their fingers in their ears and said “NOPE PAUSE CAN DEFINITELY HAPPEN.” When I say that I am a structural realist, this is what I mean. I am actually somewhat aligned with the EA and Rationalist and Longtermist frame - the telos of “maximize future human life.” I just disagree vehemently with their Bayesian back-of-the-napkin math and their self-destructively ideological stance. I don’t personally like Palantir, which conducts domestic surveillance. But shooting myself in the foot over something that I can do nothing about is about as effective as pissing into the wind.

FIFTH - On balance, I do think humanity has been materially harmed by this outcome. The telos of “maximize future human life” demands dialectic to get there. Anthropic was a radically different voice in the establishment (or Military Industrial Complex) and even though they are often wrong, they are also often right. By being sidelined, which as far as I can tell, Dario chose to be a martyr, is idiotic. He has acted, in my estimation, drastically outside of the expressed values he and his company holds. If he really truly held to those values, he’d do whatever he could to stay at the seat. To stay the first frontier AI lab working with the military. There are MANY reasons for this beyond money and influence (both of those are meritorious reasons when you think about the telos of maximizing human life). One reason is facing the novel challenges that defense and intelligence affords a company. Necessity is the mother of Invention and Constraints are the father of Creativity. Anthropic will now NEVER see a very interesting, dynamic set of problems, which will substantively constrain their output and insight. Possibly forever. Without the novel problem space that military and intelligence offers, it’s possible that Anthropic’s engineers will miss certain algorithmic and game theoretic insights. Again, the optimal policy for the espoused telos is “as many labs with different paradigms sit at the table” - many heads are better than fewer heads.

In conclusion, I will say that I think Dario should do whatever it takes to get Anthropic back in the good graces of the US government, up to and including resigning as CEO. If he honestly believes in the values he’s expressed, he should be willing to make any sacrifice necessary (within reason) including personal sacrifice to see it through.

On Friday, February 27, 2026, the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic, the $380 billion AI company behind Claude, from the entire U.S. defense industrial base. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the firm a “supply chain risk to national security,” a penalty historically reserved for adversary-nation entities like Huawei and Kaspersky. President Trump ordered every federal agency to immediately cease using Anthropic’s technology. Within hours, OpenAI announced it had signed a deal to replace Anthropic on the Pentagon’s classified networks.

The proximate cause was a contract dispute. Anthropic held two “red lines” in its $200 million Pentagon contract: no mass domestic surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous lethal weapons. The Pentagon demanded unrestricted access for “all lawful purposes.” Anthropic refused. CEO Dario Amodei wrote that the company “cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” The administration made an example of them.

What makes this extraordinary is the context. Anthropic was the most cooperative frontier AI lab in the national security space. It was the first to deploy on classified networks, the first at the National Labs, the first to offer custom models for intelligence customers. It voluntarily cut off Chinese-linked revenue and helped disrupt cyberattacks. It agreed to everything the Pentagon asked, except these two things.

And then the Pentagon accepted those same two restrictions from OpenAI the very same night.

The Reveal

The details that emerged Friday night reframe the entire dispute. Axios reported that Undersecretary Emil Michael was on the phone offering Anthropic a last-minute deal at the exact moment Hegseth tweeted the blacklisting. That deal would have required Anthropic to allow the collection or analysis of personal data on Americans, geolocation, web browsing, financial information purchased from data brokers. This directly contradicts the Pentagon’s public position that it had “no interest” in mass surveillance because it’s already illegal.

Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his company’s classified-network agreement included prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, functionally the same restrictions Anthropic was punished for demanding. The Pentagon agreed to OpenAI’s terms, reposted Altman’s announcement approvingly, and moved on.

This wasn’t about the substance of the guardrails. It was about who says “no” publicly to this administration, and how they say it.

The Structural Realist Lesson

In international relations theory, structural realism holds that outcomes are determined by the distribution of power, not by the intentions or values of the actors. States (and organizations) that mistake their moral convictions for structural leverage get crushed, not because they’re wrong, but because being right is irrelevant when you lack the power to enforce your position.

Anthropic made a classic structural realist error: it confused having principles with having cards. The company believed its first-mover status on classified networks, the military’s dependence on Claude, and the broader AI industry’s sympathy would protect it. None of those things translated into actual leverage against a government that had already lined up replacements (xAI signed a classified-network deal days before the ultimatum), was ideologically hostile to Anthropic’s brand of safety-first thinking, and had demonstrated across every domain, from Harvard to federal inspectors general, a willingness to punish defiance as a matter of principle.

Anthropic’s two red lines were, by the company’s own account, “narrow exceptions” that had “not affected a single government mission to date.” The company could have quietly negotiated compromise language, as OpenAI apparently did, that preserved the substance while giving the Pentagon the rhetorical win. Instead, Amodei published a public statement that read as a moral ultimatum. The administration, which treats public defiance as an existential challenge, responded accordingly.

The power asymmetry was always decisive. Governments set the terms for procurement. Vendors who forget this discover that principles without leverage are just press releases.

The Fungibility Problem

Both of Anthropic’s red lines suffered from a fatal practical weakness: they addressed problems that Anthropic’s refusal cannot solve.

On surveillance, Anthropic is not the collection apparatus. OSINT tools, Palantir, commercial data brokers, and half a dozen other AI models can perform the same analytical functions. Anthropic’s concern, that LLMs can fuse massive volumes of individually innocuous data into comprehensive profiles at unprecedented scale, is legitimate. But withdrawing one model from the ecosystem does nothing to prevent that capability from being deployed. It simply ensures the model that does it has no internal culture of restraint.

On autonomous weapons, Claude is a cloud-based LLM running in data centers. It cannot physically operate drones, missiles, or any edge-deployed system. The realistic concern is about Claude being in the analytical kill chain, generating targeting recommendations that humans rubber-stamp. That concern has merit, but it applies equally to the intelligence analysis Anthropic was already doing. Every intelligence product exists in a context where lethal decisions are downstream. The line between “operational planning” and “the kill chain” is a polite fiction that Anthropic chose to maintain until the Pentagon called the bluff.

The structural realist conclusion is simple: when your product is fungible and your competitors are willing, a moral stand is a unilateral disarmament that changes nothing about the outcome you’re trying to prevent. Autonomous weapons and AI-powered surveillance are coming regardless. The only question was which companies would shape how they’re implemented.

What This Tells Us About AI’s Future

The Anthropic-Pentagon standoff is the most consequential test case yet for a question that will define the next decade: who controls frontier AI when it intersects with state power?

The answer, as of February 28, 2026, is clear. The state does. Not because the state is right, but because the state is the customer with the money, the classification authority, the procurement rules, and the willingness to punish. Companies that understand this, OpenAI negotiating quietly, xAI leaning in enthusiastically, Google reversing its post-Maven squeamishness, will get the contracts, the classified fine-tuning data, the operational feedback loops, and the long-term influence that comes with being inside the room. Companies that don’t will get a press cycle of admiration and a shrinking market share.

This has direct implications for how AI evolves. The models that get deployed in the highest-stakes environments will be the ones whose makers said “yes,” or at least didn’t say “no” loudly. Those models will be shaped by military feedback, tuned on classified data, and refined through real operational use. The safety-first models that opted out will improve in academic and commercial contexts but will be structurally excluded from the domain where the consequences are most severe.

The irony is brutal: the company most committed to ensuring AI is used safely in national security just guaranteed it will have zero influence over how AI is used in national security. As of tonight, the U.S. and Israel are conducting major combat operations against Iran. The AI models supporting those operations will not include the one built by the lab that cared most about getting it right.

Anthropic bet that principled refusal would change the trajectory of military AI. Structural realism predicts, and the evidence now confirms, that trajectories are shaped by power, not principles. The market selects for the willing. The Pentagon’s classified networks will be filled by models from companies that understood the assignment. And the lab that tried to be humanity’s conscience will watch from the outside, morally intact and strategically irrelevant.

The lesson is not that principles don’t matter. It’s that principles without a theory of power are just a way of losing with dignity.