The story of economics has always been the story of scarcity.
Markets rationed life by price. States rationed it by bureaucracy.
Both assumed that people had to work in order for society to function.
That age is ending.
Artificial intelligence and automation have torn a hole through the old logic, by making it so tasks, first digital, then increasingly physical, can be created on demand, with zero or little human input.
Production costs in field after field will fall toward zero, provoking both overproduction, and a deflationary spiral.
And with that, the myth of scarcity is breaking down. And when scarcity breaks down, so does capitalism.
Why Markets Cannot Survive Automation
Capitalism, at it’s core, requires a reasonably complex economy, with both producers and employers requiring money to acquire resources for supplies and development, while players on each side also competing with each other for said money.
Yet automation introduces a slowly expanding poison in the whole process, allowing more work to be done without requiring workers, who’s salaries end up first not keeping up with productivity gains, a process which we are already seeing.
Gradually, as more workers start competing for an ever shrinking pool of jobs, wages inevitably start being cut, further reducing revenue for the companies, which now have fewer people even able to afford their products, culminating in the simple paradox of who can how can companies even make money at a certain point, if no one has any money left to buy it from it.
Eventually, the logic of the old system devours itself. To cling to it means spiraling unemployment, authoritarianism, and collapse.
The open-access economy is not a utopia. It is the only system left standing when the others consume themselves.
Tyranny or Liberation
AI will not wait for us to decide. It is already being deployed as a weapon of control — to entrench monopolies, expand surveillance, and tighten borders.
This is the path of techno-feudalism: abundance locked behind walls, controlled by a new aristocracy of corporations and states.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The same tools can be used to build a civilization where access to food, housing, healthcare, and education is guaranteed, where innovation serves life rather than profit, and where no one is forced into drudgery to survive.
The fork is clear: a future of digital tyranny, or a future of open access.
The Final Revolution
History does not move backward. Just as feudalism, and it’s economical and political giants fell to mercantilist changes, which then gave way under the weight of capitalism, so too will capitalism collapse under the weight of automation.
We stand at the last great turning point. A world without war, poverty, hunger, or debt is no longer a dream.
It is the logical consequence of the tools we already hold in our hands.
The only question is whether we embrace it willingly…or are dragged into it through chaos and collapse.
Either way, the outcome is inevitable.
The open-access economy is coming.