Introduction
The world is undergoing a change right now. For decades, futurists have predicted that digital technology will change the world. The world has shifted enormously over the last few decades, but it has not always gone in the direction these futurists thought it would. Instead, we have witnessed platform enclosure and the world’s first trillionaire.
Today we see the rise of AI and the still-developing state of robotics, and many fear what will become of the world. In this article, I look at the fundamental nature of digital technology and build a theory about what type of society such technology will bring us. In this discussion, we will see how AI is not the herald of doom but rather another part of the digital toolkit which will enable us to create a world of abundance and individual empowerment.
This article is a primer to a longer article I wrote, “Beyond Capitalism: The Rise of the Informational Economy”. This shorter article will introduce some of the core concepts but will not go into as much depth. If you are interested in the topic, I encourage you to read that longer document. This is a project I am deeply invested in and plan to continue developing. I would appreciate any feedback and would like this to spawn debates rather than passive agreement or disagreement.
Historical Materialism
One of the powerful insights about human society is the recognition that it is built upon a series of incentives. Some of these incentives are built into the laws of the universe; work requires energy, physical impacts can cause injury, turbines can produce electricity. Some of these incentives are socio-political; first-past-the-post discourages third-party candidates, crimes get you sent to jail, if you are rich you can hire fancy lawyers to keep you out of jail. Some of these incentives are economic; having money allows you to invest in projects that return more value than you put in, stocks are worth what someone else will pay to have them regardless of the value of the underlying company, paying employees is one of the highest costs for businesses.
The laws of the universe are the most important incentives because they cannot be changed. They are the same forever, even if we don’t know about particular ones, like the rules that might allow us to go faster than the speed of light. Political incentives are important because they are flexible and can be changed rapidly, with the passing of a new law or the election of a new administration. Economic incentives are particularly interesting because they do change over time, but they are resistant to human whims. We can want it to be profitable for a company to provide high-quality products at rock-bottom prices, but making that true is extremely difficult.
When Karl Marx introduced the idea of Historical Materialism, he did it to explain his idea about how economic incentives are the most important driver of human civilization. The laws of the universe require that we must consume resources to survive and to manipulate our environment. Since existing and being able to take actions are preconditions for anything else we might want to do, the method by which we create and distribute those resources is the bedrock on which society is built. That is why he believed that the economic reality, the way that value is built, is the core driver of history.
The Changing Face of Production
Since the 1700’s the world has been living in the Capitalist “mode of production”, which means the way we organize and distribute productive capabilities. This has happened because the “method of production”, which means the technology and processes we use to create value in society, was based around producing finished goods. The “means of production”, which are the actual tools used to create value, are privately owned by a minority of the population. This ownership scheme allows those who own these tools to survive by coordinating workers to use the tools to create value and charging a rent for that usage.
In the 1940’s the digital computer was invented. This thinking machine was superhuman at performing a small set of mathematical tasks and was adopted for situations where those particular types of tasks were important. The burgeoning field of computer science was able to show how more and more problems could be transformed into the simple binary operations that computers excel at. Much like Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei transformed natural philosophy by showing that the physical laws of the universe could be translated into mathematical formulas, so did Claude Shannon and Alan Turing transform information into programs that can be manipulated and automated.
This new capability has transformed the world in countless ways, from how we communicate to how we work. While these changes have been profound, the core way we interact with value creation through capital ownership and wage labor still hasn’t changed. I am joining the storied list of intellectuals who believe that computer technology will transform this most fundamental economic reality of society at some point in the future. My contribution to the conversation is to discuss how the fundamental nature of the productive technology and product, physical versus informational, compels this change and shapes what the new society will look like. I then lay out several different social “institutions”, or broad organizational patterns in society, that will likely come to exist in this new mode of production, which I am calling Informationalism.
The Nature of the Products
In order to understand the nature of the coming change, we need to look at the core features of the industrial capitalist system and the digital informationalist system.
Industrial capitalism is based around the idea of taking in raw materials and using machinery to turn them into finished goods. Those finished goods can then be shipped long distances to customers. These finished goods can be simple objects like silverware or extremely complex objects like silicon chips or rockets.
Digital informationalism is based around the idea of using computers to create information which can perform useful work. That can be software that directly provides benefits, like the ability to process financial transactions. It can be software that runs extremely complicated machines that humans couldn’t handle themselves, like the processing software that allows MRI machines to exist. It can even be ways of organizing work that produce a significant amount of extra value, such as tools for organizing workers in a factory.
As our technology has increased, more of the value is coming from this digital information than from the previous physical machines. A car company still creates a significant amount of value from building and selling cars; however, their ability to effectively build and sell those cars is increasingly derived from information as opposed to improved machines. Furthermore, our economies are now dominated by companies that specialize in information technology instead of those that specialize in physical creation.
The transition from the old way of creating value into a new way of creating value is already happening. In order to understand this change, it will be helpful to look at the differences in the products they create.
Reproducibility
The first, and most obvious, difference is in how the different products are reproduced. For physical goods, each new instance requires exactly as many resources as the previous one. If you have one chair, and you want a second chair, you have to use the same amount of wood/metal/plastic and labor time to create it. There is some economy of scale that can be achieved, and this is where most of capitalism derives its value, but those economies of scale cannot replace the fact that each iteration is a unique physical object.
Even more importantly, if someone wants to have a chair of their own, they need to either take that original chair from me (whether by purchasing or stealing it) or they have to go through the labor of creating one from the beginning. Businesses can therefore gather power and wealth through creating objects and controlling how they are distributed.
Information is very different in that it can take a lot of effort and time to create a particular piece of information, whether that is a software program or a blog post, but creating copies of it takes practically no effort. Distributing that information is trivial because anyone can rearrange the bits in their computer or the neurotransmitters in their head to create another copy of it.
The current paradigm is struggling to find a way to control this abundance of information. This is doomed to failure both because the capability of people to subvert those controls is numerous and because there is immense value to be found in embracing the power of limitless duplication.
Barriers to Entry
In order to build finished goods, one needs to develop expertise, acquire machinery, get enough raw materials, and set up some form of workshop. This is difficult, and it is why the vast majority of the world works as paid labor instead of individual owners. It is expensive to set up a business, and there is a significant risk that all of the time and money put into the work won’t pay off.
Producing informational goods is nearly the opposite. It still requires developing expertise, but the machines we need are widely available in the form of computers. The raw materials are just electricity, which is readily available, and the workshop can be as simple as your own home. The skills necessary to learn coding or writing are freely available to everyone. The cost to begin creating informational goods is minimal and can be done as a hobby for many people. This makes the risk of starting to start producing this work small.
We see the result of this in an explosion of creativity. This is as small as social media posts, where billions of people feel the freedom to create content for their friends and families to consume, all the way up to software startups and open source projects being ubiquitous.
Like with the ability to copy information, this ability to create informational goods has led us to a world where these goods are abundant and often extremely cheap or even free to access.
Transportation
Physical goods are made of matter and need to be transported from where they are created to where they are going to be used. This requires a massive industry consisting of shipping vessels, trains, warehouses, and logistics managers. The energy required to move the goods is immense, and the time required to travel can make dynamically responding to needs difficult.
Digital goods also require infrastructure including satellites, undersea cables, internet service providers, and data centers. The similarities end there, as these informational goods do not require massive fleets of workers but instead run on systems which are mostly automated. Delivery can be done at nearly the speed of light, crossing the whole planet in less than a second. Additionally, unlike physical goods, we do not move the original document, so it isn’t a choice of whether the product is here or there; it instead is in both places.
This feature also contributes to a world of abundant information. As we create new information and duplicate that information, we can easily spread it around the world. This allows the benefits from this information to be widely distributed and contributes to the fact that much of the web has been offered for free.
Aligning Social Institutions
Simply saying that the world will change due to this new method of production is insufficient. If we want to understand what is happening to the world, we need to think about why the world might change.
There are numerous books written about this subject, so our treatment will be relatively light. What I will introduce is what I call the capability pump.
In the world, there are actions that technology allows us to perform. Many of those are illegal, many of those are impractical, but some of those are useful. When a new technology or capability is introduced, the members of the society will explore the nature of these capabilities. They will try to apply it to a variety of tasks and see where it can fit into their lives.
Most of these will be less effective than previous ways of operating, but some of them will be more effective. When we perform actions in ways that are ineffective, we will experience a negative reinforcement loop, where each time we do the activity we wind up “poorer” than we would have been compared to someone who used the previous way of working. When we perform the actions in ways that are more effective, then we get a boost on each loop.
The effect of this is that, over time, those who are engaging in ineffective ways of operating will either lose their social and economic power to continue influencing the world or they will abandon the ineffective activities. This leads to a world where those practices die out. On the flip side, those operating in highly effective ways will find themselves more powerful, and they can invest that additional time, energy, and money back into that loop. The result of this is that those ways of operating in the world which are highly effective will propagate over time both as the people doing them become more socially powerful and as new people see their example and join in.
This applies to all sorts of social systems, but with regard to historical materialism it is important to think about how the new ways of acting relate to the nature of the new productive technology. Some businesses will try to use the old method of producing value, and some will use the new method. If the new method is more capable, then we will see those newer companies thriving. In our world, we see GM and Ford falling behind while Google and Amazon use digital technology to thrive.
In a similar manner, when people adopt the new technology, they can do so in ways that align with the nature of the technology or do not align with it. In our world, we have the newspaper industry, which runs websites and articles competing against bloggers and social media. The newspaper industry tries to rely on capitalist thinking, tightly controlling who can access information, spending a large amount of capital creating high-value work. Bloggers and social media, on the other hand, have embraced the fact that information is abundant and nearly free to copy so that they distribute their words widely. They have created an abundance of information where, yes, there is plenty of slop in it, but there are also more insightful and well-researched blog posts than there are insightful and well-researched news articles simply because of the massive volume. The newspapers have watched as people got used to the idea of receiving information for free and have seen their newsrooms hollowed out while social media and blogging are bigger than they ever have been. The newspaper model is not well aligned with the nature of informational production, and so it is struggling, while the blogging industry is more aligned with the core features of informational production and so it is becoming more socially important.
The key insight to understanding the difference between the old capitalist world and the new informationalist world is to understand that the capitalist world is built around scarcity. Controlling scarce resources and access to them is the primary way that institutions gain power. The new informationalist world is one built on abundance. Those systems which can embrace abundance will thrive within the new informationalist world.
The Looming Dangers
We are living in a time of transition, where the old forces of capitalism, and the thinking that surrounds it, are attempting to control and contain the power of informational production. In the long term (decades to centuries), this project will fail, but in the current world it can use the built-up power in the existing institutions to keep itself going for a long time.
The current version of this is the platform economy. The platform economy is a recognition that a lot of our online life is performed not on the open web but on platforms controlled by corporations. LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Substack; all of these are platforms that mediate how we experience the internet. They harness the abundance of content creation, where billions of people are eager to share their experiences and sell their products, and filter that through a scarcity pipeline that they control. Yes, you can talk to your Grandparents who live on the other side of the country, but only if you do so through our platform. You can have engaging conversations with strangers, but only through our platform.
The feature of the new informational mode of production that these technologies leverage is the Network Effect. The platforms are networks where individuals are connected to other individuals. The platforms enable those individuals to connect to each other, and the users gain value through those connections. When you connect on Reddit, every new user improves the capacity to communicate. If there are a thousand users and one more is added, the total number of connections (where the value lies) doesn’t increase by one; it increases by 1000 as every existing member can connect to this new one. As these platforms add new members, they experience exponential growth in value. This means that once the platforms get large enough, it is hard for a new competitor to enter the market.
The platforms charge a small rent, which can be as simple as showing ads, in order to fund the platform, because they are benefiting from the low cost of informational production. They allow the users to create all of the content so that they do not need to spend resources producing it.
The early downside of this is that the platforms are incentivized to make money off their users rather than provide benefits to their users. So we see the platforms undergoing Enshittification as they turn from social spaces into money factories.
Techno Feudalism
The larger fear is Techno Feudalism. This is a hypothetical future where platforms use their monopoly power over the internet to begin controlling every aspect of our lives. Already, these platforms use discovery algorithms to shape the conversations that happen. Those that fit with their goal of user retention are boosted, and those that don’t are downranked. The possibility exists for them to use the algorithms in far more controlling ways, such as boosting the signal for politicians that support their cause or causing people who hold anti-tech views to fail every ATS check. As automation increases, these tech companies can monopolize AI and robotics to replace the human workforce. What happens after this is murky, but it could be anything from cheap organ farms to mass extermination.
The core of the fear is that, by monopolizing access to the technology, these platforms will be able to set themselves up as the new government, except it won’t be one that we can influence in any way.
Cracks in the Foundation
There are two reasons that the techno-feudalism future will be unlikely or at least unstable. The first of these is that the platforms derive their power from users. YouTube can control the conversation and make money off ads only because people are creating videos for them and consuming those videos. If either the people decide to stop creating videos or people decide to stop consuming them, then their capacity to control anything falls apart. Historical feudalism maintained its power because it owned the land that grew the food and could use armies to enforce its will. In every age, it is the Monopoly of Coercive Violence that enables the government to maintain control.
The techno-feudalist regime is built within cyberspace, which means that one can escape it by turning off the computer. This doesn’t solve the problem if they control the supply chain for food and jobs, but it means their control is more ephemeral than the control of a government that can power a police force. When they do merge with the government, then they will face the threats that any other government faces, including rebellion and mass protest. The common fear that they could simply remove the “excess population” isn’t reasonable when we realize that their power is derived solely from the platform control they have.
The second major weakness is that capitalism functions by distributing goods as widely as possible. If I choose to keep my prices artificially high or not serve some community, then a competitor can undercut me or serve that other community and derive more profits, and thus more power, than me. This applies to a great many things, but the most important thing it applies to is computer technology. In the world today, there are more people with cell phones than people with running water. Selling a computer to someone doesn’t just make you profit from that one sale. It turns them into a consumer and producer of digital goods. That is how the platforms add people to their network and gain their power. They cannot become powerful unless they first give people access to these computers.
As we enter informationalism, these computers are increasingly the most important means of production. They are the tools that we use to create and distribute value. The capitalist system, through its incessant drive for profit, has distributed the means of production more widely than any other technology.
With these tools, we are able to build our own alternative systems to the big platforms. Open source software, free online classes, and cheap web hosting make starting up competitors easier than ever. Yes, the big platforms have an advantage of their network effects, but the more they attempt to enact enshittification or techno-feudalism, the greater incentive there will be for people to find or make alternatives. The very tools they use to gather and enforce their power are the tools that make them vulnerable.
At the end of the day, techno-feudalism, and similar tech-based dystopias, are weak because they are attempts to control the increasing technologically driven abundance. They need the world to be small and scarce so that they can control access to those scarce resources. When building alternative systems, when making more information outside of their tools becomes easy, then those that derive value through scarcity will find themselves unable to keep up.
The Bright Future
The technology we have is increasing every day. Not only are we building more powerful software, but we are designing ever more powerful robots, creating productive artificial intelligence, and finding ways to control our biological world at an unprecedented level.
Technologies like 3D printing, bio-engineering, general robotics, and ever increasingly effective logistics systems mean that our physical world is likewise becoming ever more abundant.
The systems that will thrive in the new world are the ones that can harness abundance. When we are presented with a problem, we must ask ourselves how to solve the problem with “more” rather than with “less”.
In my larger article, I discuss a variety of new social institutions that I predict will emerge under this new paradigm. Here I will discuss just three: the Commons-Based Production, the Competitive Explosion, and the Intelligent Economy.
Commons-Based Production
This is an institution we are already seeing in the world. One of the key values that the internet was built on was open sharing of information. We share our stories, our videos, and even our software with each other freely. There are some attempts to lock content behind paywalls, but this is widely seen as antisocial, and much of the internet has no compunction about bypassing these paywalls.
In the realm of software, where much of the value is being created, a significant portion of the stack is open source. This is possible because the cost to create the software is low enough, and the capability to manage disparate teams is tractable enough that creating work for free is reasonable. Because it can be done, there are millions of people who choose to do so. We are, after all, Homo Narrans, or the story-telling man.
On a social level, open source tools are highly valuable because they allow businesses and creatives to reap the benefits of these technologies without having to pay to access them. This allows them to keep more of the profits from their final products. Even more importantly, though, this creates a world of abundance where anyone can access Linux because they do not have to go through a gatekeeper. If anyone tries to create a paid version, they have to contend with the fact that the free version will provide a floor to how poor their service can be, and they will never be able to compete with the sheer abundance that can exist for a product that can turn every user into a distributor.
Competitive Explosion
Access to the shared tools, both free and paid, is one of the big drivers of this second broad social institution. The increasing power of AI in creating value is another big driver.
The barrier to digital creation is low, but it isn’t zero. There is a time cost to learn how to code or draw or edit videos, even if you are using free training. Actually building the project can take considerable time and require dozens or even hundreds of coworkers. Even once you start the company and gather the employees, you need to manage their work, pay them wages, and market your product. These requirements are far smaller than what was required for purely industrial production, but they are still more than many individuals are able to muster by themselves.
As the technology continues to increase, the resources required to do all of these are continuing to fall. In 2026, vibe coding became a new powerful use for AI, which allows people to build software by themselves that would have taken months for a whole team. Open source and free software are available to help in almost every aspect of running a business. AI is getting increasingly able to help manage general business activities, and it will only increase in its capacity to assist individuals.
The result of this is that it will be possible for billions of people to start up their own projects and scale them to the point that they can compete with current corporations. These small companies don’t need to take on the corporations directly either. The large corporations must create products that serve a mass market; this is the only way for them to support their large payroll, investors, support staff, and all of the other projects they are running. This requirement to serve a large community means that they have to offer a relatively vanilla product that isn’t too niche for any set of users.
The requirement for mass market fit creates openings for small competitors to come in and carve off a few hundred or a thousand customers at a time with more specialized versions. Since these are built by individuals or small teams, they do not need nearly as much profit in order to sustain themselves. Even more, they could possibly be released as open-source projects, which would make it even harder for the big company to recapture that market niche.
This is another aspect of true abundance. As the technology grows, we can create more than ever before. Any company that attempts to grab a large portion of the pie will just make itself a target for the swarm of competitors. We have already seen this mass creation threaten some markets in the economy, such as the newspaper industry. As the technology continues to grow, we will see it stretch out into every aspect.
Intelligent Economy
The previous two institutions are about creating abundance. The first is an abundance of tools for building. The second is an abundance of products and competitors. The logical question is, how do we deal with all of this abundance? We are used to a world where you could go to the reputable car dealership and ask the one clerk for their recommendation and feel like you got enough information. Now there are thousands of stores, and none of them contain even a fraction of all the information.
The techno-feudalism platforms try to solve this problem by setting themselves up as master gatekeepers that control the flow of abundance. As we said above, though, that kind of system is misaligned with informationalism and so is not stable as the abundance grows. What is needed is a system that utilizes abundance to manage abundance.
One way we can describe civilization is to think of it as a system for organizing our lives. We set up rules and routines for handling our day-to-day life. This can be things as simple as laws or as complex as the way we handle social interactions at a party with people we’ve never met. We all learn from each other, figure out which things work and which things don’t work. We adjust to try and be effective in life, and our various institutions undergo evolutionary pressure.
All of these systems are “dumb” in that they do not have any true agency, and none of us have the whole picture at any time. We are on the cusp of building a system that does not suffer from this flaw.
When the USSR and the US faced off in the Cold War, one of the big questions was whether a planned economy or a market economy would be more effective. The answer turned out to be that the USSR planners were not able to foresee all of the complexity within the system, nor could they root out enough of the corruption, and thus their planned economy failed. The US economy was unplanned, where individual businesses could compete, and natural evolutionary-like pressure would push us towards more successful business strategies. This sounds like a free market unplanned economy is the optimal choice. What it actually says is that we didn’t have the tools to effectively plan the economy.
The market economy functioned well because it allowed various “signals” to move back and forth between the different actors. The consumers could choose to buy one product and not buy another, and this was a signal sent to the producers to build more of the first type of product. The planned economy lacked those signals and wasn’t flexible enough to adjust to changing circumstances.
Today we have a different kind of planned economy, and that is the one found in large businesses. Walmart is famous for having extremely detailed logistics operations that can ship just the right product to each store. The entire economy has moved to Just-in-Time production, where they are able to predict what goods are needed and only keep enough stock on hand to last a week or less. Personalized algorithms are able to watch our habits and make highly effective recommendations, whether that is a new video or soap. These are possible because our technology for understanding the economy has grown immensely past what was available to Soviet Russia.
An intelligent economy takes this to the limit. It is an economy where all of our signals are as data-rich as possible, and our productive units use highly intelligent systems that can parse an entire planet’s worth of signals all at once. Today, when customers go to the grocery store, they may really want a particular flavor of cookie, but they aren’t able to communicate that desire. They would have to wait until some baker decides to make that flavor and then buy it to send that signal. In a fully intelligent world, the customer can just make the complaint out loud, and their personal AI can then commission someone to make that flavor of cookie. The overall system that tracks all purchases in the economy can see this and can send out queries to see how many other people want that flavor. The AIs of the people who are interested in cookies can see this request and send back a signal on whether their human would likely want to buy those cookies. This can create a whole new market for them without needing to wait for some business to decide to take a risk.
An economy where every business and every private citizen are using intelligent agents to coordinate work is one where the economy can be hyper-efficient. It can take our current level of coordination, where we can build and ship a prototype across the world in a few weeks, and make that look painfully slow.
Our Mission
Historical materialism argues that the course of history is shaped by how we create economic value. So a transformation similar to what is laid out here will happen eventually. What it does not say is how long that transition might take, what specific shape it will take, nor what countries may choose to be holdouts. Even if the historical materialism theory is correct that such a change is inevitable, it could still take a century for a holdout capitalist oligarchy to fall.
This is scary because it means that the fear of some techno-feudalist future isn’t ridiculous. Yes, it will eventually change, but that doesn’t mean it will do so before it can do significant damage. So the question is, what are we supposed to do?
The explanatory power behind this theory rests on the fact that certain ways of behaving are in line with the nature of the technology. The broad nature of this technology is one that promotes individual empowerment and an abundance of creativity. This means that if we can build systems that align with these features, we can use them to push the overall society towards the direction it should go.
The changing face of technology will provide power to both leftists who want to build out a more abundant and equitable society, and it will provide power to fascists who want to create a closed society. It will not be even, though. Because the nature of the system is designed towards open abundance, our efforts to build new systems that align with this will gain a greater benefit from the technology. The deck is stacked in our favor.
On the other hand, if we decide that we are afraid of the technology and try to reject it entirely, building systems that fully rely on a pre-technical paradigm, then we will be even less aligned with the new world than those that seek platform dominance. This will make us weaker and less effective. Since they already control society today, we need to take every advantage we can. We also need to push towards the future rather than trying to pull us back to a mythical past.
The project of leftism in the digital age needs to be a project to build towards this new future, using the tools that have been built. The new means of production are available to us right now. The next step is to use them to build the future.