The Dismantling of Civilization
Why and how the consumer economy is heading for a downfall with AI.
In history, when a new technology or a social system takes precedence over the existing order, there is a gradual destruction that lasts generations.
If history does not teach us, then what will? When the restoration of the emperor happened in Japan — also known as the Meiji Restoration — the low-ranking samurai (not the high-ranking educated ones) were stripped of all their lands, stipends and funding. This military/bureaucratic class was forced to integrate with a classless society in modern Japan, which in actual fact was creating an economic or capital-led class-based system. The old order was replaced in under a decade with the signing of a paper by the emperor and high-ranking samurai who now masked themselves as modern, educated and progressive people building for Japan.
But those who held on to the old ways entered into abject poverty, until some of them banded together and began to industrialize themselves to prove a point — that they too could become great once again. And some of them became businessmen.
However, one must never forget that when political orders change, the social order just changes its form; it does not wipe out the systems of power.
To the Meiji oligarchy, keeping 2 million non-producing samurai on the payroll would bankrupt the state. Now think about it when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence — the most powerful technology since the invention of the gun. Today’s global corporations and governments recognize that algorithmic automation maximizes efficiency at a fraction of the human cost.
Based on this assumption, the quest for human beings has always been upward mobility, which is a key feature for the growth of humanity. When the Emperor of Japan abolished the samurai class, he offered mobility to everyone else, which was previously reserved only for the samurai class.
Similarly, in the era before AI, nations strived towards upward mobility because fundamentally the entire economy was built around productivity in factories, the rise of wages and production, coupled with the consumption economy. You earned salaries and paid for the services that sold manufactured goods. Banks made a supreme profit in lending for the dream of buying a house or a car or running a business.
Let’s pause and understand if AI offers upward mobility. The answer is a big “No,” because AI is going to create oligarchic systems that will usher in a generation where powerful, technology-led enclaves control the entire world — where downward mobility will be real. This means the entire upward mobility in the form of the middle class will collapse, because the old economic system of a consumption-led economy is going to die within fifty years.
The samurai and the software engineer
Japan dissolved a two-million-strong class with the signing of a paper; AI needs no paperwork at all. Read the two restorations side by side, or one at a time.
The answer is in your hands — the death of specialization
Today AI is in your phone as you read this; if you are not aware, it is learning.
AI displacement attacks the global middle class’s identity — people who went to university, built specialized cognitive skills, and believed their intellect guaranteed stability. This breeds immense cultural resentment, political polarization, and anti-corporate sentiment.
Before 2023, the whole of civilization was able to benefit from the services economy, and for the first time there was financial inclusion, as people aspired to lead meaningful lives — with money being saved for children and the continuity of their legacy with home ownership. The free market created an equilibrium of spending, frugality and controlling price rise by using interest rates. But as people have become comfortable over the last 150 years, the system is not prepared for the artificial intelligence era. It is only a matter of time before corporations — or the new oligarchs — dump people.
AI, when combined with factory automation, is going to rewrite the rules of consumption and bring back a neo-feudal oligarchy, where technology and progress will be in small enclaves while the larger masses of people will be dependent on things such as universal basic income, which will be guaranteed by governments controlled by the oligarchs of the world. This argument is not new — it is predicted by the prominent social scientist and historian Yuval Noah Harari, and many other Marxist writers before him.
The dystopian world: universal basic income and time-as-currency
What good is universal basic income or time-as-currency when people do not have the jobs and the incentives to own land or buy clothes or have credits to consume content — unless the government keeps subsidizing these through rationing? For some of you this may be unthinkable. It is happening under your feet, until one day the oligarchs pull the rug from under your feet. These oligarchs are the global corporations and their shareholders, the bankers, the technologists.
Yes, even Adam Smith did warn us about shareholders, didn’t he — and that was a good 250 years ago.
Before you get all alarmist on me and label me a communist, remember that all I am saying is that today you need no more than 100 people to run a software services company, because every service can be automated and AI can be used to manage reporting.
One can also ask: what about chartered accountants, lawyers, journalists and authors, or marketing and sales roles? Anyone without perspective will be replaced. As for journalists, they were already betrayed by the very corporations that created them. Authors, artists and artistes will continue to be important — but if a society loves to consume AI-based content, then why would you need writers or thinkers?
The oligarchs will use technology to produce content and stories that will glue one to the screen forever. And those who are specialized will forever struggle to live, because — just like the samurai of ancient Japan — their services are no longer required. But remember: you will be given a 180-square-foot space, with bath and board, free food and lots of free content. Perhaps the compensation will be time spent on screen, which allows you to buy things — like a book, perhaps.
The reorganization of society around time spent consuming content is perhaps going to be the new economy; your minds are currently being farmed for data, and later, inference.
With the way people are glued to reels and shorts, you must wonder why this can’t be a way to reward people. For time spent on Instagram and YouTube, you get paid a certain amount of money.
Now someone has to figure out whether it is money or credits. Kunal Shah of Cred has figured out that credits and points can play a vital role in the gamification of an individual’s needs. The credits can be used for haircuts, travel and what not. Money will be rehashed into credits or loyalty points to platforms, given by the oligarchs.
Maybe you buy protection from some sort of community police, or buy some open-source technology leaked by the oligarchs themselves to keep you busy.
Perhaps this argument sounds like a Philip K. Dick novel — but that is what makes the imagination of these writers an impeccable inspiration for writers like me in observing this world. But who pays for my imagination unless one has an oligarch as a patron — which, by the way, has already taken root for this author.
Coming back to the dismantling of civilization: it is real.
When there is no money to save for upward mobility — because the means of production (food, pharma, logistics) are now only going to serve a small portion of the population while the rest are rationed through a credits or loyalty points system — we are essentially dismantling the old economic order.
Upward mobility will be made available to a small percentage of the population, controlled by the oligarchs. Let me substantiate this with history — to show how upward mobility gets limited, and to tell you what is happening.
In economics, this is known as the Automation Paradox or the Underconsumption Crisis.
A corporation can use AI to design, market, and manufacture products at near-zero marginal cost. However, if millions of middle-class knowledge workers (coders, writers, legal assistants, mid-level managers) lose their salaries, the aggregate demand in the economy collapses.
This is exactly what happened to the samurai. When their stipends were cut, the domestic market for luxury goods, traditional swords, and high-end textiles crashed. The Meiji government had to rapidly pivot the economy toward global export markets (like silk and tea) and build state-funded infrastructure to inject money back into the hands of the populace.
To prevent total economic collapse, modern corporate and state leaders will likely have to shift away from pure consumer capitalism toward new economic distribution models like UBI, time-as-currency or loyalty points. These are structural necessities to keep a consumer market alive when labor is decoupled from survival.
The underconsumption spiral
Every turn of the loop is individually rational — together they starve the market that capitalism needs. Tap a stage to look closer; tap it again to step back.
The samurai ran this loop first: stipends cut in the 1870s, the market for swords and fine textiles crashed, and the state had to pivot to exports and public works to break the fall.
Stage 1. A corporation can use AI to design, market, and manufacture products at near-zero marginal cost — productivity detaches entirely from mass-market demand.
Stage 2. Coders, writers, legal assistants, mid-level managers — the specialized cognitive class that believed its intellect guaranteed stability.
Stage 3. Discretionary income is the fuel of the consumer economy. Without it, aggregate demand collapses — the Underconsumption Crisis.
Stage 4. Retail, hospitality, banking, corporate support and healthcare rely entirely on the middle class spending its extra income. If UBI only covers food, nobody hires a fitness coach.
Stage 5. Lines either shut down for lack of buyers or are subsidized by the state to produce standardized survival goods — and the rational response to shrinking margins is stage 1 again.
In the AI era there won’t be a war of the depressed masses, and it is very unlikely that there will be a physical war — rather, a political and legal war. We are already seeing the first waves: massive union strikes, class-action copyright lawsuits against AI companies by creators, and political pressure to tax AI computing power (“robot taxes”) to protect human jobs.
Eventually, the old class realizes the technology cannot be defeated. The chaos only settles when humans figure out what machines are meant for.
Let’s go back to old Japan quickly. Some of the samurai used their literacy to become the new schoolteachers, police officers, and corporate managers. They used their discipline to clear the wilderness and build the Shizuoka tea industry. This was the new upward mobility.
Unfortunately, AI will limit it. How?
When wages disappear due to hyper-automation, people lose the discretionary income required to buy guitars, movie tickets, or restaurant meals.
Without that discretionary spending, services jobs vanish, and factories lose their domestic buyers.
Factories will achieve near-infinite efficiency, operating 24/7 with zero human labor. However, productivity will become entirely detached from mass-market consumer demand and suited only to oligarchic enclaves.
Instead of producing millions of consumer items for a middle class, factories will pivot to producing infrastructure for the state, automation upgrades for other corporations, and hyper-luxury goods exclusively for the new oligarchy.
Mass production lines will either shut down due to a lack of buyers or be heavily subsidized by the government to produce standardized, basic-quality goods (like uniform clothing or survival rations) distributed directly via UBI vouchers.
Today, the service sector — retail, hospitality, banking, corporate support, healthcare — relies entirely on the middle class spending its extra income. If UBI only covers food, nobody goes to a cafe, hires a fitness coach, or pays for a haircut.
The service sector will instantly bifurcate.
The mass service sector will vanish or automate completely. The elite service sector will thrive, but it will be incredibly small, serving only the top oligarchs who still possess concentrated capital.
One economy becomes two
The consumer economy does not shrink evenly — it splits. A tiny elite tier thrives; a vast rationed outside waits. Choose where to look.
The mass service sector vanishes or automates completely; the elite service sector thrives but is incredibly small. The middle — which was the market — is gone.
The enclaves. Productivity detaches from mass-market demand and serves oligarchic enclaves only: infrastructure for the state, automation for corporations, hyper-luxury for the few who still possess concentrated capital.
The outside. Perhaps time on screen becomes the wage — for hours spent on reels you are paid in credits, redeemable for haircuts, travel and what not. Your mind is farmed for data, and later, inference.
The new limited upward mobility
Based on historical precedents of non-market societies (like the Soviet Union, imperial courts, and elite academic systems), the selection system in this dystopian future would likely operate through four distinct mechanisms.
When there is no financial incentive to build and sell software, brilliant minds will still write code out of passion, peer status, or sheer boredom within the open-source ecosystem. Such folks have hope.
The oligarchy’s AI systems will continuously scrape global open-source repositories (like future iterations of GitHub). The algorithms will not look for products to buy; they will look for unusual cognitive architecture and problem-solving patterns in the code written by ordinary citizens.
The selection
If a 16-year-old living on basic UBI writes an elegant, highly optimized algorithm to manage a local time-bank, an automated flag is triggered inside an oligarchic corporation.
The teen is immediately offered selective mobility — not a paycheck to start a company, but a gilded golden ticket (a “Fellowship”) to enter the enclave and work on the oligarchy’s proprietary systems.
To systematically filter millions of people who have unlimited free time but no jobs, the oligarchy will replace traditional schooling with highly addictive, state-sponsored gamified digital platforms.
This is the modern equivalent of China’s ancient Imperial Civil Service Examinations or the Soviet chess school system. The state provides free, immersive virtual reality games that secretly mask complex quantum physics, advanced mathematics, and strategic logic problems.
Performance is tracked in real time. Those who reach the top 0.001 percent of these global leaderboards are identified as cognitive anomalies. They are approached by enclave scouts and offered a life of hyper-luxury, advanced medical longevity treatments, and access to real scientific tools — escaping the flat survival loop of the outside world.
Curated patronage
Without market metrics (like sales or revenue) to judge worth, the system reverts to an aristocratic patronage model, much like Europe during the Renaissance or the Meiji Emperor’s inner circle.
High-ranking oligarchs will compete with each other for social prestige by funding and “owning” the brightest human minds. Excellence will be judged purely on subjective or aesthetic metrics defined by the elite.
A musician, philosopher, or theoretical physicist will only gain access to the enclaves if they find an oligarchic patron.
This creates a highly toxic, compliant class of intellectuals who must tailor their work entirely to the whims, ideologies, and entertainment of the ruling elite to maintain their mobility tokens.
The future
For a truly brilliant mind, the ultimate torture is the inability to execute their ideas due to a lack of resources.
The desire to escape the cultural and material stagnation of the UBI world — and to play with the universe’s most advanced technology — becomes the most powerful psychological incentive imaginable.
In this dystopia, the system of selection works because the oligarchy controls the only gateway to meaningful impact and physical comfort. They do not need to buy your company; they buy you.
Humans outside the enclaves will interact via time-banking and open-source collaboration just to keep their humanity alive, while the most exceptional among them will be systematically harvested by the enclaves — leaving the outer world permanently leaderless, compliant, and domesticated.
Four gateways out of the outside
No markets, no résumés. Four mechanisms decide who crosses into the enclave — each one with a precedent.
The scrape
The oligarchy’s AI continuously scans the open-source commons — future GitHubs — hunting not for products to buy but for unusual cognitive architecture in code written by ordinary citizens. A 16-year-old on UBI writes an elegant time-bank algorithm, and a flag trips inside a corporation.
The game
Schooling is replaced by addictive, state-sponsored games that secretly mask quantum physics, advanced mathematics and strategic logic. Reach the top 0.001 percent of the global leaderboards and an enclave scout comes calling.
The patron
With no sales or revenue to judge worth, taste rules. Oligarchs compete for prestige by funding — and owning — the brightest minds; a musician or physicist enters only on a patron’s whim, and tailors their work to keep it.
The offer
Never a paycheck to start a company — a gilded “Fellowship” inside the walls: longevity treatments, real scientific tools, hyper-luxury. They do not need to buy your company; they buy you.
In an AI-saturated world, human economic productivity will likely shift away from “processing information” (which AI does perfectly) toward uniquely human-centric domains: complex emotional intelligence, physical trades and craftsmanship, high-level philosophical strategy, and community-driven human experiences.
The transition period between the destruction of old jobs and the creation of new economic productivity is incredibly messy, often lasting one to two generations.
Just like the old samurai, people will have to find a way to reinvent themselves.