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My guess at a future

This page is different from the rest of the site.

Parts 1–3 are me doing my best to describe how the present system works and what freed markets might look like in a grounded way.

This page is my conjecture about the future. It’s where I say out loud the thing that becomes hard to avoid if you sit with this worldview long enough:

We are standing between technofeudalism and socialist ends achieved with market means, and I don’t see a third serious option.

The fork: technofeudalism vs freed markets

If we let the current system keep running on its default settings—same state–corporate complex, same monopolies, same logic of accumulation—but with more and more powerful technology and a corporation inevitably being more visibly married to the state, I think we end up in a fairly clear place:

  • Technofeudalism: A world where a tiny class owns the platforms, the data, the infrastructure, the IP, and the political system that enforces all of it. Everyone else rents access to life from them, under increasing surveillance.

If we actually dismantle the structural privileges that create and protect that class, without throwing away the power of markets to coordinate, I think we get something equally clear:

  • Freed markets with socialist ends: A world where markets exist, but:

    • the default is worker/community control,
    • rent extraction is radically harder,
    • accumulation hits real limits,
    • and the median person’s life is unrecognizably more secure and rich.

To me, those aren’t just two “policy preferences.” They’re two very different attractors for the next century.

Everything good and everything bad

I thought of this stupid generalization:

Almost everything good in your life came from the free market.
Almost everything bad in your life came from capitalism.

But it's been increasingly hard for me to get this out of my head as I continue examining the world.

The free market gave us:

  • cheap, powerful computers and phones
  • modern medicine
  • the internet
  • mass literacy, mass printing, everyday abundance of food and clothes
  • enormous practical knowledge about building, engineering, logistics, etc.

Capitalism wrapped those things in:

  • rent and debt stagnation with widespread wage slavery
  • landlordism and mortgage servitude
  • IP cages, DRM locks, proprietary repair
  • bullshit jobs, bullshit hierarchies, bullshit fees
  • militarized borders, imperial wars, resource grabs

The free market gave us the ability to coordinate production and exchange at massive scale.

Yet capitalism gave us a rule-set where a small class can own and control that coordinating infrastructure, and everyone else has to pay them for the privilege of participating.

If you strip away the four monopolies you don’t lose the good stuff, but you make it more powerful; you lose the machinery that keeps the innovation fenced off, throttled, and selectively distributed.

I don’t think that’s utopian, but just following the logic:

  • Same technological capacity.
  • Very different rules about who gets to put tollbooths where.
  • Very different result for the median person.

War, empire, and what happens when the skimming stops

Modern wars are rarely about pure ideology or random hate, but instead control over resources, strategic infrastructure, and populations as sources of labor and markets.

In other words, imperial war is what happens when:

  • states and capital are tightly fused,
  • giant entities can profit massively from controlling territory,
  • and the costs of violence are socialized (you pay in taxes, conscription, trauma; they get the contracts and the leverage).

If you pull apart that fusion:

  • no state to mobilize millions on behalf of corporate interests,
  • no big cartel of capital that can turn occupied territory into a cash machine guarded by a national flag,

what’s left to justify industrial-scale war?

People will still fight. There will still be conflicts, violence, stupidity. But it becomes radically harder to justify multi-trillion-dollar wars, global empires, permanent military occupations, when no one has a structural incentive to turn war into a business model.

A freed-market, post-monopoly world doesn’t magically create global peace. But it does remove the main economic reasons to run whole societies as engines of empire.

As a solution to the economic problem

We’re trained to think that the “economic problem”—how to coordinate labor and resources in a complex society—is some eternal, unsolved mystery.

I don’t really think that’s true anymore though.

We already know that:

  • markets are astonishingly good at coordinating local knowledge,
  • price signals do a lot of work,
  • specialization and trade boost productivity like crazy.

Adam Smith saw all that. And he also worried about exactly the flaw we’re living inside now: accumulation. The tendency of wealth and power to pool, to turn into rent, to distort the system that produced them.

We took the first half of his insight, built a civilization on it, and largely ignored the warning label.

This project is basically me saying:

The coordination side of the economic problem is 90% solved. The remaining 10% is fixing the institutions so that:

  • markets stay free,
  • accumulation can’t harden into permanent ruling classes,
  • and the bulk of gains flow to the people actually doing the work.

Once you do that, I think “the economic problem” becomes just another technical field:

  • how to manage logistics better,
  • how to balance redundancy and efficiency,
  • how to design good mutual insurance schemes, etc.

Important, but not existential.

We stop living in a world where “can people eat and live decently?” is an open question. That part just… gets handled.

That doesn’t mean history ends—people will still make art, love, fight, form movements, screw things up. But the basic survival and dignity layer stops being perpetually up for debate.

Everyone’s life looks radically different

If you really imagine a world without the four monopolies, it doesn’t just look like a slightly nicer version of the present.

It looks like almost everyone’s life being completely re-shaped by more slack, more security, and more agency.

For working people:

  • Work less or live better. If you currently only keep a small fraction of what your labor produces (after rents, interest, monopoly pricing), then reclaiming that fraction doesn’t just give you a small raise. It means you could:

    • keep your current living standard and work dramatically fewer hours, or
    • keep your current hours and live at a much higher level.

(And I don't mean by a marginal amount; anarchist economic theories show if you remove the parasitic costs (rent to landlords, interest to banks, profit to bosses), a worker effectively receives 2x to 4x more value for their hour than they do in a capitalist system.)

  • Fear recedes. Fear of missing rent, fear of medical bankruptcy, fear of falling behind forever because of one bad month.
  • Work feels less like a trap. More options to switch to co-ops, small shops, independent work; less power for bosses to say “if you don’t like it, there’s the door” when the door leads straight into homelessness.

For culture:

  • Less “content” engineered for advertisers, more art and media aimed at people as humans, not as data points.
  • More time and attention for things that aren’t hustling to survive.

For science and technology:

  • Open knowledge as the default: faster progress because ideas can spread and be built on without permissions regimes.
  • Tech actually aimed at making people’s lives better instead of squeezing a few more basis points out of engagement metrics or extracting more data to sell.
  • More research guided by curiosity and need, less by “can this be locked down and monetized under IP law?”

For the environment:

  • Much easier to say “no” collectively to destructive projects when there isn’t a state-corporate battering ram insisting that GDP growth is the highest good.
  • Local and global commons institutions that can actually enforce sustainable use without being captured by the same corporate interests they’re supposed to restrain.

None of that is a paradise. But compared to “work until you die to service the debts and rents of a digital landlord class”, it is a radically different baseline.

Even the billionaires

One of the weirdest things about this whole picture is that, in some sense, it’s not even against the long-term interests of the very rich.

Short term? It could appear that way:

  • They lose vast quantities of paper wealth.
  • They lose the ability to treat the planet as their private playground.
  • They lose global political influence.

But what do they gain?

  • A world where they are not responsible—directly or indirectly—for the grinding misery of billions of people.
  • A world where their kids aren’t hated or kidnapped or endlessly targeted as symbols.
  • A world where they can actually relax a bit and be just… people with talents and projects, not half-monarchs constantly managing a precarious empire of property claims.

In a freed market, no one has the structural right to live like a god-king off other people’s time. But nothing stops a formerly rich person from living very well as:

  • a great engineer,
  • a great artist,
  • a great organizer,
  • a beloved community figure.

They lose the throne. They also lose the constant stress that comes with holding a throne over a world that’s increasingly angry and unstable. They gain a world that is nice to live in. Even a billionaire doesn't want to see homeless people during their chaffeured drive to a private jet.

Why I think this is the only serious alternative

Spend enough time in different ideological spaces and you start to see the limits:

  • Status-quo capitalism / mild reform still leaves the machinery of accumulation in place. You get:

    • slightly nicer technofeudalism,
    • better safety nets in some places,
    • but the same basic logic of rent, debt, and monopoly.

  • State socialism tries to solve capitalist abuses by centralizing ownership and planning. You end up with:

    • a different elite,
    • a different official story,
    • and many of the same problems of hierarchy, opacity, and accumulation—just in a party and bureaucracy instead of a shareholder class.

  • Anarcho-capitalism keeps all the most questionable property assumptions and just rips away the remaining social brakes. You don’t get freedom; you get privatized feudalism.

The weird little corner I’m arguing for—socialist ends through freed markets—is the only one I’ve found that:

  • keeps the coordination genius of markets,
  • takes accumulation and structural power seriously,
  • insists on worker and community control as the default,
  • and doesn’t require a central state to manage everything.

I might be wrong. Maybe there’s a fourth path no one has articulated yet. Maybe history will surprise us in ways I can’t imagine.

But given what we know now, to me this is the only configuration that:

  • makes sense of how we got here,
  • explains why the current trajectory points to technofeudalism,
  • and offers a way off that doesn’t just swap one ruling class for another.

Why I’m writing this at all

I’m not a prophet. I’m just someone who:

  • loves markets,
  • hates exploitation,
  • and doesn’t buy that “capitalism or Stalinism” is the full menu of human possibility.

These ideas have been quiet, for reasons you may see on the history page. I was lucky enough to stumble across them and have the time to be able write a resource that isn't doing the impressive theory, but get the world out slightly more accessibly.

This page is me saying out loud what I think is at stake:

If we keep running the same software with better hardware, we slide into a very pretty, very polite, very inescapable feudalism.

If we have the courage to fix the institutional flaw of accumulation, to let markets work without building a throne for rentiers on top of them, then for most people, life can become radically less cruel, less anxious, and more free than anything capitalism ever offered.

You don’t have to agree. All I’m asking is that you consider the possibility:

  • that the real conflict was never “state vs corporation,”
  • that the economic problem is much closer to solved than we’re allowed to think,
  • and that the future doesn’t have to be a choice between authoritarian socialism and authoritarian capitalism.

There is another branch in the tree.