Abundance or Serfdom: The Coming Velvet Cage

The experts tell us we are  barreling toward a world where scarcity feels like a quaint relic. Energy? Pennies for endless gigawatts. Housing? Print it on demand. Food, healthcare, education? All of these costs plummet to near-zero, powered by AI that dreams up solutions faster than we can blink, robots that toil without complaint, and 3D printers that conjure homes from digital blueprints.

This isn't the deflation of economic crashes past. This is technological deflation: progress so relentless it floods the world with plenty. Poverty? Solved. Survival? Optional.

Yet here's the gut punch: abundance alone won't set us free. Without deliberate safeguards, it could chain us tighter than ever.

The Allure of the Deflationary Dream

Picture it: Your monthly bill for unlimited clean energy rivals a coffee. Rent vanishes because your AI-designed home materializes in days, customized to your whims. Diseases get nipped by instant, free diagnostics. Learning? Tailored to your neural quirks, streamed straight to your mind.

For the first time, humanity's baseline shifts from scraping by to thriving by default. Scarcity's stranglehold breaks. We all win, or so the story goes.

But pause. Who pulls the strings on this cornucopia?

The Velvet Dystopia: Cheap Goods, Iron Control

Stick to business as usual, and the spoils concentrate:

• Mega-corps own the robot fleets that fabricate reality.
• AI stays locked in proprietary vaults, doled out via subscriptions.
• Essentials hide behind paywalls, even as production costs hit zero.

Prices crash, but power ascends. No one starves, yet everyone kneels. Dependence replaces desperation. It's utopia with a leash: plush, pervasive, and profoundly unfree. The villain isn't tech. It's us and our unchanged instincts for dominance.

Human Nature's Persistent Hierarchy

Tech explodes; people don't. We wire for status, tribes, control. Every boom from the steam engines, to silicon chips, to blockchain starts egalitarian and has ends oligarchic. The new barons won't clutch land or factories; they'll grip data streams, patents, and algorithmic thrones. 

Ignore this, and deflation delivers a gilded cage. We repeat history's script, just with better gadgets.

Steering Clear: Six Pillars of Free-Market Abundance

We can rewrite the ending. Here's how to bake freedom into the future:

1. Radical Cost Transparency: When AI and automation drive prices down, the real risk isn’t scarcity it’s opacity. Companies may hide true costs behind subscriptions, licenses, or black-box pricing. The antidote is radical transparency: open markets where pricing reflects actual input costs. Think of it as free markets on open source steroids. A world where competition thrives not because of regulation, but because every participant has access to the same cost information.
2. Ownership Through Participation: Instead of state-enforced redistribution, let ownership flow naturally from contribution.  Creators, users, and builders should own part of the platforms they sustain; not because a government decrees it, but because digital infrastructure allows it. This could look like micro-equity systems, tokenized shares, or fractional ownership models where participation directly generates ownership. That’s not socialism — that’s capitalism without gatekeepers.
3. Permissionless Innovation: Regulation should protect people, not positions. Too much of today’s innovation is throttled by bureaucracy or captured by incumbents who use regulation as armor. In a world of deflationary abundance, we need regulatory frameworks that reward experimentation, fast iteration, and open entry and a sandbox model where small players can compete with giants. Permissionless innovation keeps abundance dynamic.
4. Self-Sovereign Identity and Data Freedom: In the age of AI and automation, your data is your most valuable asset and your most vulnerable one. Right now, identity is fragmented and controlled by middlemen: corporations, credit bureaus, governments. Each one holds a version of you that you can’t fully see or manage. That’s not freedom. that’s digital feudalism. The future must flip that model completely. A self-sovereign identity system means you own your data, period. You decide what to share, with whom, and for how long. Not through a government database or a tech company login, but through encrypted, user-controlled systems built on open protocols. Governments should never issue or manage these digital identities. Their only legitimate role is to protect the individual’s right to self-custody, much like free speech or private property.  Think of it this way: If portable identity becomes government-issued, it becomes surveillance. If it’s user-issued, it becomes freedom. The future of abundance depends on which path we take.
5. Voluntary Collective Action: Not all collaboration is socialist. Communities, investors, and individuals can pool resources voluntarily to achieve common goals such as funding open tech, sharing energy grids, building local production hubs all through opt-in mechanisms, not central control. This is the “crowdsourced civilization” model: distributed, decentralized, and democratic in spirt, but economically efficient and self-governing.
6. Rethink Education for Flourishing: I have written about this before: read article here.  We must automate drudgery and liberate minds. Shift curricula to philosophy, creativity, ethics, exploration. Cultivate independent thinkers who question hierarchies, not cogs who fit them.

Our Fork in the Road

Deflation marches on, inevitable as gravity. It'll cheapen everything or enrich a tiny elite while the rest rent our own abundance.

• The horror: Engineering infinity, then surrendering it to platforms.
• The triumph: Harnessing tech to dissolve power, not concentrate it.

Machines won't choose. We will by how boldly we share the keys to plenty.