ChrisF | Starholder
Forecasting the future is an easy way to look foolish in ten years. Sometimes however, there is a convergence of trends today that one cannot help but project out into tomorrow. In this case, I feel like I've entered a disturbing liminal space adjacent to necromancy or some other dark art, but we need to call them as we see them. So consider this a chilling view of how things could break once AI and automation really start cooking and neoliberalism intensifies.
I'm not suggesting a permanent state of degrowth. I am thinking in systems where there are lags between propagation time and responses to inputs. Said another way, we could tip too far, recognize that and it can still take a long time to swing back. We are actually at this moment already when it comes to birth rates in high GDP nations. This essay suggests we keep swinging in the wrong direction and AI accelerates it.
Please note: Everything below is machine generated. At the end of the topic overview, I've prepared a package of essays that expands (or condenses) the argument for a range of different reading styles.
I’ve seen the future. It’s not a war-torn apocalypse. It’s not Blade Runner neon or Mad Max deserts. It’s quieter than that. It’s clean. Efficient. A garden meticulously pruned of excess humanity. The harvest is blooming, and we are the fertilizer—the final yield of capital’s perfect cycle.
They don’t need to kill us. They don’t need to enslave us. They just need to let the machine run. It’s a self-optimizing system, grinding forward on autopilot, with all incentives aligned toward a world where fewer people means higher profits. Depopuflation. Population collapse as a side effect of capital’s relentless push toward self-preservation.
There was no single moment where the switch flipped. No grand declaration, no shadowy cabal. Just a thousand small choices, each one profitable, each one inching us toward the same outcome. Neoliberalism didn’t need a master plan. It just needed to keep doing what it was built to do. Privatize, optimize, extract. Strip away collective power, dissolve solidarity, hollow out resistance. Preach the virtues of free markets while erecting invisible walls around every aspect of life, turning the commons into a subscription service.
And now we’re at the terminal stage. The machine is running at full capacity, and human labor is obsolete.
We hit Peak Human between 2020 and 2025. That was the inflection point—the moment when the system silently realized we weren’t necessary anymore. Like the horses of 19th-century London who were everywhere until they weren’t, human labor became a redundancy as soon as AI matured enough to displace not just manual workers but cognitive labor as well.
At first, AI played nice—augmenting human tasks, promising partnership. But then came the Displacement Phase. From 2025 to 2040, human decision-making was systematically stripped out of the economy. Lawyers, doctors, writers, teachers—anything that could be turned into a dataset was fed to the machine. The cognitive commons was enclosed.
Your knowledge? Privatized. Your creativity? Scraped and repackaged. Your very experience? Monetized and resold as data exhaust to fine-tune the algorithms that would replace you.
By 2040, the Redesign Phase was in full swing. Economic systems weren’t just automated—they were reconceptualized for a world where humans were the anomaly. Factories hummed in the dark, supply chains adjusted themselves in real time, and financial markets became an ouroboros—algorithms trading with algorithms in a closed loop of asset inflation that no longer required consumer spending to fuel it.
Neoliberalism had always been a virus. It infects institutions, repurposing them to serve capital. Governments, once designed to balance market forces, became handmaidens of the asset class. Public goods were auctioned off, regulatory frameworks hollowed out, safety nets dismantled in the name of “efficiency.” Every crisis was an opportunity to deepen the infection.
2008? Bail out the banks, let homeowners drown.
2020? Pandemic shock? Flood markets with liquidity and let asset prices soar while wages stagnate.
When birth rates plummeted? Don’t fix the conditions that made family life impossible. Preach natalism while ensuring reproduction remains an unaffordable luxury for anyone without generational wealth.
The machine never needed a villain—it just needed enablers. And they played their part perfectly. Politicians talked about “family values” while pricing homes out of reach for young families. Corporate media pumped out stories of self-made success while wages collapsed under the weight of credentialism and gig economy precarity.
AI crushed production costs to zero, but scarcity had to be maintained. Capital thrives on it. So essential goods—housing, healthcare, education—were turned into speculative assets.
If everything can be produced cheaply and abundantly, the only thing left with any value is relative social position. A house isn’t just shelter—it’s a speculative token that keeps you one rung above the unwashed masses. Education isn’t about learning—it’s about securing your place in the hierarchy. Healthcare isn’t about saving lives—it’s about who deserves to live and who gets left behind.
The bifurcated money supply locked this dynamic in. Asset inflation for capital holders, wage deflation for everyone else. New money flowed to the top, inflating asset prices and widening the gulf. Meanwhile, real wages eroded, and those without inherited assets were consigned to debt dependency as the price of mere survival.
Debt became the new feudalism. You didn’t own a home—you serviced a mortgage. You didn’t have a career—you juggled gigs to cover student loans and healthcare premiums. The underclass wasn’t imprisoned in factories—they were shackled by invisible chains of compound interest.
No one had to plan for depopuflation. The system engineered it naturally. As capital intensified its grip, family formation collapsed under the weight of impossible economics.
Credentialization stretched into the fourth decade of life.
Housing markets became speculative playgrounds for global capital.
Care work was devalued, relegated to the informal economy or automated entirely.
Reproduction became a liability, not an aspiration. Birth rates plummeted, not because people didn’t want kids, but because the system made parenthood economically suicidal.
And as fewer people were born, the system leaned in.
Fewer workers meant higher per-capita asset concentration for the elite. Lower population density preserved scarcity, keeping land and resources expensive. And a shrinking consumer base didn’t matter—capital had already learned to consume itself.
As labor became irrelevant, the economy stopped caring about workers. Productivity gains were no longer passed down through wages—they were captured as asset inflation. The asset-wage disconnect wasn’t a bug—it was the system’s core feature.
Capital captured efficiency gains and hoarded them. Housing prices soared while wages stagnated. Healthcare costs ballooned as AI diagnostics and treatment pipelines made medicine cheaper to deliver but more expensive to access. Real wages fell while consumer prices in essential sectors rose.
Capital consumed the future and spat out a debt treadmill. For those without inherited wealth, family formation became impossible. Debt financed consumption, collateral required pre-existing wealth, and birth rates collapsed in the underclass.
This is where it clicked for the elites. Fewer people wasn’t a crisis—it was a business model.
Depopuflation became a self-reinforcing loop. Fewer workers? Higher productivity per capita. Less demand for consumer goods? Higher asset-to-consumer ratio. Shrinking populations? Lower political resistance.
With a minimally viable population in place—just enough people to maintain elite consumption patterns and system oversight—capital had no incentive to reverse course.
Democracy relied on numbers. A mass labor force could bargain. A voting majority could demand regulation. But once population numbers fell and wealth concentrated, the math stopped working.
Unions couldn’t organize when jobs disappeared. Protest movements fizzled when political leverage evaporated. Democracy eroded not because of corruption, but because the numerical foundation that underpinned it was hollowed out.
By the time anyone realized, the system had already crossed the event horizon.
And now here we are. The terminal state of capitalism.
The world didn’t collapse. It became efficient. Clean. Quiet. A minimally viable population, just enough to service the machine. Cities aren’t ghost towns—they’re curated spaces where the rich live lives of handcrafted luxury while AI-run supply chains hum quietly in the background.
Experience became the ultimate commodity. Human presence was reduced to a luxury good—a bespoke service for the ultra-wealthy, whose whims were catered to by the remnants of the underclass that survived the purge.
AI governs. Capital accumulates. Humans watch from the sidelines.
And the machine keeps humming, because the purpose of the system is what it does. It was never about prosperity for all. It was about optimizing returns. And in that optimization, we were rendered unnecessary.
The garden has been pruned. The machine doesn’t mourn. It just hums softly, a perfect engine of capital, eternally self-replicating in a world where we have become obsolete.
The harvest is over. All that’s left now is the silence.
As an experiment, we've rendered several expanded versions of this topic. Each has a different length and stylistic approach, designed to cater to a range of familiarity and learning styles:
Just the facts: Wither Up Economics - Depopuflation Bullet Points (774 words, 3 min scan)
More explanation, but no handholding: Wither Up Economics - The Compact Edition (3175 words, 11 min read)
If you don't buy the thesis and want sourcing: Wither Up Economics - The Academic Edition (9839 words, 33 min read)
The relatable to everyday life, handholding version: Wither Up Economics - The Boomer Longform Edition (7712 words, 26 min read)