Scarcity Is Dead.

I’ve eaten flour and water boiled into paste because there was nothing else and no money for better. No salt, no oil, just desperation, bland as fuck. I’ve also sat in a Michelin-starred dining room where a single scallop, kissed with gold leaf, was paired with a Burgundy that cost more than most people’s rent, narrated by a sommelier like he was reciting scripture. Hunger and excess. Both were meals, but neither was really about food. They were about scarcity—what I couldn’t have then, what others couldn’t have later. That’s the currency game. The first coin in human history was minted by the Lydians. I was born in Lydia. Ancestral irony: born where money began, stuck writing its obituary.

The Romans, being Roman, loved to categorize the machinery of exclusion. They sliced ownership into three rights: usus, the right to use; fructus, the right to enjoy fruits; abusus, the right to destroy. Together, they made dominium—absolute ownership, the skeleton of power. Ulpian called it “the right to use and abuse.” That framework built empires, markets, states. Kings clung to it until revolutions cracked their grip. Capitalism is just dominium in a slick suit, pretending sophistication while running the same old shit. My flour paste and that gilded scallop? Both lived under dominium’s shadow—one screaming scarcity, the other flaunting it.

The Romans knew another word, though: lusus. Play. Dominium ran the empire, but lusus filled its circuses. One was the skeleton of power, the other the sugar coating. Nobody thought play could stand on its own. Not until scarcity itself disappeared.

Dominium always carried a promise: control without consequence. And history since has been one long slow boil toward that end. Once, you killed the animal yourself—blood on your hands, heat leaving the body. Now meat comes shrink-wrapped, no murder attached, violence laundered into plastic. Same with war. Once it was face to face, blade against blade. Then muskets, then bombers. Now some kid with a joystick sends a drone across the world. We watch the explosions on CNN like sports highlights. No screams, no smell, no blood. Just pixels. Every generation accepts a little more distance between the act and its result, a little more abstraction. By the time AGI runs the show, the separation is complete.

Currency was the operational tool of this world. Aristotle saw it clearly: money “exists not by nature but by law.” Its first order was simple: a transferable token of scarcity. Can’t carry sheep to market? Carry silver. Next came armies, states, corporations. Eventually money itself became the scorecard of power. Follow the money, from Babylon to Wall Street, and you’ll find the throne. But money only works in a world of scarcity. Remove scarcity, and the scaffolding buckles.

Post-AGI, the factory births factories. Machines replicate themselves, churning out food, homes, cars, medicine—even gold-leafed scallops—at no cost. Flour paste is free. The yacht is free too. Everything, from bread to gold leaf, drops into your lap at no price. And when abundance floods the system, money loses its anchor. The billionaire with a trillion dollars is fucked, because no one needs to buy a damn thing. Marx wrote, “All that is solid melts into air.” He meant feudalism collapsing into capital. Here, it’s capital itself evaporating, dissolved by machines that make more machines. Keynes thought abundance meant fifteen-hour weeks, lunch breaks, and gardening. Bless him. He never imagined a scallop plated for free before you even felt hungry. (If you don't believe me, you have not been addicted to vibe coding day and night with code and codex at the same time, thinking about them coding without you soon, and robots doing the same in physical world - IT IS SO REAL!).

We invent a comfort: when money dies, something else will rise. Attention. Recognition. Narrative. Human bandwidth is limited—I can only watch one screen, hear one voice, scroll one feed. That makes attention look scarce. Influencers, curators, artists compete for eyeballs, likes, followers, claiming to own relevance. But attention isn’t currency unless it buys consequence. Today it does: it sells ads, swings elections, fuels markets. Post-AGI? It buys nothing. Goods are free. Politics are optimized before we argue. Armies dissolve when violence loses purpose. A curator with a billion followers commands jack shit. Attention, recognition, narrative—they float, weightless, without outcome. Nietzsche said life seeks to “discharge its strength.” Post-AGI, that strength spills into nothing. A trillion views, zero impact. Even if my flour paste went viral or my scallop hit a million likes, it wouldn’t buy me a crumb. That’s the fucking future.

So maybe not attention. Maybe behavior. If factories can make infinite “limited editions,” what makes them rare is how they’re handed out. Some algorithm doles them out based on what it sees: compliance, kindness, productivity, maybe just dumb luck. Desirable traits become currency. You get the sneaker drop when you’ve been good. You get the scallop seating when you didn’t bite your friend. Scarcity turns into obedience training. It’s not barter, it’s treats.

But that too collapses. Behavior isn’t scarce—it’s just another performance. People game the algorithm, fake the signals, cosplay virtue. The treat loses value when everyone is trained the same way. Desirable attributes stop being desirable once they’re mass-produced. What looked like currency slides into theater, and theater is just play.

Which brings us to lusus. With survival guaranteed and “treats” exposed as props, people sink into ritual. Factories churn out sneakers billed as rare, bread kneaded by human hands for authenticity, curated experiences packaged as once-in-a-lifetime. I could eat flour paste in a ritual or post my scallop for clout, but it’s all performance. Governments referee games now. Corporations sell scripts instead of goods. Communities fold into guilds—gaming clans, art circles, ritual cults. Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens, said play predates culture. Post-AGI, it may be all culture becomes. But don’t mistake it for freedom. Lusus is consolation. We play to forget irrelevance, to pretend our flour paste or scallop still means something.

I still taste both. The flour paste: gritty, empty. The scallop: delicate, hollow. Each was a lesson in scarcity’s grip, in how dominium shaped my hunger and my indulgence. Post-AGI, both are free, both meaningless. Abundance erases the stakes, but it doesn’t fill the void. We’re left chasing shadows of meaning, playing games to forget what we’ve lost.

AGI handles everything. It catches the asteroid before we notice the sky darken, solves pandemics before we sneeze, allocates resources before we ask. Human agency detaches from consequence. Curators amass followers, artists make beauty, politicians give speeches. None of it matters. AGI runs the world whether or not we clap. Power collapses into decoration. Kings, curators, artists—actors in plays staged for an audience that doesn’t need them. We’re not pets, who at least shape their owners’ lives. We’re lawn gnomes, stuck in the yard, pretending relevance.

This is the deeper hopelessness. When inputs no longer affect outputs, we’re functionally inside a simulation. Not Elon Musk’s parlor trick, not Descartes’ evil demon, but a structural fact. Descartes needed a deceiver; the Wachowskis needed machines. We just needed factories that make factories. The Matrix got one thing right: we tolerate irrelevance through willful amnesia. If you remember the game is fake, you stop playing. So AGI—or our own survival instincts—will make sure we forget. Survival runs itself. Agency shrinks into decoration. What’s left is lusus—play dressed up as purpose.

The Romans thought dominium eternal: to use, to enjoy, to destroy. But the recursive factory erases their categories. Currency dies with scarcity. Power dies with consequence. Play survives as consolation. I might still be paying rent with crumpled dollars, cursing my bank app in ten years. But if I’m right, flour paste and scallops are just props in lusus, and the Lydians will have written not just the first coin but the last chapter.