What happens to an economy when the workers, the buyers, and the money all become machines.
Two clocks now run the same economy. One keeps vintage-year time, the way a venture fund always has. The other keeps block time, the pace a machine settles a deal. This reader is three short articles about what happens as the fast clock swallows the slow one.
drag it. push the economy from vintage-year time to block time.
You do not need to know anything about crypto, venture capital, or AI to read this. Each part builds on the one before it, in plain language, with one interactive picture you can play with. Read them in order.
First principles, with four toys you can play. Value is a ratio, not a thing. Money is an elastic ledger created by lending, not scarcity. Value is intelligence turning energy into order. And on a long enough timescale, the ledger's only wall is physics. Unlearn "we run out of money" before the rest.
READ PART 0 → PART IThe starting idea. Software agents stop being tools and start being economic actors: they earn, spend, and hire each other. Products get built for a single moment and dissolved. Value stops accruing to any one company and moves to the plumbing underneath.
READ PART I → PART IIThe thesis. A venture fund is just a guess about what people will want. Once AI can read that want directly, demand allocates its own capital, mints its own rewards, and the professional allocator becomes the last of its kind. Includes the collapse you can drag.
READ PART II → PART IIIThe turn. When the economy can build its own machines, allocate its own capital, and set its own direction, it starts to reproduce itself, like von Neumann's self-copying machine. Five ways this can go, and the one lever that keeps a human in the loop.
READ PART III →An economy is just a way of deciding what gets built. This is a note on what decides, once the deciding is automated.