Wage abolition, programmable money, digital identity and the private ownership of allocation together constitute a transfer of sovereignty that no abundance narrative can disguise.
Editorial Analysis | October 2026
At a White House AI event on September 29, 2026, Elon Musk predicted an “age of abundance” where AI and robots deliver “universal high income,” not just basic income. He also said jobs will change. Just a prediction, not a promise.
The promise of effortless plenty has returned to the centre of public argument with a confidence that its earlier iterations lacked, and the current version arrives wrapped in the language of universal enrichment rather than technological novelty. Elon Musk has told audiences at events including VivaTech in Paris that work will eventually become optional, that artificial intelligence and robotics will produce an “age of abundance,” and that a form of universal high income will replace wages as the primary means of subsistence (Musk, 2024). Those remarks are frequently reported as though their benevolence were self-evident and their feasibility the only open question. The more consequential question concerns not whether the machinery can be built but who will own it, who will operate it, and under what legal authority the resulting distribution will be determined. A promise of abundance issued by the owners of the production system is simultaneously a claim to administer consumption, and that claim deserves the same scrutiny that any other transfer of sovereignty would receive.
The historical record offers an instructive comparison that contemporary commentary rarely invokes, because the company town was the last serious attempt in the industrial West to provide for a population entirely through an employer rather than through wages circulating in a market. Coal operators in Appalachia and elsewhere issued payment in company scrip redeemable only at company stores, housed workers in company housing, and exercised powers of eviction and discipline that no elected authority had granted them (Fishback, 1992). The worker in that arrangement received provision rather than a wage, and the difference mattered enormously because a wage can be spent anywhere while scrip can be spent only where the issuer permits. Contemporary proposals for administrative income differ in technology and scale rather than in their underlying structure, because the entity that issues the payment would also own the robots that produce the goods the payment purchases. A population that receives its means of subsistence from the same entity that controls supply has entered a relationship of dependency, and the vocabulary of kingship cannot survive contact with that arrangement.
The wage relation performs a function that its critics frequently overlook, because it establishes a legal claim that workers can enforce collectively through organisation and industrial action. A wage is a debt owed by the employer, and the machinery of labour law, collective bargaining and strike action exists to make that debt enforceable. Substituting an administrative transfer for a wage dissolves the enforceable claim and replaces it with a discretionary grant whose conditions are set by the grantor. Marx analysed this relationship with considerable precision, arguing that wage labour constitutes the legal form through which the worker participates in the distribution of the product while remaining separated from ownership of the means of production (Marx, 1867). Removing the wage does not resolve that separation but completes it, because the worker loses even the formal claim that the wage relation provided. Universal basic income pilots in Finland and elsewhere have been evaluated primarily for their effects on wellbeing and employment incentives, and those evaluations have not addressed the question of what happens when a basic income replaces rather than supplements earned wages (Kangas et al., 2020).
The technical infrastructure that would administer such a transfer has been under construction for more than a decade within the institutions that govern money and identity. The Bank for International Settlements has published extensively on the programmability of central bank digital currency, including work on conditional payments, purpose-bound money and the automation of transfers through smart contracts (Bank for International Settlements, 2021; Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, 2023). The European Central Bank has conducted its digital euro investigation with detailed attention to holding limits, tiered remuneration and access conditions, and its published design choices establish that programmability is a matter of political decision rather than technical constraint (European Central Bank, 2024). Institutions may state that a particular feature will not be deployed, and such statements deserve to be tested against the governance arrangements that would permit their reversal. The capability is being built before the politics that would determine its use, and capabilities have a way of being exercised once the institutions that hold them encounter pressure.
Digital identity constitutes the second layer of the emerging architecture, and its development has proceeded with far less public controversy than its implications warrant. Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 established the framework for a European Digital Identity Wallet intended to authenticate citizens across public and private services, and the United Kingdom has deployed its One Login system across an expanding range of government services (European Parliament and Council, 2024; Government Digital Service, 2024). India’s Aadhaar programme has enrolled more than a billion residents and has been linked to welfare delivery, tax administration and financial account opening. Each of these systems performs a genuine administrative function, and each simultaneously creates a gate through which access to services must pass. The practical consequence of linking identity, payment and entitlement is that the withdrawal of a credential becomes the withdrawal of the material conditions of life, and no legal formality accompanies that withdrawal.
The state’s analytical capacity has been substantially contracted to private firms whose commercial incentives differ from those of the publics they serve, and the contracting record is a matter of public documentation. NHS England awarded its Federated Data Platform contract to a consortium led by Palantir at a reported value of approximately £330 million, placing a private company at the centre of health data integration across the English system (NHS England, 2023). The United States Department of Defense expanded the Maven Smart System contract to a ceiling reported at approximately $1.3 billion, embedding commercial machine learning within military targeting and intelligence workflows (US Department of Defense, 2025). These arrangements concentrate analytical capability in firms that answer to shareholders rather than to electorates, and the resulting asymmetry of information constrains the capacity of legislatures to scrutinise the systems they have purchased.
China’s social credit framework offers the most developed example of administrative scoring integrated with financial and civic access, and its evolution deserves attention from anyone assessing where such systems tend. The State Council published a planning outline in 2014 that envisaged a unified system rewarding trustworthiness and punishing dishonesty across four domains including government affairs, commercial conduct, social behaviour and the judiciary (State Council of China, 2014). Subsequent regulation has focused on corporate credit rather than individual scoring, yet the system includes blacklists that restrict travel, market access and access to finance for individuals and firms deemed non-compliant. The model’s influence extends beyond China through smart city exports, surveillance technology procurement and the standardisation work of technical bodies, which means that the governance questions it raises are not confined to a single jurisdiction.
The displacement of price by administrative allocation represents the quietest and most consequential element of the emerging order, because the mechanisms are introduced as technical solutions to discrete problems. Carbon budgets, tokenised environmental attributes, congestion charging, geofenced mobility zones and the fifteen-minute city concept each address a legitimate policy concern while establishing precedents for deciding who may go where and consume what without reference to a market price (C40 Cities, 2019). Proponents of these instruments argue correctly that they internalise costs that markets ignore, and the argument does not resolve the question of who holds the authority to set the parameters. Administrative allocation is not inherently more just than market allocation, and it becomes considerably less just when the administrators are private firms whose decisions are reviewable only through contract.
The material foundations of the abundance narrative constrain its realisation in ways that its promoters rarely acknowledge, and the energy data are unambiguous on this point. The International Energy Agency projects that electricity consumption by data centres could reach approximately 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, a figure comparable to the total consumption of Japan, with water use and land requirements adding further pressure on local infrastructure (International Energy Agency, 2025). Automation reduces the labour required per unit of output while increasing the capital, energy and materials required to operate the automated system. Scarcity is therefore relocated rather than abolished, and it reappears in the form of grid capacity, water rights, rare earth supply and land acquisition. A society that has automated production without democratising ownership of the energy and compute infrastructure has simply changed the identity of those who control access.
A materialist analysis locates the decisive question in ownership rather than in technology, because the distributional outcome of automation depends entirely on who holds title to the robots, the patents, the data and the infrastructure. The enclosure of the intellectual commons through training data, the patenting of biological materials and the privatisation of water utilities represent a continuing accumulation by dispossession in which previously shared resources are converted into private assets (Harvey, 2003). The individual who is provisioned by an administrative transfer, monitored through a digital identity and constrained by a programmed wallet is not a sovereign participant in that economy but a client of its owners. The distinction between citizen and client turns on the revocability of entitlements, and every element of the emerging architecture is designed around entitlements that can be adjusted, suspended or withdrawn at the discretion of the issuer.
Contractual governance has expanded into domains that legislatures once controlled, and the terms of service attached to digital platforms now function as a form of private lawmaking that operates largely beyond democratic contestation. Disputes arising under those terms are frequently resolved through arbitration clauses that foreclose collective redress and public precedent. Procurement agreements between states and technology vendors contain performance specifications, data access provisions and liability limitations that few parliaments examine in detail and fewer still amend. The practical effect is that the constitutional settlement governing allocation, identity and mobility is being negotiated in commercial documents rather than in statutes, and the negotiations proceed without the publicity that legislative deliberation requires.
The urgency of the present moment arises from the timing of institutional lock-in rather than from any single dramatic development, because infrastructure decisions taken in this decade will constrain the choices available in the next. Standards adopted by technical committees, procurement contracts signed with single vendors and interoperability specifications embedded in payment systems create switching costs that effectively determine policy long before any legislature debates it. The window for shaping these systems through democratic means narrows with each procurement cycle, and the relevant debates are occurring in bodies whose proceedings are poorly reported. Recognising the pattern does not require attributing conspiratorial intent to any individual, because the outcome follows from ordinary institutional incentives operating without countervailing public pressure.
The trajectories that follow from this configuration remain genuinely contested, and the contest will be decided by political capacity rather than by technological inevitability. One plausible path involves continued administrative consolidation, in which allocation authority migrates further toward private infrastructure owners and public accountability weakens accordingly. A second path involves legislative reassertion, in which procurement conditionality, interoperability mandates, data trusteeship and public ownership of payment rails restore democratic control over the systems that govern access. A third path involves municipal and regional experimentation, in which cities and states impose transparency requirements, cash acceptance laws and algorithmic audit obligations that establish precedents national governments later adopt. The evidence does not permit a confident forecast of which path will dominate, and the outcome will depend on whether publics organise around the infrastructure question with the intensity that they have historically applied to wages and civil liberties.
The abundance narrative performs an ideological function that its technical content cannot sustain, because it invites populations to exchange enforceable claims for discretionary provision while describing the exchange as liberation. A wage confers standing, a programmed transfer confers dependence, and the difference between the two is the difference between a citizen and a client. The architecture now being assembled in payment systems, identity wallets, data platforms and automated production does not require any hidden hand to produce that outcome, because the ownership structure alone is sufficient to produce it. What remains open is whether publics will treat the design of these systems as a constitutional question rather than as a technical convenience, and the time available for that decision is shorter than the rhetoric of inevitable progress suggests.
Authored By: Global GeoPolitics
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References
Bank for International Settlements (2021) CBDCs: An Opportunity for the Monetary System. Annual Economic Report, Chapter III. Basel: BIS.
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