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The Indistinct

Every economy produces its poor. I think about who the poor will be in the Z Economy, and it frightens me.

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A New Kind of Poverty

They will not starve. They will not lack shelter. AI will provide all material needs. But they will lack identity. They will be the people whose inner lives are unremarkable, whose secrets interest no one, whose dreams are generic, whose relationship configurations remain conventional.

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The Cruelty

This is a new kind of poverty, and I think it may be crueler than anything that came before. Material poverty at least offers dignity in resistance. You can organize against exploitation. You can maintain integrity through struggle. But identity poverty is existential. To be unremarkable in an economy that trades only in remarkability is to be worthless while surrounded by abundance. You are fed, housed, comfortable, and meaningless.

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The Caste

I expect this caste—the indistinct—to be enormous. Most people, stripped of material circumstance, may prove more similar than different. The Z Economy will expose this with a brutality that previous economies never could.

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The Industry

And so identity fabrication will become an industry. Specialists will design interesting lives for the unremarkable. They will script peculiarities, manufacture secrets worth selling, architect relationship structures. But the truly wealthy—those with genuine inner depths—will recognize these counterfeits immediately. The divide will only deepen.

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Why Z

I call this the Z Economy because I believe it is the last. Not the end of humanity, but the end of the game we’ve been playing since those Paleolithic bands first traded animal skins 500,000 years ago. That game was about managing material scarcity. AI ends it. But a new game begins—the game of identity, meaning, distinction. This game has no end, because identity is infinitely divisible. You can always become more peculiar, more complex, more interesting. Or you can fail to do so, and slide into the caste of the indistinct.
I don’t know if this is utopia or dystopia. It depends on whether human beings actually contain infinite depths, or whether we are shallower than we believe. If each person truly possesses unique interiority worth sharing, then the Z Economy is paradise. If most of us are more similar than different at our cores, it is hell. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between.