The Z Economy: The Last Economy

I've been thinking about what comes after. Not after capitalism specifically, or after the current recession, but after the entire project of economy as we've understood it for ten thousand years. I call what's coming the Z Economy, because I believe it is the final form, the terminal phase of human exchange. And I believe artificial intelligence is what brings us there.

Let me explain what I mean.

The Long Arc

When you look at economic history, what strikes you is how recently anything changed. Throughout the entire Paleolithic era, from roughly 500,000 BC to 10,000 BC, humans lived in small bands, trading stories and tools and animal skins with neighboring groups. Economists have estimated that for all of prehistory, average GDP per capita was about $158 per year, adjusted for inflation. And here's what's remarkable: it didn't rise much until the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of thousands of years, the human economic condition was essentially static.

Then things began to move. By the third millennium BC, the Sumerians had developed a market economy based on the shekel, originally a weight measure of barley. The Babylonians created the first system of prices fixed in legal code. Temples became history's first creditors, charging interest as early as 3000 BC. Around 650 BC, the Lydians introduced gold and silver coins. These were profound innovations, but they were all variations on the same theme: managing scarcity.

For the next several thousand years, that's what economy was. India and China dominated global GDP for over 1,500 years. The Achaemenid Empire at its height around 480 BC connected over 40% of the world's population. Rome at its peak in 117 AD held 50 to 90 million people. The Mughal Empire in the 17th century represented a quarter of world GDP. But through all of this, the fundamental logic remained unchanged: resources are limited, and economy is how we distribute them.

Even the Industrial Revolution, which finally broke the static line of human prosperity, was still about managing scarcity, just managing it better. The Watt steam engine, the expansion of wheat production after 1860, the shipping container revolution of the mid-20th century: all of these made goods cheaper and more abundant, but none of them eliminated scarcity itself.

I believe artificial intelligence will.

What Happens When Scarcity Ends

This is the question that keeps me awake. When AI systems become capable enough to produce everything we need (food, shelter, manufactured goods, energy, medicine) without requiring human labor, what happens to economy?

The economists will tell you it ends. I think they're wrong. I think it transforms into something they never had language for.

Here's my theory: every economy in history has been a technology for distributing scarce resources. But that was never the whole story. Beneath every transaction, from the first traded shells in the Neolithic period to the most complex financial derivatives of the 21st century, there was always a deeper exchange happening. People weren't just trading goods. They were trading recognition. They were trading identity. They were answering the question: Who am I, and does it matter that I exist?

Material goods were proxies for this deeper commerce. The aristocrat's estate, the industrialist's factory, the tech billionaire's platform: these were never just productive assets. They were proofs of distinction. They were ways of saying: I am someone. I am not interchangeable with the mass of humanity.

The Z Economy is what happens when we drop the proxies.

The New Aristocracy

I think about what we used to call the wealthy classes. The landed gentry. The nobility. The robber barons. The captains of industry. What did they actually possess? We say they owned land, or capital, or data. But what they really owned was the capacity to be distinct. Their wealth was a technology for achieving identity in a world where most people had none.

In the Z Economy, that technology becomes obsolete. When AI can produce any material good on demand, having things means nothing. So the new aristocracy (I don't know what we'll call them, but they're coming) will need a different basis for distinction.

I believe they will trade in secrets. Not state secrets or corporate intelligence. Personal secrets. Confessions. The content of their dreams. The peculiar, unrepeatable material of their inner lives.

Why would anyone buy such things? Because a secret is the purest form of scarcity that remains. No AI can generate my secret, because it exists only in my mind until I choose to release it. No algorithm can replicate my dream, because my dream is not a pattern. It is a singular event that happened once, in my sleeping consciousness, and will never happen again.

The wealthy of the Z Economy will be those who have cultivated rich inner lives and are willing to sell access to them. They will commodify confession. They will monetize their own interiority.

The Transformation of Relationships

This leads me to what I find most interesting about the Z Economy: how it will reshape human relationships.

When identity becomes the primary commodity, relationships become the primary means of production. Each relationship I maintain refracts my identity differently. I am a different person to my mother than to my lover than to my colleague than to my rival. The more relationships I have, and the more varied those relationships are, the more complex my identity becomes.

Complexity is wealth in the Z Economy.

This is why I believe polyamorous and non-traditional relationship structures will proliferate, but not primarily for sexual or romantic reasons. They will proliferate because they produce identity. One partner gives you one reflection of yourself. Multiple partners give you multiple reflections. A web of intimate connections (lovers, mentors, collaborators, former enemies, complicated friendships) gives you a prismatic identity that simple arrangements cannot match.

But here's the dynamic I find troubling: when everyone pursues complexity, complexity becomes ordinary. The returns diminish. So people will push further. They will seek stranger and stranger relationship configurations to distinguish themselves. Intimacies structured around shared secrets that neither party can ever reveal. Bonds designed to be dissolved at predetermined moments. Relationships defined by incomprehension rather than understanding.

The goal will be to have a relationship structure so peculiar that it becomes part of your value. People will form connections specifically to become more interesting. They will architect their intimacies for the marketplace.

The Indistinct

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why I Call It 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. Some will thrive. Many will suffer in a new way, surrounded by plenty, impoverished in the only currency that matters.

What I'm Trying to Say

I see the Z Economy coming. I see its early forms already: the attention economy, the creator economy, the commodification of personal narrative, the proliferation of relationship structures, the growing premium on authenticity. These are primitive versions of what AI will bring to completion.

I don't know the timeline. Maybe decades. Maybe sooner. But I believe that when it arrives, we will finally confront the question that every previous economy allowed us to avoid: What are we, underneath the struggle for survival? What do we have to offer each other when material needs no longer bind us together?

The answer will vary. Some will discover genuine depth. Others will discover emptiness. And unlike any economy before, there will be no way to fake it. The Z Economy trades in the irreducible self. Counterfeits will be detected. The indistinct will be revealed.

This is what I've been thinking about. I may be wrong about the details. But I am not wrong that something is coming, something for which we lack adequate language, something that will ask us questions we've never had to answer.

I call it the Z Economy. I call it the last economy. Because after we start trading in who we actually are, there's nothing left to trade.