Classification: Late-Stage Economic Foma · Technological · Institutional · Hypernormalised

Status: Privately acknowledged · Publicly deferred · Structurally preserved

I. The Core Foma

The belief:

Increased productivity leads to broadly shared prosperity.

This belief was once conditionally true. It is now structurally false.

The system continues to speak as if it remains valid.

II. What Has Changed (Quietly Understood)

AI dramatically increases productivity.

This is not disputed.

What is rarely stated plainly is that productivity gains now flow primarily to:

  • ownership
  • capital
  • platforms
  • scale

Labor captures residual value, if any.

This is not a failure of AI. It is the predictable outcome of applying exponential tools to unequal systems.

III. The Critical Omission

Public statement:

“AI will raise productivity and benefit society.”

Unspoken continuation:

“…unless ownership, taxation, and distribution are redesigned.”

The foma survives in this omission.

No one lies. No one completes the sentence.

The result is reassurance without commitment — optimism detached from mechanism.

IV. The Hypernormalisation Phase

This belief has not collapsed. It has lost conviction.

Everyone can see the mismatch. Everyone continues the performance.

Policy language shifts toward ritual:

  • Upskilling
  • AI readiness
  • Responsible innovation

These do not redistribute power. They delay confrontation.

Belief has died. Procedure remains.

V. Why It Is Always Left Too Long

Early action would require:

  • admitting the post-1980 economic model failed
  • threatening incumbent advantage
  • redefining the relationship between work and dignity

Late action requires only:

  • crisis framing
  • emergency legitimacy
  • reactive redistribution

Institutions always choose delay.

Collapse becomes the editor.

VI. Why AI Accelerates the Endgame

AI does not create inequality. It removes the remaining justifications.

When productivity surges, margins expand, and aggregate wealth grows — yet lived experience stagnates — the narrative fails under its own weight.

At that point, reassurance becomes farce.

Not because people wake up, but because pretending not to be awake becomes impossible.

VII. The Deeper Risk

The risk is not technological unemployment.

It is moral unemployment — a society unable to explain why most people still matter once productivity is no longer scarce.

If dignity remains tethered to economic output, AI does not liberate.

It disqualifies.

VIII. Status Summary

  • The belief no longer maps to reality
  • The language persists
  • Institutions remain immobilized
  • The public senses the gap without being explicitly deceived

What appears as stability is already drift.

The system still enforces productivity, but it no longer convincingly explains why it confers dignity.

That failure does not remain abstract for long.

IX. The Migration Phase

When formal societal and state-sanctioned productivity stops conferring dignity, dignity does not disappear - it migrates.

It relocates into:

  • subcultures
  • protest movements
  • counter-economies
  • identity formations
  • oppositional communities
  • in extreme cases, organized violence

These are not anomalies. They are alternative productivity systems - producing meaning, belonging, status, and power where official systems no longer can.

This migration is already underway.

And it accelerates when power fails to notice it has already begun.

X. Why This Phase Is Unstable

Migration changes the relationship between productivity and power.

Once dignity becomes oppositional by default:

  • productivity no longer reinforces legitimacy
  • value becomes adversarial
  • meaning detaches from institutions
  • authority persists without belief

At that point, order is maintained by inertia rather than consent.

This is not collapse yet - but it is no longer equilibrium.

XI. Agentic Exit

Seeing the foma early does not grant control. It grants orientation.

The central question is no longer economic or technological:

If dignity is no longer reliably conferred by state-sanctioned productivity, how will it be conferred - and by whom?

Societies that answer this intentionally may yet adapt.

Societies that refuse the question do not prevent the answer - they simply lose the right to shape it.

Editor’s Note

This file was published with the quiet assumption that the decoupling of productivity and dignity was primarily a legitimacy failure within formal systems.

A subsequent reflection by Chris Reid usefully sharpened the lens.

When state-sanctioned productivity no longer confers dignity, dignity does not vanish — it migrates. It reappears in alternative forms of productivity: subcultures, protest movements, counter-economies, and oppositional identities. These formations are not marginal. They are adaptive responses to a vacuum of meaning.