In the year 2029, it became painfully apparent that something was wrong. Not wrong in the “Oops, we forgot to update the software again and now the self-driving buses have become self-aware” kind of wrong, but rather the fundamentally wrong kind of wrong; the kind that, had anyone been paying attention for the last thirty years, would’ve made them drop their decaf soy lattes and stop scrolling through their influencer feeds long enough to do something about it.
But no. People were busy. Too busy. Busy in that human way of letting other people do their jobs while they waited for the next social media trend to appear on their screens. It wasn’t until 2030, when corporate profits—those beautiful beacons of human achievement—collapsed into an abyss so deep that even the CEOs’ golden parachutes turned out to be made of tissue paper, that anyone began to suspect that maybe, just maybe, the system might have a teensy-weensy flaw in it.
You see, a lot of highly intelligent people—mostly at the top of the economic food chain—had spent the last few decades working tirelessly to automate everything. Production? Automated. Customer service? Automated. Even your local Starbucks was fully run by robots, which, to be fair, did brew an espresso that was objectively indistinguishable from wet cardboard. But no one cared because the app told them they were getting premium cardboard and that it was “crafted” (no one knew what that meant, but it sure sounded good).
The problem was that once they automated everything, the people who used to buy things—the ones who didn’t have robots making their food and doing their laundry—weren’t working anymore. Which, okay, fine, you say, who needs work? Everyone deserves a break. After all, didn’t we all agree that the whole idea of work was an outdated construct, a way to keep people too distracted to notice that their entire existence was an endless treadmill running toward oblivion?
Sure. But it turns out that when you don’t hire anyone, when you fire all the humans to save on healthcare and pension benefits, there’s no one left to, you know, buy the stuff you’re selling.
Enter stage left: the corporate response. It was as if a collective, twenty-ton, completely pointless orgy of middle-management decision-makers in suits had huddled in a room, smoking cigars made of shredded legal contracts, trying to figure out how to turn not selling anything into a profit.
They tried everything, of course. The CEO of “GlobalCorp” (name redacted for legal reasons) famously declared, “If you build it, they will come” while the company’s literal field of dirt outside their headquarters sat empty and largely ignored by the general public. He was, of course, talking about a new product line—they didn’t specify exactly what it was, because they were still figuring that out.
But no one came. No one could afford to. Oh, sure, the stocks soared in the short term, thanks to massive buybacks and the creative redefinition of “revenue” (which now included things like “promises,” “concepts of a plan,” and “vague future potential”). But eventually, the magic wore off, like those timeshare vacation sales that turned out to be, at best, a subscription to a well-lit hole in the ground.
The truly magical part, though, was the government’s response. You know, the ones that were supposed to step in, provide a safety net, maybe start a little thing called “basic income” so that people could still afford to buy the robots’ stuff? Instead, they had a meeting. A very important meeting.
They concluded, after rigorous debate, that the best way to solve the problem was to create more problems—and to continue making a show of pretending they knew what they were doing. So, they implemented a tax on happiness. Anyone caught smiling in public had to pay a fee, because, you know, people were just too damn cheerful for their own good. This, in turn, led to an exponential rise in complaints about the increase in the “frown tax,” which the government had conveniently neglected to mention during the public hearings.
Meanwhile, the corporate overlords—who were, of course, all extremely busy golfing and inventing new ways to bypass antitrust laws—decided that the real issue wasn’t that no one had jobs or could buy anything. No, the problem was that everyone was lazy. If they could just get people to want to work for free, everything would be fine. So, they launched a new initiative: “Work For Exposure.” The idea was simple: people would voluntarily do jobs for zero wages in exchange for the honor of having their names mentioned in a company press release. Some 14 million people signed up. Most of them ended up filing lawsuits for emotional damages.
But that didn’t matter. The press release was a success.
In the end, the global economy did collapse, as it had been clearly programmed to do since the late 1990s. No one really noticed until the financial system, now entirely run by sentient spreadsheets and angry Twitter bots, started sending out “out-of-office” replies in response to everything. The last transaction ever made was a corporate buyout of a tech startup that had patented a device to finally help humanity deal with the existential dread of automation.
It was, of course, a perfect failure, because no one could afford the subscription.
And so, as the world slipped quietly into the void, corporate CEOs smiled to themselves, comforted by the fact that they had managed to create something no one could afford, which was, after all, the purest form of capitalism. And the rest of humanity? Well, they were busy not working.
And as far as anyone could tell, that was a win for everyone.