An Invitation After Abundance

Six technological transformations are arriving at once. Artificial intelligence is turning cognitive work into metered infrastructure. Quantum machines are pushing at the boundary of what can be computed in practice. Brain-computer interfaces are bringing cognition closer to capital. Gene editing is changing the inheritance of disease. Robots are moving from demonstration into physical work. Fusion remains commercially unproven, but capital is already staking ownership claims around the energy systems that would follow if it succeeds. Each domain is being shaped, in 2026, by a small number of firms and states whose control over the new productive forces is unusually concentrated.An Invitation After Abundance is a roughly eleven-hundred-page political-economic treatise on what comes next. It develops the working category of Technological Monopoly Rent to name the structural mechanism by which simultaneous productive-force ruptures are enclosed as private property and metered against the people whose collective intellectual production helped build them. It traces what Marx, Sen, Roemer, and a long lineage of political economy got right, and what they could not have anticipated. It engages, with care, the strongest objections of frontier-AI builders, libertarians, mainstream economists, and labor organizers. And it proposes, without utopian guarantees, the institutional architecture an adequate political response would have to assemble.The book is an invitation. The decisions are still ahead of us.

Pagina's: 1164, Hardcover, Jiaxuan Chen