Cancel out all the terms related to money in your model of the world. What remains is power. Although you do not see it clearly because we remain distracted as we are by the surface struggle between what appears and what can be known. Yet history shows that power is legible. Like invisible ink revealed by time’s patina, it emerges in outline. You could draw it. Land. Oil. Factories. Shipping lanes. Central banks. Armies. Ownership charts and supply chains. If you wanted to know who mattered, you followed the metal and the money. If you wanted to know what would happen next, you watched who controlled scarcity.
That map is still partially true. But the center of gravity is drifting. Not because material constraints vanished, but because the control surface for coordinating material systems is changing. The world power structure is reorganizing around a different primitive:
Information.
Not “data” in the narrow sense, not mere facts stored in files, but the full bandwidth of what can be known, what can be taught, what can be repeated, what can be made to feel obvious. Information as the substrate of consensus reality. Information as the mechanism by which populations perceive, decide, and comply. Information as the interface layer between a nervous system and the world.
Post-Capitalism
A post-capitalist society is not a world without markets, money, or private property. It is a society in which capital accumulation ceases to be the primary organizing logic because the decisive scarce resources shift from commodities and labor toward information, coordination, and automated execution. Value creation becomes increasingly detached from marginal human work; the most powerful actors are those who control networks, compute, identity, distribution, and the rules by which information is filtered and trusted. Markets still exist, but they function more like measurement and allocation tools inside a broader system whose real leverage comes from controlling the informational environment that determines what people want, what they believe, and what they will tolerate.
If that sounds abstract, it's because the shift is happening at the level of primitives. We're moving from “who owns the means of production” to “who owns the means of persuasion and automation.” The old order accumulated power by owning production. The new order accumulates power by owning attention and the machinery that shapes belief.
The Final Lever
Information is what can be known, but it is also what can be taught. Which means it's what can be propagated. Which means it is what can be normalized. And once something is normalized, it becomes invisible.
This is the essential move of modern power; it stops arguing and starts curating. It stops issuing decrees and starts designing defaults. It stops telling you what to do and starts shaping what you perceive as possible. Control the information layer and you don't merely influence decisions, rather you influence the space of decisions that feels available.
There is a reason “narrative” has become a serious strategic asset. Narratives are compressed operating systems for large groups. They don't just explain events; they decide which events count as events at all. They determine what is morally salient, what is laughable, what is unforgivable, what is inevitable. They establish the boundaries of the thinkable.
Attention as Tribute
If you poses neither intellectual property, nor equity, nor rentable assets; fret net, for your attention is the payment.
Many still think of attention as a personal and private resource you spend on what you enjoy. That framing is quickly becoming obsolete. Attention is now extracted and converted into models: preference gradients, behavioral predictions, influence pathways, automated persuasion. When high school students seriously consider influencer as a viable career path, we must take seriously the attention economy.
When you give your attention to a feed, you are not merely consuming content. You are training a system to understand what you will notice, what you will tolerate, what you will fear, what you will desire, and what you will believe after enough exposures. You are participating in the construction of a map of your interior. And maps are power pieces of information.
This is why convenience is not neutral. Convenience is the mechanism by which extraction becomes voluntary. The interface removes friction, then removes choice, then removes awareness that choice was ever present.
A decade ago, “convenience” meant fewer clicks. Now it means something deeper:
- You outsource memory to platforms.
- You outsource navigation to algorithms.
- You outsource taste to recommendation systems.
- You outsource correspondence to autocorrect and autocomplete.
- You outsource judgment to summaries.
- You outsource action to agents.
Each outsourcing is rational locally. Each saves time. Each reduces cognitive load. But aggregated across billions of people, outsourcing becomes a transfer of sovereignty.
The Quiet Surrender
AI automation is not simply labor substitution. It will inadvertently become an agency substitution.
The difference matters. Labor is what you do. Agency is what you decide. In one of my favorite quotes from Alice Bailey's The Labours of Hercules, "Send him to labor in a field wherein he must decide which voice, of all the many voices, will arouse the obedience of his heart."
When an automated system begins selecting goals, prioritizing tasks, filtering inputs, and choosing outputs, it doesn't merely speed you up. It begins shaping what “you” are, operationally. It becomes a prosthetic for intention. And prosthetics do not remain neutral: they tune the body that depends on them.
The bargain is seductive: let the system handle the tedious parts. But the tedious parts are often where values hide. Friction is where you notice consequences. Delay is where you reconsider. Effort is where you discover what you actually care about. Convenience erodes these guardrails. And once the guardrails erode, power migrates to whoever controls the automation.
This is why the new world order doesn't need a single sovereign. It can be an ecology of systems; platforms, models, infrastructures. It is collectively shape reality by shaping the flow of information.
The Individual's Stake in Reality
Here's the inattentional truth: the individual plays a role in the manifestation of reality.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Reality, at the human layer, is a collaborative hallucination constrained by physics. Your world is made of objects, but your experienced world is made of interpretations, labels, permissions, and taboos. Those are informational. Those are teachable. Those are contestable. This is why control of information is control of reality: because the human layer of reality is a story we agree to live inside.
Most people do not experience themselves as participants in that agreement. They experience themselves as spectators. They believe reality is delivered to them like weather. Our civilization is awakening to the truth that has been known by royalty, secret society, and the initiated alike - reality is an illusion that we shape with our conscious attention.
A Note From the Ancients
None of this is new in spirit. The ancient traditions were obsessed with the relationship between mind and world, between naming and being, because they were studying the same interface layer, just without servers. The Tao Te Ching opens with a warning that naming itself is a kind of reduction, a filtering of what is real into what can be spoken: “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
In the Upanishadic tradition, the self and the totality are not separate substances but different vantage points on one reality summarized in the mahāvākya “Tat tvam asi” (“thou art that”).
And in early Christian mystical literature, the divine is not confined to temples or institutions but saturates the ordinary world: “Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone… you will find me there.”
You don't have to take these as metaphysical facts to see the pattern: they all point at a continuity between consciousness, meaning, and the world that meaning reveals. In modern terms: perception is not passive. Attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly attend to becomes your reality. Which means the struggle over attention is, inevitably, a struggle over reality. It is the base power structure.
Power Becomes Epistemic
The old sovereign demanded obedience. The new sovereign demands belief—or, more precisely, it demands epistemic dependency.
When people no longer feel capable of knowing what's true without an intermediary—when they must ask a feed, a model, a platform, a priesthood of experts—power has already won. Not because the intermediary is always wrong, but because the intermediary becomes the gate through which reality must pass.
This is the post-capitalist pivot: the commanding heights are not just steel mills and ports, but search, distribution, identity, compute, model access, and narrative legitimacy. The new empires are not drawn on maps; they are drawn in interfaces.
What To Do With This
We are finally growing up as a civilization. Think of pre-enlightenment as our toddler years - smashing bashing and trashing. Our enlightenment and rationalist years as our adolescence. The psychic revival of the 70s or the dropping of the bomb in 1942 as the beginning of our young adulthood - exciting, dangerous, confusing, and consequential. Crypto, covid, Epstein Files, and now AI are destabilizing our institutions and demanding we finally act our age. It is in this moment we must reject the convenience.
If information is the final lever of power, then the ethical question is not simply "who owns what," but, "who decides?" At the individual level, the resistance is not dramatic. It is boring. It looks like reclaiming agency in small, repeated acts:
- choosing friction when friction protects values,
- cultivating first-hand knowledge instead of borrowed certainty,
- building attention discipline as a form of sovereignty,
- refusing to outsource judgment on matters you can learn to judge,
- treating convenience as a trade, not a gift.
Because the quiet truth is this: the world order is always being negotiated. It is negotiated through what people believe is real, what people believe is possible, and what people believe is permitted.
Those beliefs are made of information.