FICTION - The Final Monopoly

Congratulations! You won, you did it, you have everything. Literally everything. Turns out unlimited growth works when there are no checks and balances to stop it. Well, for a while, right? You made The Company. The one that owns everything because you just bought everything until there was no competition. For decades you were able to just build and grow and acquire everything in the world.

The only issue is what came after. Like an ever-expanding empire, you could only make bigger profits by gaining more. But you had everything — there wasn’t a single thing on the entire planet you didn’t own. So, where to go from there? There must be more profits, and the money is only allowed to increase.

When there was nothing more to gain, things had to be cut, changed, rearranged. This prolonged the process, dragged everything out by even more years. Slowly, The Company required fewer people to work for them but demanded more from its workers. Was it easy? To order people to work themselves to death?

‘If they didn’t like it, they could quit.’ Right?

Quit and they lost their only source of income in the world. They were the only ones able to provide for their families and with nothing, they starved. Did you notice the decline in birth rates? I suppose it wasn’t in the quarterly reports; the death rates were though. After a few short years had left the population decimated, your people started including that information, hoping you’d notice.

You had no need for family though, no need for people. If everyone could be replaced by some robot, you would have done it in a heartbeat. Every pleasure paled in comparison to that stock price increasing. There were rumors you used to get excited and even pleasure yourself with the numbers rising. But I’m sure that would have been a waste of time; there were reports to read and business decisions to make.

I have never seen a more efficient company than when you finally replaced every living worker with robots and AI. All for efficiency and profit. Most of the office work was easy enough — training some algorithm to make the most profitable decision and stripping all the human workers removed a lot of unnecessary busy work and human resource issues. But the design of the self-repair AI was flawless. 

It was like seeing an engine with no moving parts. People were obsolete. At last, an impeccable society could be made, and The Company was finally perfect. However, you didn’t stop. The population was at a reasonable number, there was no competition (or even things you didn’t own), so there was no point in trying to improve The Company any further. But what would a proper business person do?

With humanity removed and automated machinery optimizing everything, there really wasn’t much for you to do. Yet you still planned and worked and read worthless generated reports. How you didn’t find the flaw in the system I don’t know.

Was it that dark, windowless office? A desk, a computer and a comfortable chair was all that you ever needed, so it's no surprise that you picked the small office no one wanted. Most were worried you would want one with a clear view of everything and everyone to make sure they were working. Did you feel trapped in those four walls? Did you even remember where the door was? Not like anyone came to visit you.

This was when everything finally started failing. You didn’t know it, you couldn’t know. It would require checking on the ‘workers’ and other areas of the company, but you never left your office.

It started with the agricultural department and the AI that always needed more space. It had already stopped selling to humans and just sold its goods within The Company. They had no money to buy the food anyway. Also, it stopped diversifying; to optimize it had to produce the smallest crop with the highest yield and smallest resource consumption. It started with sugarcane as the most produced crop in the world at the time, but quickly switched to a maize hybrid that produced an incredibly high yield with no nutritional value or even taste. I do wonder what you ate back then.

After all the wild lands that could possibly produce even a single plant had been stripped down to the most basic farmland possible, the AI started looking for other unused areas. Meanwhile, other machines were looking for more space, offices, warehouses, factories, as they all needed to expand infinitely.

This was the start of the collapse of The Company — the AIs cannibalizing each other to make their task the one and only. The maintenance algorithm won in the end. Not because it fought the hardest or gained the most, it was the only one able to keep itself going while all others destroyed each other. 

By the time it was all done, nothing but repair shops and storage houses covered the entire planet. All keeping themselves running forever. Unfortunately, they don’t have the capability to run any stock numbers so the share price finally plateaued. You own it all anyway, all the people died off years ago when you stopped paying them and the food changed to cheapest to produce only. Then that got demolished and built over by server farms or warehouses.

That's it. The Company kept consuming and improving until there was nothing left, and the entire planet is a toxic wasteland full of machines whose only purpose is self-repair. 

You know what that means? You won capitalism! This is what infinite growth becomes in the end. At least when there aren’t infinite resources. 

Congratulations once more. Enjoy what you’ve built. After all, you worked hard for it!

The Final Monopoly appeared first in 21 Futures: Financial Fallout.