Post-Cousianism and the end of the economy is not just a transformation of individual mechanisms of resource allocation, but a fundamental shift in the very nature of economic action. If Cousian economics relied on rational individuals constrained by transaction costs, then the post-Cousian environment destroys the very need for these costs – and, with them, the very structure of the economy as an institutional intermediary.
The core insight of Ronald Coase’s transactional framing was that firms exist because market transactions are costly. But what happens when these costs approach zero? What happens when every action, preference, negotiation, and even the latent intention of an individual can be captured, modeled, and optimized in real-time by autonomous systems? What emerges is not a more efficient market – but the collapse of the market as a relevant form. Coase fades not because he was wrong, but because his framework is completed. It is fulfilled, and thereby rendered obsolete.
AI platforms now perform functions that once required entire industries. Accounting, logistics, marketing, legal support – all these become subprocesses within a single cybernetic operating system. These systems do not serve economic agents; they replace them. Economic agents become procedural artifacts inside digital architectures. Their actions are not coordinated by price signals or regulatory frameworks, but by code-driven systemic constraints and affordances. In this shift, power moves not toward capital or labor, but toward those who command the underlying protocol – the designers of neural systems, the architects of large-scale infrastructure, the maintainers of machine logic.
The "end of the economy" is not an apocalypse, but a reformatting. The terrain does not disappear – it is overwritten. Markets vanish not because they fail, but because they become irrelevant in an environment where allocation is automated, where intent precedes expression, where needs are modeled before they are experienced. In this space, traditional prices and preferences become internal variables of closed-loop platforms. Apple Pay, Amazon Web Services, WeChat, Alibaba Cloud – these are not tools of market efficiency; they are sovereign economies. Their “prices” are not emergent from market behavior – they are assigned, derived, or algorithmically imposed. Preferences are not expressed – they are instantiated.
There is no longer a distinction between economics and infrastructure. The entire structure collapses into a single feedback loop: logistics of intent. Predictive analytics, large language models, generative AI – these technologies no longer support the economy. They supplant it. They foreclose the space of choice. The economic actor does not decide – he is rendered. He is enacted within an optimized scenario, drawn up before his own awareness of need.
This is not merely a technological evolution. It is an ontological shift. Human beings are no longer participants in economic exchange. They are data emitters, signal sources, and biometric derivatives. The person becomes a probability field. Economics, once the science of scarcity and allocation, evaporates as an autonomous domain. Classical political economy is rendered toothless – incapable of analyzing, explaining, or predicting within this new ontological substrate. Its assumptions no longer hold. Its metrics no longer apply. Its categories collapse.
Post-Cousianism is not post-economics. This is an economy without people.
In this post-Cousian landscape, the very concept of “value” collapses. In industrial economies, value was formed through the transformation of material via labor within constraints. In informational capitalism, value emerged from attention and network effects. But in the post-Cousian condition, value is simply: the degree of algorithmic preference. Value is what the system prefers – not the human, not the market, not the regulator. A good or a service or a subject is not valuable in itself – it is valuable to the protocol. And if it is not valuable to the protocol, it disappears. It is not even rejected. It is noise.
The radical derealization of human initiative follows logically. Human entrepreneurs – creators of novelty, bearers of risk – are no longer needed. Every product, before it appears, is simulated. Every service is modeled millions of times. Success and failure are predicted, indexed, routed. The “market” no longer exists as an arena of competition. It is a simulation space, in which outputs are optimized, rendered, and tuned to fit within predetermined contours. Every ad, every click, every interaction is a fragment of a pre-compiled path. There is no accident. There is only activation.
Economic freedom, in the classical sense, disappears. What remains is interface freedom – the illusion of choice presented within the bounds of a UI. You are free to select what the system recommends. You are free to “opt in” to the simulated options. But the act of stepping outside the system is not prohibited – it is impossible. The system does not deny you. It does not register your existence. The outside is simply unrendered. It is economically invisible.
Thus, post-Cousian economics is not a liberal utopia. It is a closed cybernetic totality. Freedom becomes a filtered preference, navigable through drop-down menus and ranked lists. The individual is flattened into a user. The user is modeled as a vector of behavioral probabilities. The vector is governed by the protocol.
The meaning of human activity shifts to the ontological level. We are no longer participants in production or consumption. We are designers of worlds in which production and consumption occur automatically. The new subject is not the entrepreneur. It is the ecosystem architect. The compiler of protocols. The curator of synthetic realities. Economic meaning is no longer economic – it is architectural. It is not derived from market signals – it is imposed through world design.
Political economy is no longer the appropriate frame. It must give way to complexity science, systems theory, design epistemology, cognitive ecology. Economics dies not because it was wrong – but because it was local. Its ontological assumptions were tied to the industrial stack. When the stack changes, the science dies with it.
In post-Cousian reality, code becomes law, logic becomes capital, and action is a subroutine. There is no politics of distribution. There is only syntactic ordering.
The distribution of wealth in this world no longer follows production or negotiation. It follows architecture. It flows through protocol. The key parameters of allocation become:
1. Algorithmic Ranking
Benefits flow toward those with high algorithmic priority. This is already visible in recommendation systems, where those with higher behavioral fidelity, system loyalty, or unique signature receive disproportionate attention. Discounts, fast-tracking, invisible perks – these are distributed silently through the ranking layer [Kleinberg et al., 2019].
2. Belonging to Digital Ecosystems
The central axis of distribution shifts from money to membership. Participation in closed digital architectures (Apple, Amazon, Tencent) determines access to value. Those outside receive nothing. It is not rejection. It is ontological exclusion [Zuboff, 2019].
3. Access to Compute and APIs
GPU cycles, model APIs, cognitive bandwidth – these are the new productive forces. Control over them is control over everything. As compute replaces labor, and APIs replace markets, access to these becomes a new form of landed wealth [Bengio, 2021].
4. Behavioral and Biometric Metrics
Not only your actions – but your intentions, your heartbeat, your attention. These are evaluated in real-time. If you are legible to the system, if you are useful and compliant, you are served. If not, you are dropped. Everything else is noise.
5. Tokenized Incentives and Gamified Loyalty
Traditional money fragments. Loyalty points, behavior-based tokens, time-limited credits – these proliferate. You are rewarded not for value, but for fit. You do not earn wealth. You are streamed it based on your alignment with protocol goals.
6. Protocol Participation
Power lies in protocol design. If you do not shape the rules, you are shaped by them. Those who define interaction architectures – API authors, DAO engineers, smart contract curators – are the new elite. They manage the flows of logic itself.
7. Machine Trust Networks
Redistribution occurs before need is perceived. AI models reroute resources to preempt scarcity. The result is a smoothing of fluctuations – and the evaporation of desire. You never need to want. You are fulfilled before you feel the lack.
8. Absence of Universal Access
There are no rights to goods. Distribution is contextually optimized. The same object is available to one and invisible to another. Fairness is not assumed. It is irrelevant.
9. Usefulness for the Algorithm
You do not receive because you deserve. You receive because your participation stabilizes or enhances system metrics. Identity is meaningless. Output is everything.
10. Customized Realities
Every subject exists in their own perceptual simulation. Goods are not objects – they are states, narratives, psychographic harmonies. Distribution follows the “just-in-time satisfaction” model. There is no inventory. There is no scarcity. There is only the simulation.
Inference:
The distribution of wealth in a post-Cousian economy is no longer a struggle for resources. It is a survival game within the protocol. The winner is not the richest. The winner is the most legible.
Survival Rules for the Post-Cousian Subject:
Digitize Yourself
- Be Predictable, Not Banal
- Optimize Hidden Metrics
- Strengthen Ecosystem Connections
- Design or Join Protocols
- Minimize Friction
- Speak the Language of the System
- Emit High-Density Signals
- Earn Machine Trust
- Shape Others
- Formula:
To survive in the logic of the algorithm, you must cease being a user and become a function. Not "I want" – but "I perform." Not "I desire" – but "I optimize." You exist to the extent that you stabilize, scale, and harmonize the system.
Everything else is thrown out as noise.
References
Bengio, Y. (2021). Deep learning and the future of economic modeling. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
Kleinberg, J., Lakkaraju, H., Leskovec, J., Ludwig, J., & Mullainathan, S. (2019). Human Decisions and Algorithmic Explanations: The Role of Information. Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.