Welcome to the terminal stage of consumer capitalism, where the core engine , waged labor in exchange for production, consumption, and taxation

It is breaking down due to the automation of human toil.

And without toil, there is no wage, no mass consumption, and no broad-based taxation to fund the state or support debt service.

No mortgages

The collapse of the wage-consumption-tax loop that sustained the post-WWII model of growth. Gone

As AI and robotics replace labor across white- and blue-collar domains, we’re entering a world where:

•Human labor is no longer needed at scale.

•Wage income collapses, especially for the middle class.

•Consumption shrinks, not because needs vanish, but because purchasing power does.

•Tax receipts implode, as governments lose the broad base they once taxed to fund infrastructure, services, and welfare.

•Debt systems default, as people can no longer service mortgages or personal loans—because income no longer flows predictably.

Asset prices collapse

The end of industrial-era capitalism and the beginning of something else. But what replaces it?

And what do humans do once they fully realise the implications ?

Because this period we are in —— is the calm before the storm 1. Resilient Thriftiness: The Return of Autarky

Yes—one likely response is a return to localized, small-scale resilience. The ability to:
•Grow your own food.
•Generate your own power.
•Fix, build, and repurpose instead of buy.
•Form mutual aid communities not governed by money but by reciprocity and necessity. Shelter in exchange for work

It’s not so much regression as it is adaptive re-localization. You’re not going back to the past, you’re reactivating dormant capacities in a high-tech context but humans have at least done it before .

A decentralized survival economy.

1/ The New Serfdom: Mortgage Debt in Australia’s Hollow Economy

In medieval Europe, serfs were bound to land they did not own, tethered by custom, obligation, and the implicit understanding that freedom meant starvation. In 21st-century Australia, this same dynamic persists, repackaged in glossy brochures, sanctified by central bank policy, and secured by 30-year mortgage contracts. The Australian dream of home ownership has become a modern serfdom: a ritual of financial bondage masked as economic aspiration. Through the lens of historical and political analyses by Postan, Domar, Hayek, Thompson, Graeber, Piketty, and Standing, it becomes clear that Australia’s housing system does not elevate its citizens, it enslaves them in a meticulously constructed edifice of debt. We slave & toil all week in order to pay banks for the privilege of somewhere to sleep. These provide less zero productive benefit to anyone yet we pay 30-50% of our incomes to them for what? What have they done for us? What have they done for the country? We are their slaves. 2/Feudalism Without the Lord

M.M. Postan’s accounts of medieval serfdom make one thing clear: serfdom was never just about agriculture. It was about control, over land, labor, and destiny.

Evsey Domar famously theorized that serfdom arises not in poor land-scarce regions, but where land is abundant and labor scarce. That contradiction the availability of land, yet inaccessibility for ownership required a mechanism to tie people down. This the same mechanics of serfdom we experience today

Australia, one of the most land-rich nations on Earth, has recreated this system. It is not feudal lords who monopolize access to land today, but banks, speculators, and planning authorities who artificially restrict supply, drive up prices, and funnel demand through the spigot of credit.

Citizens are not legally bound to the land, but they are economically indentured, with debt burdens that tether them more tightly than any feudal contract ever did. You're a indentured peasant, enslaved by the system no differently than a few centuries ago