A Floor for Everyone, a Frontier for Anyone

A lot of people my age like socialism.

In Gallup’s latest poll, taken in August 2026, 57% of Americans aged 18 to 34 viewed socialism positively. Only 43% said the same of capitalism. Among everyone, socialism’s positive rating hit 43%, the first time it has broken 39% since Gallup started asking in 2010.

Older people tend to read numbers like that as a warning. I read them as a request.

I don’t think the answer is socialism, and I don’t think it’s capitalism as we know it either. I think it’s a new thing, built on machine labor on demand, and I’ve spent this series describing it.

This piece gives it a name, and a creed.

Brake, gas pedal, steering wheel

Most arguments about AI are arguments about one dial: speed.

On one side are the doomers. In 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute called on every AI lab to pause training anything more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months.

On the other side are the accelerationists. That same year, Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto argued that more technology can solve any material problem, and named deceleration as an enemy.

Faster or slower. That’s the whole debate.

But speed isn’t the interesting question. Direction is.

So here’s the brand, which closed Part 9:

Doomers want a brake. Accelerationists want a gas pedal. Worldbuilders want a steering wheel.

Worldbuilders argue about direction and design. We’re short-term practical, long-term optimistic: build the prototypes now, fix what breaks, and keep our eyes on a world worth arriving at.

Our neighbors

We’re not the first to look past the speed dial. Here’s who’s nearby.

d/acc. In his 2023 post My techno-optimism, Vitalik Buterin argued that direction matters, not just magnitude, and proposed deliberately accelerating defensive, decentralized and democratic technology.

That’s our closest cousin. But d/acc is mostly about which technologies to build. Worldbuilders also care who owns them and how their output gets shared.

Techno-optimism. Andreessen is right that building solves problems. But markets are great at building things and bad at guaranteeing a floor under everyone.

Abundance. In March 2025, two journalists, Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Derek Thompson, a longtime writer at The Atlantic, published Abundance. Their argument: America has forgotten how to build, and much of the blame sits with rules that well-meaning people wrote.

Zoning, environmental reviews and layers of procedure meant to stop bad projects now stop good ones too: the homes, clean energy and transit that blue states say they want. They call for a liberalism that builds, now known as the abundance agenda.

It’s already moving policy. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, cited the book when he loosened the state’s environmental review law to make housing easier to build.

I agree with almost all of it. Abundance is the goal of this whole series. Where I differ: the book is about building more, and says little about who owns what gets built. Worldbuilders want both.

Protopia. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired, coined the word in 2011. A protopia sits between utopia and dystopia: a world a little better today than it was yesterday, and a little better again tomorrow.

His point is that real progress is quiet. Each new technology brings about as many new problems as new benefits, and the world still comes out slightly ahead, a small gain that compounds. That’s why, in his words, protopia is “much much harder to visualize” than a perfect world.

That’s the right temperament, and close to our short-term practical, long-term optimistic. Where I differ: protopia describes the direction of travel. We also want to name the destination, so we can steer toward it.

Solarpunk. Picture the opposite of cyberpunk. Swap the neon megacities and corporate overlords for solar roofs, gardens on every terrace, bikes and trains, and neighbors who fix and share their own tech.

It’s a genre of art and fiction about ecologically sustainable futures, and it has grown into a loose movement in design and activism, too.

The word goes back to a 2008 blog post that imagined steampunk run on sun and wind instead of coal and oil. Unlike steampunk’s Victorian machines, the post noted, solarpunk technologies “need not remain imaginary.”

In 2014, the researcher Adam Flynn wrote Solarpunk: Notes toward a Manifesto for Arizona State University’s Project Hieroglyph. He called it “a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears,” and treated local infrastructure, like rooftop solar, as a form of self-determination.

I love the gardens, and I love the idea that owning your infrastructure sets you free. That’s the trusts in a sentence. Where I’d push further is heavy industry: my future also has chip fabs in every region and mines on asteroids.

Why socialism looks good from here

Let me start with respect, because the young people who like socialism aren’t confused. They’re paying attention.

According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, a record 22.7 million renter households, or 49%, spent more than 30% of their income on housing in 2024.

The typical first-time home buyer is now 40 years old, a record. Add healthcare tied to a job, and jobs AI may soon do, and you get a generation that feels one bad month from falling through the floor.

That’s the backdrop for November 2025, when New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor.

He ran on free buses, free childcare and city-run grocery stores, and exit polls found 75% of voters under 30 backed him. In June 2026, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board froze rents on about a million stabilized apartments.

Look at what people voted for. Rent. Groceries.

Getting to work. Childcare. That’s the floor.

Here’s another number from that same Gallup poll: 95% of Americans view small business positively. Only 35% say the same about big business.

People don’t hate markets. They hate precarity, and they hate bigness that doesn’t answer to them.

You’re not foolish for wanting what socialism promises. I want it too. I just think there’s a better way to get it.

Sweden isn’t socialist

Whenever someone says socialism works, they point to Scandinavia. The Scandinavians tend to disagree.

In 2015, after American presidential candidates held up Denmark as a model, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen gave a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School and set the record straight: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Sweden is the same story: a strong welfare floor under a market economy. And above that floor, Sweden is in some ways friendlier to wealth than the US.

Its parliament voted unanimously to abolish its century-old inheritance and gift tax in 2004, and Sweden abolished its wealth tax in 2007.

Forbes counted 45 billionaires in Sweden in 2025, against 902 in the US, in a country about a thirtieth the size. Depending on whose list you use, Sweden has as many billionaires per person as America, or more.

Something else I’ve noticed about Sweden: young Swedish men love to flaunt it. The cars. The watches.

A whole gospel of wealth. (Funny, since Andrew Carnegie’s original Gospel of Wealth was about giving your fortune away. More on him below.)

Here’s what I take from it. This is what happens above a secure floor.

When you’re not afraid of losing your home, you don’t stop wanting things. You start wanting nicer things.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. Wanting nice things isn’t a sin.

Neither is wanting to build and invent new technology. The question is whether that striving happens on top of a floor everyone stands on, or on top of other people.

Some things, like the best watch or the best address, are valuable precisely because not everyone can have them. Fred Hirsch called these positional goods in Social Limits to Growth (1976). I dig into them in Part 11: Remix Will Kill the Copy, Not the Creator.

From dividing to distributing

Here’s the line everyone knows, from Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875):

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Read the conditions Marx put in front of it, though. The slogan was for a “higher phase” of communism, after work had become people’s chief want and not just their means of survival, and after wealth flowed far more abundantly.

Marx assumed the economy runs on human labor. Goods only exist if somebody makes them, so the first half of the slogan carries the second. Everyone has to give, so everyone can get.

Machine labor on demand breaks that assumption.

If machines can do any job, nothing has to come “from each according to his ability.” The essentials can get made whether or not any particular person shows up to make them.

That shifts the whole problem. For all of history, economics has been about dividing scarce goods.

Who gets the bread when there isn’t enough? Feudalism, capitalism and communism are all answers to that question.

The future’s question is different: how do we distribute abundant goods and services?

Here’s the whole problem, as I see it, in three parts:

Engineer abundance by automating away scarcity. That’s machine labor on demand, plus the scarcity flywheel from Part 3.
Decide who controls the inputs of abundance: the energy, the materials, the machines, the compute. That’s the town trusts and the regional federation they form.
Distribute the outputs: universal basic goods and services as the floor, with markets above it.

And here’s how I’d rewrite Marx for that world:

From each according to their will, to each according to their needs.

That’s the human-will rule in Marx’s form. As I put it in Part 2: If a Human Wants to Do a Job, a Machine Shouldn’t Take It: “if a human wants to do it, a human gets to do it.” Everything else is covered by machine labor on demand.

“Isn’t that libertarian socialism?”

That’s the obvious question, and my honest answer is: yeah, it pretty much is! Libertarian socialism, the anti-authoritarian, decentralized branch of the socialist tree, is the closest modern equivalent. Credit goes to the people who argued it first.

Peter Kropotkin. In The Conquest of Bread (1892), Kropotkin argued that “Well-being for all is not a dream,” and proposed a rule that sounds a lot like the floor in Part 6: “no stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short.”

In Mutual Aid (1902), he argued that cooperation is as much a factor in evolution as competition.

But look at the deal Kropotkin offered.

His model community would give you its houses, stores, streets, schools and museums “on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to existence.”

There it is again. Somebody still has to do the work.

Murray Bookchin matters most for this series. In his 1965 essay “Towards a Liberatory Technology,” collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), Bookchin noted that socialists of every school had built their programs on one premise: people would have to spend much of their lives toiling.

He argued that automation, which his era called “cybernation,” could finally remove that assumption.

Later, in his 1991 essay Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview, he proposed placing land and enterprises in the custody of each community, linked to other communities through confederations. That’s very close to the trusts.

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed (1974) imagined Anarres, a moneyless anarchist society where people take what they need, and where work and play share a word.

Labor-centered framings made sense when humans were the economy’s engine. If the only way to make bread is for people to bake it, any fair system has to start with who bakes, how long, and for whom. Workers were the source of value, so workers’ power was the lever.

In a post-AGI world, that stops being true. A politics of “the workers” loses its center when the work is optional.

So the primary driver has to change, from labor to agency. The question isn’t “who works?” anymore. It’s “what do you want to do, now that you’re free to choose?”

And here’s where I differ from them:

No central coordinating body. Le Guin herself showed how much power Anarres’s coordinating body quietly accumulated. Communities coordinate through networked surplus, not a planning office.
Markets above the floor. Bookchin wanted to replace the marketplace. I want to keep it for everything that stays scarce, and for anyone who wants to build something new.
Trusts, not the state. The machines that make the essentials belong to the places they serve, controlled one person, one vote, and they can’t be sold. Your membership is your universal basic capital share, as I lay out in Part 5: Every Town Can Own Its Own Power Plant and Chip Fab.

Spend big now, give it back

In 1889, Andrew Carnegie published an essay later known as The Gospel of Wealth. He argued the rich are trustees of their fortunes and should give them away while they’re alive. His most famous line: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

He mostly lived it, giving away some $350 million, the bulk of his wealth. He was no saint: his company’s Homestead Strike in 1892 left at least ten men dead.

But look at what the money built. Between 1883 and 1929, he funded 2,509 libraries, 1,689 of them in the United States.

Here’s the part I love. Under what became known as the Carnegie formula, a town had to provide the site and fund the library’s upkeep every year, at about ten percent of the gift.

A rich man built it. The community owned it, ran it, and paid to keep it going.

That’s the gift-back, a century early.

In Part 5: Every Town Can Own Its Own Power Plant and Chip Fab, I suggested: “Instead of today’s billionaires gifting their wealth in shares and cash payments after they die, they could gift the infrastructure.” Carnegie actually did it.

So here’s my analogy. Today’s library is the data center.

A library gave a town knowledge it couldn’t afford on its own. A data center will give a town machine labor it can’t afford on its own.

And like libraries, that machine labor should run through locally controlled nodes: the town’s machines and energy, owned by the town’s trust, with the big compute held by the regional federation of trusts.

In Part 6: UBI Won’t Work. Universal Basic Goods Will., I wrote: “Nobody resents public roads, libraries, or schools the way they resent benefits that only some people receive.”

The library is the original universal service. The machine-labor node should be the next one.

Who pays for the build-out? Money pre-packages belief, and right now corporations and investors are pouring theirs into chips, data centers and robots. (I dig into that idea in Part 11.)

Let them fund the flywheel. Let them invest in it and build it today, so that we can all benefit from it tomorrow. They get their return. Then comes the gift-back.

One lesson: write the handover into the deal before anything gets built, the way build-operate-transfer contracts already do. A gift-back agreed up front is a bargain. A gift-back forced after the fact is a fight.

Build or conserve? Both.

Some of my generation’s interest in socialism comes from climate, and a sense that growth itself is the problem.

So we’re told to pick: build, or conserve. That’s a false choice. Here’s the rule instead:

Be abundant in flows. Conserve the stocks.

Build, recycle and regenerate freely. But don’t run down aquifers, topsoil or ore bodies faster than they come back, and push heavy mining out to the asteroids.

The Earth should be a garden, not a mine. I made the full case in Part 9. As I put it in Part 3, the goal is a system that “creates abundance without burning out.”

Where to push

For that, I lean on the systems thinker Donella Meadows. In her 1999 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, she ranked twelve places to push on a system, from weakest to strongest. Here’s how this series maps onto her list:

The paradigm (her #2): from dividing scarce goods to distributing abundant ones. From labor to will.
The goal (#3): a floor for everyone and a frontier for anyone, instead of growth or shareholder return for its own sake.
Self-organization (#4): parties and guilds that anyone can form, and that form and disband as needed.
The rules (#5): the human-will rule, one person one vote, capped returns, and trusts that can’t be sold.
Information flows (#6): Meadows tells of identical houses where some electric meters sat in the basement and others in the front hall. Where people could see the meter, electricity use ran 30 percent lower, at the same prices. Every trust should put its meter in the front hall: what the machines made, what got used, where the surplus went.
Parameters (#12): tax rates and subsidies. Meadows put these dead last: they get most of our attention and rarely change much.

That’s why the tax reforms in Part 18: Every Spending Bill Should Show Up on Your Paycheck are a bridge, not the destination. The floor isn’t a tax rate. It’s a design.

Success to the successful

Meadows also named a trap: the “success to the successful” loop. Winners get rewarded with the means to win again. Rich people collect interest, poor people pay it, and the gap compounds.

Her classic fixes were progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes and good public schools. (Sweden dropped one of those, which is one reason I don’t think Sweden is the final answer.)

In Thinking in Systems (2008), she adds more ways out: let losers leave and start a new game, cap how much of the pie any winner can take, and level the field. Worldbuilders build those in:

Capped returns. Builders earn a return up to a ceiling, and then the infrastructure goes to the community.
The floor. Losing a round never means losing your home. You can always walk away and start a new quest.
Trusts that can’t be sold. Nobody can buy up the inputs of abundance, so no one can corner them.

Ostrom’s spec sheet

If trusts hold the machines, they need a design that works. The best I know comes from Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for showing that communities can govern shared resources without a central planner or a private owner.

In Governing the Commons (1990), she found that long-lasting commons shared a set of design principles. Here they are, as listed in her Nobel lecture, with how trusts would meet each:

Clear boundaries. Membership by residency, and it moves with you when you move.
Rules that fit local conditions, with costs in proportion to benefits. Each town decides what sits on top of the floor. Quests draw machine labor from the surplus, by demand, and each charter reserves a share of that surplus for personal quests. There’s no standing policing of use: outsized use during a shortage gets a review, and when demand for the essentials outruns supply, a temporary conservation flag, like a power grid’s demand-response alert, puts the essentials first and lifts automatically once supply recovers.
Collective choice. One person, one vote.
Monitoring. The meter in the front hall.
Graduated sanctions. Small penalties first, bigger ones for repeat abuse.
Cheap, local conflict resolution. And a government whose job is settling disputes between communities.
Recognized rights to self-govern. A state charter for every trust.
Nested enterprises. Town trusts that federate into regional ones, the way rural electric co-ops did. The federation holds the regional half of everyone’s share.

Wired to accumulate

Humans are wired to accumulate. Thorstein Veblen named “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class back in 1899. Those Swedish watches are a very old instinct.

You can’t design that out of people. But you can channel it into status that doesn’t cost anyone else: mastery of a craft, quests completed, a reputation in your guild.

Video games figured this out long ago. Players grind for hundreds of hours for a rank, a rare cosmetic, or a title next to their name, and none of it takes bread off anyone’s table. That’s the striving a world of abundance should reward.

Something higher than stuff

Still, if all of this ends with everyone owning nicer things, we’ve aimed too low.

In Part 1, I called the world we want “a world of ultimate self-actualization.” A floor under everyone means each of us gets to find out what we’d do if survival weren’t the question.

But Abraham Maslow didn’t stop at self-actualization. Late in life, he added a level above it, self-transcendence: serving something bigger than yourself.

For a civilization, I think that bigger thing is the frontier: exploring the universe, and learning what’s out there and what we’re for. That’s the second half of the title.

The floor is for everyone. The frontier is open to anyone who wants to go. I make the case for self-transcendence in Part 16: Above Self-Actualization Is the Universe.

For readers outside America

I’m writing mostly for Americans, and a lot of Americans right now want America to come first. Fine.

The system I’m describing is for all of humanity, and I think an America-first argument actually leads there. Here’s why: China is already exporting its stack.

DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025 under an MIT license, free to use and modify. Alibaba’s Qwen is now the world’s most downloaded open model family, with 151,448 derivative models on Hugging Face, by that site’s count.

In late 2025, Singapore’s national AI program rebuilt its regional language model on Qwen, dropping Meta’s model to do it.

Open weights became a stack other countries build on, and whoever’s stack the world builds on gets a big say in where it goes. The US government sees this too.

In July 2025, the White House issued an executive order on Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack, which set up a program to promote exports of “full-stack” packages of American chips, cloud, models and applications.

My twist: sell first, open eventually. Sell the stack now, so the builders get their return.

Then open it on a schedule, so every country can run its own nodes. That’s the gift-back at the scale of the planet.

There’s precedent. After the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983, killing all 269 people aboard, the Reagan administration opened GPS to civilian use. For years, the military still blurred the public signal on purpose.

Then, just after midnight at the end of May 1, 2000, the US turned that off. President Clinton said civilian users would be able to pinpoint locations up to ten times more accurately.

America built GPS, paid for it, and gave it to the world. It’s in our phones, our planes and our maps. Nobody thinks America lost that deal.

And the floor itself is an American idea. In Agrarian Justice (1797), Thomas Paine proposed a national fund that would pay every person a sum when they came of age, and he was clear about why: “It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice.”

Objections

Isn’t this just socialism with extra steps?

It’s close to libertarian socialism, as I said. But it isn’t what most people picture when they hear “socialism.” Nobody’s labor gets planned, nobody’s business gets nationalized, and markets stay open for everything above the floor.

What changes is that the inputs of abundance belong to the places they serve, instead of to whoever bought them first.

If nobody has to work, won’t people stop doing anything?

Some will rest for a while. Most won’t stay there. People want to build, compete, teach and make things.

Just look at Sweden’s watches, or any video game. The human-will rule doesn’t ask people to work. It guarantees they get to.

Why would billionaires ever give anything back?

Some will, for legacy, the way Carnegie did. The rest should agree to it up front, as a condition of building. Written into the contract before the first shovel goes in, a gift-back is just a deal.

Why would America give its technology away?

Because it already did, with GPS, and won. Selling first gets the builders paid. Opening later makes the American stack the one the world builds on.

The creed

Here’s what Worldbuilders believe.

Speed isn’t the question. Direction is. Machine labor can end the age of dividing scarce goods and start the age of distributing abundant ones.

The machines that make the essentials should belong to the places they serve. Builders should get their return, and then give it back. We should be abundant in flows and conserve the stocks.

And once everyone is safe, everyone should be free to aim as high as they want, all the way out to the stars.

From each according to their will. To each according to their needs.

A floor for everyone. A frontier for anyone.

Above the floor, some things stay scarce. Next, I follow where that scarcity goes once AI can copy anything, in Part 11: Remix Will Kill the Copy, Not the Creator.