Post-capitalism
How the transition happened, from capitalism to Pluralism
A scenario · London, 2025–2060
We wrote a scenario for what post-capitalism could look like by 2060. Not a utopia, but a fight, a hard time, and a new system no one idealizes.1
It is informed by trend extrapolation, real-world signals from law, ecology and labor, and a model in which the dominant system declines as an emergent one rises.2 The panel on the right is the state of the world: it changes as you scroll.
Historical evidence
Present signals
Scenario extrapolation
Open questions
COMPILED JUNE 2026 | GLOBAL SCOPE, UK / LONDON AS ANCHOR | MODEL: TWO LOOPS × PESTEL × OWN SIGNALS
2025 – 2030
The cracks become visible
The dominant system meets a ceiling it cannot price its way out of. Nothing collapses; the story simply stops convincing.
Historical evidence
Six of nine planetary boundaries crossed (Stockholm Resilience Centre,
Science Advances, 2023);
3 a seventh, ocean acidification, follows, with humanity consuming
1.8 Earths and Overshoot Day landing in July (2025).
4
At the same moment, accumulation turns obscene: shareholders put one man on the path to becoming the first trillionaire, while a river is granted legal rights and a council adopts a Rights of Nature framework. Legitimacy cracks first, before any structure changes.
Present signals
~$1T Tesla pay package (Fortune, 2025);
5 River Ouse charter 2025 and Maidstone Rights of Nature, April 2026;
6 Fink at Davos 2026: “the system left too many out.”
People realized they lived in a fictitious scarcity: resources weren’t missing; distribution was.
Scenario extrapolation
By 2030 the growth story has lost its grip on the young, and +1.5 °C is sustained. Nothing has been replaced yet, but the old account no longer settles the argument.
2028 – 2035
The revolution of intelligences
Two intelligences arrive at once: the machine kind, and the more-than-human kind we had refused to notice.
Machines take the repetitive work. What is left for people is what needs craft, judgment, or care. The legal form that grows is not the corporation but the cooperative: to work becomes, at once, to own. The turn is not “more with less” to free capital, but enough with far less drudgery, to free time.
Historical evidence
Generative AI could automate 60–70% of knowledge-work time (McKinsey, 2023);
9 Project CETI identifies combinatorial structure in sperm-whale vocalisations (2024).
10
Present signals
22% of jobs disrupted by 2030 (WEF, 2025);
7 ≥15% of operational decisions made autonomously by 2028 (Gartner).
The second intelligence is older. Around 2028, a first ecological translator learns to render what water, soil, air and species are doing into terms a public can argue with, built as much from sensor data as from ways of listening some peoples had never lost.
Scenario extrapolation
Between 2029 and 2033 a decisive idea sets: if accumulated human knowledge gives AI its value, part of that wealth belongs to everyone. The sovereign knowledge funds are born.
Open question
If knowledge is collective, who owns the models trained on it, and who decides what they are optimised for?
2030 – 2041
New possibilities
Four forces contend for the exit. In the end it is not argument that settles it, but scarcity.
Neo-growthers insist more technology and green innovation are enough. Techno-sovereigns, the platforms, want to privatise AI, data, energy and compute, and charge rent on them. Retro-conservatives want to restore hierarchy, order and social discipline. And the Pluralists argue for sufficiency, commons, redistribution, rights of nature and economic democracy.
Scenario extrapolation
The Blackout Decade (2031–2041): the AI bubble bursts as the climate stops being a future threat and becomes a present bill. Energy and compute are rationed. Dark winters, impossible summers.
People understood, not in a seminar but by being cold, that infinite growth had always been an accounting fiction.
The Pluralists win, not by being the good guys, but by being in the right place. The limits were never won in argument: reality imposed them. Growth simply stopped being possible. What the Pluralists did was take the compute infrastructure the Techno-sovereigns had built and put it to work inside those limits, which no one else was willing to accept. The world still carries its rivals’ DNA.
Scenario extrapolation
From that lived scarcity comes money split in two: points for investment between firms, credits for personal consumption. Two non-convertible currencies that make it arithmetically impossible to turn corporate gains into private fortune.
Present signals
Oil demand peaks before 2030 (IEA,
Oil 2025); copper and lithium deficits around 2035 (IEA Critical Minerals).
8
Open question
Crises also produce nationalism and eco-fascism, both still alive in this world. Nothing guaranteed this break would fall toward the commons rather than the fence.
2035 – 2045
Nature as a political voice
Nature stops being a resource and becomes a party to the negotiation. Not a mystic one, a procedural one.
ELMO is the infrastructure that makes this possible: ecological translation and political mediation. It does not speak for the Earth and it is not a neutral authority. It renders ecological processes legible enough to be argued about, and it is built to be contested.
Historical evidence
The Whanganui River granted legal personhood (New Zealand, 2017); the River Ouse charter (2025) and Maidstone’s Rights of Nature framework (April 2026) carry the same logic into the UK.
6
Scenario extrapolation
ELMO’s governance is deliberately hard to capture: three keys to change it (civic, scientific and ecological), a public audit every five years, a constitutional convention every ten, and a right of appeal for any community it rules against.
That last provision was not designed in the abstract. Around 2043, the Severn river verdict holds that an agricultural valley must be flooded to protect a wetland regulating half a basin. The reasoning was sound; the valley lost its fields. From that wound comes Human potential, a legal movement that wins seats and repeats a line the system takes seriously:
“ELMO says what its interpreters want it to say.”
Open question
Can you trust whoever translates? Every ecological claim passes through people with training, funding and interests. That this movement exists, and is heard, is part of what keeps the system honest.
2040 – 2050
Institutionalising the common
What was improvised in crisis gets written into institutions, which is where transitions are usually won or lost.
Scenario extrapolation
At the end of 2041 the universal dividend begins, funded by the levy on automation. It doesn’t make anyone rich; it removes the fear.
The essentials (housing, health, transport, energy, connection) stop being bought: they are simply had. They call it decommodifying. And productive property (land, water, housing, data, compute) can no longer be accumulated: it becomes common, cooperative or public, held in usufruct. Access over ownership.
A whole sector becomes visible: Kinship: raising, tending elders, healing, keeping a neighbourhood or a stretch of river alive. What capitalism made invisible is here counted and named. Some of it is paid, the rest recognised in access and time, but none of it is worth zero.
Historical evidence
Feminist economics showed for decades that GDP ignored the care work sustaining everything else (Waring, 1988); Universal Basic Services were already formulated as an alternative to basic income (IGP, 2017).
Present signals
Annual working hours modelled to fall from ~2,100 toward 1,000 on the path to 2100 (World Inequality Lab, 2026).
2
Open question
Recognising care is not the same as distributing it. Without deliberate redistribution, it falls back on women, exactly as before, only now it is measured.
2045 – 2058
Pluralism is born
Three names organise the world, the way “liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy” once did.
The worldview and cultural frame is Pluralism: the art of living together within limits. Its economy is the Living Economy. Its politics is Symbiocracy: a democracy in which nature, too, is represented.
Desire didn’t die; it moved. You no longer accumulate money; you accumulate recognition. The rarest luxury, the forbidden one, is not being measured.
Open questions · honest limitations
Economic concentration was dismantled and replaced by informational concentration. New elites formed around knowledge rather than capital (ELMO interpreters, commons custodians, system architects), holding access and influence rather than fortunes, and passing both to their children. The three-key lock that prevents capture also produces deadlock: when the keys disagree, a region can stall for months. And the world is not uniform — charter cities, petro-enclaves and libertarian holdouts persist. Did we trade billionaires for an aristocracy of knowledge? There is no reassuring answer.
Scenario extrapolation
No one here believes they arrived somewhere. The Pluralist claim was never that a perfect society is reachable, only that a society able to correct itself in time is.
2060 · A morning in Pluralist London
Pluralism: London
Naima wakes early, the city still cool, because the day is organised around the sun.
In the kitchen the mycelium panel on the wall breathes slowly. Through the window, what was once a six-lane avenue is now a row of trees and shared gardens. Naima is an ELMO interpreter: she translates ecological processes into terms a public can argue with, and she is paid, in part, to say out loud when she isn’t sure.
The first thing a visitor from the past wouldn’t understand is not the heat or the living panels. It’s that capitalism ended and almost no one remembers the exact day.
Fifty years ago we wouldn’t even have known how to listen. What we say from here, together, is still unwritten.