Capital Has No One to Write to It
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
The colonel, to whom García Márquez didn't even give a name, had been waiting 15 years for a letter the government had promised him—one that would confirm the pension owed to him for his service in the army. But the letter never came, and he and his wife were starving in a miserable house in a small Colombian town.
Like the colonel, capital—that cultural construct we’ve created to describe the desire of some people to make money with their money—has been waiting 25 years for a promise to be fulfilled.
Until around the year 2000 (give or take a decade), capital was a central pillar of the economy. This was because, up to that point, economic growth and development had largely meant extracting wealth from the Earth, and that required immense force. You had to carve a path into the world, open a mine, extract iron, transport it, melt it, shape it into a part, assemble it with others, and transport it again. No single person could provide all that effort. Not even a small group. It took the combined strength of thousands or millions across multiple countries to pull a car or a washing machine out of the Earth. That’s what capital did: it advanced that effort in the form of money lent up front. That’s why, until the year 2000, capital was at the heart of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the “geosphere” (the physical world), and capital-holders were kings of that world.
But with the advent of the internet, the course of human development changed. Suddenly, the most valuable things and greatest innovations were no longer born from tearing things out of the Earth. Wealth was increasingly found in the noosphere, the realm of human thought.
Suddenly, every major innovation of the 21st century was an idea: the CRISPR method, mRNA vaccines, the misleadingly named “artificial intelligence,” social networks, or blockchain. All of them.
And the problem for capital is that in the noosphere, force is worthless. Massive amounts of money are not needed to generate ideas—certainly not at the same scale as what was needed to build dams, airports, or explore the ocean for oil.
Quite the opposite. The breakthrough we’ve seen with LLMs came from collaboration between several universities and a handful of tech companies—but ultimately, it’s the work of a few hundred people over a number of years, many of them in public institutions. The same happened with CRISPR. Meanwhile, some technologies have flipped the world on its head with little more than a dream and a laptop—WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, to name a few.
Meanwhile, capital, like the colonel, has been waiting 25 years for the letter that would return it to the center of society. It tried in 2000, throwing every last penny into anything ending in “.com.” When that didn’t work, it invented mortgage derivatives, triggering the 2008 crisis and the Great Recession that followed. And it still refuses to accept that the promised letter may never come. That’s why it keeps inflating bubble after bubble, chasing anything that might look like it could one day become a “big, investable thing”—at least long enough to sell the stock to some unsuspecting buyer.
That’s why there are startups that go a decade without turning a profit, surviving on one funding round after another. That’s why crypto works the way it does. And it’s why housing has become the dumping ground for all the capital that can’t find a home on the stock market.
Since the pandemic, capital has been pouring into a new bubble tied to a few tech giants. In recent years, what the markets call the “Magnificent Seven” stocks in the U.S.—Microsoft (×3), Apple (×4), Amazon (×2), Meta/Facebook (×3), NVIDIA (×20), Tesla (×9), and Alphabet/Google (×3)—have multiplied their market value, accumulating trillions of dollars in unrealized expectations of future profit.
And just a few days ago, OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT, which still isn’t publicly traded—put the cherry on top with the largest funding round in history: $6.6 billion, bringing its total valuation to $157 billion. That’s about 50% more than the GDP of Barcelona, for comparison.
This, despite the fact that in recent months, several major players have issued warnings that the so-called “Artificial Intelligence” will not generate profits proportional to the trillion dollars investors plan to throw at it. That’s not to say that AI won’t change the world—just that it won’t do so by generating the kind of profits that cars or oil once did. Simply put, the world doesn’t work that way anymore.
Sooner or later (and I believe it will be sooner), the music will stop, and everyone will rush for the last chair left in the room. What matters now is that, this time, instead of panicking, we take the time to imagine what a world without the need for capital—or even for brute effort—might look like. A world of ingenuity. A world where everything, from our time to our sense of meaning, can change for the better.