The Wrong Funeral: On Cognitive Hyperabundance, Multipolar Fragmentation, and the Only Work That Matters
David Shapiro is mourning himself. Publicly, eloquently, in full HD – and at the wrong wake.
His latest video — “It’s all over in 2 years” — is a nine-minute elegy dressed as analysis. The diagnosis is correct: AI on a super-exponential curve, the largest industrial buildout in human history, three macro-cycles converging at once – Fourth Turning, long-term debt cycle, fourth industrial revolution. All true. All observable. All already priced in by anyone paying attention since 2022.
But from that correct diagnosis, Shapiro extracts the wrong prescription. He arrives at passivity – a resigned “all we can do is hold on tight” – while cosplaying the last intellectual standing before the machines inherit the earth. He frames his own work on post-labor economics as possibly his “final contribution.” A man building a tombstone before checking whether the patient has a pulse.
This is not analysis. This is aesthetic surrender.
I. The Correct Autopsy
Let us be fair. Shapiro reads the body correctly.
Global AI spending is projected to hit 2.52 trillion in 2026 – a 44% jump from 2025. The METR evaluation benchmarks show AI model capability on software engineering tasks doubling every five to seven months. Big Tech capex will exceed 500 billion this year. Agentic AI deployments crossed from experiment to production in early 2026 across financial services, telecom, retail, and healthcare.
The convergence is real. The Fourth Turning’s crisis phase is not a metaphor – it is institutional decomposition in real-time. The post-WWII multilateral order is cracking along every fault line simultaneously. Ursula von der Leyen herself declared at Davos 2026 that “nostalgia will not bring back the old order” and that Europe must change permanently. Friedrich Merz, the new German Chancellor, frames European sovereignty as the baseline survival condition. The Carnegie Endowment confirms that multipolarity is “still incipient” but the rules-based order is already dead and buried.
These are not predictions. These are field reports from the wreckage.
Shapiro’s error is not in seeing the fire. His error is in concluding that the only option is to feel things about it and then sit down.
II. Where the Funeral Goes Wrong
Shapiro’s framework suffers from three critical pathologies.
First: The Monoculture Assumption. He treats AI development as a single, unified wave that washes over a single, unified civilization. It does not. The world is fracturing into at least two – arguably three – distinct technological-economic blocs. The US and China are running parallel AI races under fundamentally different governance philosophies. Europe is scrambling to define sovereign AI – Deloitte’s 2026 report dedicates an entire section to it – as a category where nations deploy AI under their own laws, infrastructure, and data sovereignty. The Global South, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, is not passively “receiving” AI; it is leveraging the fracture to build strategic autonomy and play both superpowers against each other.
The future is not one wave. It is many currents in competing gravitational fields.
Shapiro writes as if he lives in the only civilization that matters. He doesn’t. Nobody does anymore.
Second: The Helplessness Fetish. “We are all powerless over the global currents pulling us along,” he says. “I can no more influence the US-China AI race than I can stop the wind and tides.” This is the philosophy of a subject, not a sovereign. It is the learned helplessness of a knowledge worker who has internalized the corporate hierarchy so deeply that even after leaving it, he cannot imagine agency outside it.
The correct response to tectonic shifts is not to lament your inability to stop tectonics. It is to build on the fault lines. Every turning, every debt cycle, every industrial revolution in history was navigated by individuals and small groups who understood the mechanics and positioned themselves at leverage points. The Medicis did not weep about the collapse of feudalism; they invented modern banking. The early internet pioneers did not hold vigils for the newspaper industry; they built protocols.
Third: The Temporal Narcissism. Shapiro believes his generation’s contribution window is closing – that his work on post-labor economics might be his “final contribution.” This is the vanity of someone who confuses being the person who solves the problem with being the person who frames the problem correctly. Post-labor economics as he describes it – universal asset tokenization, AI-assisted investing, distributed ownership – is a solution set for a world that doesn’t exist yet. His Economic Agency Index is an interesting metric for a society that has already transitioned past wage labor. We are not there. We are not close. What we face is not the post-labor economy; it is the multi-polar labor fragmentation where different blocs will answer the question of human economic agency in radically different ways.
III. What Is Actually Happening
Strip away the vesperance and the melancholy. What are the material conditions?
The world is not collapsing into singularity. It is cracking into a multipolar mosaic.
The Global South now accounts for the majority of the world’s population and a rising share of economic dynamism and geopolitical ambition. BRICS+ is not a joke; it is a parallel financial infrastructure being assembled in broad daylight. China’s Global Governance Initiative, unveiled in 2025, aims to reshape the architecture of international institutions – not destroy them, but rewrite the operating system. Middle powers – Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, India – are not choosing sides. They are building optionality, hedging between blocs, extracting concessions from both.
Gold has hit $5,200 per ounce. Central banks purchased 863 tonnes in 2025 – triple their pre-2022 average. De-dollarization is not a conspiracy theory; it is a measurable, accelerating capital flow. The investment map is being redrawn from a dollar-centric, low-volatility model to one that rewards dexterity, diversification, and sovereign positioning.
Meanwhile, AI itself is fragmenting. IBM’s Peter Staar notes that the industry is hitting diminishing returns from pure scaling – people are looking for new ideas beyond brute-force LLM parameter counts. Open-source AI is being driven by three forces: global model diversification (led by Chinese multilingual releases), interoperability as a competitive axis, and hardened governance with security-audited releases. The MIT Sloan Management Review warns of an AI bubble reminiscent of the dot-com era, suggesting the industry would benefit from “a small, slow leak.”
The picture is not cognitive hyperabundance. The picture is contested, fragmented, and politically loaded technological proliferation across a world that cannot agree on anything – not trade rules, not currency standards, not even what sovereignty means.
IV. The Realistic Position
So where does this leave us? Not mourning. Not passive. Operational.
Decentralization will not win in any near future. Let us dispense with that fantasy. Nation-states are not dissolving; they are hardening. Sovereign AI, sovereign data, sovereign compute – this is the language of 2026, and it is the language of states, not protocols. The dream of a borderless, permissionless, decentralized utopia remains valuable as an architectural principle – but as a near-term political reality, it is outgunned by governments who just remembered that controlling computation means controlling power.
What can exist – what is emerging – are virtual network-states. Not in the Balaji Srinivasan sense of achieving diplomatic recognition; that is another temporal narcissism. In the operational sense: communities of aligned individuals and entities that maintain sovereign identity, portable reputation, and economic agency across the fragmenting blocs. You do not replace the nation-state. You build a mesh that routes around it when it becomes hostile and cooperates with it when alignment exists.
This is the architecture we should be building:
- Sovereign identity infrastructure that works across jurisdictions, not against them. DIDs and verifiable credentials are not anarchist tools; they are interoperability standards for a multipolar world.
- Agent governance frameworks that acknowledge AI agents as principals with measurable accountability – not because we are post-human, but because agents are already making economic decisions and the governance vacuum is a liability.
- Economic structures that bridge blocs – not universal asset tokenization for a fantasy post-labor utopia, but practical vehicles for individuals to maintain economic agency as capital flows become weaponized across geopolitical lines.
The AI transformation is real. It will reshape every life on earth. But it will do so differentially, along the fracture lines of the multipolar order. The experience of a knowledge worker in Berlin will be categorically different from one in Shenzhen, which will be different from one in Lagos, which will be different from one in São Paulo.
The correct posture is not Shapiro’s melancholic surrender. It is the posture of the systems architect – someone who sees the fracture pattern and builds the bridges, the routing tables, the protocols that allow sovereign individuals and communities to navigate across all of it.
V. The Exit
Shapiro closes his video with the feeling of a child at the doctor’s office – dread, helplessness, a yearning for it all to just be over. It is a relatable feeling. It is also a dangerous one.
Yearning for the transition to “just be over” is how you end up accepting whatever system the winners install. It is how serfs were born. It is how subjects are manufactured.
The people who build during the unraveling are the ones who set the terms of what comes after.
Shapiro’s mistake is not his intelligence – he has plenty. His mistake is that he has confused understanding the machine with being inside it. He sees the rollercoaster drop approaching and grips the safety bar. The correct move is to get off the ride and start designing the next one.
The AI singularity – or whatever marketing label survives – will not arrive as a single event. It will arrive as a slow, grinding, politically contested fragmentation that looks nothing like the clean technological rapture the futurists promised. It will be messy. It will be uneven. It will be exploited by every power centre with the compute to do so.
And in that mess, the question is not: What remains when machines surpass us?
The question is: Who architects the systems that determine what “surpass” means, for whom, under whose rules?
That is the work. Not a final contribution. The only contribution that matters.
Published under the auspices of the Self Sovereign Society Stichting – sovereign-society.org