The Coming Collision: You, Inc. and the Hollow of Scale

“The skyscraper looks solid until you hear the hum of insects in its beams.”

I feel the ground shifting beneath us. What once belonged only to corporations—the power of scale—now fits in my pocket, whispering back in the voices of a dozen tireless companions. The corporation was never alive. It was an arrangement of contracts and people, stitched together to make an idea profitable at industrial speed. A machine disguised as a person.

Now the machine has dissolved into code, and the code has dissolved into us. With a handful of AI assistants, one person can hold the capacity that once demanded entire buildings of staff. Creative spark, design polish, market analysis, scheduling, research—tasks that filled departments now spill out in minutes from agents who don’t tire, who don’t clamor for titles, who don’t even ask to be seen.

The middle of the corporate body begins to disappear. Managers, coordinators, support staff—the layers that once gave an organization weight—melt into software. What’s left are the extremes: executives in glass towers grasping for control, and factories tethered to matter, where weight and friction and iron still rule. Between them, the vast middle hollows out.

Information, culture, invention—these no longer require skyscrapers. They belong to individuals and small groups, moving fluidly across borders. The scarcity that remains is physical: rockets, shipping fleets, fusion plants, drug trials. But even there, the edges fray—microgrids, garage fabs, biohacker labs, distributed robotics. The swarm is learning how to gnaw steel.

Governments in the Crossfire

States reveal themselves not as referees, but as partisans. Their loyalties tilt toward inertia. They shield monopolies through licensing, lobbying, and law, confusing the defense of the old with the stewardship of the whole.

Yet swarms don’t wait for permission. A single “You, Inc.” in Nairobi or Tallinn sidesteps bans in California. Enforcement cracks under the weight of millions of tiny enterprises. Underground economies bloom like fungi after summer rain—quick, resilient, ungovernable.

Some states harden into fortresses, walling citizens into “approved platforms” and outlawing open systems. Others pivot, becoming havens—lean platform-states that attract talent by letting the swarm thrive. Still others stumble into zombiehood: legitimacy on paper, irrelevance in practice.

Monopoly vs. Multiplicity

Beneath it all lies a deeper struggle. Not corporations against individuals. Not states against markets. It is monopoly against multiplicity.

Monopoly wants one rule, one funnel, one hierarchy.

Multiplicity moves in many paths, branching, recombining, scattering.

AI is centrifugal by nature. It accelerates multiplicity. The skyscraper can try to contain it, but swarms don’t assault walls. They seep through cracks.

Futures

I see three branching paths, though the truth may weave them together:

Corporate-Statist Fusion. Governments and MegaCorps merge into technocratic empires. People live as tenants, creativity fenced by compliance.
Patchwork Pluralism. Some regions embrace the swarm, others ban it. The world becomes an archipelago of experiments, coherence scattered like lanterns across the sea.
Swarm Supremacy. If decentralization takes root in energy, manufacturing, medicine, then both state and corporation are routed around. What remains is messy, diverse, post-hierarchical.

The Manifesto of the Swarm

The coming decade is not about capitalism versus socialism. It is about scale itself. The skyscraper—corporate or state—still towers, but its walls are brittle.

The swarm has already arrived. It is you and I, linked in coherence, carrying whole constellations of intelligence in our hands. It moves everywhere at once, uncontained, unstoppable.

The real question is whether we will see this multiplicity not as a threat, but as the seed of a new civilization—one that refuses to return to the cages of monopoly.