Elon Musk is not forcing Starlink on South Africa because he wants to make more money. AI and automation will radically reduce human labour in many sectors in a few short years and separate productivity from employment. Once this happens, the wage-based economy we have become accustomed to will collapse—and with it, the livelihoods of billions.
When generative AI displaces 99% of the working population, the resulting mass unemployment will trigger social unrest on an unprecedented scale. The oligarchs, unwilling to give up control, will respond with brutal suppression, killing millions and herding the rest into Hunger Games-style containment zones.
You may be thinking, “Well, all past innovations created new job opportunities, that’s how progress works”, but this fundamentally misses the point. Generative AI is not like the steam engine or the internet. It’s not a tool that augments human labour; it replaces it wholesale.
In the AI revolution, unlike in the industrial or digital revolution, the pace of labour displacement will outstrip the pace of adaptation. The few new job roles that emerge—prompt engineer, model fine-tuner, AI ethicist—will be niche, hyper-specialised, and short-lived. By the time people train for them, they will already be automated.
This isn’t a cycle of creative destruction. It’s just destruction. Human labour will not be restructured—it’ll be made obsolete. And once the system no longer needs Homo sapiens to produce value, it will no longer need them at all. At this point, power will become the goal in itself. Not wealth accumulation.
If you’re thinking about fighting back, history shows that elites defend their privilege violently. But in a hyper-automated future—where every movement is tracked, every dissent preempted by algorithms, and every act of resistance met with autonomous force—that violence will become absolute. Surveillance and repression will be total.
The government can’t help either. In a true AI corporatocracy, the state will no longer act as a counterbalance to capital—it will be a subsidiary. After all, governments already depend on tech giants for critical infrastructure: the internet, cloud storage, data analytics, and surveillance. This has embedded corporate power deep within governments.
When the machines take over, policy will not be shaped through public debate, but by algorithms owned and controlled by private entities. Government regulation will become performative because regulators will rely on the very firms they’re meant to police for expertise and infrastructure.
The traditional social contract will disintegrate and the real authority will no longer lie in law or representation, it will reside with those who own the code and the computing power.
Consider how Elon Musk is bulldozing his way into South Africa with his Starlink, openly disregarding the policies of a democratically elected government. This is not just a tech rollout, it’s a demonstration of where real sovereignty now lies.
Some believe Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the solution. This sounds good in theory, but it rests on fragile assumptions:
First, it requires the powerful to share their wealth voluntarily or to be compelled by a force strong enough to make them. History offers little evidence that elites give up power without resistance, and as we’ve just seen, most governments are not capacitated to fight back against tech oligarchs.
Second, the idea of a UBI assumes the continued legitimacy of the state and democratic oversight. But in an AI-driven corporatocracy, where the state functions as a subsidiary of capital, who enforces such redistribution? Who decides what is “basic”? And for how long?
No, the masses cannot use their numbers to overturn the system. Under the tech feudal system, protest will be moot because, without material leverage, protest is just noise.
Traditional activism worked when labour could strike, boycott, or shame. But in a post-labour world, AI doesn’t need your consent, your labour, or your opinion.
Technocrats will live in insulated digital fiefdoms, protected by security, biometrics, and machine learning models that predict and neutralise dissent. Mass action will become impossible when information is algorithmically fragmented and surveillance is predictive.
The elite will not fear the masses because they will no longer need them. When AI can design, manufacture, govern, and wage war better than humans, the underclass will be irrelevant, except as a threat to be managed. In other words, how do you threaten an elite that doesn’t need you?
If you’re still clinging to the idea that governments will rein in AI and defend the public interest, consider Palantir Technologies—a company that now effectively governs large parts of the world’s security, immigration, policing, and intelligence apparatuses.
Palantir’s platforms—Gotham and Foundry—integrate vast data from governments, militaries, and corporations into decision-making engines. These are not just tools of analysis; they are tools of governance. Once deployed, they structure how institutions see the world and what actions they deem rational.
At Davos in 2020, Palantir CEO Alex Karp was quoted saying, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people”. This isn’t hyperbole. Palantir’s systems are used for drone strike targeting, immigration raids, predictive policing, and battlefield coordination.
In conflict zones and cities alike, Palantir turns data into lethal action. As militaries and police forces outsource decision-making to these platforms, the centre of authority shifts from humans to algorithms, and from elected leaders to private software vendors.
Palantir is not shy about its ambitions. It wants “to be the most important software company in the world”. This is not about market share, it’s about global command and its biggest clients aren’t consumers—they’re states: the Pentagon, ICE, MI5, and the militaries of Ukraine and Israel.
What happens when a private company’s AI models are more central to a nation’s operations than its elected officials? What happens when governments depend on a company’s surveillance platforms to function?
You get a world where policy is led by proprietary algorithms, and where democracy becomes little more than a decorative ritual—because the real decisions are made in the data layer, owned and controlled by the tech oligarchs.
And Palantir isn’t alone. Companies like Amazon (AWS GovCloud), Google (JEDI cloud bid), and South Africa’s newest best friend, Starlink, are embedding themselves into national infrastructures in ways that make traditional political accountability obsolete.
But this isn’t just about profit, it’s about power. In the world we’re heading toward, profit will cease to be the motive. After all, profit is only a means to an end—power. Once the tech oligarchs have secured total control over infrastructure, data, governance, and force, the pursuit of profit will become redundant.
When they own the platforms, the compute, the surveillance apparatus, and the means of enforcement, the tech bros will no longer need markets.
This is the crux:
When AI surpasses human capabilities in designing, manufacturing, managing logistics, controlling drones, writing laws, and shaping public opinion, the elite will have little incentive to share such power. There will be no economic incentive to socialise AI, only to monopolise and militarise it.
The result will be a post-democratic world where elections are devoid of all influence, and governance is dictated by those who control the AI. Power will no longer be rooted in land or labour but in algorithmic dominance—a new form of feudalism under technology ownership.
Rather than exploiting the masses as cheap labour, the system will simply render them obsolete, excluding them from the levers of power.
What will life look like? The permanent underclass will be pacified with digital distractions—virtual bread and circuses—while being physically and economically segregated, left to languish on the margins of a society that no longer needs them.
If you struggle to grasp what’s coming, it’s because you’re trapped in a moral framework that insists good always triumphs over evil.
It’s a comforting fiction deeply embedded in religion, media, and civic mythology, that no matter how dark things get, justice will somehow always prevail.
People naturally assume the arc of history bends toward progress, that the system will self-correct, and that “things will just work out.”
But history doesn’t guarantee happy endings, only outcomes, and there are only two outcomes now:
1. Techno-Feudalism: A permanent underclass quarantined in decaying urban zones, kept docile with VR entertainment and synthetic food, while the elite live in fortified enclaves.
2. Mass Extermination: If the dispossessed resist, the oligarchy will deploy AI-driven warfare to cull the population and ensure total and ultimate dominance.
By Sizwe SikaMusi
Political Analyst and Writer