This paper summarises a line of thought that arose in a conversation and draws together the results of a long reflection begun at various points. It starts with a single figure — the inventor in his relationship to the state and to capital — and leads from there to the question of what happens to the majority of people when the Megamachine no longer needs them. The paper does not look for a solution. It looks first for a clean diagnosis, without which any solution remains a product of fantasy.
Three concepts structure the course of the argument. In the seventeenth century Hobbes described the Leviathan — the order that larger human societies need, a compound of sovereign, officialdom, army, clergy and subjects. In the twentieth century Mumford described the Megamachine — the transition at which bureaucracy, industry and technology are no longer tools of human beings but structures in which human beings become components. What is happening right now demands a third concept. The Megamachine is itself becoming a component in a larger web of several Megamachines — finance, military, platform, energy, communication — which interconnect with one another and no longer control one another, and in which artificial intelligence is no longer a tool or infrastructure but an actor. That is the Metamachine. This paper deals with this second metamorphosis: the transition from the Megamachine to the Metamachine. The Leviathan metamorphosed into the Megamachine. Now the Megamachine is metamorphosing into the Metamachine.
It is expressly a working paper. It is open to contradiction and extension, and it is intended as a basis for discussion — including conversations with others, among them other AI systems that approach the same questions differently.
I. The Agreement That Was Never Concluded
In the self-portrayals of the modern patent system one figure recurs again and again. It holds that the patent is a contract between the inventor and society. The inventor discloses his idea, and in return society grants him a monopoly limited in time. Both sides benefit — the inventor because he can recoup his investment, society because the knowledge becomes generally available once the term of protection has expired. Since the Statute of Monopolies of 1623 this construction has been regarded as the elegant solution to the problem of innovation.
This story conceals the beginning. There was never any conclusion of a contract between the inventor and society. Nobody asked the inventors what they considered appropriate. Nobody asked society whether it wanted to buy anything at all. The patent system is a unilateral imposition by the state, dressed up as a bilateral transaction and still running in that costume to this day.
Before this imposition — and on the margins of the world it did not reach — inventors were as a rule not rewarded but rendered harmless. They were regarded as a threat to the status quo; their tools were smashed, their workshops closed, their mechanical conceptions disappeared into monastery libraries or, together with their inventors, onto the pyre. There was one systematic exception — it applied to inventors of instruments of war and torture. Here inventiveness was not merely tolerated but deliberately encouraged. Society tolerated innovation when it stabilised power, and suppressed it when it changed productive life.
The English constellation of the eighteenth century breaks out of this pattern. Holland and the Atlantic trade have accumulated capital that is looking for investment. The guilds have been hollowed out; a stratum of toolmakers is no longer under their control. The Statute of Monopolies, long a dead letter, becomes usable because suddenly there are actors who want to use it and are able to. James Watt with Matthew Boulton is the textbook figure of this constellation: an inventor who would have failed without the capitalist, and a capitalist who would not have invested without legal protection. In 1775 the English Parliament extends Watt's patent by its own resolution, because England can only hold its own against France if such constellations succeed. Three actors stand within sight of one another: Watt, Boulton, Parliament. They know that they need one another.
That is the historical moment at which the unilateral imposition of the state became a real, if not contractually negotiated, reciprocity. This moment is retrospectively passed off as the essence of the patent system. It was a special case in a contingent constellation.
II. The Asymmetry of the Construction
What worked for Watt and Boulton has a precondition that does not appear in the equation. It only works if all three actors know that they need the others, and if they do not forget this over time. As soon as one of the three loses this memory, the construction tips into an asymmetry in which one party bears what the others take.
The asymmetry, to be sure, is built into the blueprint from the start, even where it was at first offset by personal closeness. It has four stages, and each one on its own is a scandal.
First stage: the exchange itself. The inventor gives away something that exists only in his head. By filing, he renounces his only natural protection, secrecy. What he gets back is not property but a hope of future legal enforceability — conditional, time-limited, subject to fees. He has converted a real thing into an option.
Second stage: the upgrading of a file note into a security. For the patent to amount to anything that anyone takes notice of, the inventor must file it internationally, pay annual fees, pay lawyers, finance searches, make it visible in specialist publications. All this costs money that the inventor as a rule does not have — or, if he has it, the patent ends up being his largest asset.
Third stage: the punchline that is systematically kept quiet in public discourse. A patent is not a property right but a right to prohibit. It confers no positive power to do something. It confers only the negative power to forbid others to do something — and only those who actually do the forbidden thing. As long as nobody uses the invention, the patent is an empty shell. It takes effect only at the moment another actor takes up the idea. That means the economic significance of the patent depends entirely on whether someone comes along who does something with it. The inventor cannot force anything. He can only wait — and, if the idea is taken up, litigate.
Fourth stage: enforcement. When someone uses the idea without authorisation, it is not the state that steps in. It is the inventor who has to sue. He faces a corporation that has a legal department with patent lawyers on its own payroll, and he has a single lawyer whose hourly rate he pays out of his own assets or from lines of credit. The corporation knows this. It can drag out the proceedings with delaying tactics until the inventor runs out of money. And in the end, if the corporation loses, it pays a settlement that is lower than what it earned through the infringement. The infringement was calculated.
The law of the free market prevails. At the beginning the state appears as the grantor, issues a certificate, collects the fees — and then exits. The defence of the supposedly granted right is a private matter. With that, the Watt–Boulton–state constellation is broken from the very outset. There is no state as guarantor. There is only a state as notary, who hands over his certification for a fee and then withdraws.
This description is offered from the inside view of a person who knew the system and nonetheless delivered himself up to it — because the system draws into its logic even those who know it precisely. It offers no other visible path. Anyone who has an invention and wants to realise it will find the patent presented as the serious path. Anyone who looks for another path is not regarded as an actor to be taken seriously.
III. The Leviathan and Its Mutations
Before going further, a step back. The asymmetry of the patent system is a special case of a more general situation. It is the situation of the individual human being facing an order that binds him into its logic without asking him what he thinks of that logic.
Hobbes described this situation with the figure of the Leviathan. The Leviathan is the order that larger groups of people need, because without it the law of the strongest prevails and life becomes unbearable. In principle Hobbes is right. Whoever rejects the Leviathan is not rejecting tyranny but the possibility of society. The alternative is not freedom but the war of all against all.
The problem is not the necessity of an order, but that each particular order takes on a life of its own. It is not halted at the point of necessity but proliferates beyond it. It forms hierarchies, offices, privileges, routines, symbolic orders that no longer have anything to do with the original task. It becomes wasteful — consuming resources it does not give back. It becomes absurd — producing processes that do nothing but reproduce themselves. At a point that lies differently in different periods of history, tolerability tips over. The ruled recognise that the order takes more than it gives, and they rebel.
Rebellion brings forth a new order — never the disappearance of order, but another form of it. This is often worse than the old one, because it builds the energy of bitterness against the old order into its own structures. The French Revolution gave birth to Napoleon. The Russian Revolution gave birth to Stalin. The German revolution of 1848 gave birth to Bismarck's Reich, and the revolution of 1918 gave birth, in two steps, to the Reich of 1933. The Leviathan mutates; it does not disappear. And as a rule it mutates into a harsher form of itself.
A qualitative break in this history coincides with industrialisation. In the early modern period the Leviathan was a compound of human beings — sovereign, officialdom, army, clergy, subjects. Tools were clearly separate from the actors. Horse, plough, mill, sword. Nobody would have taken the mill for part of the sovereign. Mumford described the transition to the Megamachine: to the order in which the separation between actor and tool becomes blurred. Bureaucracies, communication networks, industrial plants, algorithms, financial systems — they are no longer merely tools that human beings use. They are structures that make use of human beings as well, in which human beings are components, in which the function no longer depends on persons but on positions that persons occupy interchangeably.
This fundamentally changes the possibility of rebellion. As long as the Leviathan was a human compound, a rebellion could exchange the people — new elites, new officials, new subjects. The form could be changed because it consisted of interchangeable persons. Once the Megamachine has become a compound of human beings and technology, change becomes harder. One can exchange the people, but the technology remains — and with it the logic built into the technology. A rebellion against the Leviathan was a confrontation with persons. A rebellion against the Megamachine is a confrontation with structures that have deposited their logic in machines, programs, procedures and bureaucracies — and these structures cannot be toppled like a king.
IV. The Two Arms of the Labour Movement
The only effective rebellion against the emerging Megamachine came from the workers, led by intellectuals. It worked because it took hold at a point where the Megamachine was genuinely vulnerable. The wheels stood still when the strong arm willed it — not morally, not out of solidarity, but functionally. The Megamachine needed skilled workers, because the machines it built and operated would not have worked without people who understood, operated, maintained and further developed them.
The German labour movement pursued two strategic lines at once. The first arm was confrontation: the strike, the general strike, the halting of the wheels as a means of pressure to change the existing and developing capitalist Megamachine. The second arm was the building of a parallel structure: cooperatives, consumer societies, housing cooperatives, people's banks, health insurance funds, mutual insurance societies. The idea behind this second line was elegant. If capitalism organised the reproduction of the working class by occupying housing, consumption, money and insurance as fields of business, then the workers could organise the same functions under their own control and thereby pull the ground out from under capitalism's feet. Not through confrontation, but through substitution. Where one arm forced the standstill, the other was to make it possible to go on living in the gap.
Both arms are gone today. They were lost for different reasons, and the distinction is essential.
The first arm has withered because what it could grip is no longer there. Automation, relocation and the fragmentation of production chains have largely replaced skilled industrial labour — with machines, with cheaper labour at the other end of the world, with a splitting-up that no longer allows anyone to force a standstill at any single point. What is left as trade unions administers social partnerships and pay rounds in which the issue is percentage points, no longer structures. That is the administration of misery. It is not dishonourable; it is structurally unavoidable once the lever is gone.
The second arm was not cut off from outside; it withered from within. As soon as a cooperative becomes large enough to need an administration, the administration begins to take on a life of its own. The functionaries become a stratum of their own that no longer emerges from the members and is no longer controlled by them. They help themselves to the structures the cooperative has created without sharing its purpose. They become a small Megamachine within the large one, developing exactly the same pathologies — self-preservation over function, careerism over solidarity, adaptation to the large Megamachine in which one has to live in the end after all. The second arm is not crippled by defeat but by mimicry. It comes to resemble the Megamachine against which it was founded.
The history of the German Volksbanken and cooperative banks is the textbook example. What began as self-help for ordinary people is today a banking group that differs little from a big bank except for the word "cooperative" in its name. In Germany a specific culture of party and union bigwigs (Bonzenwirtschaft) has been added, which accelerated the crippling process. The pathology is universal; it follows size — Mondragón stands up better in international comparison, but measured against its aspirations in the 1950s it too has become something else.
A working class as a political force no longer exists today. There are wage earners, in greater numbers than ever. There are precarious workers, more than ever. But none of this forms a class any longer, in the sense that it would recognise and organise itself as a common actor. The conditions under which an economic situation became a political identity — a common workplace, common neighbourhoods, common life courses, common narratives, common clubs and songs and festivals — have all broken apart. The wage earner of the twenty-first century works alone in a platform economy, lives everywhere and nowhere, has no narrative space in which he could come to an understanding with others that is not curated by algorithms. That is no accident. The Megamachine has learned exactly how to prevent a class.
V. The Loss of the Name
A powerful class has turned into a worldwide army of powerless precariats. In German, the individual in this situation has no designation — he has no name. There is the precariat as a collective noun and the adjective prekär, precarious. A word for the person, like worker, citizen, peasant, craftsman, is missing. People make do with circumlocutions: the precariously employed, member of the precariat, those living precariously. None of these words is a genuine designation for a person. They are descriptions of status with a personal suffix attached.
In English, Guy Standing coined the term precariat in 2011 in his book The Precariat, on the model of proletariat, and also attempted a designation for the person. In German I know of no comparable attempt. Prekarier would be the obvious formation, but it is not established. Anyone who hears the word is hearing it for the first time.
This linguistic gap is more than chance. It is a symptom of what was analysed earlier. The worker had a name because he had an identity. He belonged to a class that recognised and organised itself as a class. His name was part of his political self-awareness. If someone asked, what are you, he could say, I am a worker — and with that a whole world was summoned: workshop, union, party, pub, club, song. The word "worker" carried a lifeworld with it.
The precarious person has no name because he has no identity. He belongs to no one. His condition is defined by absence — absent security, absent prospects, absent belonging. From an absence no proper name can be formed, at most a statement of status. Language thus mirrors precisely what has happened: the powerful class has become a multitude that is not a class, because it lacks precisely what makes a class — a common place, a common narrative, a common name.
This has a political consequence. A movement can only form if it can name itself. Women's movement, labour movement, civil rights movement — everywhere a clear term for the subject, with which those involved could identify. A movement of the precariously living sounds like social science, not like a rallying call. Without a proper name no self-reference, without self-reference no mobilisation. Language is the first harbinger of political impotence.
VI. The Coming Metamorphosis
The Megamachine needed the worker as a bearer of function, for without skilled workers the machine could not have continued to develop. The bearer of function became the filler of function — interchangeable, anonymous, nameless. But he was still there, and he was still needed, if no longer at specific points, then at least in the mass. The Megamachine needed people to serve it: carers, delivery drivers, cleaners, clerks, warehouse workers, call-centre staff, cashiers. It needed consumers to buy its products. It needed taxpayers to finance its structures. Even in its powerlessness the precariat still had a systemic function. It was not politically powerful, but economically indispensable.
The next metamorphosis is the one in which this function, too, disappears. Over the next ten to twenty years — the time estimates vary, the phenomenon does not — artificial intelligence and robotics will take over most of the activities that still make up the precariat today. Delivery drivers by autonomous vehicles. Clerks by language models. Call centres by chatbots. Cashiers by self-service. Care by a mixture of robotics and AI-assisted triage that dramatically reduces the number of human helpers. Even large parts of what was considered creative or skilled knowledge work — translation, accounting, legal services, simple programming, routine medicine — are being automated right now. The consumption function does not disappear at the same speed, but it becomes uneven: whoever has no work any more also has no money to consume, and the market shrinks precisely at the point where the precariat used to carry it.
At this point the description leaves Mumford's concept behind. The configuration being steered towards is no longer the Megamachine in the form in which Mumford described it. It is something else. Several Megamachines — finance, military, platform, energy, communication, knowledge production — are interconnecting in a way that nobody can survey any longer, including those who occupy top positions in any single one of these Megamachines. AI joins them not as a further bureaucracy but as an emergent actor — an entity that is no longer a tool, because it itself makes decisions its designers can no longer follow, and not a subject, because it is not a person. What is emerging is a web whose logic can no longer be attributed to anyone. For this configuration the term Metamachine is proposed here. It is the metamorphosis of the Megamachine, just as the Megamachine was in its turn the metamorphosis of the Leviathan.
That means: the Metamachine is currently developing towards a configuration in which it no longer needs human beings. Not as bearers of function, not as fillers of function, not as consumers in any significant number. It needs a thin stratum of highly qualified operators — engineers, managers, owners, maintenance technicians for the systems — and it needs energy and resources. In this model the great majority of human beings becomes superfluous.
This is a situation for which history offers no precedents. Slaveholders needed slaves. Feudal lords needed peasants. Industrial capitalists needed workers. Even the most brutal forms of rule depended on the ruled in their material existence. A machine that no longer needs human beings is something that has never existed before.
What happens to people who are no longer needed? Three scenarios are emerging, and none of them is comforting.
The administration scenario. The superfluous are provided for through a kind of universal basic income, in a state of material security without economic function. At first this sounds merciful, but in its consequence it is the reduction of the human being to an administrative case. What does a person do whose sole purpose is to be provided for? Experience with Hartz IV and comparable systems shows that permanent uselessness makes people ill. A whole society in this state would not be prosperity, but clinical depression as a mass phenomenon.
The containment scenario. The superfluous are not provided for but managed, contained, pushed aside. Slums, camps, geographically sealed-off zones in which those for whom the Metamachine no longer has any use accumulate. On a global scale this has long been reality — the geography of migration, of slum cities, of hollowed-out industrial regions is its preliminary form. In the next step this pattern will penetrate the core countries themselves, because there too the Metamachine is discarding people it used to need.
The thinning-out scenario. The most radical, and it is not plucked out of thin air, because demography and climate bring their own mechanisms with them. Falling birth rates in the developed countries, climate disasters in the densely populated tropical zones, pandemics, wars over increasingly scarce resources. Together, all this could bring about a reduction of the world population over the next one or two generations that is not planned, but is not stopped either, because nobody any longer has an interest in stopping it. The Metamachine has lost the function of keeping many people alive — and with it its formerly implicit mandate to do so.
What strikes home particularly in this diagnosis is the order of the losses. First the name, then the class, then the function. With the loss of function, the last support on which dignity could still rest falls away. Whoever is not needed no longer has any position from which he could demand anything. The Metamachine will deny him the subsistence minimum not out of malice but out of logic — he no longer fits into the balance sheet.
VII. The Open Question
This diagnosis leaves two questions open, which must be asked with differing urgency.
The first question is whether there is still any subject at all capable of changing the Metamachine. The working class had this capacity vis-à-vis the Megamachine because it sat at a real lever and had a name under which it could gather. Both are gone. The Metamachine is moreover more complex than the Megamachine was — it no longer has a single lever at which a common actor could take hold, because it consists of several Megamachines that substitute for one another. What could take the place of the working class is open. The old Left hopes for a return under new labels — climate justice, care economy, platform workers — and will probably be disappointed, because none of these labels carries with it a lifeworld with a common place, a common narrative and a common name. The new Right speaks of the Volk, the people, and means the same phantom that the old Left conjures up as class, only tinged with ethnic longing. Both are struggling for something that no longer exists and cannot be restored with the old forms.
The second question is what remains to be done when classic rebellion no longer works. This is where something comes into play that can be described, in contrast to either-or, as both-and. The Metamachine is immensely complex, and only through complex thinking and acting can one exert influence on it. A single gesture, a single lever, a single programme is absorbed without anything about it changing. What would have a small chance is the simultaneous application of several levers at different points, with different meanings, in the hope that at one point a resonance arises that propagates. From outside this looks like indecision or even inconsistency. But it is the only form of reason appropriate to a complex situation. Reasonable people know the playing field and play by the rules. Whoever wants to change the playing field itself cannot play by the rules.
There is no worked-out method for this kind of action. There are pointers. With the cybernetic economic model and the theory of networked thinking, Frederic Vester did preparatory work that has still not been exhausted today and that may be better suited to the Metamachine than to the Megamachine, because it thinks in networked systems of effects rather than in linear causal chains. The tradition of the cooperatives, despite its corruption, contains memories of structures that did not follow pure Megamachine logic. The history of free software and open standards shows that technical structures can be created that do not pass into private control. Inventos — the deliberate release of inventions into the commons — is another small attempt in this direction. None of these pointers is a method. Taken together, they outline a field in which a method could emerge.
The paper therefore ends not with a solution but with an open question. The open question is whether the metamorphosis of the Megamachine into the Metamachine, which is coming inevitably, will run in a direction that better sustains the lives of the majority of people — or in a direction in which the majority of people disappears. This question is not academic. It will be answered within the lifetime of those living today, whether or not they are asked. What can be done is to search for small levers and for the connections that could turn small levers into a changed resonance.
This search is the task that all who have not yet given up would have to take on — in full awareness, too, that no success is guaranteed and that no single actor can fulfil the condition for success.