The Fata Morgana Pitch: Why Trillionaires Sell an Abundance Only They Can Reach
Sailors in the Strait of Messina used to see cities standing on the water. Towers, walls, ships stacked on ships. The Fata Morgana is a mirage of real things. A layer of warm air over cold sea bends light and lifts a distant coast into the sky, closer and larger than it is. The coast exists. It is not where it appears, and no one has ever sailed into it. The abundance story now told by the trillionaire class has the same optics. What follows is why the coast is real, why you will not reach it, and why the people showing it to you need you to keep sailing.
The coast is real. Output will rise. Autonomous factories, farms, and mines will run with almost no one in the loop. Models will do the office work. The pitch is not lying about supply. It is lying about position.
A good is labor plus energy plus materials plus land plus time plus permission. AI removes the first term. Every other term stays. Energy is gated by generation and by interconnect queues measured in years. Materials are gated by mines that take more than a decade to open. Land is fixed by geography. Compute is gated by fab capacity and memory supply. Permission is gated by regulators, insurers, and courts. Remove labor and output rises until it hits the next wall. Then it stops. More, not unlimited.
The discount lasts until the auction. The price of a token has fallen by two orders of magnitude in three years. That part is real and it is permanent. What AI makes gets cheap. Now look at what AI needs. The PJM grid has set record capacity prices three years running, and its own market monitor names data center load as the primary cause. Residential rates in the District of Columbia nearly doubled in five years. Memory prices spiked. Land near a substation trades like waterfront. What AI needs got expensive, and everything you buy is made of what AI needs.
Jevons saw the mechanism in 1865. A more efficient steam engine raised the demand for coal instead of lowering it. Cheap intelligence does the same to energy, chips, and land. Every project that was too expensive to staff is now cheap to attempt, and all of them arrive at the same substation, the same fab, and the same corridor in the same quarter. The bounded inputs get bid up. The cost floor rises. The price of anything physical follows it back up. Any discount is the interval between the labor getting cheap and the inputs getting auctioned. A few quarters. Then the sky.
Households are in that auction, and they lose it. A family bids for kilowatt-hours against a data center holding a twenty-year power contract. A first-time buyer bids for land against the same data center. The machine economy outbids the household economy for every bounded input, because the machine economy is where the returns are. Prices do not fall for people. They fall for the layer that owns the machines, and that layer passes its input costs down.
Henry George wrote this down in 1879. Progress raises rent and pushes wages down, because the gains from better production get capitalized into whatever cannot be expanded. He was writing about land. The list is longer now. Interconnects, fabs, corridors, spectrum, data rights. The trillionaires hold the list.
You reach the coast with a wage or not at all. The tractor gets cited every time. It made food cheap. True. But the farmhand did not eat cheap food because food was cheap. He ate it because a factory hired him and paid him. Abundance arrived as a paycheck from somewhere else, then got spent on the cheap good. Every automation wave in history had a receiving sector. Muscle went to the factory. The factory went to the office. The office has nowhere left to go, because cognition is what AI is pricing at zero.
Amartya Sen showed what happens when the paycheck fails and the goods do not. In the Bengal famine of 1943, food availability was not unusually low. Prices rose, wages did not, and the laborer's claim on rice collapsed. People starved in sight of full markets. Famine is not a shortage of food. It is a shortage of claims. Cheap labor recreates that structure in a warehouse instead of a granary. Output priced at the cost of the bounded inputs, well above zero and climbing. And a population whose one claim on it, the wage, has been repriced to nothing.
The mirage buys time. Here is what the story is for. Claims on output get settled once. Either they get negotiated while labor still has leverage, or they get settled by default once it does not. Right now labor still runs the office, pays the taxes, casts the votes, and can walk out. Five years from now it will do none of that. Every year the abundance story holds, the ownership of the bounded inputs gets locked in a little further. Interconnect capacity. Fab allocations. Fiber corridors. Spectrum. Data rights with legal standing. By the time the displaced ask who owns the warehouse, the deeds will be filed.
The story converts a demand into a wait. Do not organize. Do not legislate. Do not ask for a stake in the systems replacing you. It is coming, and it will be free. A sedative works this way. It does not treat the injury. It lowers the signal long enough for the injury to become permanent.
The same story sells upward as well as downward. To markets, abundance is the multiple. To governments, it is the case for subsidies, fast-tracked permits, and sovereign compute contracts. To regulators, it is the reason to stay out of the way. One document, three buyers. And the population it is sedating pays for all three.
No conspiracy is required. Nobody has to coordinate this. The story survives because it is useful to the people with the largest channels. Anyone who owns a bounded input benefits from patience. Anyone who sells the alternative, ownership now, gets called a socialist on the same channels. When the sedative wears off, a second dose is ready. Universal basic income. A check, later, from a government the same people decline to fund. The pitch never has to be believed by the people telling it. It only has to be repeated.
The coast is real. The deed is already filed. The only thing they made up is the distance.