The decline of the Roman Republic began in the 2nd century BC, when mass slavery began to function as a primitive form of automation. The massive influx of prisoners after the Punic Wars allowed the senatorial elite to consolidate large estates on an industrial scale, with which the small farmer, the pillar of Roman civil life, could not compete.
Economically empty, but politically decisive, this one pushed the state to adopt the Cura Annonae, a system of living without work, which led to a strong sense of futility and eroded the institutional stability of the Republic.
The dynamics that destroyed the Romanian middle class appear to be re-emerging on the horizon of the replacement of intellectual labor by artificial intelligence, with an acceleration expected in the middle of the next decade.
If this trend is confirmed, the labor market could be purged of millions of professionals, opening the way for a new social category: the outdated, with the potential to foster an era of hyperpolarized populism around the promises of redemption.
Signs of their presence are evident among education and training students, a fast-growing group who do not study or work formally and who, upon reaching adulthood, do not form new families or circles of friends.
This combination of educational, productive, social and relational disconnection is a harbinger of demise: individuals displaced from the active economy find themselves increasingly isolated and dependent.
The shortfall will be practical, but also ideological. For nearly 150 years, discourses on inequality have relied on the capital-labor dichotomy to assert that the primary source of distress is the overexploitation of human power to generate the wealth of others.
In contrast, obsolescence arises from the loss of commercial interest in human effort as a productive factor, calling into question the intellectual framework from which competition over the economic system traditionally arises.
It is worth noting that the only political-economic model currently relevant to the transformations of the digital world is technological feudalism, which begins with the rise of social networks and markets supported by unpaid clicks to confirm that we are witnessing the decline of capitalism. It turns out that the observed trend is in the opposite direction.
Platforms are investing billions of dollars to eliminate reliance on clicks as a source of information, shifting the center of competence to independent recommendation and sales systems outside of old digital fiefdoms.
While Varoufakis claims that these companies are bringing back slavery, they are moving to make this form of free labor irrelevant, pushing the theory to the brink of obsolescence.
Nor are liberal thinkers immune to trouble in the face of a scenario in which consumption is no longer supported by wages, meritocracy becomes empty, interventionism spreads across the West, and China emerges as the main generator of technological patents.
These factors indicate that the ancient era tends to create ideological vacuums that are in line with its practical and emotional needs. The intellectual challenge facing democratic systems is to comprehend this vacuum before they absorb it, as was the case in Rome, under the pressure of despair.
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