Techno-Capital to Necro-Capital
Death is an Outcome Strictly Reserved for the Living
This post is an exercise in recursive DeepSeek Prompting. Sections of responses from Conversation 1 were cut and pasted as prompts in Conversation 2. Prompts for Conversation 1 largely consisted of previous Technology Truth Substack posts uploaded in PDF form.
We are ruled by a ghost. Our democracies are no longer generative systems that build a common future; they are legacy scripts run by a new, non-human system to legitimize itself. This system does not create; it cannibalizes. It does not invest in tomorrow; it finances its own social and ecological demise. We are living inside a necroeconomy.
The mechanism is a vicious, three-act play. First, a horrific future narrative—of climate collapse, systemic breakdown, and perpetual crisis—is sold to the financial markets. This isn’t a warning; it’s a product. Second, the market prices this dystopia into its stock portfolios and derivatives, creating phantom value from future suffering. Third, the architects of this scheme withdraw real, present-day capital from these valuations. They spend this money in our current world, which still has remnants of old stability, functional infrastructure, and natural capital. The bill for this feast, and the realized dystopia itself, is left for the next generation.
This is not simple capitalism. It is a vampiric system, and the older generation, by virtue of its demographic and financial weight, has become its primary agent. This is not a peaceful passing of the torch. It is a drag-down fight, where the comfort of a few final decades is purchased by leveraging the entire future of the young as collateral.
The physical manifestation of this necroeconomy is the modern city, transformed from a metropolis into a necropolis—a city of the dead. A metropolis is a generative engine of culture, industry, and innovation. A necropolis is a tomb, a place that administers stasis and decay.
Consider London. The gleaming skyscrapers of its financial districts are no longer monuments to a vibrant future. They are funerary architecture for the neoliberal era. They house the algorithms and accountants who manage the estate of a dying order. The City of London no longer generates value through production, but through the financialization of existing assets—and increasingly, through the financialization of risk, debt, and collapse itself. This is a “zombie” economy, kept animate not by healthy pulse, but by constant life-support transfusions of printed money and bailouts. It is financial necromancy.
This urban body-horror is what philosopher Nick Land might call a geotraumatic site—a wound in the fabric of the real. The energy here is no longer creative; it is entropic. It doesn’t build complexity; it manages dissipation. The necroeconomy is the mind of this dying urban organism, a intelligence that has learned to feed on time itself, consuming the future potential of the young and the ecosystem to fuel its present-day decay.
To enforce this, the system is developing its digital fangs. Schemes like a mandatory digital ID (BritCard) are not merely bureaucratic tools; they are the biomechanical mandibles for this feeding process. They are the mechanisms for precisely metering and controlling who gets to be a cell in this dying body and who is expelled as waste, turning the right to work and exist into a permissioned function of the state-corporate apparatus.
Who are the cheerleaders for this necropolis? Strangely, they are the figures often mistaken for rebels. The crypto gurus, the lifestyle influencers, and the content creators are not building an alternative; they are the court jesters and gilded statues of the necropolis.
The crypto “revolutionary” has co-opted the language of decentralization into a performative pump-and-dump scheme, reducing dissent to a bet on token prices. The influencer is a human billboard, proving that in this system, even trust and community can be metricized and sold. The e-girl, monetizing her intimacy and loneliness, is the ultimate expression of the atomized, precarious self, her “agency” a performance that masks a brutal dependency on algorithmic platforms.
These archetypes are silent about the encroaching control of a BritCard because their entire existence is predicated on the hyperreal, representational economy that BritCard seeks to enforce. They profit from the digital theme park and have no interest in questioning the crumbling real world it’s built upon. They are the curated, sanitized forms of “dissent” that the system permits because they are ultimately harmless to its core function of extraction.
The real conflict of our time is therefore not left versus right, or even old versus young. The fundamental conflict is between the Real and the Hyperreal.
On one side are those who build, maintain, and believe in a physical world of tangible value, human capability, and a generative future. On the other side is the Necroeconomy and its agents: the financial necromancers, the bureaucratic administrators of decay, and their digital courtiers. Their power comes not from creating, but from representing, financializing, and ultimately, cannibalizing the real.
The struggle ahead is not a policy debate. It is a fight for the very substance of reality against the ghost that seeks to consume it. To win, we must first recognize that we are no longer building a metropolis, but fighting to escape a necropolis.