Published June 4, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence • 7 min read • 
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The long-running television and film series Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity economy in which no one goes hungry or suffers from material want. A central technology in this vaguely socialist setting is the replicator, a device that reconstitutes energy and recycled materials into food, medicine, and spare parts for the ship, among other objects. The technology is magical: USS Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard says, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” and a cup of hot tea appears, thanks to the replicator.
What would happen in our world if replicators became available to everyone? AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code may give us a foretaste of a post-scarcity economy by enabling a kind of replicator for software: “Claude, create a replica of QuickBooks for my business.” This winter, each of Anthropic’s product announcements seemed to slice billions off the valuations of other software companies, and the iShares tech ETF suffered a massive decline. Why pay a monthly fee for software-as-a-service if Claude can cook up a pretty good knockoff for free?
What’s bad for QuickBooks (and Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle) might be good for the rest of us. What could a post-scarcity software world look like? Will it be like Star Trek, or more like The Matrix? And are there steps we can take now to get us on the higher path?
I’m going to be uncharacteristically optimistic. There are a lot of Trekkies among the techies, and the history of the software industry contains a robust strain of communitarian thinking. Maybe humans don’t have to end up serving as comatose battery systems for Big Tech.
There are a lot of Trekkies among the techies, and the history of the software industry contains a robust strain of communitarian thinking.
Today, the Linux operating system is pervasive, though invisible to most of us. Linux runs on the vast majority of the world’s web servers. It’s the underlying basis for Android, used by four billion smartphones. You are very likely using Linux right now. As we expect in a healthy market capitalist system, Linux wins by offering a superior product at an affordable price: free. It’s free because it was produced by (mostly) volunteer labor, and because its license reflects a distinctive view about technology and freedom.
Linux is known as free and open-source software (FOSS). In an industry populated by billionaire college dropouts and rapacious tech monopolies, how did Linux happen? The answer traces back to the early history of the computer industry. Mainframe manufacturers commonly distributed software source code to customers, which enabled users to modify it, and early user groups (including academic institutions) exchanged free software to address shared needs. After a 1974 decision determined that software was eligible for copyright, software became a profitable product, and the advent of the PC vastly expanded its potential market, giving rise to companies like Microsoft.
Some conscientious objectors did not like what was happening to software. Richard Stallman, a programmer-activist, helped create a movement to ensure the accessibility of free software that was open source (that is, users could examine and modify the source code). Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 and created a set of widely used free software licenses known as “copyleft”. In contrast to copyright, copyleft guarantees that a piece of software and any of its derivative products will remain free of charge in perpetuity. This is the kind of license that made Linux (first released in 1991) probably the world’s most popular software.
Linux, Wikipedia, and similar projects demonstrated a way of organizing large-scale, cooperative endeavors that is very different from that of business and government. They were, in effect, working anarchies. Their success inspired some scholars to see opportunities for a more democratic and participatory economy. Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler put it well: “Over the course of the first decade of the 21st century, commons-based peer production has moved from being ignored, through being mocked, feared, and regarded as an exception or intellectual quirk, to finally becoming a normal and indispensable part of life.” Maybe FOSS offered a way out of domination by Big Tech.
A social movement is emerging to point AI's development in a more sustainable and democratic direction.
The optimism about FOSS as a transition point to a more democratic economy has dimmed, to put it mildly. On the one hand, FOSS is inescapable today. Linux is as pervasive on the internet as microplastics in the ocean. On the other hand, Big Tech is far more powerful and concentrated than it was even a decade ago. The Magnificent Seven make up one-third of the value of the S&P500 (compared to 12.5% in 2016). The advent of generative AI hinted that new entrants like OpenAI and Anthropic might challenge the dominance of incumbents such as Google and Microsoft, but their capital and computing needs are so vast that they have little choice but to collaborate with the old guard. For now, Big Tech has made itself indispensable.
But maybe not forever. Claude Code and its inevitable successors mean that almost anyone can be a coder, speaking software into existence like Captain Picard with his tea. Many who have sampled the wares of advanced vibe coding see it as a Promethean moment, making amazing superpowers readily available to average humans.
When my kids were going to college in the 2010s, I told them, “Study what you want, but if you don’t learn to code, you will die penniless, homeless, and alone.” (This may be why there are no “World’s best dad” coffee mugs in my house.) They ignored me, and now they have their revenge: anyone who can follow a few simple directions can code now, just by chattering about what they want into an AI dictation program and feeding the transcript to Claude. It’s not much more complicated than that.
Imagine a world where every entrepreneur in Detroit could speak into existence customized tools for everything they need. Plumbers, furniture designers, coffee shop owners, graphic artists, accountants, home health co-ops – they can all be coders now, self-reliant and self-employed.
But, of course, they need something like Claude Code, and Claude’s parent company Anthropic has investment deals and cloud contracts with Google and Amazon, along with other partnerships with Microsoft and Nvidia. Anthropic is densely connected with Big Tech, perhaps inextricably so.
What would a more democratic alternative look like? Trebor Scholz, an American scholar-activist, and Swiss social scientist Mark Esposito propose the creation of a full “solidarity stack“. They write: “A democratic AI cannot simply rent space on the extraction stack. It requires that workers, communities, cooperatives, and public institutions reclaim ownership of the infrastructure itself, layer by layer, from the earth to the cloud.”
Some of the components are already in place. The Swiss AI Initiative, a collaboration between several Swiss research institutions, recently released Apertus, a “fully open foundation model for sovereign AI”. All of its central components are open access, the LLM meets Swiss data privacy and copyright protection laws, and it was trained on the Alps supercomputer using 100% carbon-neutral electricity. It was released under an Apache 2.0 license (comparable to copyleft) and is available on Hugging Face, an AI repository similar to GitHub.
More broadly, a social movement is emerging to point AI’s development in a more sustainable and democratic direction. This movement has the wind at its back. As Bernie Sanders put it, AI is “the most transformational economic revolution in world history”. The public does not want the direction of this revolution guided by a handful of peculiar tax-dodging billionaires who are busy building escape bunkers on distant Pacific islands. Only by enrolling the public in its development will AI avoid some of the more apocalyptic scenarios.
“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” So states American historian Melvin Kranzberg’s first law of technology. AI creates incredible opportunities for self-reliance and community wealth-building. It is not inevitable that a few oligarchs on America’s West Coast end up appropriating the bulk of the benefits of this technology. Software development has a glorious history of working anarchy, relatively free of hierarchical domination. You’re probably using the products of this history right now. Perhaps we can reclaim these traditions for the biggest software revolution yet. (One way to start is to join the forthcoming Solidarity AI 2026 conference in Thailand this November.)
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