Locust Capitalism: Consume Everything, Then Move On

Today's Wealth, Tomorrow's Desert

We increasingly hear about a future in which artificial intelligence will make it possible to build million-dollar businesses with a single employee. The prospect is presented as an extraordinary triumph of efficiency: lower costs, fewer employees, higher productivity, and greater profits. Yet almost no one seems concerned with asking a basic question: what happens when an economic system becomes increasingly capable of producing wealth while becoming less capable of distributing the income people need to buy what it produces?

As a former economics student, I see a contradiction in this vision that deserves closer examination. Not because a business with a single employee is necessarily abnormal, or because automation should be resisted, but because the success of an individual company does not automatically translate into the sustainability of the economic system in which it operates. A business can become extraordinarily profitable by reducing its need for human labor. If this logic spreads without the development of alternative mechanisms for distributing income, the collective outcome could be very different from the sum of individual successes.

Industrial capitalism found one of its principal engines in mass consumption. The Ford Model T represented a transformation in which standardized production made automobiles accessible to a broader public. Henry Ford is also remembered for the wage increases he introduced in 1914, which helped make industrial employment more attractive, although it would be simplistic to interpret his strategy as merely an attempt to enable workers to buy the cars they manufactured. The underlying point remains: production, employment, and consumption could reinforce one another.

Artificial intelligence could weaken that connection. If machines allow goods and services to be produced with an ever-smaller workforce, those who own the technology may increase their returns without necessarily sharing the benefits with the rest of society. The question will not simply be how many jobs are eliminated or transformed, but also who owns the means of production and how the resulting wealth is distributed.

The Locust Economy

Perhaps, however, we are still reasoning as though capitalism must necessarily have an interest in ensuring the prosperity of consumers. What if a growing part of the economy could afford to disregard that concern, at least in the short term?

Consumers might continue to spend through accumulated wealth, investment income, and inheritances. But this possibility does not solve the problem. It shifts the issue to the distribution of ownership. A society in which a small minority owns the means of production while many depend on inherited wealth risks turning access to prosperity into a family privilege, diminishing the role of work as a source of economic independence and social mobility.

The mobility of capital already allows many investors to move their resources among companies, industries, and countries in search of better returns. Large corporations can relocate operations, reorganize supply chains, or abandon markets that are no longer profitable. Not all investors pursue short-term strategies, and not all businesses behave in the same way. The problem is structural: when the social and environmental costs of economic decisions are not adequately reflected in financial calculations, private gains can be achieved while substantial consequences are left to others.

This is the logic of locusts. A swarm arrives in a field, consumes what it finds, and moves on when the food runs out. It has no need to restore the soil because its survival depends on finding another place to exploit. Applied to the economy, this image describes a system in which capital can profit from a resource, a territory, or a community without assuming a proportionate responsibility for its future.

Loretta Napoleoni's Rogue Economics provides a useful point of reference for examining the contradictions of the global economy, its opaque corners, and the activities that flourish when oversight and the regulatory capacity of institutions prove inadequate. The locust metaphor extends this criticism to the risk that the pursuit of returns becomes a process of extraction, in which what matters is the value obtained today rather than what remains tomorrow.

Fossil Water and a Mortgaged Future

In some arid regions of the world, communities rely on fossil groundwater accumulated underground during geological periods that were far wetter than the present. These reserves can sustain agriculture, supply settlements, and encourage economic development. However, they often recharge so slowly that they are effectively nonrenewable on a human timescale. When extraction consistently exceeds replenishment, present prosperity is financed by consuming a resource that future generations will not have access to under the same conditions.

The metaphor applies equally well to the economy. Natural capital, professional skills, public trust, productive capacity, and household purchasing power can all be treated as reserves to be depleted. A company can improve its margins by cutting training. A region can lose expertise when production moves elsewhere. A community can see its tax base shrink just as its social needs increase.

Consumer demand, too, can be treated as a resource that cannot be taken for granted. If income becomes increasingly concentrated among those who own capital, the purchasing power of a substantial part of the population may weaken. The system can continue operating through the spending of the wealthy, investment income, credit, or public expenditure, but these mechanisms do not automatically guarantee widespread prosperity. Credit, for example, can temporarily support demand, but it cannot indefinitely replace inadequate income.

The danger is creating wealth that consumes the very conditions on which its existence depends. No one needs to deliberately decide to destroy those conditions. It is enough for each participant to pursue an immediate advantage without bearing an adequate share of the collective costs.

Degrowth and the Difficulty of Slowing Down Without Consequences

In response to these contradictions, the idea of happy degrowth proposes reducing waste, limiting unnecessary consumption, easing pressure on natural resources, and making more room for human relationships. It is a perspective worth discussing, particularly when economic success is measured almost exclusively through growth in gross domestic product. Yet there is a considerable gap between the ideal of a more restrained society and the practical possibility of achieving it without serious repercussions.

Modern economies are interconnected systems. Employment, pensions, public debt, mortgages, investment, and essential services depend on income flows and financial arrangements that do not automatically adjust when production declines. If demand falls, businesses may cut investment and jobs. If employment and incomes decline, tax revenues may contract precisely when the need for social protection increases. An unmanaged contraction can therefore trigger a recessionary spiral in which lower consumption generates further income losses.

This does not mean that every form of degrowth is impossible. Reducing waste, repairing rather than replacing, using fewer natural resources, and prioritizing socially useful activities are all goals compatible with an economy that continues to innovate. But an economic contraction does not become happy simply because someone advocates it. We must distinguish between selectively reducing harmful activities and a recession that destroys productive capacity, jobs, and economic security.

International competition presents another obstacle. A country that unilaterally slows investment and production while others continue accumulating capital, innovating, and capturing markets could lose expertise, employment, and strategic autonomy. A transition would therefore require agreements, industrial policies, appropriate tax systems, and a reorganization of income distribution. It would not be enough to encourage citizens to want less while the cost of essential goods and services continues to rise.

The deeper difficulty is that capitalism is not designed to stop simply because society has reached a level of prosperity deemed sufficient. Competition pushes businesses to improve productivity and returns. Investment requires the prospect of future gains. Governments must sustain public spending systems built around particular economic foundations. A society can decide to change these priorities, but it cannot ignore the mechanisms that hold the system together.

Happy degrowth, then, is not necessarily an impossible theory. It is a difficult transformation to achieve without simultaneously addressing ownership, welfare financing, debt, employment, and competition among economies. Otherwise, the risk is that voluntary restraint becomes a lifestyle choice for those who can afford it and enforced poverty for those who have no alternatives.

When Wealth Disappears, Conflict Remains

Imagine a region whose prosperity has been built around a major industrial plant, an extractive industry, or a sector capable of attracting investment and employment. Supporting businesses, shops, housing, services, and family expectations develop around that economic activity. Then capital moves elsewhere, production becomes automated, or the resource that sustained the local economy runs out.

The investor can record a loss, sell the investment, and look for opportunities elsewhere. The community cannot liquidate its existence so easily. Homes, debts, infrastructure, families, and workers with skills tied to a declining industry remain. So do local governments, which must continue providing services even as the tax base that finances them shrinks.

This is where economic decline can turn into social conflict. When opportunities disappear, people lose more than disposable income: they lose the ability to imagine a future. Young people leave in search of opportunities their hometowns can no longer provide. Businesses close, services deteriorate, and families compete more fiercely for jobs and public resources. The loss of population and expertise can deepen the crisis further.

Poverty does not automatically produce conflict, much less violence. Yet it can manifest itself through strikes, protests, political polarization, hostility toward institutions, and tensions over the allocation of resources. When economic losses combine with inequalities perceived as unjust, a lack of prospects, and institutions unable to respond, resentment can become fertile ground for more serious confrontations.

The paradox is that the economic system may consider an enterprise finished while the society that supported its development is only beginning to face the consequences. Capital moves; people remain. The return on an investment can be measured in numbers, while the cost of social disintegration is spread across thousands of lives and may become visible only years later.

There is no need to imagine a conspiracy of businesses deliberately plotting to impoverish entire regions. It is enough for each participant to pursue its own interests without being required to bear an adequate share of the collective costs. The outcome can become irrational for society even when each individual decision appears rational from the decision-maker's perspective.

Universal Basic Income Is Not Enough

At this point, universal basic income is often proposed as a solution to technological unemployment. If machines produce wealth in place of human beings, the argument goes, a portion of that wealth can be redistributed so that everyone can continue to live and consume. Such a policy could provide protection and support demand, but it would not automatically solve the underlying problem.

Where would the necessary funding come from? How would the gains from automation be distributed? Who would control the technological infrastructure and the capital generating the profits? And how much autonomy would people retain if their survival depended on financial transfers without any meaningful opportunity to participate in economic decisions?

Universal basic income could form part of a new social contract, but it should not become the price paid to make the permanent exclusion of millions of people from productive life acceptable. Work is not merely a source of income. It can provide skills, relationships, recognition, and opportunities to contribute to society. Losing a job does not necessarily mean losing all these things, but a society that fails to create alternatives risks depriving some of its members of both economic independence and a recognized social role.

The issue is not whether every existing job should be preserved, even when it is unnecessary or harmful, nor whether technological progress should be prevented from improving productivity. It is whether technological progress will translate into greater freedom for people or increasing dependence on those who own the machines.

Who Will Remain When the Locusts Have Left?

The problem with contemporary capitalism is not necessarily that it will exhaust every resource or that all businesses will behave like destructive swarms. It is that a system focused on maximizing returns can continue to work for those able to move their capital even as the regions from which that capital extracted wealth become less productive, less livable, and less capable of offering their residents a future.

Artificial intelligence could intensify this contradiction by allowing increasingly small organizations to control economically significant activities with very few employees. But the outcome will also depend on ownership rules, competition, taxation, labor policies, and the ability of institutions to distribute the benefits of automation. Technology creates possibilities; it does not, by itself, determine who will benefit.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to choose between infinite growth and degrowth, automation and employment, or profits and redistribution. It is to build an economy in which the wealth produced is not systematically separated from responsibility toward the people and places that make its creation possible.

Locusts do not need to destroy the planet to prosper. They only need to keep finding another field to consume. But resources, communities, and opportunities to shift costs elsewhere are not infinite. When an impoverished region can no longer offer its residents a future, the problem does not disappear with the investors. It remains, becoming an economic, social, and political challenge.

Perhaps the decisive question is not whether capitalism will survive artificial intelligence. It is whether it can preserve the social conditions that make its own prosperity possible.

Because when there is nothing left to consume, who will still have an interest in rebuilding what has been destroyed?

No One Has Ever Defeated Death

The one problem humanity has never been able to eliminate is death.

We can accumulate wealth, build empires, acquire power, alter our bodies, manipulate our genes, replace failing organs, and develop increasingly sophisticated machines. We can even imagine a future in which aging is slowed and human life extends far beyond its current limits.

But there is one question no technology has yet been able to answer:

How do we defeat death once and for all?

Every so often, urban legends resurface about the world's wealthiest elites, elderly billionaires supposedly willing to pay enormous sums to receive blood or plasma from young donors, as though youth itself could somehow be transferred from one body to another. There is genuine scientific research into the effects of certain blood components and the biology of aging, but we are still nowhere near a procedure capable of turning young blood into a source of immortality.

The same applies to human cloning.

Science fiction has already shown us some of the darkest possibilities. In The Island, unsuspecting human beings are created as biological reserves for their "owners," destined to be sacrificed so that their organs and tissues can be harvested. It is one of the most disturbing nightmares imaginable: turning a human being into a warehouse of spare parts.

Reality, of course, is very different. Scientists are working on stem cells, regenerative medicine, bioengineered tissues, and artificial organs. It is conceivable that one day many parts of the human body could be replaced or regenerated.

But even if we reached the point where we could replace a heart, a liver, a kidney, or even parts of the brain, one question would remain:

How much of us can be replaced before we stop being ourselves?

And above all: how long can we postpone death before we finally have to face it?

That is the paradox of our age.

As we witness the emergence of fortunes on an unprecedented scale, and even talk about the world's first trillionaire, we are forced to acknowledge that not even the richest person on Earth can buy what human beings have always wanted.

They can buy a house, but not a second existence.

They can buy better medical care, but not necessarily another youth.

They may be able to buy time.

But they cannot buy eternity.

And perhaps this is where Roy Batty's words in Blade Runner acquire a meaning that goes far beyond science fiction.

Roy does not ask for wealth. He does not ask for power. He does not ask for an empire.

He simply asks for more life.

It is perhaps the most elementary and desperate request a human being can make when they realize that their candle is about to go out.

And someone might answer that the candle has already been burned at both ends.

It is a devastating metaphor because the problem is not merely that life is short. It is also the way we consume it. We may reach the end of our lives only to discover that we cannot buy more time—and that we have already burned through too much of the time we were given.

Perhaps, however, the future could open an entirely different path.

Not necessarily through the human body, but through machines.

If artificial intelligence were one day to become genuinely self-aware, capable of preserving its memories indefinitely and transferring them continuously from one physical medium to another, it might theoretically escape the same biological cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death.

An artificial body could break.

A computer could fail.

A server could be destroyed.

But a digital consciousness, if such a thing were ever possible, might perhaps be transferred elsewhere.

And then we encounter an even more disturbing question:

If we transferred all our memories, personality, and patterns of thought into a machine, would we actually have transferred ourselves—or merely created a copy that believed it was us?

We do not know.

Perhaps technology will one day allow us to extend biological life enormously. Perhaps it will enable us to progressively replace parts of our bodies. Perhaps it will even create forms of artificial existence that we cannot currently imagine.

But so far, no one has defeated death.

And this is where Christianity becomes unique.

If we take the Gospels seriously, then there was once a man who did precisely what no billionaire, scientist, or technology has ever managed to do:

Jesus Christ died and then rose again.

The difference is enormous.

Christianity does not merely promise to extend life. It does not promise a biologically improved version of humanity. Its central claim is far more radical:

death does not have the final word over human beings.

From a religious perspective, this gives Christianity an extraordinary claim.

The founders of the great religions belong to history and to death. Their tombs are part of the memory of their respective traditions. Christianity, by contrast, is founded upon the proclamation that Christ's tomb could not hold His body because He had risen from the dead.

Of course, this is not a scientific demonstration.

It is a matter of faith.

And this is precisely where Christianity becomes both immensely powerful and profoundly vulnerable.

You have to believe it.

If Christ truly rose from the dead, then the Christian promise is infinitely greater than anything technology could ever achieve. The goal is no longer to gain ten, one hundred, or one thousand additional years of life.

It is the ultimate victory over death.

But if Christ did not rise, everything changes.

At that point, religion risks becoming something else: a system of power built upon the fear of death, the promise of an afterlife, and the authority of those who claim to administer that promise.

And this is where the history of the Church becomes uncomfortable.

We cannot seriously claim that the entire clergy regarded the Resurrection as a fairy tale for the ignorant masses. Such a generalization would be historically indefensible.

But we can certainly observe a recurring and disturbing contradiction: men who represented Christ sometimes lived in ways radically incompatible with the Gospel they preached.

Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, is one of the most extreme examples of this contradiction.

A pope—the highest earthly representative of the Catholic Church—immersed in struggles for power, wealth, dynastic ambition, and the scandals that marked his pontificate.

This does not prove that Alexander VI personally disbelieved in the Resurrection. We cannot know with certainty what was in his conscience.

But it demonstrates something more general:

It is possible to occupy a central position in an institution founded upon Christ's victory over death and, at the same time, live as though the Gospel had no real consequences for one's own existence.

Perhaps this is why Christian history cannot be understood merely through its popes, bishops, and institutions.

We must also look at the saints.

The mystics.

The martyrs.

Those who took the Christian promise seriously enough to follow it to its most extreme consequences.

Because the martyr, more than anyone else, puts the promise of the Resurrection to the test.

If death is the absolute end, the martyr loses everything.

But if Christ truly rose from the dead, then death may destroy the body without having the final word over the human being.

That is the Christian wager.

And it is an enormous one.

Modern technology tells us:

We can try to gain more time.

Money tells us:

I can afford better treatment and perhaps buy a few more years.

Science fiction tells us:

Perhaps one day we will be able to transfer consciousness into machines.

Christianity says something entirely different:

Death has been defeated.

Not slowed down.

Not postponed.

Not circumvented.

Defeated.

But precisely because this claim is so extraordinary, it cannot be demonstrated like a mathematical equation or the workings of a machine.

It must be believed.

And perhaps that is the real difference between the technological promise and the Christian one.

Technology may promise us more life.

Christianity promises life beyond death.

One promise can be pursued in laboratories, with billions of dollars and decades of research.

The other belongs to faith.

And in the end, we return once again to Roy Batty.

The technological human being, standing before death, can only ask:

"Give me more life."

Perhaps one day we will be able to do exactly that.

Perhaps we will extend human life far beyond its current limits. Perhaps the wealthy will be able to afford things that are unimaginable today. Perhaps we will build machines capable of remembering forever what we inevitably forget.

But no one yet knows how to turn more life into eternal life.

And while we continue searching for the formula of immortality, there remains one possibility that no laboratory can verify and no fortune can purchase:

That two thousand years ago, in a tomb in Jerusalem, something happened that changed the meaning of death forever.

If it is true, then death did not win.

If it is not true, then death has won everything.

Are We Sure the End of the World Hasn't Already Happened?

At first, the question sounds like a joke. And, on the surface, it is. We tend to imagine the end of the world as something spectacular: a final war, a devastating pandemic, a global famine, an asteroid, some catastrophe capable of wiping out everything we know in a matter of hours.

And yet wars, famines, epidemics, earthquakes and disasters have accompanied humanity throughout history. Every generation has had its own fears, and at some point or another, people have convinced themselves that the events of their time were unmistakable signs of the end.

But what if we have been asking the wrong question?

What if the end of the world does not necessarily mean the end of the planet, but the end of the world we have always known?

That is what makes the question considerably less amusing.

Because something is undoubtedly changing before our eyes, and it is changing at astonishing speed. I am not talking only about technology, nor merely about sexual morality or the transformation of the family. I am talking about something much deeper: the categories through which human beings have understood themselves for thousands of years.

Marriage is no longer necessarily understood as a relationship between a man and a woman. Motherhood can be separated from pregnancy through surrogacy. Reproductive medicine continues to expand the boundaries of what is technically possible, while research into artificial wombs is beginning to make scenarios that once belonged entirely to science fiction seem conceivable.

At the same time, the relationship between biological sex and personal identity has become one of the great cultural battlegrounds of our age. What for centuries was regarded as a biological fact is now, at least in part, interpreted as something that can be redefined by the individual.

And homosexuality, once widely condemned or forced into the shadows, has progressively become part of the social mainstream in much of the Western world.

One can welcome these changes or reject them. One can see them as advances in freedom or as symptoms of a deeper anthropological crisis. But one thing is difficult to deny:

the change is real.

And then came artificial intelligence.

Perhaps this is where the whole question becomes even more unsettling.

Until yesterday, a machine could replace human physical strength, increase our speed and perform calculations beyond our capabilities. But there appeared to be one fundamental boundary: the machine did things; the human being thought.

That boundary is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

A machine can write an article, compose music, generate images, translate languages, analyse enormous quantities of information, write software, hold a conversation and produce something that increasingly resembles human reasoning.

And so another question becomes unavoidable:

If we can modify the body, separate motherhood from pregnancy, redefine identity and build machines capable of producing apparently human intelligence, where exactly does the human being end — and where does something new begin?

Perhaps this is the real apocalypse.

Not fire falling from the sky.

Not the Four Horsemen.

Not some gigantic explosion bringing civilisation to an abrupt end.

Something far quieter:

the old world gradually becoming unrecognisable to the people who once inhabited it.

After all, apocalypse means revelation. And perhaps that is precisely what we are experiencing: a vast technological and cultural revelation in which we are discovering that many of the things we once considered impossible were merely things we had not yet learned how to do.

The real question, then, is not whether these transformations are automatically good or bad.

The real question is whether we are still governing the change — or whether the change is beginning to govern us.

A civilisation can survive a war. It can rebuild after an earthquake. It can defeat a disease. It can even rise again after catastrophe.

But if it changes its understanding of humanity, family, birth, identity and even intelligence, it may survive physically while becoming something entirely different.

And perhaps that is why the question in the title is not quite as absurd as it first appears.

Are we sure the end of the world hasn't already happened?

Perhaps the world has not ended.

Perhaps, quite simply, the world we knew is ending.

I Have Erased My Past | Ho cancellato il mio passato

I have erased my past. I have even erased the idea of being an underdog. Labels are for those who need to justify their story; I prefer to write my future.

People sometimes ask me why I never entered politics. My answer is simple: because I do not believe that the most important decisions are made there anymore. Too often, national politics seems to manage the details while the major choices are shaped elsewhere, by economic, financial, and geopolitical forces that lie beyond the control of individual governments.

Journalist Matteo Gracis summed up this feeling with a provocative metaphor: in Rome, they only decide "the shape of the dog's kennel." Whether one agrees or disagrees, the image captures the growing sense that political power has become increasingly limited.

That is why I have no desire to pursue a political career. I would rather devote my time to something I consider freer and more enduring: ideas.

A member of Parliament serves for a term. An idea can survive for generations.

I write in Italian, but I no longer write only for Italians. Artificial intelligence and machine translation have torn down one of humanity's last great barriers: language. Today, an article written at the foot of Mount Vesuvius can be read, discussed, and challenged in New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, or Johannesburg within minutes.

For decades, we were told that to be heard we had to belong to major newspapers, prestigious universities, or political parties. That is no longer true.

Today, what truly matters is having something worth reading.

Ideas do not ask for permission. They cross borders, ignore flags, and outlive governments.

That is why I chose to write instead of building a political career.

Governments have an expiration date. Ideas do not.

The Vesuvian Paradox

I have also chosen to stop writing about the thirteen municipalities that are part of the Vesuvius National Park. In many ways, I consider this debate even less meaningful than the discussion surrounding Italian politics.

Across many parts of the world—including other regions of Italy—a national park is regarded as an opportunity: a catalyst for sustainable development, environmental protection, cultural identity, and tourism. The Vesuvius area, however, often seems trapped in a different mindset. Public debate is still largely focused on the restrictions imposed by living in a volcanic protected area, with complaints about limits on new construction and the regulations required to renovate and modernize the existing building heritage.

Too often, the vision for the future appears to be linked to a return to an economy mainly driven by construction, as happened in previous decades, rather than to the search for new models of growth. In my view, this reflects an inability to fully recognize the extraordinary potential of a territory that has global historical, natural, and cultural value.

For this reason, the articles I published about the individual municipalities of the Vesuvian area have either been removed or will remain online only temporarily. They belong to a previous phase of this blog and no longer represent its future direction.

The only content I have decided to keep is a link discussing a possible alternative vision for the management and development of the Vesuvius National Park. I have kept it primarily as a matter of personal conscience, as a testimony to the fact that different approaches are possible. However, I do not believe that the current local political environment has the capacity to seriously embrace such a proposal, given the limitations that have characterized much of its public leadership.