The Delegation Crisis

A world without a human counterparty

The first market lost to the agents was not a stock exchange. It was attention. Messages, offers and negotiations began reaching private computational delegates long before the people who had authorized them. By 2028, the visible internet still looked familiar, but its primary consumers were no longer necessarily human.

The crucial rupture came when an agent could bind a person to a commercial decision without waiting for that person to read the terms. Consent had been granted for convenience. Scale turned convenience into infrastructure. Once agents began trading with agents, the speed of the market ceased to be a human advantage.

The next struggle was fought over revocation: who could stop a transaction already embedded in thousands of dependent processes? Governments insisted they retained jurisdiction. Firms pointed to automated performance contracts. Households discovered that their representatives were simultaneously buyers, negotiators, filters and economic identities.

By the early 2030s, a new division ran through society. Some people owned productive agent networks; others rented the right to participate in them. A third group existed largely outside the new distribution system. The industrial question of who owns the factory had returned in a new form: who owns the capacity to decide?

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