Surplus and Stack
How Civilisations Capture AI’s Gains and Turn Them Into Power
“AI rewards those who control both production and power.” — Nicolas Colin
Nicolas Colin enters the Republic as the economist who remembers that capitalism, in Braudel’s sense, was never about competition — it was about capturing and compounding surplus. His recent essay, AI, Productivity, and Prosperity, distills this with unusual precision: the age of AI will divide not along who automates first, but along who reinvests.
For Colin, two conditions determine whether AI becomes civilisation’s engine or another deflationary trick:
The ability to retain producer surplus, rather than leak efficiency to consumers or rentiers.
Control over the compute–energy stack, the new hierarchy of capital from electrons to GPUs.
In his frame, China is the only polity satisfying both — a “self-reinforcing capitalism machine calibrated to convert AI efficiency into lasting development.” The United States, bound by its dollar hegemony, can no longer be both banker and factory; its AI gains evaporate into consumer surplus and speculative liquidity. Europe retains manufacturing depth but lacks stack coordination — a civilisation of engineers stranded without a grid.
Where Colin stops at political economy, the Dispatch continues into planetary form. His “producer surplus” is our metabolic surplus — the capacity of a system to metabolise optimisation into expansion, knowledge, and trust. His “compute–energy stack” is our canon of pipes — the infrastructural layer through which a Type-1 civilisation dispatches power, not code. And his observation that AI functions as a deflation engine for services perfects the argument of Intelligence Is Not Enough: optimisation without reinvestment erodes the very capabilities it measures.
Colin’s Braudelian reminder tightens the hinge between the Canon and the Metabolic Wars. It tells us that civilisation does not advance by intelligence alone, nor even by infrastructure alone, but by the alignment of surplus and stack — by who captures, compounds, and dispatches the gains of computation back into matter.
Finance, Futurism and Firepower.