In the previous article, we explored in detail how the State installs glass ceilings and entry barriers to tame individual business owners into compliant livestock. In this article, we examine why ambitious young people are all diving into the worlds of YouTube and Cryptocurrency. To dismiss this as a desire for “easy money” or mere promotion is to fail to understand the desperate choice of a generation struggling to escape the suffocating grip of the Democratic Welfare State.
1. The Golden Age of Personal Branding: Why Everyone is Flocking to YouTube and Crypto
(1) Technology and Markets Evolve in Forms the State Cannot Read
Academia teaches that when the State proactively invests in R&D and technological innovation, the economy and businesses evolve accordingly. In fact, “Sovereign AI” policies in countries like South Korea and France are based on this premise. I, too, attended many classes on “government-led innovation” during my undergraduate years.
However, this is a false narrative crafted to justify tax collection. Mises, a leading figure of the Austrian School, said as follows: ‘Human society cannot do without the apparatus of the state, but all the progress of mankind has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of compulsion. No wonder that all who have had something new to offer to mankind have not had a good word to say about the state or its laws.’ Murray Rothbard of the Austrian School also said: ‘True to the virtual law that all innovations come from free individuals and not the state, the first coins were minted by private individuals and goldsmiths.’ This is true.
Let me get straight to the point: Technology and markets always flee to places the State cannot read, transforming into forms that cannot be captured (abstraction and personalization). In a State that fails to protect producer sovereignty and republicanism, once a market is captured by the government, growth becomes impossible. Let’s look at a few cases.
Financial Systems: Invented to Evade State Plunder
Today, financial systems have been absorbed into the State’s official apparatus. Originally, however, financial networks were invented to evade the watchful eye of the State. Medieval merchants researched ways to avoid the plunder of kings and popes. Because gold and silver coins were frequently seized under the pretext of war, credit, bills of exchange, and double-entry bookkeeping were born. The State didn’t invest in these; merchants created them to survive.
Bitcoin is the manifestation of this logic. After the 2008 financial crisis, cypherpunks moved with the same intent. As the State imposed shadow taxes through inflation, they poured cryptography into creating a form of money beyond State control. Blockchain was a dagger driven into the heart of central banks by anarchists.
The Internet: An Uncensorable Network Built on a Defense Budget
Schools teach that the Internet originated from the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPA project. True, the Pentagon provided the funding. But what they intended to build was a centralized command network where headquarters controlled every node.
The graduate students and hackers involved had a different vision. They wanted to build a network that the State and AT&T could not censor. Thus, they embedded an anarchic structure called the End-to-End Principle into the TCP/IP protocol. This structure forces the center (the State) to act merely as a “dumb pipe,” while individuals at the ends retain all control. Using the State’s own taxes, they birthed a rebellious communication network the State could not govern.
Encryption: Evading Export Controls to Open New Markets
In the 1990s, the U.S. government tried to classify encryption technology as a “weapon” to ban its civilian use. Enraged by this, programmer Phil Zimmermann developed PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for individuals. When the government blocked the export of the code, he printed the algorithm in a physical book and published it. Under the First Amendment, books could not be censored.
The U.S. government was forced to surrender. Through the persistent “exodus” attempts of private individuals, we saw the birth of messengers, internet banking, and web security (SSL/TLS). The core lesson is that innovation does not explode when the State pours money into it. It explodes into an economic miracle only when State control, censorship, taxes, and regulations are removed, allowing private producers to optimize freely.
Why Does Innovation Flourish When Left Alone?
The efficiency of technological development and capital investment is maximized only in an environment where anything can be attempted and 100% of profits can be reinvested. In such an environment, the absence of massive fixed costs like taxes, regulations, and shadow taxes lowers the break-even point, allowing for free entry and exit. Consequently, producers willingly pay the cost of failure and evolve adaptively. Those who survive dominate the market as the strongest—exactly like the order of the natural world.
In contrast, the State cannot lead innovation because it:
- Cannot attempt anything not permitted by statute.
- Continuously spends profits on low-productivity sectors.
- Refuses to take risks.
In conclusion, the history of the capitalist market is one of collision between the “Millstone System” (Democracy + Welfare + Bureaucracy) and the wild entrepreneurs fleeing from it. The established B2C brands we see today are those that accumulated surplus capital in the regulatory blind spots of a “wilder” era when the State’s surveillance was thin.
The moment a business structure is fully mapped by the bureaucracy, risk-taking and profit reinvestment—the engines of explosive growth—become impossible. As we’ve seen, the only surviving forms are zombie small businesses, Peter Pan corporations (that refuse to grow to avoid regulation), monopolistic giants, and local oligarchs.
Understanding this explains why the younger generation is flocking to the Coin, Gig, and Creator economies and beting everything on Personal Branding. Since a democratic state cannot easily plunder an individual as a political sovereign, producers are “incarnating” their means of production. They are entering markets with high technical complexity to evade the bureaucratic radar, seeking explosive leverage by taking on the risks themselves.
(2) Understanding the Coin/Gig/Creator Economy: The Optimal Market for Solo Entrepreneurs
The public still tends to dismiss the “Coin/Gig/Creator Economy” as a mere trend for Gen Z. However, this market is booming because it is, quite simply, the most lucrative arena for a one-person business. In a Democratic Welfare State, any producer who isn’t a massive corporation must physically restrict their scale. Let’s examine this through the lens of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Theory.
Ronald Coase’s Equation: Why One-Person Firms are Becoming the Standard
Nobel laureate Ronald Coase explored a fundamental question: “If the market is so efficient, why do people bother creating hierarchical organizations called ‘firms’ instead of trading individually?”
The answer was Transaction Costs. When the cost of searching for, negotiating with, and contracting production factors in the open market (Transaction Costs) is higher than the cost of hiring and directing employees internally (Management Costs), a firm is born. Transaction costs are high when ownership of assets is unclear. Conversely, when ownership is clearly established, the incentive structure becomes sharp. Transaction Cost Theory serves as a validation of the Austrian School’s assertion: that the sole responsibility of the state is to define private property rights, and that all market transactions flourish only when these rights are recognized. Today, because of platform, market transaction costs are falling below organizational management costs, making the one-person firm far more cost-effective than a traditional organization.
Let’s take an example. Suppose Saltnfire needs a logo. If I don’t know who a skilled designer is, or if I fear they might steal my copyright later (High Transaction Costs), it’s easier to just hire a designer on a salary. However, when the government forces me to pay social insurance and wages that exceed productivity, platform operators emerge. They lower market transaction costs and absorb the “arbitrage” previously spent on organizational management. By establishing clear ownership structures through standardized contracts and copyright rules, they render traditional firm structures obsolete.
This theory applies differently to monopolistic giants versus small-to-medium producers. Large corporations act as unpaid welfare officials and blame shields for the state in exchange for their protected monopoly status. From the perspective of conglomerates, the sweet benefits guaranteed by the government in exchange for maintaining employment—such as a status as a price setter, market monopoly, intellectual property rights protection, and the recognition of succession structures—are far more lucrative. The state does not wish for corporations to verify small businesses or private buyers in the market just to trade externally and downsize their organizational scale. Because the state must lower the unemployment rate and provide a symbolic narrative for local communities—hanging pamphlets celebrating that ‘a Samsung employee was born in this village’—it pressures corporations to expand hiring, and corporations comply. This explains why Samsung Electronics, uniquely among large conglomerates, continues to absorb massive cohorts of graduates from regional universities every year, consenting to transform South Korea into a ‘Samsung Republic.’
Medium-to-small producers, however, are not guaranteed monopoly status. Unlike conglomerates, failing to secure a monopolistic position implies that scaling up inevitably increases Management Costs. Consequently, solo entrepreneurs and small-scale producers look forward to the emergence of platforms to streamline their ownership structures. Entering under a platform’s umbrella proves less costly than directly hiring employees, which drives them to prefer transacting within the platform economy. Designers and freelancers—who could have originally enjoyed risk-free sweet benefits as hired laborers—ironically lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the demands they made to the government, finding themselves in a position where they must sell themselves to platforms as independent producers. Therefore, the more a government like South Korea’s runs amok with populist policies, the more the market is stripped down to only three entities: 1) conglomerates, 2) platforms, and 3) micro-scale solo entrepreneurs. Since entering the crypto, gig, and creator economies is the ultimate way to maximize capital efficiency as a solo entrepreneur, everyone is predictably swarming into these sectors.
| Era & Subject | Coasean Equation | Status of Labor | Producer’s Strategy & Hiring Choice |
| Past (Traditional Firms) | Transaction Costs > Management Costs | Secured stable, risk-free benefits within the corporate nest. | Achieved economies of scale through direct hiring. |
| Present (Monopolistic Giants) | Transaction Costs > Management Costs (Maintained by State Monopoly Protection) | Protected by populist labor laws; acting as de facto welfare officials. | Accepts bloated management costs in exchange for state-guaranteed monopoly. [Hiring Choice: Maintained as Ransom] |
| Present (Solo Firms in Platform) | Transaction Costs < Management Costs (Driven by Tax, Regulations & Platforms) | Forced to survive on independent reputation/skills. | Maximizes capital efficiency through fluid marketplace transactions. [Hiring Choice: Abolished (0 Employees)] |
(3) Why the Coin/Gig/Creator Economy, and Why Now?
Why are solo entrepreneurs closing their shops and flocking to the Coin/Gig/Creator economy? There are three reasons:
High Capital Investment Efficiency: A Competition of Making, Not Selling
The Coin/Gig/Creator economy is a competition of Making, not Selling. Think of the Atom Market where people compete with physical goods like clothes or food. Here, a producer must take on the additional risk of supporting workers who can’t create surplus value. Because the state engineers inflation and continuously forces up statutory wages, producers face soaring prices and labor costs through no fault of their own. Consequently, they are compelled to sell the exact same products at higher prices each year. This stands in stark contradiction to the teachings of the Austrian School of economics, which posits that the essence of capitalism lies in entrepreneurs competing to lower prices through a roundabout system of production—a process of deflationary technological innovation. It is through this very process that consumers are meant to inherit the unearned blessing of rising real incomes. The problem? Being a good producer doesn’t guarantee you’re a good seller. Thus, they waste capital on high-uncertainty areas like marketing and new product planning—areas outside their expertise.
Take my brother, a producer who has designed and made clothes for 20 years, even scouting supply lines in China and Kazakhstan. Producers are optimized for the competition of making it better and cheaper. Yet, he has abandoned that to struggle with branding—investing $70,000 into a high-uncertainty field he knows nothing about. He is wasting money on the wrong things.
In contrast, in the Bit market, making and selling are one and the same. The actual quality and concept of the content—the result of the ‘make’—is exactly what drives the ‘sale.’ Cheap tricks like clickbait thumbnails or trying to outsmart the algorithm get wiped out by a single platform core update. At the end of the day, pure making skills are what matter most. On the flip side, the Atom market is plagued by high fixed costs driven by taxes, regulations, and inflation; moreover, a huge chunk of what should be a company’s profit is hijacked by the state and the workforce. Therefore, quite apart from making things well and cheaply, producers must find a way to sell them at a premium just to stay afloat, forcing them to rely on separate selling tactics. This heavily drags down a producer’s capital efficiency, meaning you have to pump in a massive volume of capital just to take home a decent profit. Simply put, there is no way for penniless young people in the Atom market to beat the established players using only their god-given capital—their brains and their bodies.
Another advantage of the Bit market (the Crypto/Gig/Creator economy) is that, as it deals in digital goods, the marginal cost of production approaches absolute zero. A producer can create an archetype of high-quality content or service in their area of expertise and dominate the market through infinite replication. Since platforms and algorithms handle the selling and distribution, you only need to excel at making. For example, Marketing in the Atom market is primarily centered around flashy packaging. In the Bit market, however, packaging is obsolete. What matters far more is creating high-quality, standardized content and distributing it across platforms like YouTube, Substack, and Google. While paid advertising exists to guarantee visibility, the sheer skill of content creation vastly outweighs any promotional budget. The crypto market illustrates this even more blatantly: traders compete on exchanges purely through their charting proficiency, and simply broadcasting their live trading on YouTube is sufficient. In this paradigm, traditional apparatuses like modeling, public relations, and mass media advertising become redundant. For a producer, making things better and cheaper is a low-uncertainty area of expertise. If you have the skill to produce, this market is optimal. Consequently, all young individuals aspiring to become producers are flocking to this market.
Note: For a field report on how deflationary competition unfolds in a country free from intervention (like Georgia), please refer to the article below.
- 🇬🇪 The Dancing Milk Prices: Why a “Weak” Government Makes Us Happier (Field Report)
- 🇬🇪 Butchering the Paternal State: Why the “Wild Market” is the Only Cure for Old Age (Field Report)
Intangible Expansion through Branding (Avoiding Physical Scale)
Consider an offline business owner renting space and hiring staff. They are shackled by hundreds of regulations—fire codes, food hygiene, labor laws, and workplace safety acts. Profits that should go toward innovation and reinvestment are bled dry by non-productive compliance costs.
In the Coin/Gig/Creator economy, however, your name is the asset. Here, you can “incarnate” the means of production into yourself, requiring no additional physical expenditure. By utilizing this regulatory arbitrage, you can reinvest and achieve explosive growth. Some intellectuals label solo entrepreneurs immoral and demand high income taxes, but they have never taken a risk themselves. To earn $100 in the market, you must be prepared to lose $100. If the state siphons off 40% of the profit for social insurance and taxes, the risk-taking premium disappears. It becomes more rational to earn $30 as an employee with zero risk.
Once branding is successful, a solo entrepreneur can reinvest everything. Expanding into physical goods, lectures, or memberships is easy through OEM contractors. Conversely, it is nearly impossible for an OEM company to succeed in branding; they excel at the competition of “making it cheaper,” not “selling it dearer.” Exploited by democratic governments and employees, they cannot reinvest boldly and eventually become dependent on solo entrepreneurs for work.
Monopoly through First-Mover Advantage
In this economy, the first person to plant their flag dominates. Because capital efficiency is high and brand expansion is easy, latecomers must be exponentially more efficient or spend far more to compete. Early movers can crush newcomers. Moreover, because these structures have no physical substance and value is generated by an individual, the state cannot easily use antitrust laws to break them up. The ability to find a niche market is crucial. Find a niche, collaborate with AI, and consume that market whole, and no follower can enter.
This is why low-resolution producers are being slaughtered in droves, leading to extreme wealth gaps in Bit Market. Nevertheless, because competitive advantage within the Bit market is not sustained by state coercion, it remains highly attractive to producers equipped with competence and adaptability. In particular, the strategic and efficient utilization of AI can narrows the disparity. Aside from the primal ideas or core inspirations, the marginal cost approaches zero in all ancillary fields, such as translation, research, market analysis, and report generation. So, the extreme income inequality within the Bit market is not treated as a target for democratic or communistic correction; instead, it is igniting greater aspirations among the youth. To hedge against the decline of their own intuitive edge, first-movers invest in the younger generation, linking them to their networks and solidifying their market positions through collisions. Driven by this spontaneous competition, a deluge of content has flooded the world, ensuring people can rarely tear their eyes away from their smartphones even while walking the streets. Consequently, we have entered an era where even elementary school students dream of becoming YouTubers, OnlyFans creators, and crypto traders.
By the way, My brother made clothes for 20 years. Today, he supplies to those who own the brand. Between the ability to make and the ability to sell, the market has already given its answer.
2. AI is Meaningful Only for the Solo Producer
For methods on finding niche markets, please refer to my previous articles (Link Below). Here, we focus on collaboration with AI. To put it bluntly: AI is meaningful only for the solo producer.
- The Myth of the Niche: Why Seth Godin Missed the Real Question
- AI and the Death of the Labor Theory of Value in the Welfare State, and the Return of Producer Sovereignty
As a large portion of white-collar work is replaced by AI, the value of the tacit knowledge held by workers is declining. If you cannot use AI to boost your own labor productivity or transition into a knowledge producer, you will inevitably become a digital sharecropper. Only those who leverage new technology to boost productivity can create more wealth and jobs. This means abandoning the mindset of being a mere ‘worker and consumer’ and becoming a ‘Solo Producer.’ An attitude of simply doing what you are told will be instantly replaced by technology. Even if you are employed by a company, you must think and work like an independent solo producer.
The reason I used the term digital sharecropper is that both the process and the output of the work are entirely dependent on the company. No matter how brilliant the prompts you craft on a company computer, those outputs and data are stored on the corporate server. When you leave, you cannot take the know-how optimized over hundreds of hours with you. Not a single byte of that archive remains in your personal life.
It was different in the past. Outputs created through a professional’s manual handwriting and deep thought contained a unique trajectory that a corporation could not easily seize. It was leverage for wage negotiations. Today, however, skills are deskilled by AI—and both the prompts and the results are subordinated to the firm. Where, then, does the value of the employee remain?
(2) The Employee’s Delusion: The Biological API
Crucially, AI strips away the value-add (judgment, planning) of white-collar workers, turning them into Biological APIs. Think of an API as a waiter. A waiter takes an order, delivers it to the kitchen, and brings the finished dish to the table. They don’t know the recipe, nor do they handle the ingredients. They merely shuttle between the kitchen and the guest. Because they do not create value independently, they are perpetually replaceable.
Actuaries and underwriters are prime examples of Biological APIs. From the outside, they look like high-level professionals making complex mathematical judgments. But their actual task is checking rulebooks to ensure no errors. The system handles the calculation; the human is just a waiter verifying the result. Once AI begins to handle the verification, even that role vanishes. The crisis is real. A college colleague of mine, an underwriter, is considering switching to sales. His logic? Use AI to analyze insurance data and create marketing materials, then sell a Trust Package—“I help you sign, and if a dispute arises later, I’ll fight for you.” This is a shift from being a cog to being a sovereign protector.
(3) The Solo Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Skill: The Commander of a Legion
There is only one exit: entering the Competition of Making as a 1-person entrepreneur with 100% equity. In this realm, AI is the tool that allows me, the CEO, to command a copywriter, data analyst, developer, and designer—all with zero internal management costs. The resulting brand, reputation, and archives belong 100% to the entrepreneur.
Sam Altman predicted that “a single founder will build a billion-dollar unicorn.” An employee enters a prompt to create surplus value for a corporation. A solo entrepreneur enters the same prompt to expand their own digital territory. It is the same tool; only the soil in which it is planted differs. Past producers owned factories and machines. The future producer owns brand, reputation, and archives.
(4) A World Where Everyone is a YouTuber or Crypto-Trader
When producers abandon the physical world to rush into the YouTube, Coin, or Gig economy, it strips our offline world of rich, fermented experiences. Locally baked, slow-fermented bread disappears, replaced by OEM bread promoted by creators. This is economically inefficient. People born with the talent to make physical goods are forced by the Democratic Millstone to focus on selling rather than making. Someone capable of creating massive value in the physical realm ends up chasing pennies on YouTube.
This is the absurdity of a democracy corrupted by populism, as seen in South Korea today. In the name of a fair society where everyone thrives equally, the producer is thrown into the millstone and ground to dust. Is a country just if the individuals dreaming of a better tomorrow suffer the most? Because the masses demanded more welfare and sweet handouts from the government out of a resentment toward competition and responsibility, our physical world has devolved into a low-quality dystopia filled with franchise OEMs and uninspiring Chinese commodities. Escaping into the online world of YouTube and crypto—where wildness and youthful energy thrive—we are losing our sensory touch with reality. Furthermore, as AI urges workers, who are digital sharecroppers, to transform into sovereign producers, individuals now face the added burden of distinguishing themselves from an AI equipped with overwhelming computational power. Given that the truly lucrative markets are fleeing into realms where the democratic welfare state cannot intervene, the populist plunder within the Atom market is bound to intensify. It is human instinct to fight for even a single shred of meat before total collapse. This tragedy stems from the failure of the democratic welfare state to constitutionally suppress the predatory instincts of the masses.
I find myself longing for an era before mass bureaucracy, welfare, and democracy—a time when one was responsible for their own welfare and survival. Back then, people worked and conducted business with their lives on the line. Because of that, there was hope for tomorrow; profits could be accumulated for reinvestment, and the means of production could be passed down to the next generation. Some even confess a longing for the pre-welfare era—a time before the state, under the guise of welfare, completely dismantled localized networks such as family, religion, and neighborhood. Back then, it was taken for granted that parents reared their children and children sustained their aging parents. Private charity thrived within the community to support the impoverished and the vulnerable. People shared meals with the elderly, wore secondhand backpacks handed down by older boys next door, and secured employment through recommendations from community elders. It was an age where one could live a meaningful life at sixty, respected by family and neighbors, rather than surviving until eighty as a forgotten soul staring at a television, estranged from children who are themselves overwhelmed by the struggle for survival. People might have bickered and clashed, but because they knew one another, the density of their existence was not as translucent as that of today’s phantoms. My mission in this series is to explore whether such a world still exists—to find an alternative and build a Producer Philosophy.
3. Conclusion: Which Side Will You Stand On?
It is fine to work as a chef or a delivery driver right now. Physical labor and archiving are not mutually exclusive. What matters is this: Will you settle as an employee and descend into being a Biological API, or will you use AI to expand your own digital territory inch by inch?
The millstone grinds what is physically exposed first. It cannot yet reach what remains hidden. Your archive resides within your mind. The millstone cannot reach that far—not yet. In the next article, I will dive deep into identifying the “True Enemy” within the Leviathan we call the Democratic Welfare State.
4. Related Series
- [The 51% Legal Dictatorship] How Democracy Plunders the Productive Class (The Collapse of American Republicanism)
- [The 51% Legal Dictatorship] A Geopolitical Autopsy of the Welfare State (U.S, U.K, France, Korea)
- [The 51% Legal Dictatorship] From Craftsmanship to Captivity — How the Democratic Caste System Traps the Producer
- [The 51% Legal Dictatorship] A “Rigged Democracy” Happy for All, Save for the Growth-Oriented Entrepreneur (Beyond James C. Scott’s “Legibility”)
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