In my review of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, I noted a different kind of “eat-the-rich” movement that is portrayed in the fantasy novel. In this revolution it is the merchants who hold the wealth, and it is the nobility—not the poor—who rise against them. This is one unique aspect of the book that I found interesting. But I digress. The focus of what I want to say in this essay is different. It comes from another interesting nugget in Abercrombie’s saga.
The Merchant’s Mansion by the docks - watching one’s wealth
from nearby
What caught my attention most was a smaller detail that
resonates beyond the novel. A wealthy merchant builds a grand house near the
smelly docks, the only place he can live while keeping an eye on his ships. He
does not choose the elegant quarters of the city, too far from the assets he
must watch. Later, the merchant is dead and trade has moved on. The house, once
palatial, sits decrepit in an unsavoury quarter, unsellable and worthless.
So many real-world investments are made not purely for
economic value but because they provide a physical reminder of wealth and
control. They allow the owner to see and oversee their fortune. Without that,
the sense of ownership feels incomplete. This seems like an archetypal need humans
have.
The archetypal urge of visible wealth has always been there
And like most archetypes, the idea runs deep. In Tolkien’s
world, Smaug the dragon sleeps upon his hoard to keep dominion over it. In
modern pop culture, Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck dives into his vault of coins
to reaffirm his control. Both echo the same primal urge: to make wealth visible
and tangible and in doing so be in control of it. It is, in a sense, a
financial version of Foucault’s Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison design
where inmates never knew if they were being watched, so they behaved as if they
always were. Foucault used it as a metaphor for modern systems of control:
power lies not in direct force but in visibility. In the same way, dashboards,
balances, and ledgers keep wealth under constant surveillance, ensuring its
owner never loses command.
That is why, in a finance-driven world, a bank balance is
such a powerful status symbol. Why crypto enthusiasts flex their wallets. Why
dashboards—Bloomberg terminals, portfolio trackers, real-time net worth
calculators—are so compelling. They are the contemporary equivalent of living
near the docks, watching the ships as they come and go. Only now, the ships are
numbers, charts, and tokens moving across a screen. The owner feels in control
precisely because the movement is visible: as long as the dashboard shows the
assets, the wealth feels under command.
From making to managing - wealth’s long drift
There is also a pattern worth pausing on. Titans of industry
often begin as makers and producers, leading them to their wealth. But once
wealthy, their fortunes shift into financial assets, increasingly detached from
the act of making itself. This is more than concentration of capital. It
reflects how the most productive and creative minds are no longer rewarded for
producing or creating, but for managing finances.
This drift is easier to see if we step back and look at how
wealth itself has been defined over time. We began with barter. Then came fiat
money—first backed by tangible assets like gold, or by the means of production.
But today, wealth drifts further and further away from the metaphorical dock or
market, recast into dashboards, futures, and notional values that exist more on
screens than in the real world. The danger is that it squeezes out true
creators, replacing them with those who are content to manage charts and graphs
without ever making anything. At some point, that bubble will burst.
The numbers illustrate this. Today, the top 1 percent of the
world owns about 43 percent of all financial assets. A century ago, wealth
inequality was also stark, but wealth was more tied to land, factories, and
productive assets. Now, it is increasingly financial, intangible, and
concentrated in instruments far removed from production.
Two forces threaten to push this shift further.
AI and the shrinking role of the maker
The first is artificial intelligence. When creative
tools—writing, design, music, even art—are programmable and mediated through
data, the role of the human maker shrinks. More concerning is if the walled
gardens of AI concentrate the access of creative tools to only the select few. Those
who build or produce become fewer, while those who control the platforms and
dashboards multiply. The value accrues not in what is made, but in how data
about what is made is captured and leveraged.
DeFi: Transparency or Abstraction?
The second force is DeFi. At its core, decentralised finance
promises to bypass traditional gatekeepers and give individuals more freedom
and transparency over their money. On the surface this looks like
liberation—capital moving more freely, assets visible to all on the blockchain,
and no central authority pulling the strings. But in practice, what it often
produces is another layer of financialisation. A house, a painting, or a piece
of land can be reduced to a token on a blockchain—valuable less for its use
than for its tradeability. Wealth becomes more transparent in one sense, but
also more removed, anchored not in production or utility but in speculation and
flows of digital transactions. This is financialisation taken another step
further, a retreat from the dock into pure abstraction.
A new class of landlords – or shall we say Rise of the
Dashlords
All of this points to a troubling trajectory. We may be
creating a new landlord class—“dashlords,” one might call them—who sit atop
dashboards of tokenised assets, feeling powerful while shielding capital, tools
of creativity, and even physical assets from those outside.
Over-financialisation is pushing capitalism into a narrower
funnel. Wealth is not just concentrated; it is abstracted away from making and
producing. AI and DeFi may arise from the right instincts—freedom, access,
transparency—but if their development ignores fundamental human needs of power,
agency, they will reinforce the problem.
Capitalism in its true sense has to be a win-win: a transaction, an exchange of value. It is not going to thrive if there is hoarding or unjust blocking of access to the tools of production. Efforts at transparency and productivity will not succeed unless they connect to the human psyche—our deep need for agency and control. Without that, the system risks collapsing under its own abstractions, producing not makers but watchers, not producers but Dashlords.
Let us get back to that initial thought about Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself and its unusual “eat-the-rich” movement. At the heart of it all is the vicious, mean Inquisitor Glokta—once a nobleman, now a cripple—who feels righteous in turning the screws on corrupt merchants. Glokta, in this way, becomes a fitting metaphor for what happens when capitalism is drained of its productive vitality. Like a broken enforcer still wielding power, financialisation risks becoming a crippled remnant of productive capitalism—vicious, commanding, but ultimately reducing capitalism to a shell.
Note: All images were imagined and created with Gemini.
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