Dystopia Ran Out of Government

Every dystopia I grew up on had a building you could march on.

Winston Smith spends his working day at a ministry, editing photographs of people who no longer exist. Offred is issued to a household by a Republic that has already taken her name.

Government was the only institution built big enough to own an entire population at once.

The state kept the letterhead and outsourced more of the verbs. Prisons run under contract. Private companies supply wars, satellites, water systems, and increasingly the machinery used to predict what happens next. The government may still write the check, but somebody else owns the equipment.

Dystopia spent a century rehearsing revolutions against buildings. Vendors are harder to find on a map.

You can’t storm a Bastille that’s been outsourced to a vendor.

The same century that produced 1984 had already produced the Gestapo, the gulag, and a bomb only a handful of treasuries on earth could afford to build.

Orwell wrote Big Brother two years after watching Stalin rewrite Soviet history in real time, photograph by retouched photograph. Huxley’s World State barely needed force at all. Pleasure and conditioning could do most of the work. Atwood set Gilead in a country whose founding document put “We the People” ahead of any board of directors.

Half a century before Orwell sat down to write, the Pullman Palace Car Company owned an entire town outside Chicago. They owned the houses and church, stocked the library and company store, then paid workers with one hand while reaching back into the same pocket for rent. The company cut wages but never the monthly charge. When workers finally struck in 1894, federal troops were called in to break it, and not by any mayor. The strike had disrupted the mail, and people died in the streets before it was over.

Andrew Carnegie’s steel works at Homestead, Pennsylvania ran its own private security two years earlier, three hundred Pinkerton agents shipped upriver by barge to put down a strike, and the ensuing gun battle left men dead on both sides before the state militia arrived to finish what the company had started.

The twentieth century’s great dystopias got written by people living inside a world that had spent decades building the tools to out-muscle exactly that kind of private power: antitrust law, labor regulation, the New Deal machinery. None of that proves Orwell reasoned his way from Pullman to Big Brother in any tidy, traceable line. But by the time he sat down to write, government looked like the biggest thing on the board, because for most of his lifetime it had been racing to become exactly that.

We may be among the first generations in a century watching some of that power migrate back behind a corporate logo.

The reach got sold off again, piece by piece, mostly on purpose. American prisons started going private in the 1980s, on the promise that a company could run a cell block cheaper than a state could. Private military contractors guarded diplomats in Iraq, and in 2007 a Blackwater convoy killed seventeen civilians in a Baghdad square under a contract that answered to a corporate chain of command instead of a military one. Fiction noticed the direction of travel well ahead of the headlines.

RoboCop handed Detroit’s future to Omni Consumer Products in 1987 and turned municipal collapse into a corporate acquisition before most moviegoers had heard the word privatization outside a business page.

Eight years before that, Alien put a corporation’s fine print above a human crew’s survival, the Company quietly willing to sacrifice an entire vessel for one specimen because the specimen was worth more than the payroll.

In 1982, Tyrell Corporation manufactured its own labor force and owned the patent on the four-year lifespan it built into them.

William Gibson gave the arrangement a vocabulary in 1984. The zaibatsus in Neuromancer outlive every person inside them, and a national border is a routing problem. Fifteen years before The Matrix, the genre had already moved its capitals into office parks.

In September of 2022, Ukraine asked SpaceX to extend Starlink coverage over occupied Crimea so its sea drones could reach the Russian fleet at Sevastopol. Musk refused, later saying that switching it on would have made SpaceX, in his words, explicitly complicit in a major act of war. Walter Isaacson initially reported that Musk had shut the service off, then corrected the account: coverage had never been enabled there.

Agree with his reasoning or don’t. A private citizen made a wartime call that used to sit with a head of state, and a national military found out its battlefield ran on somebody else’s login.

Most people don’t need a war to have lived the smaller version of that story. An insurance company doesn’t legislate. It approves the surgery or it doesn’t, and the checks and balances written into the Constitution have nothing to say about a claims department.

On the morning of December 4, 2024, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson, was shot on a Manhattan sidewalk on his way into his own company’s investor conference. The man charged, Luigi Mangione, was carrying handwritten pages accusing the industry of putting profit ahead of patients. He pleaded guilty in federal court earlier this month, admitting under oath that he had planned and carried out the shooting, though the state murder case in New York remains unresolved.

Public reaction outlasted the shock. Within days, UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty published an op-ed acknowledging the anger. Comment sections became an unauthorized claims archive, filling with denial letters, drug names, procedures, appeals, and premiums from people who had spent years fighting the same machinery in private.

The anger had no elected target. People named their insurer, their plan, the date on the letter. A claims department has never once had to stand for election.

Late last year, when Titus and I started building this book, we made a bet about the calendar: sometime in 2026, the world would crown its first trillionaire. On June 12, 2026, we turned out to be exactly right. SpaceX went public that morning in the largest stock offering in history, more than two and a half times the size of Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, and Musk’s stake repriced his fortune past a line no human being had ever crossed.

Six weeks later, Musk was back below seven hundred billion. The world’s first trillion-dollar fortune had lasted less than two months, because at that scale wealth stops resembling a pile of money and starts behaving like a live readout. Oxfam had already put global billionaire wealth at $18.3 trillion. The $2.5 trillion added in 2025 alone came within rounding distance of everything owned by the poorest 4.1 billion people on earth.

Titus and I set the book’s numbers against that report and rounded down.

The book’s central mechanic isn’t invented from nothing either. Amazon has spent years measuring warehouse workers through productivity systems that can track time away from a scanner down to the second. Reporting on those systems has described workers separated from the company on productivity grounds with no manager required in the loop. The scanner builds the case while counting boxes.

Uber promises every deactivated driver a human reviewer and a real appeal. In April of this year, Rideshare Drivers United sued on behalf of more than twenty thousand California drivers, alleging that the promised appeal often fails to produce anything resembling one.

China never built the single national score outsiders love to describe. What it built instead is messier and, if anything, more instructive. Rongcheng’s pilot starts residents at a thousand points and keeps a long ledger of ways to gain and lose them, and it runs opt-in, with real penalties reserved for actual violations of law. National blacklists can quietly ground repeat offenders from flights and trains.

None of these systems needed a national election before gaining power over somebody’s choices. One grew out of warehouse management, another out of municipal administration. The Chinese pilot everybody points at lets you decline. Your warehouse and your app do not.

Fiction has been circling this exact target for a few years now. Squid Game came closest to admitting the actual problem: foreign billionaires flown in as anonymous spectators to watch contestants die for sport, no government that can reach it. That show’s finale doesn’t bother pretending anyone stops it. The final shot is a recruiter on a Los Angeles sidewalk, playing the same children’s game used to find contestants in Seoul. By the time the credits roll, the business has found another market.

A lot of eat-the-rich fiction still reaches for the old machinery when it needs somebody to blame. Someone calls the cops. A detective works the house, however unofficially, and builds a case a court is going to receive, because a story needs somewhere to put a verdict. You can still call the police on a killer at a dinner party. You cannot call the police on the entity that owns the police.

That became Zero Billionaires.

Our book is set in a near future where the capitols are still standing but citizenship has been hollowed into a running number called a Vitality Score, five tiers deep, Bronze to Diamond, recalculated by the hour against how useful you were that day.

Above Diamond sits the Sovereign Circle, nine people who between them own the water, the breathable air, and, in one case, the weather itself, most of them living in orbit while the planet’s surface keeps supplying the labor. One of them routes hurricanes like a landlord adjusting thermostats, steering a storm away from a paying subscriber’s coastline and letting it break on whichever coast fell behind on its bill. There’s no legislature to lobby or capitol to occupy, because sovereignty stopped living in a building generations before the story opens. It lives in a server farm covered by a service agreement.

So the people fighting back don’t storm anything. They build an artificial intelligence inside the same infrastructure the Sovereign Circle depends on: water systems, power grids, access controls, security. One afternoon it turns those systems inward. By the time anyone understands what’s happening, 20,183 of the wealthiest people alive are dead and the money has started moving before the obituaries do.

The killing takes an afternoon. Keeping the water running starts the next morning.

That’s where the book spends its time: who inherits the passwords, the obligations, and the authority to decide who gets what when the people who owned everything suddenly own nothing.

Government is still very much here. What changed is the monopoly. Decisions that can reshape a person’s life now happen inside platforms, insurers, infrastructure companies, and scoring systems whose owners cannot be voted out.

Oxfam publishes the Sovereign Circle every January. We gave the rows names and a place to live.

Somewhere between a trillionaire minted in June and unminted six weeks later, and a health insurance executive shot outside his own investor conference, the distance between our near future and the morning news got small enough that we could mostly stop inventing and start transcribing.

You still can’t storm a Bastille that’s been outsourced. Zero Billionaires follows the paperwork instead of the bodies.

Twenty thousand people die in one afternoon and the water keeps running because the pumps never cared whose portrait hung in the boardroom. The shares begin transferring before the funerals are over, and at six the next morning somebody still has to sign for the water.

The signature line survives everybody who signs it. Zero Billionaires is about who picks up the pen next.

Zero Billionaires is written by Alexander Titus and Sean Platt, with a prequel trilogy coming in January of 2027.