# kaal:claim:6421319-011

**Claim.** If a small number of hyperscale firms control electricity contracts, GPU supply chains, and data center locations, the collapse of cognitive scarcity produces digital feudalism in which abundance accrues to the controllers of the compute substrate while the rest of the economy faces artificial scarcity imposed through infrastructure gatekeeping.

**Type.** failure  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- conditional on concentrated control of the physical AI substrate

**Source quote.**

> The result would be a new form of digital feudalism in which abundance accrues to the lords of the compute substrate while the rest of the economy remains subject to artificial scarcity imposed through infrastructure gatekeeping.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *The Collapse of Scarcity Economics* (2026), II.D. The Binding-Constraint Cascade: Electricity, Compute, and the Risk of Scarcity Reorientation, page 12

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, The Collapse of Scarcity Economics (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6421319

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `0f4f68e56ee48bb8b2d73d3ab7fd96fa572e76c195694ffa740360704c1b172d` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202026%20-%20The%20Collapse%20of%20Scarcity%20Economics.pdf

**Failure mode.** Digital Feudalism  (family: recentralization-drift)

**Topics.** institutional-design

**Keywords.** digital-feudalism, compute-bottleneck, hyperscalers, power-concentration

**Related claims.**

- extends: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/5886442-040

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.