How Long Can an Absolute Terror Economy Last?

An Absolute Terror Economy, or ATE, is not a formal academic framework, but a lens by which we can understand a disturbing pattern in the modern marketplace. In this system, companies increase their power, profitability, and dominance by unwittingly degrading human well-being, not only materially, but psychologically and spiritually as well.

The core claim is deliberately unsettling. In an Absolute Terror Economy, there is an inverse relationship between the condition of people and the success of corporations. As workers become more precarious, consumers more unhealthy, and users more anxious or dependent, dominant firms grow larger, more entrenched, and more profitable.

This is not a conspiracy theory, nor a nostalgic complaint about markets. It is an attempt to vividly describe what is plainly visible across multiple sectors of daily life. Gig work, our food supply, and social media each reveal a system in which human degradation is not an unfortunate side effect, but a structural input.

What follows is not a rejection of capitalism; it is an observation so that our investments can be informed even when the risks are too uncomfortable to discuss publicly.

The Mechanism

An Absolute Terror Economy operates through a simple but corrosive dynamic. As human conditions worsen, corporate returns grow. Financial insecurity pushes workers to accept unstable arrangements. Health decline traps consumers in cheap, harmful habits. Rapid exposure to micro psychological stressors drives compulsive engagement with digital platforms. While many experts, both rigorously academic and those leaning toward health-conscious woo-woo, have discussed these downsides, few have pointed to the underlying cause.

What distinguishes ATE from older models of exploitation is its emphasis on psychological and existential pressure rather than overt coercion. Terror, in the traditional sense of car bombings and internment camps, is a mechanism of population control. Terror here, however, does not usually mean threats or violence. It means chronic anxiety, a fear of losing income, being trapped in a “permanent underclass”, being lonely, or being bored. These pressures hollow out agency and identity while leaving formal freedom intact.

This builds on earlier critiques without fully repeating them. Marx described alienation, the worker estranged from labor, product, and self. Contemporary theorists describe surveillance capitalism, where behavior itself becomes raw material for profit. The gig economy adds permanent insecurity as a condition of work. The Absolute Terror Economy ties these threads together by showing how fear and fragility are themselves a “productive” outcome.

In such a system, improving human stability is often bad for business. Healthy, secure, grounded people are harder to monetize. Anxiety, dependence, and fragmentation scale remarkably well.

This begs the question: if regimes built on terror often eventually fall, do markets built on terror also have an expiration date?

The Gig Economy

The gig economy initially marketed itself as liberation. Workers could choose their own hours and be their own boss. You work when you want, for as long as you want, under your own terms. The reality currently experienced by most gig workers is far more constrained.

Uber drivers, for example, shoulder nearly all the risk of their labor. After accounting for fuel, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and unpaid waiting time, effective wages often fall close to or below local minimums. There are few benefits, no job security, and no meaningful appeal process when algorithms penalize or deactivate accounts.

Surveillance is constant. Ratings determine access to income. Incentives shift unpredictably. Turnover is extremely high, which allows the platform to avoid responsibility for long-term workforce stability. Drivers are interchangeable units, not members of a profession. With recent layoffs, many regions have too many drivers, so Uber has begun preventing new gig workers from signing up.

This precarity is not incidental. It is central to the business model. Driver financial strain enables ultra-low fares. Low fares drive massive user adoption. Scale allows the platform to dominate markets, undercut competitors, and pressure regulators. After years of subsidized growth, the company moves toward profitability on the backs of workers who absorb volatility once managed by firms.

Uber’s valuation and revenue now dwarf those of traditional taxi systems, even as surveys consistently report high stress and dissatisfaction among drivers.

The deeper cost is existential. Gig work erodes stable identity. There is no ladder, no mastery, no shared culture. Workers exist in a perpetual present, chasing algorithmic signals. Human relationships are reduced to transactions. The individual remains intact, but silently terrified. I encourage you, the next time you take an Uber, to ask the driver what they think of the pricing and algorithmic nature of their job.

Fast Food and Ultra-Processed Foods

Fast food did not always mean nutritional devastation. Early chains emphasized speed, consistency, and affordability. Over time, however, competitive pressures drove the industry toward extreme processing. Ingredients were optimized not for nourishment, but for shelf life, cost control, and engineered palatability.

Modern fast food relies heavily on refined carbohydrates, industrial oils, artificial flavorings, emulsifiers, and texture agents. These foods are cheap, addictive, and metabolically destructive. Regular consumption is linked to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive and emotional impairment.

This is bodily degradation, but it is also psychological. Ultra-processed foods hijack reward systems. Hunger becomes decoupled from nutrition. Eating becomes compulsive rather than sustaining. Consumers feel full yet unsatisfied, driving repeated consumption.

The inverse relationship is again unmistakable. Increased processing allows tighter supply-chain control and global scalability. Cheap inputs protect margins. Engineered cravings lock in customer loyalty. Industry consolidation accelerates as smaller, healthier producers struggle to compete on price.

Meanwhile, the costs are externalized. Healthcare systems absorb the burden of chronic diet-related illness. Governments hesitate to regulate aggressively due to lobbying pressure and employment concerns. As public health critics have long noted, the industry profits at the point of sale while society pays the long-term bill.

As bodies degrade, brands strengthen. Corporate dominance grows alongside declining health.

Algorithmic Social Media

Social media platforms originally enabled people to interact as though they were in person, despite being miles away from each other. These firms originally targeted user growth metrics. Saturation became apparent when I noticed that every person I met while traveling had a Facebook. Currently, social media companies operate under an economic logic that rewards something very different. Algorithms prioritize content that provokes strong emotional reactions; outrage, fear, envy, and tribal affirmation consistently outperform calm or nuanced material.

The result is an environment saturated with anxiety and comparison. Users are exposed to endless signals of threat and inadequacy. Research links heavy platform use to rising rates of depression, loneliness, polarization, and distorted self-perception, particularly among younger users.

This is terror at the level of the psyche. Not acute fear, but chronic unease. A persistent sense of being behind, under threat, or unseen. A fragmented reality in which shared understanding dissolves into algorithmically curated torture chambers.

From the platform’s perspective, this is optimal. Even if originally unintended, distress increases engagement. Engagement generates data. Data enables finer targeting and higher advertising revenue. Companies like Meta, TikTok, and now unfortunately X (Twitter) achieve extraordinary valuations precisely because their systems encourage compulsive use.

As users become more anxious and fragmented, platforms become more indispensable, because customers in that state of mind are not acting logically or in their own best interest as consumers. It would be morally reprehensible to sell a product to a mentally unwell person, but firms are now able to create the mentally unwell customer whom they can then exploit. That is terror.

Conclusion & Investment Foresight

The Absolute Terror Economy extends far beyond these examples. Artificial intelligence threatens to displace large segments of white-collar labor, expanding precarity upward. Debt-based consumption keeps households anxious, compliant, and perpetually behind.

These systems share a common structure. Degradation fuels dominance. Dominance enables further degradation. Feedback loops calcify into normalcy. What begins as efficiency becomes dependency. It is quite possible that social media companies did not initially set out to induce anxiety or polarization; they observed that fear-and-outrage-driven content maximized engagement. Gig platforms discovered that workers with fewer alternatives accepted worse terms. Credit companies learned that revolving debt generated higher lifetime value. These outcomes emerged from metric optimization, but this accidental terror proved to be highly effective and easy to implement, which is why it has been a common form of government throughout human history.

ATE persists because it aligns profit with natural and innate human weakness. It monetizes fear, hunger, loneliness, and insecurity. It does not require overt coercion. It relies on the quiet terror of having no viable alternative.

The Absolute Terror Economy is not inevitable, but it is revealing. It shows what happens when corporate logic operates without moral boundaries, when profit is maximized not by improving human life, but by degrading it just enough to ensure dependence.

The real question is not whether these systems are efficient. They are extraordinarily efficient. The question is whether an economy that thrives on human degradation can ever sustain a healthy society, or if it can even be sustained itself. Ancient slave economies, totalitarian police states such as the Soviet Union and East Germany, and modern terror-based regimes all achieved short-term control but collapsed under stagnation, exhaustion, or sudden failure.

The Absolute Terror Economy remains, for the most part, unseen, unchallenged, and devastatingly effective, which is why related equities have done exceedingly well. But history will show that terror does not rule in the long term, and we must prepare ourselves for such an eventuality.