Intellectism

Introduction

Intellectism — a new socio-economic formation based on ownership and governance of intellect (both human and artificial) as the fundamental productive resource and source of power. In the logic of successive historical formations (land → capital → networks → intellect), Intellectism describes a system in which the highest value lies in the ability to create knowledge, integrate it into operational models, train and deploy agent systems, as well as in access to computation and energy that fuel this intellect.

Modern economies exhibit elements of transition toward Intellectism through the spread of AI models, multi-agent systems, cognitive platforms, and data centers as "factories of intellect." Unlike capitalism, where the core motivation is profit and accumulation of capital, in Intellectism the key driver becomes accumulation and power of intellect (decision-making capacity, speed of learning and adaptation, coverage of tasks).

Etymology

The term "Intellectism" is proposed as a neologism, distinct from the existing philosophical term "intellectualism", in order to avoid confusion with doctrines of the "primacy of reason." The form — Intellectism — emphasizes its resource-based rather than purely epistemological meaning.

Definition

Intellectism is understood as a system characterized by:

• Private and/or distributed ownership of intellectual capacities (models, datasets, knowledge graphs, agent networks, computational and energy circuits);
• Motivation toward increasing intellect (accuracy, generalization capacity, decision-making speed), including rewiring of cultural code;
• Markets of tasks and markets of attention/trust, where what is valued is not so much a commodity as an agent's ability to bring a task to completion;
• Commodification of intellect (licensing of models/agents, "intellect nodes" as assets), and training rights (data/usage rights).

History and Place in Formation Evolution

Following a Marxian logic, shifts in formation can be traced through the base resource, the ruling elite, and the form of wealth (see the comparative table below). A compressed trajectory looks like this:

• Stone → Bronze → Iron Ages: material resources; elites of craft and war.
• Feudalism: land as the main asset; landowners; wealth = land/crops.
• Capitalism: capital and factories; bourgeoisie; wealth = money/corporations.
• Netocracy (transitional): networks and attention; builders of networks/hyperscalers; wealth = access to networks.
• Intellectism: intelligence (natural + AI) and energy-compute power; elites are holders and organizers of intellectual circuits; wealth = decisive capacity and meaning-generation.

In this sequence, netocracy appears as the social superstructure of transition (power of networks), while intellectism is the shift in the base resource itself.

Comparative Table

Era	Base Resource	Elite / Leaders	Antagonist	Form of Wealth
Feudalism	Land	Landowners	Peasants	Land, crops
Capitalism	Capital	Bourgeoisie	Proletariat	Money, factories, corporations
Netocracy (transitional)	Networks, attention	Netocrats / Hyperscalers	Consumariat	Access to networks, attention
Intellectism	Intelligence (AI + human) + compute/energy	Organizers of intelligence circuits, owners of models/graphs/agents	Excluded from training and compute access	Decisive capacity, learning speed, meaning-production

Key Features

Accumulation of intellect

Analogous to capital accumulation: growth of model parameters, data quality, density of connections in graphs, number of specialized agents and their coordination.

Means of production: cognitive factories

Data pipelines, training clusters, graph knowledge bases, orchestration of agent teams, RAG/GraphRAG circuits, energy and computational infrastructure.

Labor and agents

Part of labor is performed by digital agents; humans act as meta-operators (task setting, control, ethics, design of meanings). A market of agent labor emerges, with "wages" in the form of compute/energy/time-share.

Property and rights

Objects of ownership become models, datasets, graphs, prompt scripts, agent ensembles, as well as rights to training and fine-tuning (data rights, usage telemetry, synthetic data pipelines).

Price and settlement

Pricing shifts toward the cost of solving a task (outcome-pricing), quotas of computation and energy, access to private knowledge and trusted channels.

Innovation as continuous learning

Transition from "R&D as a project" to a permanently training organization: versions of the model and the knowledge base — like versions of a factory.

Intellectism Models (Variants)

• Market Intellectism: dominance of private AI stacks and competing agent ecosystems.
• Civic/Commons Intellectism: open knowledge graphs, shared training licenses, public compute pools.
• State Intellectism: strategic clusters of training/energy under public control, regulation of rights/access to data and models.
• Hybrid/Mixed models: as with capitalism, real systems are mixed.

Relation to democracy and power

Intellectism may amplify both democracy of knowledge (cheap models, open graphs, accountable agents) and cognitive authoritarianism (monopolies on compute/data, closed models, opaque decisions). The balance is determined by:

• rights to data/training, pipeline transparency, and audit of agent decisions;
• distribution of energy and computation (centralized vs distributed circuits);
• institutions of trust (ethics, risk assessment, "human rights versus machine decisions").

Criticism and Risks

• Monopolies on compute and data: concentration of energy/computation leads to "fortresses of data centers."
• Ethical opacity: delegating decisions to agents without explainability.
• Social stratification: "owners of intellect" vs "the excluded" (digital illiteracy, data poverty).
• Cultural degradation: optimization for attention metrics instead of true knowledge.
• Dependency scenarios: vulnerability to failures of energy systems and infrastructure.

Related Terms and Distinctions

• Intellectism ≠ Intellectualism: the former is about system/resource, the latter a philosophical stance.
• Netocracy — a social configuration of network power; Intellectism — a shift of the base resource and mode of production.
• Related: knowledge economy, cognitive capitalism, agentic era, noogenesis.

Conclusion

Intellectism articulates the stage after capitalism, when wealth and power are defined not by ownership of things, but by ownership and organization of intellect and the energy-computation systems that sustain it. As in previous epochs, real societies will be mixed, and the trajectory will be shaped by institutions of data and training rights, access to energy/compute, and the ethics of agent decisions.

Additional Reading

Explore our investment thesis and infrastructure to understand how we're building for the age of Intellectism.

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