Part II: Capital as Regime Artifact

Capital is not a timeless category. What counts as capital, where it accumulates, who controls it—all of this shifts when the underlying regime shifts. Fernand Braudel's three floors of economic life provide a framework for understanding these transitions: material life at the base, governed by geography and biology and the slow rhythms of agriculture; the market economy above it, where prices form and exchange becomes visible; and at the top, the zone of the anti-market, where the rules of ordinary exchange are suspended by those with sufficient reach. The dominant capital form of one era becomes the commodity of the next, and whoever recognizes the shift early positions themselves on the floor where returns concentrate.

Carlota Perez identifies the "key input" around which each major transition organizes—cotton and iron for the first industrial revolution, steel and electricity for the second, oil and automobiles for the third, microelectronics for the fourth. Each key input satisfies specific criteria: its cost falls rapidly and continuously; its supply appears unbounded at the relevant planning horizon; its applications extend across nearly all sectors; and it reshapes organizational forms, not just production techniques.

The structural question is whether computation, powered by electricity and converted through silicon, constitutes a fifth key input. If it does, the capital forms that dominated the previous regime are already transitioning from structural advantage to commodity, while new forms crystallize around the fresh constraint.