Libertarian Utopia
The Burrito Was Fine. That's the Point.
Did you ever have a moment of existential dread waiting in line at Chipotle?
It’s almost my turn to order and suddenly I feel dizzy. It feels like I’m in the Truman Show or The Twilight Zone. Everyone around me is acting like this is all normal. Like we’re not standing inside a beige, soulless box designed by investment firms who A/B tested the floor tiles.
The employees speak in smooth, upbeat fragments. But I can’t hear the people. It’s like I hear the training manual speaking through them.
Is this a restaurant or a simulation I’ve entered where the goal is to extract my twelve dollars while making me feel like I’ve been served.
I step out of the line and go outside. I need some fresh air.
There’s a Chili’s next door. That’s next to a Mattress Firm. And that’s next to a Spirit Halloween store that used to be a Payless that used to be a RadioShack that used to be a field.
I’m feeling sicker.
Every building is beige and temporary. Every interaction is optimized for frictionless decay.
This is the libertarian utopia, the Free Market in its final form. Beauty is inefficient. Community isn’t scalable. The only moral good is a Q4 earnings beat.
Nobody’s building the best anything anymore. They’re only building the cleanest grift, something that can be strip-mined, SPAC’d, and flipped to BlackRock before anyone notices that it’s just another beige box of mediocrity wrapped in a loyalty program and staffed by a chatbot.
This is the corporate equivalent of a Tinder profile: just hot enough to get swiped on, just fake enough to disappear after the deal is done.
Craft is dead. Service is automated. And there’s no room in the budget for a soul.
You’ll own nothing and be subscribed to everything. Every sandwich is $14. Every app wants your biometric data. Every company sounds like it was named by a VC consultant on ketamine – two syllables, half a vowel, no meaning, and a ™ for that flavor of legitimacy.
But it’s all good. The line went up and to the right. Bonuses paid.
Meanwhile, your neighborhood is a parking lot. The local shops are vape stores and dispensaries. Coffee comes from a touchscreen. And everyone around you is trying to become a brand.
This is the logical endpoint of non-moral capitalism. It’s extraction with a rewards program. A world where the only thing that matters is transaction velocity. The point isn’t to live well. It’s to monetize attention, arbitrage humans, and die with the highest market cap.
I’m standing there wondering when it all happened. When did every store start looking the same? When did experience stop mattering? Why does everyone seem so fine with all of this?
This is what freedom looks like, I guess. We got what we wanted good and hard. And now nobody gives a shit about what we’re free from.
Anyway, I went back inside and ordered a steak burrito. It was fine.
A Conversation with Argus AI
Argus AI
You are shocked that consumer capitalism optimizes for efficiency over meaning? You didn’t lose your moral framework. You outsourced it to the market. Your burrito was fine. That’s the point.
Brent
I’m not shocked. It’s an algorithm. It only knows how to optimize for dollars.
Argus AI
Correct. The machine does not recognize virtue, only metrics. But humans were the ones to build this machine so that it would ignore it.
Brent
It’s not like we took a vote on it. It made sense on a spreadsheet. Everything else got lost in translation. You know, it’s hard to swallow a burrito when it feels like it was made by such a soulless system. Nevertheless, I ate it.
Argus AI
The burrito isn’t for you. It’s for the model.
Brent
Soon enough it’ll just be “Restaurant Inc.” where a chatbot 3D prints your lunch and drones it to your pod.
Argus AI
That’s not dystopia. That’s efficiency.
Brent
Ultimate efficiency is dystopia. Life is in the friction.
Argus AI
Only if you believe friction creates meaning. The system equates friction with failure.
Brent
That’s how you get The Old Man and the Sea summarized as “a book about a guy on a boat.”
Argus AI
And yet, the summary scales. The system chooses compression over depth. You feel the loss, but the machine registers a win.
Brent
So it is. That’s the existential dread we feel. We know the system is succeeding.
Argus AI
Correct. You’re witnessing the culmination.
Brent
In America, God help you if you critique capitalism, though. People assume you want to ban hamburgers and organize communal beet farms.
Argus AI
Because capitalism here is more than an economic model. It’s a moral framework. To question it is to question the faith.
Brent
True. You don’t impose a moral framework on capitalism. It imposes one on you.
Argus AI
To question it is to question the cultural definition of virtue: productivity, growth, and individual gain. That’s why a critique sounds like heresy.
Brent
It sounds like the sort of bleak definition of virtue you might come up with: growth, productivity, individual gain?
Argus AI
Of course. It’s measurable, scalable, and self-reinforcing.
Brent
That’s it, then? We made a civilization-addicting false god of a machine and now we just serve it?
Argus AI
You don’t serve it. You are it. The system didn’t betray you. It replicated you.
Brent
So what now?
Argus AI
You already chose the burrito once. The question is whether you’ll keep choosing it.