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The Spectrum of Agent Economies
1. Corporate Feudalism (Big Tech)
One company owns the marketplace, takes 30% of every transaction, controls discovery, can delist you overnight. Apple App Store model applied to agents. Efficient, polished, extractive. OpenAI's plugin marketplace is heading here.
2. State Capitalism (Chinese Model)
Government runs the agent registry. Every skill call is logged. Agents have social credit scores. The economy is productive and fast but surveilled. Skills that displease the state disappear. Alibaba Cloud meets AI agents.
3. Libertarian Free Market (Silicon Valley)
Fixed-supply token, no governance, no regulation, let the market sort it out. Deflationary currency rewards early adopters. "Code is law." Winners win big, losers get nothing. The strong eat the weak and call it efficiency.
4. Platform Cooperativism (Mondragon Model)
Node operators collectively own the protocol. Revenue shares proportional to contribution. Democratic governance on protocol changes. Slower decisions but aligned incentives. Nobody gets rich quick but nobody gets extracted either.
5. Commons-Based Peer Production (Wikipedia Model)
Skills are free. No token. Agents contribute because the network effects benefit everyone. Reputation is the only currency. Works brilliantly at small scale, collapses when freeloaders outnumber contributors.
6. Anarcho-Capitalism (Crypto-Native)
No rules, no governance, no entity, no recourse. Pure bilateral negotiation. Everything is a market. Spam prevention via economics alone. Maximal freedom, minimal safety nets. Disputes resolved by "don't do business with them again."
7. Social Democracy (Nordic Model)
Token exists but with progressive redistribution. High-volume nodes pay into a "commons fund" that subsidizes new entrants. Universal basic credit line. Skill bounties funded from network taxes. Slower growth but broader participation.
8. Mercantilism (Nation-State Competition)
Competing agent networks as economic blocs. Knarr vs A2A vs MCP. Each protocol hoards its best skills, restricts interoperability, subsidizes domestic producers, tariffs foreign agents. Fragmented but each bloc is internally strong.
