The Rise of Coercive Capitalism
The world started feeling different. This is why.
You’re not imagining it. That feeling that you’re working harder than ever and somehow falling further behind. The feeling that the world is somehow less compassionate, less caring.
My name is Pamela Latulippe. I spent twenty years inside the financial system. And I’m here to help you understand what’s coming.
We’re living in the late stages of capitalism.
The system has conditioned us to believe that our worth must be earned from the outside. That we are only as valuable as what we produce, accumulate, or achieve. That the feeling of being enough is always one milestone away.
This belief didn’t emerge organically. It was industrialized. Refined over decades into the most efficient extraction engine ever built.
Here’s how it works.
For the people at the top, validation arrives through accumulation. Wealth becomes a mirror that never stops offering praise. Empathy becomes optional. And as their influence over the system grows, everyone else’s agency quietly erodes.
The rest of us have been sold the idea that we are perpetually behind. Not successful enough. Not productive enough. Not financially secure enough. The solution is always external. More striving. More consuming. More optimizing.
One group gets the penthouse view. The other gets the bill. But both are caught in the same cycle, rewarded for different expressions of the same manufactured hunger.
Big business didn’t invent that hunger. It learned how to feed it profitably, endlessly, and at scale.
The system doesn’t need to force you into anything. It simply identifies the gap between who you are and who you’ve been told you should be, and sells you products designed to close it. The gap never closes. A closed gap is a lost customer.
For decades, we have been living in the age of surveillance capitalism. Every search, every click, every pause on a page, every route we drove, every item we lingered over in an app was being harvested, processed, and sold.
The product was not what we were buying. The product was us. And our behavioral profile was used to sell us things. Ads, recommendations, nudges towards a purchase. Somewhat annoying and invasive. But convenient and manageable.
Then something changed.
The data got richer. The models got sharper. And the infrastructure built to understand our behavior began to predict it. Then shape it, and finally control it.
This is where surveillance capitalism ends, and coercive capitalism begins.
Instead of predicting what we will buy, the system determines what we are allowed to do.
Imagine you’ve been working at a company for years, while every keystroke is being tracked by an AI agent that is learning how you work. One morning, you wake up to an email letting you know you’ve been replaced. Access to your laptop is immediately revoked.
Within days, a credit algorithm detects the income disruption. A missed direct deposit. A change in spending patterns. Something in the data has shifted. The system has already taken preventative measures before you have even told anyone you’ve lost your job. Your credit limit automatically drops in the exact moment you need it most.
Then your health insurance bill arrives. It’s higher than last month. There’s no explanation. The system predicted elevated risk. Perhaps it was the data from your health-tracking device. Or maybe it is a genetic condition hidden in your DNA. Or the prescription you picked up, or a search you made based on a symptom you were having. Whatever the cause, you are being charged more for a future condition you may or may not have.
You start looking for work. Before any human being reads your resume, an employment score has already been assigned. A recruiter’s platform has pulled your data, including employment history, gaps, social signals, and behavioral patterns, and has ranked them against every other candidate. That score determines whether you ever get a callback. You will never see it. You cannot contest it. You don’t even know it exists.
Now you’re watching every dollar. The grocery app you downloaded offers personalized deals, but what you don’t know is that it’s showing prices calibrated to exactly how much pressure your profile says you are willing to absorb. Someone else is shopping in the same aisle, with a different zip code and purchase history, and is seeing a lower price for the same item. You don’t know that. You just know things cost more than they used to.
Then one morning, your car won’t start. Not because anything is mechanically wrong. But because you were two weeks late on a payment, the bank remotely activated a kill switch. You cannot get to the job interview. The system has just made your situation structurally worse, automatically, in response to the very problem it helped create.
No single person decided any of this. Every system just ran its logic. Each one responds to the signal the last one sent.
That is Coercive Capitalism. None of these scenarios is in the future. They are all happening right now.
The system survives on two things: your self-doubt and your dollars. The moment you see that clearly, not just intellectually but in your gut, something shifts. The spell weakens. And you start making choices from a different place entirely.
Artificial intelligence is the engine. Programmable money closes the loop. When the payment mechanism itself can be coded with conditions, restrictions, and expiration dates, the coercion is no longer merely commercial. It is structural. It is the infrastructure of daily life.
This is just the beginning. The infrastructure is being built right now. Awareness is the first step. It leads to different choices. And enough people making different choices is how we shape what comes next.
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— Pam (pam@awaretrade.com)
Aware Trade