The Unincorporated Man

Nanotechnology and full automation, inside an economy where the scarce asset is people.

Work to buy back your own shares. Everyone is incorporated at birth, their upbringing and education financed by shareholders who hold a permanent claim on their earnings. Most people never reach majority self-ownership, and the ones who do are a class apart.

Capital captures it — Nothing is abolished. The gains are simply owned by someone.

The most literal version of this pattern anywhere: not that capital owns the machines, but that it owns you. The novel treats it as a functioning and broadly popular system, which is what makes it land.