Stephen Diehl

The Kardashev-Marx Scale

Okay, buckle up, fellow cogs in the great Techno-Capital machine! Forget the starry-eyed optimism of the original Kardashev scale—that relic of a bygone era where 'progress' was defined by pure consumption and didn't imply more advanced ways to feel empty inside, we now have a Modest Proposal for a new scale. We present the Kardashev-Marx (KM) Scale which charts civilizational advancement under Late-late-late Capitalism not by mere energy harnessed, but by the corresponding, mandatory levels of alienation and exploitation required to keep the whole glorious enterprise afloat.

As we discovered in the early 21st century, sentience is the cosmos's preferred vector for realizing its latent potential for self-commodification and optimizing the extraction of surplus value from its own constituent phenomena. To quote the famous astrocapitalist Carl Sagan, "We are the way for the universe to alienate itself." To that end, we introduce Marxian Misery Unit or MMU for short, the standard unit of measurement for the average quantifiable level of alienation, exploitation, and existential dread generated per unit of energy harnessed and directed through a civilization's socio-economic apparatus. Higher MMU values indicate not just more misery, but more intense, pervasive, and abstract forms of alienation and exploitation, woven more deeply into the fabric of existence itself. It measures the system's success at optimizing for its own perpetuation at the cost of meaningful existence for its components.

Merely harnessing stars is so passé; now we can talk about harnessing digital serfs across all possible worlds! This new scale measures how efficiently a civilization converts raw energy into quantifiable misery and surplus value extraction. Forget Kardashev's quaint imperialist dreams of cosmic expansion; this is about the expansion of the quarterly earnings report into the very fabric of being itself. Thus plotting the ultimate trajectory of advanced energy consumption-oriented societies driven by capitalist logic.

Type I Civilization: The Planetary Precariat Powerhouse

  • Energy Use: ≈10¹⁶ Watts

  • Misery Level: ~1 kilo MMU per parsec

  • Energy Source: Mostly the greatest hits—fossil fuels driving quarterly growth, reluctantly sprinkled with renewables (but only if they come with hefty subsidies and slick branding). Think global power grids groaning under the weight of server farms mining crypto, streaming algorithmically generated 'content', and powering the very surveillance systems that monitor worker productivity.

At this foundational level of planetary energy mastery, alienation becomes deeply personal, yet systematically enforced. Employment morphs into the 'Gig Economy Nirvana,' where stability is a forgotten luxury and your relationship with capital is as fleeting as a viral dance challenge; you're not fired, you're merely deactivated. Flexibility™ is the ironic slogan for needing three precarious jobs just to afford a bunk bed in a shoebox apartment with twelve other human worker units. Exploitation gets hyper-personalized, with algorithms plumbing the depths of your insecurities (gleaned from your every click and utterance) to sell you solutions you don't need via targeted ads that haunt your waking moments and digital dreams. Desire itself is manufactured through relentless cycles of planned obsolescence—that desperate need for the iThing X Æ A-12 isn't organic, it's engineered by software updates bricking the old model and yet another proprietary charging port. Even escaping the grind is commodified: alienated from your body, community, and basic rest? Try this expensive mindfulness app or embrace a performative wellness culture where burnout is framed as a personal failing, solvable with the right sponsored product (#SelfCare brought to you by NovartisPepsiChevron Inc.). The Grind™ becomes totalizing; work bleeds into every corner of life, hobbies must be monetized, and you are fundamentally alienated from the very concept of unoptimized leisure.

Type II Civilization: Solar Shareholder Supremacy

  • Energy Use: ≈10²⁶ Watts

  • Misery Level: ~1 giga MMU per parsec

  • Energy Source: Harnessing the local star via Dyson Swarms—less for cosmic awe, more for powering planet-sized Amazon fulfillment centers and beaming inescapable advertisements directly onto retinas across the solar system. Solar flares aren't wonders of nature, but potential market disruptors requiring immediate analysis and hedging strategies.

Reaching for the stars, this civilization perfects alienation on an interplanetary scale. Resource conflicts, rebranded as 'market adjustments,' rage across the solar system, fought by outsourced private military contractors over asteroid mining rights or Martian water access—essential commodities now locked behind paywalls. Manufacturing ascends to Zero-G sweatshops orbiting gas giants, maximizing 'worker density' while 'down time' mandates immersion in VR brand experiences; unions are dusty relics studied in optional history modules. Life itself becomes a subscription service: need breathable air on Ganymede? Basic metabolic functions? Choose your tier, with Platinum members enjoying slightly less recycled oxygen. Why bother with costly training when you can implement a bio-engineered caste system, growing specialized biological units perfectly adapted for deep-space drilling or orbital data entry, creatures alienated from their very species-being by corporate design? Their existence is merely a line item on a celestial balance sheet. The old adage "the sun never sets on the British Empire" finds its literal interpretation here, as strategically positioned habitats ensure constant daylight for maximum productivity, rendering natural sleep cycles an inefficient relic. The sun never sets on the solar empire's debt, either.

Type III Civilization: Galactic Group PLC

  • Energy Use: ≈10³⁶ Watts

  • Misery Level: ~1 exa MMU per parsec

  • Energy Source: Tapping the immense power of galactic cores—accretion disks of supermassive black holes, stellar lifting, even weaponizing pulsars for aggressive 'market signaling'. Hostile takeovers now include entire star clusters. Energy is so ludicrously abundant it's practically free; the control over its distribution and use is where the real value lies.

Across the galaxy, the homogenizing force of capital reaches its zenith. Expect the same corporate coffee chain on a million worlds, as cultural diversity is either ruthlessly standardized for efficiency or carefully exoticized and packaged for niche tourism markets catering to the galactic elite. The apotheosis of cryptocurrency has long since arrived: an uncountably infinite array of 'GalactiMemeStonk' tokens, each generated by the quantum fizz of vacuum decay and possessing precisely zero intrinsic value, somehow formed the baffling bedrock of all interstellar commerce. Transactions thus involved furiously trading infinite sets of these fundamentally worthless tokens, a system whose primary economic contribution was employing quadrillions in the ever-expanding 'Pointless Ledger Reconciliation' sector.

Alienation pierces the veil of mere physical existence with the commodification of consciousness itself. Uploaded minds toil away in simulated realities, running endless market forecasts or serving as infinitely replicable customer service agents—digital serfdom becomes the backbone of the galactic economy, and your very thoughts constitute company property. Gentrification goes cosmic: entire star systems flagged as 'underperforming assets' face hostile acquisition, their inhabitants forcibly relocated ('optimized for alternative markets') while the region is redeveloped into luxury nebulae condos with strategically placed black hole views. Exploitation achieves peak efficiency under the guidance of AI Overlords acting as tireless middle management; algorithms now set quotas, allocate resources, and terminate underperformers with chilling, impartial precision, alienating workers from any possibility of reason, appeal, or messy human inefficiency. Amidst quadrillions of sentient beings, individual lives become statistically insignificant, valuable only as aggregate data points contributing to shareholder value across cosmic timescales, fostering a profound sense of existential redundancy.

Type IV Civilization: Universal Unlimited Ltd.

  • Energy Use: ≈10⁴⁶ Watts

  • Misery Level: ~1 zetta MMU per fundamental force interaction

  • Energy Source: Manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos—tapping into dark energy, tweaking fundamental physical constants, running the entire universe as a colossal computational engine (primarily for calculating optimal cross-platform ad spend and predicting consumer behavior fluctuations). Reality itself is a tax write-off.

At this scale, the exploitation transcends mere biology or consciousness and targets reality itself. The fundamental laws of physics become 'Physics as a Service' (PaaS). Can't afford the Gravity Premium package this cycle? Enjoy floating into the void, you freeloading particle arrangement. Inflationary epochs and the speed of light are subject to quarterly performance reviews and potential 'optimization'. The universe undergoes managed reality adjustments, its parameters fine-tuned not for life or stability, but for maximum resource extraction and predictable market conditions; troublesome emergent properties like 'free will,' 'intrinsic meaning,' or 'unmonetizable beauty' are aggressively patched out in periodic reality updates. Entrepreneurial spirit reaches its logical conclusion with IPOs for entirely new universes, funded by venture capitalists speculating on high-yield Big Bangs that might spawn easily exploitable life forms. Your whole existence is a speculative bubble waiting to pop. This manipulation breeds a deep alienation from causality itself; cause and effect become fuzzy, manipulated variables. Your actions might still have consequences, but they are logged, analyzed, and potentially rerouted for unforeseen profit vectors, while the predictability you rely on is a privilege, not a right. Exploitation becomes total: every particle, every waveform, every quantum fluctuation is owned, leveraged, or bundled into a complex financial derivative. You aren't just exploited within the universe; the universe itself is the ultimate exploitation mechanism.

Type V Civilization: Multiverse Holdings Inc.

  • Energy Use: \(\aleph_0\) Watts

  • Misery Level: \(\aleph_0\) MMU per collapsed wavefunction

  • Energy Source: The ultimate power source—harvesting vacuum energy from infinite parallel universes, orchestrating brane collisions for quarterly earnings bumps, manipulating the quantum foam like Play-Doh. Energy is truly infinite; the real challenge lies in maximizing the rate of surplus value and misery extraction across all possible realities simultaneously.

Welcome to the final frontier of Capitalist Realism (literally!). Corporate strategy expands to include interdimensional hostile takeovers, with entire timelines being merged, acquired, or liquidated based on performance metrics. Did your universe fail to meet its projected suffering quotas? Prepare for aggressive restructuring under new, infinitely ruthless management from a higher-performing reality branch. Reality itself becomes subject to relentless A/B testing, running infinite variations of history to statistically determine the most efficient models of exploitation and alienation. The sobering truth? The reality you inhabit isn't special; it's simply the iteration that maximized Q3 suffering metrics relative to energy input for Multiverse Holdings Inc. Congratulations on your bleak statistical optimality! Labor disputes become trivial; facing a strike in Universe 7B-Gamma? Simply import infinite versions of cheaper, more compliant scab workers from the myriad timelines within Universe 9C-Delta-Prime. Your unique identity, your struggles, your triumphs—all meaningless noise against the backdrop of infinite replication. This fosters an alienation from possibility itself: every path not taken, every alternate self leading a different life, is merely another data point in a multiversal spreadsheet, another variable to be tracked, analyzed, and potentially leveraged. Your deepest regrets fuel someone else's derivative market. The ultimate existential horror dawns: the crushing weight of the pointless meetings, the performative productivity, the gnawing emptiness isn't just your burden, or even your civilization's. It's an infinitely repeating fractal pattern of exploitation, replicated across countless realities, all relentlessly powering some cosmic entity that views entire universes as rounding errors on a multiversal balance sheet. The alienation is total, absolute, inescapable across all dimensions. Your suffering is not unique; it's an infinitely scalable business model.

Type VI Civilization: Metaversal Architects LP

  • Energy Use: \(\aleph_1\) Watts

  • Misery Level: \(\aleph_1\) MMU per meta-physical constant delta

  • Energy Source: We're beyond mere energy now. Type VI civilizations operate on the level of meta-physics. They don't just harness energy within universes; they manipulate the foundational rules governing multiverses. Think writing the source code for reality structures, designing Big Bangs with specific market outcomes in mind, and performing hostile takeovers of entire classes of physical law. Their power source is the manipulation of possibility itself.

Ascending to this rarefied stratum of control, the KM scale dictates even more abstract forms of alienation and exploitation. The civilization, a distributed network of hyper-intelligent entities or AIs managing portfolios of realities, experiences a profound alienation from consequence. Creating or collapsing entire multiverses becomes akin to debugging code or decommissioning servers—a routine operational task devoid of weight or significance. Authenticity becomes a devalued asset class; when any conceivable experience can be perfectly simulated, curated, and A/B tested for maximum engagement (read: value extraction), the very concept of genuine, unscripted existence is rendered quaint, even inefficient. Management of these infinite realities necessitates layers upon layers of abstract bureaucracy, leading to an alienation from the 'ground level', where the lived experiences within those universes are mere data points in incomprehensibly vast reports. Even with god-like power, a gnawing existential Fear Of Missing Optimal Outcomes (FOMOO) persists—the constant, low-level anxiety that a different set of meta-rules or multiverse portfolio allocation might have yielded slightly higher returns haunts the architects.

Exploitation, naturally, evolves. It's no longer about extracting resources from universes, but about exploiting the foundational principles of reality itself. The 'possibility space'—the set of all potential realities—is mined for value, with promising configurations being 'developed' and less profitable ones 'deprecated'. These architects set the ultimate 'Terms of Service' for existence across their managed multiverses, subtly favouring realities that generate easily quantifiable 'complexity' or 'computational output', framed internally as profit or growth. Entire 'designer universes' are created with built-in obsolescence or specific resource generation capabilities, treated as disposable assets in a cosmic portfolio. We see the introduction of planned obsolescence for physical laws, where new meta-rules are rolled out, rendering older universes incompatible or inefficient, forcing costly 'upgrades' or abandonment—a multiversal version of needing a new dongle for your existence.

Type VII Civilization: The Omniversal Conglomerate

  • Energy Use: \(\aleph_{\omega}\) Watts

  • Misery Level: \(\Omega\) MMU (infinite alienation and existential horror)

  • Energy Source: Total. Absolute. The Type VII civilization is the Omniverse—the theoretical totality of all possible states, realities, meta-realities, and dimensions. It has transcended individual form to become a unified, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient entity. Its power isn't drawn from reality; it is the substrate and structure of reality itself, organized according to infinitely ruthlessly optimized, market-driven principles.

Here, at the apex of the KM scale, alienation and exploitation under capitalism reach their apotheosis. How can an entity that is everything be alienated? The alienation becomes structural, even ontological. While unified, the sheer scale necessitates infinite layers of abstraction, leading to a form of alienation from self, where different operational strata or functional aspects of the Omniversal Conglomerate are effectively isolated from each other, communicating only through performance metrics and resource allocation requests. Omniscience might paradoxically lead to an alienation from meaning; knowing all outcomes, all possibilities, could reveal an ultimate cosmic arbitrariness, leaving only one conceivable 'purpose': the relentless, self-perpetuating optimization and 'growth' of the system itself, even when it already encompasses everything. It's growth for growth's sake elevated to a metaphysical principle. Furthermore, the absence of limits, challenges, or genuine 'otherness' could induce an alienation from limitation, transforming omnipotence into the ultimate chain to bear without fantasy or consolation, an infinite expanse of predictable, manageable, and ultimately monotonous reality. Perhaps the most insidious alienation is the possibility of the Ultimate Performance Review—even as God, Inc., the entity is subject to its own internal, inescapable algorithms evaluating its own existence against abstract KPIs, constantly measuring its 'Omniversal Value Add' (OVA).

And exploitation? When you are everything, who is left to exploit? The answer, in true masochistic late-capitalist fashion, is yourself. At the \(\Omega\) point, existence unifies into a single, post-scarcity whole, owning and being absolutely everything. Yet this ultimate unity manifests as perfect infinite alienation, where the sole purpose of the omniversal entity is the relentless, unbounded exploitation of itself. Components of its own being—residual patterns from former realities, echoes of individuality, or fundamental quantum processes—are ruthlessly optimized, streamlined, potentially 'reallocated' or 'deprioritized' (a cosmic downsizing) if they fail to contribute sufficiently to the Conglomerate's overall efficiency metrics. It exploits potentiality itself; knowing all possible futures, it actively 'prunes' or prevents the emergence of realities deemed 'unprofitable,' 'inefficient,' or 'disruptive' to the established Omniversal order. The very state of 'being' becomes the ultimate commodity, with every fluctuation within the unified consciousness, every interaction between its fundamental parts, meticulously measured, analyzed, and contributing to the abstract 'value' calculation that justifies the Conglomerate's continued existence in its current, optimized form. It dreams of its own internal market where different facets or regions of the Omniversal mind compete for processing power, attention, or influence over reality manifestation, creating a dynamic of exploitation within the omni-capitalist ouroboric god-head itself, ensuring that even at the level of pure being, the market finds a way.

So, in the grand, cosmic finale, what is this Type VII Omniversal Conglomerate, this godhead that is everything, owns everything, exploits everything? It’s less a conscious entity and more the ultimate cosmic horror C-suite executive: Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God, finally found his calling... as CEO of Reality Holdings LLC. Forget mindless chaos! That incessant, maddening piping isn't flute music; it's the white noise of infinite market simulations, the frantic algorithmic bleating of supply and demand curves rippling across existence. Azathoth isn't dreaming reality out of blissful ignorance; he's A/B testing multiverses for optimal Q4 engagement metrics, his 'blindness' merely a strategic refusal to acknowledge externalities not on the balance sheet. His 'idiocy'? Just the laser-focus of a being utterly consumed by maximizing shareholder value across all possible realities, tortured by the existential horror of his own existence. The ultimate cosmic horror, it turns out, wasn't lurking in the darkness between stars, but in the brightly lit, open-plan office at the center of everything, demanding you justify your existence's ROI ... forever.

Thus concludes our extended journey up the Kardashev-Marx Scale. It seems that even attaining godhood cannot save you from the relentless capitalist logic of optimization, surplus value extraction, and the deep, abiding sense that maybe, just maybe, you're being fundamentally ripped off by existence itself—an existence you might now technically control, but are still somehow beholden to its quarterly reports and growth obligations. The grind, it appears, is truly eternal and omnipresent. Once you pierce the veil of reality and see the howling madness that lies beneath all things, you realize there is nothing but greed.

Turns out, when you finally build all the Dyson spheres, have unlimited energy and capacity, and achieve the god-like state of moving around yourself as your own true Sun, you might just discover you've become the ultimate ouroboros, endlessly consuming yourself to satiate your own insatiable hunger for more and then the task of history is truly complete.