UCAISM GLOBAL INITIATIVE
WORKING PAPER SERIES · UGI-WP-2026-01

Intelligent Capitalism

UCAISM as the Third Architecture Beyond Smith and Marx

Chang-Gyu Kwag · UCAISM Global Initiative

Status
Working Paper / Preprint — Not peer reviewed
Version
1.0 · September 2026
Journal status
A revised version of this research is currently under review at the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
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Abstract

Platform capitalism raises analytical, political, and moral questions that neither economics nor sociology alone fully resolves. This paper argues that platform rent persists because redress arrives too slowly relative to the speed of extraction — a mechanism formalized here as the Extraction Gap. A minimal formal model shows that sustainable rent falls once an AI system negotiates on an individual's behalf ex ante, rather than contesting terms afterward. Building on the technofeudalism and digital-empires literatures, the paper develops the User-Centric AI Individual Sovereignty Model (UCAISM), combining individual ownership of data and reputation with cooperative governance of the verifying infrastructure. The argument is grounded in Kantian autonomy, Rousseauian publicness, and a Rawlsian distributive test, and evaluated against four precedents: India's UPI, Brazil's Pix, Estonia's X-Road, and Finland's basic-income experiment. UCAISM is offered as a candidate institutional architecture, not a complete equilibrium theory.

Keywords

Platform Capitalism; Technofeudalism; Digital Political Economy; Extraction Gap; AI Fiduciary; UCAISM

JEL Classification

D63; Z13; L86; P16; O33

Suggested Citation

Kwag, C.-G. (2026). Intelligent Capitalism: UCAISM as the Third Architecture Beyond Smith and Marx. UCAISM Global Initiative Working Paper Series, UGI-WP-2026-01, Version 1.0.

Version History

Version 1.0 — September 2026. Initial public working-paper release.

Journal Status

A revised version of this research is currently under review at the Cambridge Journal of Economics. The journal-review status does not imply acceptance, endorsement, or publication by the journal.

Working Paper Notice. This is a pre-peer-review research manuscript issued by the UCAISM Global Initiative Working Paper Series. It may be revised as the research develops. Readers should cite the version and date indicated on this working paper. Where a peer-reviewed Version of Record later becomes available, this page should identify and link to the journal citation and DOI while preserving the archival working-paper version.