Ownership concentration × Institutional adaptation

The traffic jam is participation itself becoming a scarce civic resource: because ownership is public and institutions can restructure fast, fiscal policy turns into continuous renegotiation — dividends, rules, and forms all permanently up for a vote. That builds real collective resilience and avoids the inequality trap, but the churn produces its own fatigue, and exhausted citizens cede the constant re-litigation to whichever interest group still shows up. High public wealth, low predictability.

The most under-explored corner, because fast institutions are usually assumed to be the fix for capture — instead they make capture more efficient. Legislatures reconfigure overnight, but toward whatever protects the rent structure: laws and tax codes get rewritten as product development, state security merges with corporate infrastructure, and municipalities hand public services to tech cartels for compute credits. Efficient, unequal, and politically nearly impossible to reverse once locked in.

Public wealth ends up subsidizing institutional stagnation: AI dividends keep flowing and keep the public quiet, while schools, courts, and civil service stay structurally old. Legitimacy outlasts competence — people tolerate the frozen machinery longer because the checks clear — so legacy roles survive as distribution channels for AI surplus long after their original function is gone. Comfortable, cash-rich, and administratively rotting from the inside.

The mechanism is fiscal, not aesthetic: value migrates into things a rigid tax code can't see — compute credits, internal model licenses, transfer-priced IP — so public revenue collapses even where visible wealth is exploding. Local governments still running on payroll, property, and sales tax go bankrupt beside a booming AI firm that books its gains as untaxed compute. Corporate enclaves fund their own roads and security while the public infrastructure around them crumbles; what fills the vacuum, sometimes, is informal mutual-aid outside the state — resilience born of abandonment, not design.