Every society runs on a story it tells its people about what money means. In Volume, that story is carefully maintained. Workers are trained to believe that money represents worth — your skill, your effort, your value as a human being. They are merit thinkers by design, and that design is intentional.
Because merit thinkers work. They show up, they improve, they compete. They hold up the gig economy without ever questioning who set the rules. They look down on the discarded — the ones who couldn’t pay their birth debt and were thrown outside the walls — and see failure, not a system that was never designed to keep them. There is no retraining, no assistance, no second chance. When a worker stops being profitable they are removed to make room for a new one. The wasteland just outside the city isn’t a tragedy to the shareholders. It’s a feature.
The shareholders are game thinkers. They know money is just a score. They know worth is a story. They told it to the workers on purpose — because a merit thinker who believes they deserve what they get will never look up to see who’s keeping score.
💡 Idea by me, prose by Claude (Anthropic)
#WorldBuilding #Volume #GameThinking #Cyberpunk #SpeculativeFiction