CONCEPT
The Geography of Value Capture
The distinction between capability and capture — between who can build and who keeps what gets built — that reveals how AI's democratization of tools coexists with the concentration of value in the jurisdictions that own the infrastructure.
AI democratizes capability at the level of the individual: a developer in Lagos can now build what previously required a team in San Francisco. AI does not democratize value capture. The developer in Lagos builds on cloud infrastructure owned in Seattle, through AI models owned in San Francisco, distributed via platforms owned in Cupertino, paid through systems owned in New York, while her own jurisdiction receives only the residual after every layer of infrastructure has taken its rent. The geography of value capture reproduces the institutional core-periphery structure of earlier eras through a new technical substrate. The capability has been democratized; the capture has been concentrated. The gap between the two is the mechanism through which the citizenship premium reproduces itself in the AI era.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The economic specifics matter. The Lagos developer pays for AI tools in dollars — a currency whose acquisition cost,