Solve Everything: Achieving Abundance by 2035 — A Blueprint for the Next Decade is a free, book-length web manifesto by Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross and Dr. Peter Diamandis. It has scenario vignettes for 2026, 2030, and 2035, nine chapters, and a glossary. This essay treats it the way an entomologist treats a particularly fine beetle: as a specimen — the best single exhibit of 2026 techno-abundance ideology, quoted for what it says about its authors, never as evidence that its predictions will come true. Its timelines are extravagant even by the genre's standards, and both authors invest in the space they are forecasting.
Their thesis: artificial superintelligence has effectively begun, cognition is becoming a commodity whose price collapses toward the cost of electricity, and if intelligence is aimed through "Targeting Systems" at "Positive-Sum Moonshots," entire domains get "solved" — math and software first, then physics, materials, biology ("the human body has become a software problem"), then energy, planetary systems, and longevity, all by roughly 2035. The end state grants every citizen "Universal Basic Capability": the best AI tutor, doctor, and lawyer at zero marginal cost, plus a personal Compute Wallet.
We no longer distribute cash. We distribute capacity… We have decoupled the cost of living from the quality of life.
Wissner-Gross & Diamandis, Solve Everything, 2026 · source
Four ways it is structurally Marxist
It has a stage theory of history. Chapter one presents a four-stage "physics" of revolutions — Legibility, Harness, Institutions, Abundance — repeating across the Scientific, Industrial, Digital, and Intelligence Revolutions. Revolutions, the authors insist, "are not random events driven by slogans or charismatic leaders" but "obey a specific physics, a predictable structural progression." Compare the 1859 preface: social orders change when productive forces mature, on a schedule ideology cannot hurry. That is productive-forces determinism, rewritten in startup vocabulary, by people who would flinch at the citation.
It has fetters — they just renamed them "The Muddle." Marx's existing relations of production become fetters on the developed forces and must be burst. In Solve Everything, the named enemy is "the entrenched layer of bureaucracy, pricing based on inputs (like hours worked), and scarcity-minded institutions that currently run the world." The race is stated in a sentence Marx could have drafted after a Red Bull: "The Rails vs. The Muddle. If we build the targeting systems fast enough, we win. If The Muddle throttles the ASI with red tape, we lose the century." Same diagram, roles recast: the revolutionary subject is now engineers and capital, and the welfare-state order plays the ancien régime. This is the "protective politics prolongs the transition" thesis — asserted from the capitalist side, in writing, in 2026.
Its endgame is the Gotha Programme's. Living standards decoupled from work; the best services "replicated infinitely at zero marginal cost"; distribution by capability rather than by wage. "The Muddle is a memory. We don't pay for effort. We pay for cleared targets" — the abolition of the wage relation, cheerfully announced by its beneficiaries. Even Keynes gets an unknowing cameo: the manifesto's late chapters promote "Explorers of Purpose" and "Creators of Meaning," which is the 1930 leisure problem in a 2026 hoodie.
The ownership question surfaces inside their own text — and goes unanswered. The authors ask, of ASI, "who aims this weapon, and under what guardrails?" Their answers are governance primitives: Targeting Authorities, Decision Records, equity-constrained benchmarks. Distribution of capacity, everywhere; distribution of ownership, nowhere. Their investor advice makes the position explicit: "Own the rails… These are the railroads of the 21st century." A manifesto that promises everyone the fruits of the machines while advising its readers to buy the machines has reinvented the central problem of nineteenth-century political economy, complete with the railroads.
The texture is a bonus
As a specimen, the document rewards close reading. The 2030 vignette features an "Exolinguistics" channel in which humans trade weather forecasts with whales for ocean-current data ("The trade is mutually beneficial"). By 2035 there are post-mortem connectome uploads, and "the diploma market is being shorted." The disclaimer states that AI was used as a collaborator and that the text "may contain inaccuracies characteristic of large language models" — an abundance manifesto part-written by the means of production it prophesies, hedging itself. The authors also fence the whole thing off as educational, not financial or medical advice. Prophets used to be more committal.
Kurzweil is cited approvingly ("right on schedule"); the stated destination is "the Star Trek economy"; Musk, on Diamandis's own podcast in 2026, told listeners not to bother saving for retirement — "It won't matter." The chorus, the soloist, and the manifesto all point at the same mid-2030s date and the same moneyless destination. Marx pointed there too. He just expected different management.
Which leaves the question the specimen kept dodging, and it is the oldest one in the book: who owns the rails?