---
title: "Chapter 21: A Letter to the World"
book: "Collapse or Collapse"
author: "Vinay Pasricha"
url: https://vinaypasricha.com/books/collapse-or-collapse/chapter-21-a-letter-to-the-world
status: "On Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNL53J5R. The full text is shared on vinaypasricha.com with the author's permission."
---

# Chapter 21: A Letter to the World

To whoever is reading this, in whatever year, holding a company, a ministry, a job, or a child’s future:

I am writing to tell you what I believe will happen. Not what might, and not what I hope. The twenty chapters before this one are argument and method and proof, and you may weigh them as you like. This letter is different. It is what I see when I look down the road the book has drawn, and I have written it plainly so that it can be checked against the years as they come, because a prophecy that cannot be checked is only a mood. These dates, and the claim of long-run abundance, are my forecasts, not findings; the chapters before this one are the evidence, and the years will be the test.

Three clocks are running as you read, and none of them is yours to stop.

The first is a competitor. Somewhere in your industry, this year or next, one company will take the chain from first word to cash out of its departments and put it into vectors, with one pair of people at the gates, and from that quarter it will quote in hours, deliver in days and keep ninety-eight rupees of every hundred of growth. You will hear of it as a rumour, then as a lost customer, then as a price you cannot match. The second clock is the machine itself. The capability of the models that hold skill is doubling faster than any reorganisation you could begin today will finish, so that every quarter you wait, the gap between what the chain can carry and what your departments carry grows, and the cost of closing it grows with it. The third clock is your best people. The first collapsed firm in your industry will pay its aligners far more than you pay, for a result they own, and the ones who leave you will be exactly the ones who wanted the result most. Those three clocks are the reason the title of this book has no comma of mercy in it. You will collapse your organisation, or it will be collapsed.

Here is how the years will go.

## The first three years

In the first three years the skill leaves the person and does not come back.

Every skill an office result needs, the answering, the drafting, the searching, the checking, the scheduling, the chasing, the pricing, is already in the machine as you read this, and within three years it will be there completely, at a cost a small firm can pay. The visible sign will be small and you will almost miss it: departments will stop hiring for skill. The advertisement that asked for eight years’ experience will ask for none, and nobody will quite say why. In every industry one company, usually not the largest, will do what chapter 13 describes and collapse its revenue chain on one Monday, and within a year its people will be paid like partners and its competitors’ best people will be writing to it. You will say that your industry is different, that it is regulated, relational, technical, local. Every industry has said this, and in every industry the first firm will be in a part of it nobody thought could move. Governments will notice in these years, commission a report, and do nothing, which is correct, because nothing has yet happened to them.

## Years four to six

In years four to six the second collapse begins, and it is the one the book is named for.

The firms that did not collapse themselves will be collapsed by their markets. A department-run company competing with a vector-run company loses on price, on speed and on people at once, and it does not lose slowly; it loses a customer a week until a board meeting that should have happened three years earlier happens in a hurry, and the collapse is done by force, badly, by people who have not read the record. This is the collapse that costs jobs carelessly, and it is the one I am writing to spare you. In the same years the vectors of the first collapsed firms will cross their own walls, lent whole to companies in markets they do not serve and lent at the edge to the customers and suppliers who still run on departments, as chapter 18 describes, and the first industries will find that most of their results are produced by a handful of chains that a few hundred people hold. Unemployment will rise in these years, visibly, for the first time, and it will be worst where companies protected their departments longest, because a forced collapse pays nobody out well. You will say that customers want to deal with people. They want the result, and they will deal with a person at the one gate where a person matters, which is what they always wanted and were never given.

## Years seven to nine

In years seven to nine prices fall, governments act, and the worst passes.

When an industry runs on a few shared vectors, its costs fall by the fraction the chapters have shown, a tenth of the people for four times the result, and in a competitive market most of that reaches the customer as price. Insurance, logistics, professional services, recruitment, banking, the back half of every manufacturer: each will be a fraction of its former price, and the money that used to pay for departments will stay in households. Governments will act in these years, late and all at once: income floors, because the old link between a job and a living has visibly broken; a shorter statutory working week, because there is less work to share; and taxes on the output of vectors, because that is where the value now is and where it can be counted. You will say the state will stop it. The state will tax it, then copy it, in that order. And in these same years the thing the book has promised will become visible in the figures: new Outcomes will be born faster than old ones die, because a result that costs a tenth of what it did is a result ten times as many people can buy, and every new buyer is a new unowned result for someone to flag. Humans will move, in large numbers, from skill work to intention work, from doing the steps to holding the gates and opening what comes next, and the unemployment that peaked in year six will be falling by year nine.

## Years ten to twelve

In years ten to twelve countries diverge, and the state collapses itself.

The countries that let their companies collapse early, and caught the people who fell with floors rather than with protected departments, will be rich in a way that will embarrass the ones that did not; the ones that protected their departments by law will have kept their jobs for a decade and lost their industries at the end of it. The state itself, which is the largest department store in every country, will begin to run as Outcomes: a result a citizen feels, a chain that produces it, a master who holds it, a Keeper above her, and the ministry dissolved into agents inside the chain. A small state will do this first, and I believe it will be Singapore; New Zealand will be the second, before the span is out, because it is small enough to decide and honest enough to measure. The large states will come last, and the ones with the most citizens waiting on the most desks will come last of all, because the desks are where their power sits. And money will change its shape in these years. Pay as a share of a result, equal to the base at target and rising without a ceiling, will be the ordinary arrangement, and the word salary will begin to sound the way the word wage sounds to us now: a thing paid for time by people who could not yet measure the result.

## Years thirteen to fifteen

In years thirteen to fifteen the job as we knew it is gone, and we are fine.

Most adults will not hold a job in the sense their parents did, a place they went for hours to perform a skill under supervision, because almost nothing that was a skill is still done by a person and almost nothing that is done by a person is supervised. Output across the industries that collapsed will be many times what it was at a fraction of the labour, and the prices of the things those industries make will be near enough to zero that the question of how to afford them will have become a question for historians. You will ask what a human being does when skill is no longer needed, and I will tell you, because the chapters have already answered it. A human holds a gate: decides the irreversible thing with her name on it, which no amount of capability has made unnecessary, because the question at a gate is not what is correct but what we are willing to be held to. A human wants a result and opens a vector to get it, which is the only way anything new has ever begun. A human cares for another human, which was never a job and was always most of the work. And a human chooses what to want, which is the thing the pin factory took away from the man at the eleventh motion and the collapse gives back. The question of meaning was a question the job asked. The job is gone. The question goes with it.

## Unemployment

I have left the hardest objection for its own place, because it deserves one and because it is the one every reader has been holding since chapter 2.

Will this cause mass unemployment? In years four to nine, yes, in the countries and industries that wait to be collapsed rather than collapsing, and I will not pretend otherwise; a forced collapse is a careless one, and carelessness has a cost in people. But it will not cause the permanent idleness of a population, and I can say why with three arguments the book has already made.

History first. Every station on the road of chapter 19 cut the labour a result needed, by factors that terrified the people of the day, and every one of them left more people in work a generation later, not fewer, because a cheaper result is a result more people buy, and more buying is more results, and every result is work. The pin factory did not end the pin-makers; it made pins so cheap that a thousand trades that had never used a pin began to, and the trades needed people. Arithmetic second. A company that produces four times the result with a tenth of the people has not destroyed nine-tenths of the demand for what it makes; it has cut its price, and a lower price finds buyers who were never customers before, and those buyers want things nobody has yet built, which is a new Outcome, which needs a master, a pair and a chain. Chapter 16 shows how one is born; the world of years seven to nine will show thousands being born a month. And the human case last. The work that is going is skill work, and skill is the one thing the machine does better. The work that is coming is intention work: holding gates, opening vectors, caring, choosing, and there is no limit to it, because there is no limit to what people can want for themselves and for each other. The pin factory’s child, who was made as stupid as a human being can be made by one motion repeated for forty years, can learn a cockpit in a week, because the cockpit asks nothing of him but attention and the truth about a number.

So the honest prophecy is this. There will be a hard decade for those who held skill and nothing else, and for the companies that protected departments until the market took them. There will not be a permanently idle humanity. The thing a country can do about the hard decade is to collapse early, and to catch the people who fall with a floor, and to open the cockpits to everyone, selected on intention and nothing else, which is the one selection a nation can afford to make universal. I know this costs something to believe, so I will tell you what it cost me.

In 1989 I collapsed a reorder book: five men, five desks and a month, in a company that was not mine, turned into a program that ran in an hour, with the registers kept beside it until nobody trusted them more than the screen. That was the first collapse in this book and the smallest. Thirty-six years later I did it to my own company. GoodSpace runs today as Outcomes and vectors, with pairs at the gates and a Keeper who is not me, and it is not finished, and the places where it falls short of its own doctrine are named in these chapters where they belong. It cost me the pleasure of being needed, which is the thing an owner gives up last. What it gave back was a company that runs when I am asleep, and people in it who are paid for a result they own. I would do it again tomorrow, and I am asking you to do it before then.

## And after

Beyond year fifteen I will say only three lines and show you one morning.

Every result on earth will be produced by a chain that holds every skill it needs. Every chain will be held at its gates by a few people chosen for what they want. Every person will be free to want.

And here is the morning. Meera Kulkarni, whom the reader left in chapter 14 with her vector lent across its first wall, wakes on a terrace outside Pune, at the hour she chose, and the chain tells her what it did in the night: forty orders quoted, thirty-one won, the first castings poured in a plant where no one has stood since her daughter was small, a client in another country whose department head signed beside her at four in the morning. Two things need her. She reads them, in the order the room has already put them, and signs one and holds the other, with her name, and her name means something because it is the only one on the gate. By nine she is done with the company, which is the size of a nation and runs through her terrace. The rest of the day is hers. She spends part of it on a flag she is writing, because three of her clients have asked for something nobody makes, and she wants to be the one who opens it; part of it with her mother, who is old; and part of it doing nothing in particular, which the pin factory never allowed anyone. Nobody asks her hours. Her share rises with the result, and the result rose again this month, as it has every month since the vector was lent across its first wall. She is not unusual. She is what a working person is, after.

Collapse your organisation now, or your organisation will collapse.

Vinay Pasricha

Noida, October 2026