Concept developed by Vinay Gupta and expressed in fictional format here.

Excerpts from a TV documentary in 2030:

“Well, first we’ve got to cover briefly how Unplugging works. The core of the theory is that we can all live off the interest generated by our savings, or the profits from our investments, if we possess enough capital – and generations of Capitalists have dreamed of “getting off at the top” – making enough money to cash out of the workplace and live as they like for the rest of their lives … It comes down to the nature of capital. Wealth stored as dollars was essentially a share in America’s national economy – a credit note backed by the US Government. But Buckminster Fuller showed us that wealth-as-money was a specialized subset of Wealth – the ability to sustain life.

To “get off at the top” requires millions and millions of dollars of stored wealth. Exactly how much depends on your lifestyle and rate of return, but it’s a lot of money, and it’s volatile depending on economic conditions. A crash can wipe out your capital base and leave you helpless, because all you had was shares in a machine.

So we Unpluggers found a new way to unplug: an independent life-support infrastructure and financial architecture – a society within society – which allowed anybody who wanted to “buy out” to “buy out at the bottom” rather than “buying out at the top.”

If you are willing to live as an Unplugger does, your cost to buy out is only around three months of wages for a factory worker, the price of a used car. You never need to “work” again–that is, for money which you spend to meet your basic needs. However, there are plenty of life support activities to keep you busy, and a lot of basic research and science to do. Unplugging is not an off-the-shelf solution, it’s a research career!”