Caboose Capitalism™
The caboose is where the celebration is, neighbor.
The Caboose Capitalism National Anthem
Come Say Hi This Sunday
The Sunday Caboose Gathering
Every Sunday
11:00 AM
Southcenter Mall
Food Court · Upper Level
Tukwila, Washington
Neighbors sharing project ideas, finding inspiration, making connections, and practicing English together. Every Sunday, we push back on the loneliness epidemic one table at a time.
Coffee generously donated by Starbucks. Free, and all neighbors are welcome.
Look for the lady in the red cowboy hat waving at you. 👋🤠
The Howdy Wall
Neighbors near and far, giving the CC Salute.
The CC Salute is simple: a big wave 👋 and a cowboy-hat grin 🤠. Give it to the barista, the bus driver, the semi truck on the highway, your grandma, your dog. Then snap a picture and send it in, and you’ll join the wall.
Join the Howdy Wall
Email your CC Salute photo to elleifrolics@gmail.com. Tell us the name you’d like under it (a first name is fine) and where you are in the world.
- Photos: JPG or PNG, straight from your phone. Up to 10 MB.
- Everyone in the picture says yes. By sending it, you’re saying everyone in it is happy to be on the wall.
- Kids are welcome with a parent or guardian’s okay. First names only for them.
- Groups, pets, and grandmas are all encouraged. Cowboy hats optional, waving mandatory.
The founder picks what goes up. Private details like home addresses stay off the wall.
The Telegraph
Voices and songs from the caboose.
Wagon Wheel Picture House
Moving pictures from the caboose. Pull up a hay bale, neighbor — the show’s on the house.
Welcome Videos
Hello, neighbor. Tap one to watch it on YouTube.
Ellei’s Trail Journal
Pictures and moving pictures from the founder’s own trail, wherever it leads. First stop: Ireland.
Ellei Lotus, founder
I started Caboose Capitalism as an archive — a place to upload my personal memories, thoughts, questions, grief, and need for connection with other human beings around the earth during this late stage capitalism disease.
One of my seventh grade teachers told us that individuals can and do make a difference. I have never stopped believing that — not even when society shoved me down and told me I was undeserving of anything. Well. I am here to tell the world that is absolutely not true.
Ellei founded Caboose Capitalism in Tukwila, Washington, and soft-launched it on August 25, 2026.
Pull up a chair, neighbor. 👋🤠
The Joy Dynasty
Caboose Capitalism is not a protest. It is not a complaint. It is not an opposition movement. It is not angry. It is not afraid. It is not fighting anyone or anything.
Caboose Capitalism is a Joy Dynasty.
A Joy Dynasty is a way of living, building, and being in community that is so genuinely joyful, so warmly human, so full of beauty and meaning and connection that the broken system simply becomes less interesting by comparison. We do not defeat late stage capitalism by fighting it. We make it irrelevant by celebrating so loudly and so well that everyone wants to be in the caboose.
The caboose is where the celebration is. It always has been. We just finally named it.
Caboose Capitalism, Simply Put
We are all riding in the back of a train we didn’t build.
The engine is late stage capitalism. Its newest fuel is artificial intelligence. And from the caboose, we watch the landscape of community, meaning, and human connection disappear behind us.
This is not a framework of despair. It is a map. A way of finally naming what is happening, so we can talk about it honestly.
The train
Late stage capitalism, accelerated by artificial intelligence. Nobody voted on its destination. Nobody asked us where we wanted to go.
The caboose
Not a hierarchy, a shared condition. The billionaire and the struggling family are both in the caboose. Neither controls the engine. The illusion of control is what the system sells.
The view out the back window
The fireflies. The community that used to gather. The laughter. The work that felt like it meant something. The love. All of it disappearing in the train’s wake, not as a future risk but as a present reality.
The question
Not just where is the train going, but what was already being destroyed by the journey itself? And what are we going to do about it?
Caboose Capitalism for Scholars
An original economic framework for understanding the intersection of late stage capitalism and artificial intelligence.
Caboose Capitalism proposes that all of humanity, regardless of wealth, status, or position, now rides together at the back of a train we did not collectively build and do not collectively control. The engine is late stage capitalism. Its newest and most powerful fuel is artificial intelligence. And from the caboose, we watch the landscape of community, ecological stability, meaningful labor, and human connection disappear behind us — not as a future possibility, but as a present reality already well underway.
This is not a framework of despair, and it is not a political manifesto. It is a diagnostic tool. A map. A way of naming with precision what is happening to the human condition at this specific and unprecedented moment in history.
The public conversation about artificial intelligence is currently dominated by two questions: will it work, and will it harm us? Both are asked almost exclusively by those closest to the engine — the builders, the funders, the researchers, the accelerators. Caboose Capitalism asks a third question that neither addresses: what was already being destroyed by the journey itself, before the destination was ever reached?
The framework’s reach is its distinguishing feature. It is not a partisan argument. The billionaire and the struggling family are both in the caboose; neither controls the engine, and the illusion of control is what the system sells. That is why it works as a lens for anyone who has felt the train accelerating, regardless of how they vote.
Caboose Capitalism stands in conversation with Plato’s allegory of the cave and with contemporary work on surveillance, inequality, and technology — and asks to be tested, argued with, and extended.
Plato saw it first. He just didn’t have a train.
In Plato’s most enduring thought experiment, prisoners are chained in a cave from birth, able only to see the shadows cast on the wall before them. They have never seen the objects casting the shadows. They have never seen the sun. The shadows are all they know — and so the shadows become reality.
When one prisoner is freed and dragged into the light, the truth is so overwhelming it is physically painful. And when he returns to tell the others what he saw, they do not believe him. They prefer the shadows they know.
The shadows on the cave wall are the metrics the current economic system uses to tell us how we are doing. GDP. Stock prices. Quarterly earnings. Productivity figures. Engagement metrics. These numbers are real — but they are not reality.
The actual objects casting the shadows — community, ecological health, meaningful labor, human connection, wonder, joy — are what we watch disappearing out the back window of the caboose as the train accelerates.
The people in the caboose are not stupid and they are not weak. They are simply positioned in a way that makes the shadows look like the whole story. That is not their fault. That is the design of the cave.
Where Caboose Capitalism departs from Plato
Plato’s allegory ends with the philosopher-king — the freed prisoner who returns to govern the cave because he has seen the truth. That is not what Caboose Capitalism proposes.
There is no philosopher-king here. No one person who has seen the sun and must lead the rest. There is only the caboose — where all of us are riding together, watching the same landscape disappear behind us — and the possibility that naming what we see clearly enough might be the beginning of something different. Not a revolution led from above. A recognition shared among equals.
The view from the back of the train. Everyone welcome.
Tumbleweed Sightings
Late stage capitalism, caught in the act, before it blows on by.
From the caboose, things roll past the back window faster every year. The empty storefront where the hardware store used to be. The robot that puts you on hold, then puts you on hold again. The price that changed while you were standing in the aisle. The self-checkout that wants a tip.
Spot one? Snap it, film it, send it in. Together we keep a record of what we watched go by — and a little humor is always welcome.
Send in a sighting
Every neighbor gets their own spot on the list, with a link to their own album of sightings. Fill it with whatever you spot, whenever you spot it.
The easy way: make a shared album in Google Photos (or any photo app), set sharing to “anyone with the link,” and email the link to elleifrolics@gmail.com with the name you’d like listed and your town. Add to your album anytime, and the website shows it automatically.
No album? Email your photos or video links instead, and the founder will set up a spot for you.
- Photos: JPG or PNG, straight from your phone is perfect. Up to 10 MB each, and up to 5 per email.
- Videos: 3 minutes or less. Please upload to YouTube (Unlisted is fine) or Google Drive and email us the link. Phone videos are usually too big to attach to an email.
- Short clips under 25 MB can be attached as an MP4. A MOV straight from an iPhone works too.
- Turn your phone sideways for videos, if you can. It fills the screen better.
- Only send what you took yourself. By sending it, you’re saying it’s okay for Caboose Capitalism to post it here with your credit.
We point at the system, never at our neighbors. Please leave out people’s faces unless they said yes, license plates, and home addresses. The founder picks what goes up.
The Daily Brain
October 3, 2026 · Entry #33 · Tukwila, Washington
The Day the Founder Slept Until Five and Hoped to Outlive the Hunt for Parking
The founder sleeps until five (a feat, and feet), then spends the morning building: Ireland photos and videos, a YouTube upload limit, the new Wagon Wheel Picture House, an all-audio Telegraph with 38 women composers added, the Howdy Wall, Tumbleweed Sightings, and 39 Joy Mandates. Then: the kid’s band, a choral concert in Tacoma, and the ballet, if a parking spot can be found in this lifetime.
The Joy Mandate
One prompt per day. One action. One noticing of something beautiful.
Today’s Joy Mandate
Walk outside and wave at the first living thing you see. A tree. A dog. A cloud. Mean it.