One indicator that I'm watching for deflation is the concept that money is not accepted. Things like social media followers or likes are used as substitutes. People can't buy things like concert tickets or latest merchandise because all the bots have already bought them. Businesses will claim they can't provide a custom service. In tech, this would be spending a modest amount of money on online ads when in reality an ad campaign can only be "bought" with debt.

I think analysis around inflation, deflation, and consumer prices are valid but they are part of an understanding from economies of 100 years ago. Money loses value when you can't do anything with it. Tech and AI runs on debt, and an extraordinary amount of it. Is that really money? I don't think so.

Deflation may suffer from Goodhart's law. Because we've repurposed all of available human resources for mitigating against it, the variables we used to measure it cease to become useful. Our central measure for the economy are things like the stock market and the unemployment rate which have prevalent and valid criticisms that policy makers ignore. They truly don't indicate what's occurring on main street and I'm afraid that we will be in a deflationary spiral without knowing it.