Who doesn’t worry about this 21st century world of ours? Who doesn’t feel deep unease about the direction it’s taking?
A relative with teenagers at the end of their high school years describes various “employment” arrangements that say nothing good about the way of the working world today. A big box store that puts you on a zero hours contract and expects you to be available at 6 in the morning with two hours’ notice. Smaller businesses that never quite get around to paying you because they seem to think the experience they’re giving you is pay enough. All of it a pale shadow of what we once understood as work and a job.
Other friends describe their recent graduates finding the road they thought they were on just melting in front of them as the software engineering or product design work they’ve just been trained in is being given to AI instead.
AI is good at some things, and will doubtless get better. It is also exceptionally good at slop, and god that kind of writing is getting so identifiable now. Every goddamn piece sounds exactly the same. Even if you quite like Beef Wellington, could you enjoy the your dinners your whole life long if every single one of them was Beef fucking Wellington?
None of this will stop vast parts of the business world from embracing it and nothing will likely stop the melting away of roads in front of people who thought they had a working life ahead of them.
Parents of kids who urged them to get a trade may feel pleased for now. But for their electrician to make a good living, it’s going to require a town full of people earning money somehow who can pay the bill.
Hold that thought as we pause at the top of the rollercoaster plunge. I want to consider the wider context we’re working in.
The world has never been more prosperous than it is today. A great part of the reason for that can be attributed to four centuries of capitalism and industrialization, but it would be a great mistake to think we reached this point without the further dimension of democratic socialism paring back the sharp edges and ensuring a fair share and the marshalling of resources for the common good.
The world has never been more prosperous than it is today. Well then, does it not strike you as screwy that most of us are finding things steadily less affordable, and things we could once take for granted now becoming luxuries out of reach?
My contention is that if the wealth were being shared more fairly, this would not be the case. Without drowning you in data, I want to offer a few key pieces of information to substantiate this.
Over the past four decades, global wealth tripled from $144 trillion to $477 trillion. Humanity genuinely got richer, in aggregate.
But look at who captured it:
- The top 1% grew their wealth by 394%
- The bottom 50% grew theirs by 45% (while their population doubled)
- In just the last four years (2020-2024), the top 1% captured 63 cents of every dollar of new wealth created. The bottom 90% got 11 cents.
The world has never been more prosperous than it is today. But the way we’re sharing that prosperity has become very lopsided, and it stands to skew much further that way as the fruits of automation flow to fewer hands.
The world has never been more prosperous than it is today. People like David Seymour are quick to tell us that this makes a compelling argument for the free market policies of the past four decades. Well yes at first blush. Extreme poverty has plummeted globally, child mortality is down, literacy is up, technology has delivered real material gains. Humanity as a whole has more wealth, more capability, more potential than ever before.
But what they leave out of this, or want us to accept cannot be included in the calculus because the system would fail, is that the distribution mechanism is fundamentally broken. Automation threatens to break it catastrophically further.
When productivity gains come from machines and algorithms rather than human labour, capital can capture essentially all of the surplus.
This is what the graphs of the past four decades really show us: productivity and profits up, wages stagnant, the wealth flowing almost exclusively to those who own the systems rather than those who work within them.
And the political system that might have corrected this has been captured by the same concentrated wealth. We have more than enough, but the mechanisms for broad distribution have been deliberately dismantled. If we stay on this trajectory, it’s going to get much worse.
This is very much the reason why we have the kind of unrest that gets all kinds of wrong people Trump elected, simply because people want to move against the prevailing system. You sell yourself as someone against the status quo, they embrace you.
Guys guys, listen: you got it so wrong. You thought you were voting to upend the way things are, but you actually voted to strengthen it.
The only sane answer to this is to remake things so that our kids get a fairly paid job and prospects of a decent future.
The only sane answer to this is to only embrace automation if it is accompanied with a far reaching design of the economic system that uses something like UBI or free basic benefits for all, thereby averting a fate of the kind we saw in the first century or so of the industrial revolution.
The only sane answer to this is a fair share and a fair deal for all.
And if you propose even half of this people, will hiss at you socialism.
They will say we must have capitalism, this is the only way things work.
And I will say but the way things work is awful.
And they will say oh you just have to work harder and smarter like these gods of ours and I will say but wait a minute these gods of ours are monsters.
How to get past this?
Cometh the hour, cometh the breathtaking scandal, cometh a new name for what we were first calling the One Per Cent: the Epstein class. Have you read that stuff? What they say to one another in that exclusive club? How they forever look out for the interests of one another and their grotesquely privileged class? God it’s awful.
What you see all around you as we make our way through even a few of the millions of godawful emails is an utterly morally bankrupt patriarchal travesty, not fit for any purpose.
The ideological superstructure of the last forty years beatified such people. They weren’t just rich; they were proof that the system worked, that talent and drive and vision rose to the top, that wealth was some kind of moral verdict. The entire justification for deregulation, low taxation, minimal accountability rested on that premise.
This opening of so many windows into the life they live in the Epstein Class gives the lie to this. The system turns out to be a predatory criminal network maintaining itself through blackmail, coercion and the purchase of institutional protection. It’s just unwarranted power, raw and ugly, the same as it ever was.
This utterly gives the lie to the meritocracy narrative that so many people have bought: it was a lie that deified the winners and told you to find fault in yourself if you failed to emulate them. But now it’s plain to see: the game was rigged and rotten at the top. It punctures the whole theology.
The argument many wise heads have been making is that we need to campaign on the unfairness and unworkability of the current system and the way things are. I entirely agree. But how much headway can you make when so many people persist in feeling allegiance to it?
This Epstein class gives us a new and much more compelling way to frame the argument. You don’t just argue the current system isn’t working because it’s unfair. You say the current system is rotten by design. The Epstein class has shown us what it really is. They may not all be in on the abuse but they are all in on their self-interest in making their elite ever richer and more powerful at our expense. Worse, freaks and creeps like Musk and Thiel would happy see us and our risible notions of democracy discarded altogether.
You propose this not as an undoing of late capitalism but as an undoing of the Epstein class. The more you let it flourish the more rotten it gets. No entity should be greater than we the people.
These people are not your friends. This system is not your friend. This is not something to hang onto.
