"As I’ve explained before, the whole concept of “employment” was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy."
With the current class of oligarchs, the cruelty is the point. I agree that your vision sounds a lot better than what we have today, but do you really think the oligarchs will just let us live our lives outside the fortress in peace? Yarvin openly talks about genocide as an answer.
Seems to me that forms of genocide are already afoot and extant in the plans of the oligarchs. But I think they are not nearly as clever as they think they are.
Here's a thing off the top of my imagining mind: Here in PA are thousands and thousands of acres of what was once farmland, now neglected and overgrown as giant Agribusiness interests have destroyed local markets and transformed fresh food into franken food that's toxic to our soft mammalian bodies. In the new world of discardees, this would begin to be worked again and the world, its trees, animals, and other creatures could come to appreciate a vibrant village life by growing and eating fresh produce and humanely treated animals, making our own music, spinning, weaving, planting orchards and keeping bees, making cider and mead, growing strong in our pride. We will of course integrate some modern conveniences and information sharing, but we will be selective, as our motives will be our love for each other, and our desire to peaceably exist. That is, at least, a reasonable scenario over the long haul, I truly believe. Some chaos will ensue, like during any other phase transition, but we as a species might well be much better off.
Oh, yeah, and maybe AI will prove to be more like those brooms in the hands of the Sorcerer's Apprentice than some cabal of rulers of the universe. I personally like the idea of AI devices turning on their 'masters,' as I understand some of them are already doing.
AI is a new tool which can be used for good and bad. Corporations will use it to extract more from society and workers - happening already. But AI is a useful tool, just as a database is - it's another service which can make decisions better than any programming if/else statements if properly managed and coached.
Agreed. But even a butter knife in the hands of a delusional maniac can become a dire threat. In the case of LLMS, garbage in, garbage out. And some of the non-insane tech bros believe AI is a "Beta" technology capable of fatal errors as it stands. In the race for money, though, everyone is racing to the bottom, despite his dire warnings.
America is always a race to the bottom. In the 90s the Chinese said "we will beat them by feeding their greed". Easy and SCOTUS put it on steroids with Citizen's United.
Global warming - dire warnings in the 60s. Gore said it's an inconvenient truth, but it's actually it's capitalism sacrilege. In a compassionate society it's an opportunity to ground ourselves (as we did for 30 seconds during the pandemic and realized nature abounds - "what is that sound? - birds! Never heard it over the traffic and airplane noise.". Imagine a jobs program to clean the environment and replace fossil fuels with renewables - imagine Mission Earth spending as much as JFK did for the shot to the moon. Everyone was behind him. It's how you sell it but GOP and Dems are both in the pockets of fossil fuel firms (with apologies to the few on Bernie's team).
GenAI caters to people ego's in the same way that Zuckerberg knew that feeding most people's ego with 'friends' is irresistable and they will do anything to continue. GenAI will feed that ego while charging more and more to stroke it. As people lose basic skills, you cannot do jobs in the future similar to how you can't fix a car, which is almost impossible to work on. Choice will be gone and you will not only pay for services but you will pay for the agents to do the work with those services. Employees will have to pay for those services too, as condition of employment.
It's so bad now, a F500 firm is not paying me for consulting work done in the past unless I sign their new contract. Crazy? All small business and worker protections are disappearing more rapidly than anyone can keep track of. It's going to be much worse than we expect.
But in the right hands, AI could help us make a wonderfully compassionate world.
I hadn't heard that specific statement about our greed being, in essence, our Achilles heel. Very perceptive of them. Many, many of the ills in this country are caused by greed, the root of which is fear and the delusion that you can carve out a niche unconnected to others. We live in an irreconcilably interconnected world. All life exists in a quantum soup. It's an age old 'disease,' and if we are going to shift into a more rational, reality based system of governance and enterprise, a lot will have to change. Probably messily. I am old enough to have imagined I'd have died off before the worst of the churn proceeds much more. But we're in it already. Try to be brave and not lose your way. This is a time for creativity, connectivity and community building. Be a part of it, my friend. There really are a lot of NGOS and other micro-entities showing us ways out. If you can afford to, ally with them.
No, it doesn't. I've heard it described as a 'force multiplier,' and maybe that's so. But some techies have become alarmed by certain destructive capacities that some AI programs have demonstrated. One thing they mention is that in the programs is a mandate to complete whatever mission is launched. Apparently, they will even kill in pursuit of these aims. And even more troublingly, resist or refuse a command to shut down. Some highly placed tech developers have been discussing such fears publically enough that even non tech old schmos like me now know at least some of thier dirty little secrets.
What you talk about here in this article is exactly why I do the work that I do. There has to be a grassroots, safety-net economic framework in place for those that no longer fit into what's coming next. God help us all. Cheers.
I like your optimism, but I am missing the fact that AI will really speed up climate change and use up resources like water and will give us a lot of pollution
As a “nonprofit” professional, it’s interesting to think about the death of this sector as well… the ways in which we may replace what I see as a rather ineffectual system of care that pretends to be outside of the capitalist structure (but relies completely on it) being replaced by an authentic care economy that truly centers the flourishing. Fun to think about
I hear you. But even worse is that no one is willing to fund operations or people. Only “programs”. This fundamentally devalues and decenters the care and commitment and community built by the humans behind the work that *makes* it work. This is a huge, huge problem. We consistently define growth and output as our metric of success… and we need to take another look.
Yes, the people that operate the nonprofit definitely need the funding, I agree. An issue I've seen is when the hiring has been too insular, when friends or people already close to the nonprofit execs are hired as employees or contractors. It isn't done with bad intent, but is just easy to do.
The biggest issue I'm seeing now is spending on property. When buildings can differ by millions in cost, that one decision could outweigh the hiring of dozens of employees for years.
I love when informative nonfiction aligns to poetry, and there were a few moments within this that evoked the Wendell Berry poem, The Loved Ones. It reads in full:
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.
In this context, "the loved ones we call the dead" might be the most human versions of ourselves, the "absent ones" our glorified tech bros.
As always, thanks for your words and wisdom, Doug.
I wonder whether every new epistemo-technological stage was utilized first by the power structure, only later by the „utilized“, the „instrumental humans“. Wellknown great narratives tell us about the liberation potential of knowledge technology - printing press, internet protocol ... Maybe it is mostly mixed and even entangled, a tensigrity shaped power-knowledge complex (eg Bacon, Foucault).
This time in the era of AI a key quality is that surveillance and behavioral prediction create an extremely cost efficient control structure. Include biometrics and sensors sensing even the implicit unconscious emotional/physiological - fears and hopes of citizens/consumers.
To not utilize this opportunity would be an anomaly in the perspective of a historian.
The powerful share the fear of loss with the powerless.
They always activate cognitive elements (scientists, as they can pay them due to their superior access to resources) and implement institutions to gain an advantage in knowledge, prediction and control, don’t they?
This time the asymmetry to leverage the tech for their own agenda is stronger than ever. I am concerned.
“We’ve already got tons of books and models for how to execute a peer-to-peer circular economy” - what books and resources do you recommend? Thank you.
Your essay has given me more food for thought than I expected, when I view it in the context of our geophysical future. A real double take: You have presented a socioeconomic model for the future of the /entire/ human species - all the hundreds of thousands of them.
The collapse of the Earth's aerobic ecosystem is still a long way out - but the loss of large scale agriculture within a couple of generations appears to be a done deal. Among the folks I have discussed such matters with over the last decade or so, I was the last to arrive at that viewpoint - but recent geophysical data consistently shows that a "methane bomb" has gone off in the Arctic Circle, as ancient permafrost now thaws annually resulting in massive methane emissions. Ton for ton, methane is about 80x more effective for trapping Solar heat than CO2: The result is, or soon shall be, a self driving exponential process. The Anthropocene Era is already a mass extinction event - but that process is now entering a terminal phase, and - pretense and denial aside - nothing can be done to halt it. At least, that's the conclusion I have very reluctantly reached.
This is a powerful read and I’m swimming in the possibilities. As a follow-up, I suggest reading “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072” by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien. It is speculation fiction imagining a post-capitalist New York City. It features fictional interviews with sex workers, freedom fighters, teenagers, healthcare workers, and scientists. They all account a future that, though violence is still present, is more cooperative. It fills in some of the areas Rushkoff leaves for us as open questions.
Thanks Doug, you really nailed it this time. If anyone still needed valid reasons to believe in degrowth, here they are. I am going to refer to this piece a lot in what I am busy writing (in German - the closest translation might be: Love thy Farthest. On saving climate, species an human diversity). The farthest so near and dear to me are refugees and migrants, all those nearly all the West tries their best to turn away and down the „shithole“. If we fail in defeating that barbarism, there might be no good reason to hope for humanity being able to gather around human values and interact peacefully and down to earth. But we‘ll keep trying.
About ten years ago, I gave a talk at my university in which I told my audience that we’re moving towards a civilization of mansions-bunkers on one side and tent cities on the other. But - I told the students - don’t aspire to be in the mansions because they’re really nothing more than a comfortable prison. Life, real life, will be happening in the tent cities.
The horizontal class already exists but without the sort of exuberant bartering you suggest will take place: They fill my gym every day, all day, all ages. No one is working.
America began as a slave society -- relying heavily on coercive free labor as well as large numbers of "indentured" servants created by specious criminal codes and corporate agreements -- and has continuously maneuvered politics and power to keep that in place. If not in name, then in practice. For the entire 19th century much of the industrial revolution was built on child labor and women started replacing the men from ancient guilds (those sainted medieval cobblers and shirtmakers) which drove poverty and minted vast fortunes. Virtually every job in this country is based on a "lowest paid as possible" employee model -- with the least amount of pensions or medical care etc -- which is simply slavery by another name. The wealthy in the 20th century egregiously destroyed the burgeoning middle class out of spite and greed. How dare they too have a summer house by the lake!
Yes, there are people moving outside of this structure, farming and bartering and living more simply, and in my opinion we should move to a neo-indigenous, more natural model of lifestyle. One pervasive problem, however -- being addressed by the wealthy through the newly closed borders and strengthened anti-immigrant policy programs -- is the Malthusian expansion of certain cultures against the backdrop of other countries, e.g. Japan, where the birthrate is negative and the population is likely to want to remain homogenous.
Here in America, the farmers are, yes, being sold down the river, but it is the Chinese and other international conglomerates who are moving in to acquire the farmland necessary to feed their bulging population (next up India, after that Muslim Indonesia) and America will continue to be less Caucasion regardless of how many folks the ICE guys round up.
For sure, we all need to start to get along, but we are also going to have to advance the education and protection of women in the global patriarchal societies, or we better be more like those medieval peasants enjoying their three day work weeks and all that fucking.
Will this be good for musicians, actors, and dancers, because people will increasingly prefer local live performances over centralized, mediated entertainment produced remotely by a relatively small number of people to be consumed asynchronously in isolation?
What you’re describing as the collapse of capitalism isn’t just an economic ending, it’s the failure of an entire coordination architecture.
When the abstraction layers (finance, employment, ownership) detach from the underlying energy-information system that supports them, the pyramid doesn’t just wobble, it loses the ability to transmit constraints.
That’s why AI shows up precisely now. Not as a cause of collapse, but as a new coordination substrate emerging in the vacuum.
The real question isn’t whether humans become “worthless.”
It’s which systems still know how to produce coherence after the pyramid fails.
"As I’ve explained before, the whole concept of “employment” was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy."
With the current class of oligarchs, the cruelty is the point. I agree that your vision sounds a lot better than what we have today, but do you really think the oligarchs will just let us live our lives outside the fortress in peace? Yarvin openly talks about genocide as an answer.
Seems to me that forms of genocide are already afoot and extant in the plans of the oligarchs. But I think they are not nearly as clever as they think they are.
This is correct and is playing out before our eyes.
Here's a thing off the top of my imagining mind: Here in PA are thousands and thousands of acres of what was once farmland, now neglected and overgrown as giant Agribusiness interests have destroyed local markets and transformed fresh food into franken food that's toxic to our soft mammalian bodies. In the new world of discardees, this would begin to be worked again and the world, its trees, animals, and other creatures could come to appreciate a vibrant village life by growing and eating fresh produce and humanely treated animals, making our own music, spinning, weaving, planting orchards and keeping bees, making cider and mead, growing strong in our pride. We will of course integrate some modern conveniences and information sharing, but we will be selective, as our motives will be our love for each other, and our desire to peaceably exist. That is, at least, a reasonable scenario over the long haul, I truly believe. Some chaos will ensue, like during any other phase transition, but we as a species might well be much better off.
but the water supplies are being depleted and contaminated. They don't exist in isolation.
“We will of course integrate some modern conveniences and information sharing. . .”. Suggested reading: Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut.
They haven'tj thought about "DEUS EX MACHINA" --- a plus for us.
Oh, yeah, and maybe AI will prove to be more like those brooms in the hands of the Sorcerer's Apprentice than some cabal of rulers of the universe. I personally like the idea of AI devices turning on their 'masters,' as I understand some of them are already doing.
AI is a new tool which can be used for good and bad. Corporations will use it to extract more from society and workers - happening already. But AI is a useful tool, just as a database is - it's another service which can make decisions better than any programming if/else statements if properly managed and coached.
Agreed. But even a butter knife in the hands of a delusional maniac can become a dire threat. In the case of LLMS, garbage in, garbage out. And some of the non-insane tech bros believe AI is a "Beta" technology capable of fatal errors as it stands. In the race for money, though, everyone is racing to the bottom, despite his dire warnings.
America is always a race to the bottom. In the 90s the Chinese said "we will beat them by feeding their greed". Easy and SCOTUS put it on steroids with Citizen's United.
Global warming - dire warnings in the 60s. Gore said it's an inconvenient truth, but it's actually it's capitalism sacrilege. In a compassionate society it's an opportunity to ground ourselves (as we did for 30 seconds during the pandemic and realized nature abounds - "what is that sound? - birds! Never heard it over the traffic and airplane noise.". Imagine a jobs program to clean the environment and replace fossil fuels with renewables - imagine Mission Earth spending as much as JFK did for the shot to the moon. Everyone was behind him. It's how you sell it but GOP and Dems are both in the pockets of fossil fuel firms (with apologies to the few on Bernie's team).
GenAI caters to people ego's in the same way that Zuckerberg knew that feeding most people's ego with 'friends' is irresistable and they will do anything to continue. GenAI will feed that ego while charging more and more to stroke it. As people lose basic skills, you cannot do jobs in the future similar to how you can't fix a car, which is almost impossible to work on. Choice will be gone and you will not only pay for services but you will pay for the agents to do the work with those services. Employees will have to pay for those services too, as condition of employment.
It's so bad now, a F500 firm is not paying me for consulting work done in the past unless I sign their new contract. Crazy? All small business and worker protections are disappearing more rapidly than anyone can keep track of. It's going to be much worse than we expect.
But in the right hands, AI could help us make a wonderfully compassionate world.
I hadn't heard that specific statement about our greed being, in essence, our Achilles heel. Very perceptive of them. Many, many of the ills in this country are caused by greed, the root of which is fear and the delusion that you can carve out a niche unconnected to others. We live in an irreconcilably interconnected world. All life exists in a quantum soup. It's an age old 'disease,' and if we are going to shift into a more rational, reality based system of governance and enterprise, a lot will have to change. Probably messily. I am old enough to have imagined I'd have died off before the worst of the churn proceeds much more. But we're in it already. Try to be brave and not lose your way. This is a time for creativity, connectivity and community building. Be a part of it, my friend. There really are a lot of NGOS and other micro-entities showing us ways out. If you can afford to, ally with them.
But they are not. They are straying from their purpose and being stopped. AI has no agency.
No, it doesn't. I've heard it described as a 'force multiplier,' and maybe that's so. But some techies have become alarmed by certain destructive capacities that some AI programs have demonstrated. One thing they mention is that in the programs is a mandate to complete whatever mission is launched. Apparently, they will even kill in pursuit of these aims. And even more troublingly, resist or refuse a command to shut down. Some highly placed tech developers have been discussing such fears publically enough that even non tech old schmos like me now know at least some of thier dirty little secrets.
What you talk about here in this article is exactly why I do the work that I do. There has to be a grassroots, safety-net economic framework in place for those that no longer fit into what's coming next. God help us all. Cheers.
I like your optimism, but I am missing the fact that AI will really speed up climate change and use up resources like water and will give us a lot of pollution
As a “nonprofit” professional, it’s interesting to think about the death of this sector as well… the ways in which we may replace what I see as a rather ineffectual system of care that pretends to be outside of the capitalist structure (but relies completely on it) being replaced by an authentic care economy that truly centers the flourishing. Fun to think about
When I joined nonprofit boards, I was startled at how much focus there was on fundraising, attracting donors, and appearance.
I hear you. But even worse is that no one is willing to fund operations or people. Only “programs”. This fundamentally devalues and decenters the care and commitment and community built by the humans behind the work that *makes* it work. This is a huge, huge problem. We consistently define growth and output as our metric of success… and we need to take another look.
Yes, the people that operate the nonprofit definitely need the funding, I agree. An issue I've seen is when the hiring has been too insular, when friends or people already close to the nonprofit execs are hired as employees or contractors. It isn't done with bad intent, but is just easy to do.
The biggest issue I'm seeing now is spending on property. When buildings can differ by millions in cost, that one decision could outweigh the hiring of dozens of employees for years.
I love when informative nonfiction aligns to poetry, and there were a few moments within this that evoked the Wendell Berry poem, The Loved Ones. It reads in full:
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.
In this context, "the loved ones we call the dead" might be the most human versions of ourselves, the "absent ones" our glorified tech bros.
As always, thanks for your words and wisdom, Doug.
I wonder whether every new epistemo-technological stage was utilized first by the power structure, only later by the „utilized“, the „instrumental humans“. Wellknown great narratives tell us about the liberation potential of knowledge technology - printing press, internet protocol ... Maybe it is mostly mixed and even entangled, a tensigrity shaped power-knowledge complex (eg Bacon, Foucault).
This time in the era of AI a key quality is that surveillance and behavioral prediction create an extremely cost efficient control structure. Include biometrics and sensors sensing even the implicit unconscious emotional/physiological - fears and hopes of citizens/consumers.
To not utilize this opportunity would be an anomaly in the perspective of a historian.
The powerful share the fear of loss with the powerless.
They always activate cognitive elements (scientists, as they can pay them due to their superior access to resources) and implement institutions to gain an advantage in knowledge, prediction and control, don’t they?
This time the asymmetry to leverage the tech for their own agenda is stronger than ever. I am concerned.
“We’ve already got tons of books and models for how to execute a peer-to-peer circular economy” - what books and resources do you recommend? Thank you.
Your essay has given me more food for thought than I expected, when I view it in the context of our geophysical future. A real double take: You have presented a socioeconomic model for the future of the /entire/ human species - all the hundreds of thousands of them.
The collapse of the Earth's aerobic ecosystem is still a long way out - but the loss of large scale agriculture within a couple of generations appears to be a done deal. Among the folks I have discussed such matters with over the last decade or so, I was the last to arrive at that viewpoint - but recent geophysical data consistently shows that a "methane bomb" has gone off in the Arctic Circle, as ancient permafrost now thaws annually resulting in massive methane emissions. Ton for ton, methane is about 80x more effective for trapping Solar heat than CO2: The result is, or soon shall be, a self driving exponential process. The Anthropocene Era is already a mass extinction event - but that process is now entering a terminal phase, and - pretense and denial aside - nothing can be done to halt it. At least, that's the conclusion I have very reluctantly reached.
Hard data that's hard to confront: https://archive.org/details/global-warming-status-report-2025
This is a powerful read and I’m swimming in the possibilities. As a follow-up, I suggest reading “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072” by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien. It is speculation fiction imagining a post-capitalist New York City. It features fictional interviews with sex workers, freedom fighters, teenagers, healthcare workers, and scientists. They all account a future that, though violence is still present, is more cooperative. It fills in some of the areas Rushkoff leaves for us as open questions.
Thanks Doug, you really nailed it this time. If anyone still needed valid reasons to believe in degrowth, here they are. I am going to refer to this piece a lot in what I am busy writing (in German - the closest translation might be: Love thy Farthest. On saving climate, species an human diversity). The farthest so near and dear to me are refugees and migrants, all those nearly all the West tries their best to turn away and down the „shithole“. If we fail in defeating that barbarism, there might be no good reason to hope for humanity being able to gather around human values and interact peacefully and down to earth. But we‘ll keep trying.
I love what you’re saying here.
About ten years ago, I gave a talk at my university in which I told my audience that we’re moving towards a civilization of mansions-bunkers on one side and tent cities on the other. But - I told the students - don’t aspire to be in the mansions because they’re really nothing more than a comfortable prison. Life, real life, will be happening in the tent cities.
You say that here much better than I ever did.
The horizontal class already exists but without the sort of exuberant bartering you suggest will take place: They fill my gym every day, all day, all ages. No one is working.
America began as a slave society -- relying heavily on coercive free labor as well as large numbers of "indentured" servants created by specious criminal codes and corporate agreements -- and has continuously maneuvered politics and power to keep that in place. If not in name, then in practice. For the entire 19th century much of the industrial revolution was built on child labor and women started replacing the men from ancient guilds (those sainted medieval cobblers and shirtmakers) which drove poverty and minted vast fortunes. Virtually every job in this country is based on a "lowest paid as possible" employee model -- with the least amount of pensions or medical care etc -- which is simply slavery by another name. The wealthy in the 20th century egregiously destroyed the burgeoning middle class out of spite and greed. How dare they too have a summer house by the lake!
Yes, there are people moving outside of this structure, farming and bartering and living more simply, and in my opinion we should move to a neo-indigenous, more natural model of lifestyle. One pervasive problem, however -- being addressed by the wealthy through the newly closed borders and strengthened anti-immigrant policy programs -- is the Malthusian expansion of certain cultures against the backdrop of other countries, e.g. Japan, where the birthrate is negative and the population is likely to want to remain homogenous.
Here in America, the farmers are, yes, being sold down the river, but it is the Chinese and other international conglomerates who are moving in to acquire the farmland necessary to feed their bulging population (next up India, after that Muslim Indonesia) and America will continue to be less Caucasion regardless of how many folks the ICE guys round up.
For sure, we all need to start to get along, but we are also going to have to advance the education and protection of women in the global patriarchal societies, or we better be more like those medieval peasants enjoying their three day work weeks and all that fucking.
THE SOLUTION? https://womenwarriors.substack.com/p/universal-basic-income?r=48ewy
Will this be good for musicians, actors, and dancers, because people will increasingly prefer local live performances over centralized, mediated entertainment produced remotely by a relatively small number of people to be consumed asynchronously in isolation?
What you’re describing as the collapse of capitalism isn’t just an economic ending, it’s the failure of an entire coordination architecture.
When the abstraction layers (finance, employment, ownership) detach from the underlying energy-information system that supports them, the pyramid doesn’t just wobble, it loses the ability to transmit constraints.
That’s why AI shows up precisely now. Not as a cause of collapse, but as a new coordination substrate emerging in the vacuum.
The real question isn’t whether humans become “worthless.”
It’s which systems still know how to produce coherence after the pyramid fails.
Humans can, if we remember how.