the looming future
my head says everything will be okay, but my heart fears that rapid technological advancement is going to be very painful for the american underclass that we are all closer to than we might expect.
I hear a lot about inequality, the haves and the have nots, and what should be done to address the growing gaps between the classes. Anecdotally, I can observe these concerns to be true — it seems like everyone I meet on a daily basis is either the haver of a cushy white-collar gig at a Fortune 100 company, or is screaming profanities on public transit, and in another era would have been confined to the walls of a mental institution — there is no observable in-between. We are down to the Ezra Klein’s or Ross Douthat’s of the world, and people reposting AI generated stories and images about Bruce Springsteen visiting Make-a-Wish kids. You are either conversing with colleagues at your weekly happy-hour about a trendy new show on a premium streaming service, or you are at family thanksgiving listening to your morbidly obese aunt breathlessly explain how much money she’s sunk into monopoly go.
And the truest horror of this growing disparity is that I don’t know what can possibly be done about it.
An easy and understandable way to get an idea of the upper-class I speak of is to engage with any of Apple’s marketing material. The scenarios outlined and models who populate them are the essence of a very modern trend of what I would call “humble-brag wealth” — a wealthy person of a different era was very visibly wealthy, think the furs of a mid-century American heiress, or the indelible image of the New York Dandy — these are a far cry from the fashionably loose denim, and dialed-down makeup of an upper-middle class woman who meets her weekly in-office quota in Lululemon sweats and the ubiquitous matcha drink. Hasn’t it dawned on anyone else that most of the people who occupy such white-collar jobs fit this or the equivalent male profile? Doesn’t that suggest that it is not skill or competence alone that allots you a seat at this proverbial table? When I pass the chipotle line at around noon…why do all these guys look the same?
Somewhere unseen, a child is left completely alone with nothing but an iPad and unrestricted YouTube access to babysit them, as their single mother goes to her job where she does ten times as much as anyone in one of those downtown offices, and gets paid less than half.
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On the west side of the city, amongst the chain of lakes that adorn the favorite neighborhoods of the young and affluent — three friends instantly take glamour shots of their food as it arrives at the table, at one of these restaurants that only prints the clean dollar amount next to the entree.
Somewhere, only a few miles down Lake Street to the east, there is a homeless man using a VR headset. Do we think he’s watching the free online computer science courses made available by Harvard or Yale?
We were told technology would be the great equalizer, but more and more I’m consumed by how it drives the gaps between us to be much larger. It is an amplifier of the basest behaviors and derangements of the user, not something to solve all of our inherent issues. People often buy things with an idea of what that purchase is going to turn them into, they want to realize their aspirations, but more often than not, it causes them to become more of what they already are.
I begin to think of a split defined by two visions of the future, and two distinct social strata. Those using this technology as merely a tool or enhancement to a life that is already wonderful and bright, full of optimism and a pastel minimalism. And a vast, growing underclass that will be totally consumed by it, left to waste in the darkened corners of a country that’s too large and too socioeconomically diverse to ever be fully lit-up by those wondrous pastels.
Why is it that the term, “late-stage capitalism” is only ever used by people at or at least within sniffing distance of the upper class, and those that it’s actually about to rip apart, have no idea what that term means? How did it happen that one of the surest signifiers of your relative safety and affluence was voting for policies that might hurt the truly needy than it may help them?
and what happens when the technology becomes so unpredictably powerful, that those in these upper reaches are suddenly found without everything that they previously knew to be their life? Some are going to be fine, falling back on the comfort of their family name — maybe the government will step in before mass unemployment erodes the tax base. It’s easy to let the underclass wallow in their own piss, publicly masturbating on the D train, to hyper-sexualized AI generated filth…until one day you’ve got to occupy the same public transit on the way to the vastly overpopulated unemployment office downtown.
you used to be so amused
at napoleon in rags and the language that he used
