"Yes, Hello, Can I Get A New Social Contract, Please?"

Where is Modernity heading, honestly?

I would definitely refer to the modern moment as an inflection point. Back in 2016, The New Yorker called the automation age akin to “squeezing the Industrial Revolution into the lifespan of a beagle.” Then we had Trump 1.0 and COVID and we were still talking a lot about Facebook and Instagram, but eventually we did arrive at the full-on “Automation Age” and we’re now in the 1.0/2.0 version of it, which will increasingly include layoffs and social displacement. I think many people have seen this coming for about a dozen years, and I think COVID and the brief window where employees had some power as job-seekers kinda ramped it all up. Executives, who for years had no idea what 3/4 of their staff did so long as the number at the end of the quarter moved up and to the right, started thinking more along the lines of: “Hmmm, some of these jobs seem pretty easy. Could an account manager be automated?” Then we increasingly arrived at the troubling intersection of automation and greed.

The Reactions Now

There are a set of normalized reactions to this:

1. Bury your head in the sand

2. Claim it can never come for you because you’re a “people person”

3. Say that other tech things have happened (cotton gin, looms, iOS ecosystem) and we’ve kept jobs

4. Talk about how everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and this will allow them to do so

5. Say this will lead to human flourishing without discussing how we will pay for steaks

Those are your big buckets of where the conversation seems to be right now. And, in fact, this video does all five, with a heaping helping of (4):

That Video

There is a dude in that video who says “entrepreneur” enough times that I kind of think he says it when he cums, but I digress.