‘President Gavin Newsom met today in Carmel, California with the representatives of the “Ten” – a consortium of giant tech and finance firms who control most of America’s business assets. Facing a challenge from front-running New York senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is pushing for a radical redistribution of wealth and property, Newsom has struck a deal with the oligarchs. He has imposed a universal basic income to head off a mounting populist revolt.
Some have called it a second Magna Carta – an accommodation between state and oligarchy. Others see the outlines of a new feudalism, or a technocratic fascism, rather than anything resembling liberal democracy.’
Implausible? Hardly. At a time when a handful of firms now dominate industries from tech to entertainment and media, and incomes for all but the wealthy are stagnating or falling, ever fewer see the system as working for them. According to Edelman, a strong majority in 22 countries now believe capitalism does more harm than good.
In the US, rising inequality and fear of downward mobility are fuelling support for state expansion and redistribution. Most under-40s favour socialism. Worse for the oligarchs, a majority of young people also favour limiting higher incomes. A new radical politics is incubating in cities like Oakland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and, most obviously, New York – its likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a self-described ‘democratic socialist’.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could accelerate this trend, cutting even white-collar and graduate employment while boosting the profits, as well as the market share, of a handful of giant firms. Like Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, techies have unleashed forces that threaten many in their own class of educated professionals. Some 82 per cent of millennials believe AI will damage their careers. The displacement could soon reach 30 per cent of the workforce. Skilled professionals in finance, media and the arts could be undercut as AI trains itself on their past work. As one Marxist writer put it, no power on Earth is more fearsome than ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’.
AI evangelists like McKinsey insist it will enrich society. But such elite enthusiasm for the future is not widely shared. A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll recently found that only 25 per cent of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their living standards – the lowest proportion since 1987. Almost 70 per cent say the ‘American dream’ – that if you work hard, you can get ahead – no longer holds true. Among Democrats, pessimism is overwhelming, with 90 per cent holding a negative view of the future, almost twice as many as Republicans.
Having foreseen these trends, much of the Silicon Valley elite sees the mass of humanity, some of whom already eschew the value of hard work, as increasingly redundant. As they automate everything – even companionship – the oligarchical elites rarely mention mobility or opportunity. Researcher Gregory Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital founders, found little interest in expanding property ownership or entrepreneurship. The preference is for redistribution sufficient for the masses to subsist while the elites luxuriate. At the same time, unions are suppressed by ‘progressive’ firms like Apple and Amazon, and responsibility for workers’ incomes is shifted to the state.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Fabrice Florin, via Flickr, under CC 4.0 License.
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