When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

History shows that automation technologies get rolled out most actively in a recession, and there’s a chance we might be heading toward one now.

It could hardly be more clearly stated that the workers taken in by the big companies are a small “elite,” not because they have higher levels of skill, but because they have been chosen from a mass of equally able individuals in such a way as to perpetuate the work ethic in an economic context in which work is objectively losing its “centrality”: the economy has less and less need of it. The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less. It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the “losers.” Technically, there really is nothing to prevent the firm from sharing out the work between a larger number of people who would work only 20 hours a week. But then those people would not have the “correct” attitude to work which consists in regarding themselves as small entrepreneurs turning their knowledge capital to good effect.

Every classroom had a Plato in it—that had been Melania Trump’s vision. Plato was a humanoid-robot instructor powered by AI, the only kind of instructor our school had had for as long as any of us could remember. Except for Gregory, the Oldest Student. Gregory had been here for more than a decade; he had never been able to learn quite enough to graduate, but he was getting pretty good at football. Each morning, we gathered around whatever screen was functional and connected to the internet to watch Melania’s triumphant speech from March 25, 2026, when she had first laid out this future. How beautiful she looked, marching on a red carpet side by side with a robot! It was interesting to see this early-model humanoid, which had performed household tasks (fetching towels and groceries, serving champagne) before such tasks had been forcibly reassigned to women, a much more just system that freed us boys up to achieve greatness better.

In the permanent underclass, people will increasingly serve as adaptive humanoid gears to fill a missing step in a complex real-world workflow. That class is already here, and some people are even trying to get out of it, supposed permanency be damned. We don’t know what awaits them on the other side, but we know what awaits us here.