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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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The modern white-collar workplace has been understood by some as an exemplar of the "longhouse": an increasingly feminized environment where "alignment" and "consensus" matter more than "action" and "execution".

In the age of AI, I posit three phases in the evolution of the modern workplace, the labor market, and (as a result) society more broadly.

Phase 1: increased ossification and feminization. This will occur because the (mostly male) "doers" on which the company relies are likely the first to be automated. There may still need to be a handful of rockstar performers, but the age of AI will, at least initially, make all intellectual endeavors a winner-takes-all market. With the actual work mostly automated, the remaining management is free to spend even more time doing longhouse things.

Phase 2: the return of the laborer. There will be a simultaneous increase in blue-collar jobs (with a glut in software, demand will increase for physical/real-world goods) and an increase in blue-collar labor, occupied primarily by men. White-collar labor becomes increasingly rare. The layers of middle management are no longer required, and if capabilities continue on trend it won't be long before the only thing preventing some white-collar industries from full automation will be slow capability diffusion. In this step, society will become more masculine. It will appear that a "retvrn" to traditional gender roles is underway. Men will again perform the large share of labor.

Phase 3: automation. Robotics and automated factories to create the robots become a reality. Labor demand sharply declines. Depending on how society handles this transition it could be a time of broad prosperity and leisure, or it could be a time of strife and mass inequality. But either way, the longhouse will come back with a vengeance. In a society where labor and intellect are no longer required, the only thing that will matter is status games and relative positioning. This is a game that the feminine temperament is better suited for. The boot that stomps forever on our faces will be high-healed.

As a male in an intellectual role, none of these three phases will be kind to me.

The boot that stomps forever on our faces will be high-healed.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy your gauzy New-Deal fantasy about a chicken in every pot, and a cruel Latina dominatrix gf in every sensitive young white man’s bed. The future will not be this bright.

What will really happen is that modern drone warfare will make the combat value of the proletariat the lowest it’s ever been since the adoption of gunpowder. The whole Enlightenment democratic consensus is a concession to the fact that modern warfare needs lots and lots of poor people with rifles. That will all go out the window. You’re getting feudalism. Like the old feudalism, the exact social structures will probably be extremely complicated and vary a lot by what region/entity you’re living in.

What will really happen is that modern drone warfare will make the combat value of the proletariat the lowest it’s ever been since the adoption of gunpowder.

We have not even seen the first true generation of counter-drone warfare deployed yet; this is all just naval-gazing speculation. Also, a lot of poor people with rifles have been more or less a liability on the battlefield for decades now in any serious conflict.

Also, a lot of poor people with rifles have been more or less a liability on the battlefield for decades now in any serious conflict.

First, American colonial policing operations aren’t real wars. Real wars require large volumes of people. Second, bear in mind that in those colonial policing operations, the other side was entirely poor guys with rifles.

The short term effect of drones is going to be World War I style trench warfare like in Ukraine. That’s going to need a lot of people. Further into the future the systems will likely become mostly automated and the then it’s a feudal oligarchy of whoever has the keys to the war machine.

White-collar labor becomes increasingly rare.

Disagree. If we see an AI boom, then this will lead to more jobs being created overall, if economic history is any precedent. A ton of white collar jobs involve dealing with the unique needs of clients , customers, or solving coordination, adversarial, or edge cases--areas where AI is weak or doesn't work. When an insurance company denies a claim, they will anticipate a notice from a lawyer. And it's war. This is not something Ai will just fix.

I'm not too confident but I think it might be the opposite in phase 1 and generally.

(Human) speed might be what matters most. Speed of recognizing opportunities, speed in drafting and creating and redrafting and giving directives, testing, iterating, marketing, learning new things. Agents work fast, they can do months of work in weeks. I'm trying to use agent swarms right now and get my money's worth and it is quite stressful managing multiple projects at the same time, reviewing what's been done and issuing good instructions. There's no time for further collaboration between people on top of that.

By the time all the meetings and collaboration is finished, the opportunity is already gone! When work automates, the scope for competition increases dramatically (outside the govt sector at least). As tempo increases, the longhouse declines, decisions shall need to be made quickly and finally by a single actor.

Also, men have an innate advantage with AI in that they're more interested in machines and technology, whereas women are more into people. Nearly all techbros and early adopters and entrepreneurs are men. Men tend to be more pro-AI and pro-datacentre.

Switching from process-driven procedural and human-facing work to freeform instruction-giving, directorial work with machines favours men I think.

pro-datacentre

Some people seem to really hate datacentres. Can someone steelman this for me?

There's niche, addressable issues like local power/water prices (and I'm not sure I understand the water argument as it should be reusable just like in your desktop rig) and the infrasonic hum that can apparently cause anxiety over the long term. Outside of that though, it just seems like the phobia over anything nuclear.

Is this just a subconscious projection of a fear of change and obsolescence? I can't imagine seeing the first railroads go down during industrialisation and decrying the whole thing (unless maybe you're a part of the teamsters union).

People hate AI because they can sense that it is going to impoverish and disempower them and destroy their lives and futures, and datacentres are the tangible thing this is "AI", that best pattern matches to the tangible thing in previous issues, and is even something they can do something about.

Another big thing that's breaking out now is to personally abstain from using any AI and become hostile to anybody that doesn't, as a core identity issue.

Still seems like there's a missing mass feeling to become hostile to the people making it, I don't entirely understand why that still hasn't manifested at popular strength yet.

Its understandable that if a huge technological wave is coming and you don't know how to surf that you'd be against it.

I think its just a relatively small group that really knows that AI is coming for their jobs. Creatives are the most up front about this, trying to establish a cartel where they will deny anyone that uses AI a space. Gaming has this too with Steam mandating AI use disclosure so people that hate AI can boycott the product (although this just doesn't work if the game is good). I don't think Steam cares about this, but they've neatly sidestepped the issue by letting the consumer make up their own minds.

As an aside there is currently a huge AI slopwave that has swamped the Steam platform, highlighted by the recent Steam Nextfest. This trend will probably continue for quite some time.

Anyway, the mass feeling might come as more mainstream professions are automated away. By the time we have PlumberBots crawling under your sink or into your toilet, the riots will be well and truly underway. YangGang 2038?

I think what has happened at quite a few data centers is bad planning and execution. So yes if you are just running power from the grid there will be minimal noise or pollution. But if you were a bit blase about grid electricity and just trying to get in on the boom, then you need to setup onsite power generation. Which usually takes the form of fossil fuel generators. Which are not quiet. And if you mess up you are spilling pollution as well, because you are basically running an industrial scale power generation facility without the planning or expertise that is usually deployed to run such a thing.

The other thing is that people want their money and their payoff. The perception of data centers is that they generate money for someone somewhere else. And if it comes up as a political question, ya of course people want their cut.

Railroads did have an issue if they just wanted to build through a town without adding a stop inside that town. Having a stop brought benefits, just using the land to run the rail through was not well liked.

From some articles I've seen local bribes compensation seems be the way forward.

Hope someone figures out nuclear SMRs to power these things. But then would SMRs get up and running by the time Elon exports all the compute into space?

Yes, but how many such men will we need? That was my point about winner-takes-all markets.

Realistically, I think phase 3 has already happened, and more of the new Says Law jobs created by AI will be pink-collar than blue-collar.

Think about what you would add to your life if you were several times richer, but couldn't occupy any more land than you do now. It won't be more stuff (you don't have space), to the extent that it will be better stuff that will mostly be automated work (although there is obviously some scope to consume craftmanship), so most of what you add to your life will be services, and most of those services will be pink-collar.

I don’t buy Phase 2, at least to the extent that it means manufacturing laborers. Manufacturing jobs have already been in longtime decline due to automation; how does this reverse in a world of more and better automation?

I could see a greater emphasis on labor via service jobs, which is indeed already the case via nursing and elder care. To frame this in an age war, the current gerontocracy is stealing from the young (via rising national debt) to fuel the AI buildout, which they will disproportionately benefit from since wealth/assets are naturally concentrated among older people. Younger people will not be able to find employment except manual labor serving the elderly!

As another male in an intellectual role, I've accepted it and I want to get to Phase 3 as soon as possible. Phase 2 will probably be the worst: still a world with scarcity but little use for the skills I have.

Regardless, I'm positive on AI provided it doesn't kill us all.

What if the cost and material and energy problems with general robotics are simply never solved? Amongst the other problems those seems like the most likely to be just never cost effectively replace most labor

Here's my optimistic AI world:

UBI a la the "Freedom Dividend" idea from the ill-fated Yang campaign. VAT tax gets divided among everyone equally without means-testing. It is sufficient for someone to live a modest life and it replaces other cash transfer forms of welfare. Still, it's just enough to live and watch Netflix all day without a lot of frivolities. There is incentive to work to increase spending money, and because your basics are covered you don't need a lot of work to reach a comfortable amount of spending money.

All decisions/choices made by humans (probably enforced by regulation.) Also work week (by regulation) declines over time to 20 hours or so. At some point, the White Collar work day looks like: You log into a computer for a few hours, Claude gives you decisions to make, you make them. Your AI Agent does all the paperwork, excel sheeting, and email responses, it summarizes and prioritizes the decisions to make, but a human gives their reputation behind each decision.

Teaching/doctoring/other white-collar-esque things that require communicating with a human in person become more valued, more people sign up for it, more training tracks appear. To match the fake email job work schedule better, shifts are shorter. Every elementary classroom has 2-3 teachers working 3 hours of class-time, 1 hour of prep. Admin costs go down for school districts/hospitals, more money available to hire teachers/nurses.

Blue collar work becomes mostly auditing the robots. Going out to the farms/factory floor in person, making sure the robots aren't fudging the numbers or acting funny, report back.

Paper and in-person meetings become more critical as time goes on because there is a distrust of the computer. The white-collar decision maker and the blue-collar auditor must meet in person or else what if the computer is lying about the results of the audit?

Training up a white collar decision-makers involves more external activities, games, clubs, tournaments, etc. We will no longer be able to train someone up "on the job" as easily, we need to be able to train up and select for virtuous, intelligent people . There will be tournaments, honor games, VR ethical-challenge-gauntlets to select for people who make decisions in line with the broader society. Imagine selecting the next VP of Sales by how well they performed on Mr. Beast's Squid Games.

Everyone who wants it can learn/study the arts and sciences. People still form university-like things but it's all passion, little status. All the funding goes to AI-run labs cranking out math theorems and running physics experiments under the watchful eyes of the auditors and decision makers.

Having human-made things will be even more of a status symbol than it is now. The last main category of jobs will be making things by hand, giving things the personal touch, etc. This will be economically feasible because these people will already have their basic needs met through UBI, so if they spend all month making a sweater that is certified human-made, sell it for $500 to a rich person for a status symbol, that $500 might be their spending money that month but it's enough for whatever extra thing they want to buy. Especially because robot-made goods will be dirt cheap.

the loathed email job is never going away

UBI a la the "Freedom Dividend" idea from the ill-fated Yang campaign. VAT tax gets divided among everyone equally without means-testing.

This is probably among the least likely of the AI forecasts--even less so than the 20-30+ % unemployment rate figures touted by many people. It would be too expensive, for one.

I think UBI is increasingly likely should AI disrupt the job market as severely as many predict it will - after all, there can't be an exponential growth in the economy without a sustained level of consumption.

more likely welfare will be expanded

The "minimum living standard" has demonstrably gone up: my grandmother grew up in a house without running water or electricity. Nowadays people seem to think cell phones and climate control are a human right. I'm not even arguing against that, but the hedonic treadmill there is very real.

I mean plenty of places in the world that haven't achieved consistent running water or electricity and still have a ton of cell phones around. If anything the Cell Phone has kinda trumped a lot of pre-existing needs.

Cellphones are genuinely a requirement to function; modern society is built on the assumption that you have a smartphone with an internet connection. My last two jobs required daily 2FA verification through an app.

I wouldn't mind the creeping up standards of housing so much if the government did not then make it fucking illegal to build and live below those standards. Single Room Occupancy apartments like Judy's in Zootopia have been regulated out of existence unless you are a college student living in a dorm.

Yeah, they're pretty essential. So is a car in most places in the US.

I am modestly surprised there isn't a market for the "dorm experience" for non-undergrads. It's probably just price (and the sorts of discrimination that isn't legal elsewhere) that makes a "post-college dorm" with the usual college amenities like fancy gyms and meal plans something that isn't commercially available anywhere I've looked.

Growth is production, not consumption. There is no reason why a few hypercapitalist elites cannot just trade goods, services, and resources among each other to create ever bigger yachts, or whatever other projects they have.

Isn't there a pretty obvious ceiling on that? For all his wealth, Elon Musk cannot consume the same amount as 10 million run-of-the-mill middle class Americans combined, nor does he probably want to.

Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. Or never die period. Or father 10,000 children, each kings. Unlimited spending ceiling on each of those.

Your demand will not be any more necessary to the economy than your supply is turning out to be. You are working off of several historically-warranted assumptions whose floor is falling out.

There are two main AI scenarios; near-term extinction and near term non-extinction. The dice have been rolled on that, it is difficult at this point to predict which one will happen.

The extinction scenario is irrelevant in any cultural or economic context; discussion of it is meaningless unless you are counting on joining Yud in one final moment of ecstatic vindication before oblivion.

Within the ‘non extinction’ universe, then, it seems likely that in short order all of the activities we currently classify as labor (indeed pretty much all of the activities we do in general, though maybe that is less relevant) will shortly be done by AI or by cheap, mass produced robotics guided by AI.

There are a few reasons why, in this scenario, I do not anticipate a permanent state of mass unemployment (in either a negative Marshall Brain style or positive Elon Musk style - though there is minimal difference between them).

  1. Many white collar jobs are already invented. This includes both millions of public and private sector jobs. Since the end of the Second World War and the development through the 20th century of manufacturing automation and the emergence of computing hundreds of millions of jobs have been artificially invented by a combination of regulation and direct and indirect government spending in sectors like education, healthcare, finance, law, actual public employment working for government and non-government (but funded directly and indirectly by it) and quasi-government organizations, old age care and more.

  2. At the same time, the band of one’s working life has narrowed out of the average human lifespan - we start working full time much later (often in our mid twenties instead of mid teens) and retire at a similar age while living much longer. This and the above are quasi-deliberate state policy to maintain a broad level of employment, and the incentives for this will continue to be present.

  3. Humans will always compete in games of status. Status involves reward. It seems extremely unlikely that tens of millions of high status people around the world - and the PMC is the demographic that largely invented and controls AI, in terms of background class - will accept a status on the level of an unemployed single mother in the trailer park living off Universal Basic Income. They will invent new games of status and ensure they are rewarded for them, and the best way to do that is beneath a veil of quasi-meritocracy, just as it is in our current system. There is nothing people with minor status fear more than having that petty status taken away from them or otherwise limited (see cops and customs officers). Most politicians and tech people aren’t generationally super rich, they’re from and of the upper middle class, and man mostly serves his class.

  4. The incentives of mass UBI + full unemployment are extremely poor from a governing perspective. People respond to incentives. Currently, one of the main incentives that keeps gainfully employed people in line and law abiding is the risk of life ruining unemployment. Even for the semi-employed, a stint in prison can be life ruining precisely because of its effect on one’s employment prospects. In a wider sense, the fact that if you work hard, you can escape the squalor, dirtiness, and shabbiness of the underclass is the central incentive for working hard. If everyone gets ‘paid’ the same check at the end of the month, why not be disruptive in school? Why not commit minor petty crime regularly? Why not engage in endless antisocial behavior? If you work hard your whole life only for Commissar Elon to throw you into section 8 with the addicts and degenerates when your software engineering job gets automated by Grok, you are more likely to revolt than your new neighbors. The automated sentinel killer drone police fascism squads won’t appear or be sanctioned immediately; as we unfortunately just found out, democracy of a sort still exists in America, for better or worse.

  5. The actual logistics of transitioning to UBI are economically painful and there is no easy way around it. What happens to debt? What happens to mortgages that UBI doesn’t cover, or indeed ones that it does? Who gets the nice apartments, the fancy hotel rooms? Do they all go out of business? What happens when consumer confidence and spending collapses? What happens during the panic? What happens when the financial system collapses in a huge credit crunch? The education system - especially colleges and vocational schools - immediately collapses because nobody thinks they can pay back loans and because education no longer leads to any opportunity. Universal unemployment plus UBI runs into many of the same problems as, say, suddenly transitioning to Full Communism, which has historically been economically fraught, except even more extensively damaging to economic activity.

The solution is obvious. We’re going to work invented jobs, brought into being by legislation that will be no less banal than New Jersey banning you from pumping your own gas. Every contract has to be reviewed by a human for at least one billable hour per x pages. Every bank loan has to be reviewed by at least one human for at least y time. Every line of code in commercial software has to be reviewed by a human for at least t seconds. Every company audit has to have one human auditor for z months for every $10m of revenue up to $100m and then every $100m thereafter - there, I just saved lawyers, retail bankers, software developers and accountants in four sentences. You can figure out the rest. If anyone seems to publish a huge piece of commercial software with a suspiciously small 2 man company the government just says “seems unlikely you guys reviewed all 3 million lines of code yourself” and levies a ruinous fine and bans your tool from sale or distribution, maybe even for free. Obviously all this is draft stuff, but you can increasingly close loopholes until essentially labor costs are forced onto all productive enterprise. When it comes to public sector employment, of course, you don’t even need that.

To smart people like those here, many of these will seem laughably fake because they are (although many of our jobs already are). But most will accept them quickly. In many ways, they will be no more fake than many of the jobs that already exist today!

Many white collar jobs are already invented. This includes both millions of public and private sector jobs. Since the end of the Second World War and the development through the 20th century of manufacturing automation and the emergence of computing hundreds of millions of jobs have been artificially invented by a combination of regulation and direct and indirect government spending in sectors like education, healthcare, finance, law, actual public employment working for government and non-government (but funded directly and indirectly by it) and quasi-government organizations, old age care and more.

They were invented to handle a wealthier, more complex, and litigious society. i don't see AI changing any of that.

The solution is obvious. We’re going to work invented jobs

But if the jobs are all invented, how do we decide who gets the better fake invented jobs and who gets the worse ones? It's not a new problem, but at least now there is some semblance of an escape valve for people who don't like the fake job allocation process. (This is less a reason it can't happen and more a reason it'll be shitty.)

I wonder if we'll even realize the jobs are all fake. One person's fake job is another person's critical function to protect consumers/users. One plausible transition isn't some Great Fake Jobs Act of 2035 but instead the government finding it has a lot more funding and a lot more interception points in the economy and passing laws to take advantage of its new capabilities. Probably better psychologically for people than a complete lack of structure.

There's still the option a large negative-sum drone world war that destroys supply chains and puts the genie back in the bottle for long enough while also making humanity desperate enough to enable a Butlerian jihad.

If anyone seems to publish a huge piece of commercial software with a suspiciously small 2 man company the government just says “seems unlikely you guys reviewed all 3 million lines of code yourself” and levies a ruinous fine and bans your tool from sale or distribution, maybe even for free.

This simply will make the US or any country that does this so uncompetitive compared to any country that does not enact such draconian restrictions. Just reading about it has me itching to move to some developing nation that doesn't care. I guess in your broader scenario you'd rather be in whatever country has the nicest standard of living, or every country suddenly has a nice standard of living enabled by AI, but I'd still choose the high agency country you're allowed to make a two person corporation in than the make work pretend garden job world you anticipate

Similar to how Stalin didn’t require the utmost fealty to the party from his smartest scientists, the US has always implicitly created exceptions for the most productive industries.

Did he not? From what I recall reading, although I concede I haven't went deep on it, scientists were very much not exempt from loyalty requirements, except if you call "being allowed+forced to continue the vital work from prison instead of just prison" being exempt.

right, nuclear scientists were exempt in order to build the bomb. others were not.

Stalin was unusually pragmatic in this regard

I think your scenario is a bit of a prisoners dilemma.

One nation just needs to defect from offering fake jobs to offering full UBI and full automation to capture all knowledge work, at which point the entire edifice collapses.

This does assume that we still have normal nations and national governments ofc, which is not a given

If a nation can defect, why can't a nation just defect to "kill all humans except for a narrow self-selected elite"~"kill all humans"? Surely that option dominates the UBI one. Fewer mouths to feed and house. On the other hand, if you expect its competitors are sufficiently aligned that they will crush such a nation in retaliation, they could do this to one that defects from the make-work scheme too.

Personally, I'll accept a fake job if and only if I can put in fake hours.

Right now, I think we should pivot to becoming artists, curators, athletes, piano players, researchers, etc. Status would be external popularity or internal achievement. Incentive would be that that you'll be shamed and bothered if you fall into a rut, at least unless you're an intrinsic stoner; maybe they are the people who don't respond to internal or external shame, so it works out. Transitioning to UBI would work by: people in the aforementioned "failed careers" initially manage a livable-but-basic lifestyle like starving artists, then gradually afford more luxuries, while rich people's incomes gradually revert to median by inflation, and/or the extras they can afford become more luxury and less essential (like decent healthcare or a safe neighborhood).

Furthermore, I think that's feasible.Who would object? And rich people who want to coerce the world into a worse dystopia must handle backstabbers, the AI becoming misaligned especially towards their children...I think it's easier.

But I say "right now" because I'm sure later there's a better solution. Ironically, finding it is another viable career, unlikely to be fully automated.

IMO the only viable way to something like UBI is an automation-driven supply-side surplus. Not that "everything will be free", but that marginal costs can be pushed close enough to zero that nobody really cares about counting pennies to worry about it. Salt and pepper used to be substances worth fighting wars over, but now they largely sit in unused shakers on restaurant tables or packets thrown away with disposable silverware. Sugar is similar.

Which isn't to say there won't be disruption, but the existing mechanisms suffice to allocate nicer apartments and such in the short term. Something like 50% of the population worked in agriculture as recently as last century, but the tractor didn't lead to mass unemployment, nor is basically anyone dying of starvation in the West for inaccessibility of calories.

My personal take is that human touches are going to become status symbols: they already are, to an extent ("bespoke", "hand-crafted", the marketing image of "organic"), but there is certainly a lot of room to spend more there. And I'm not sure that's all bad: people in my life really seem to appreciate when I give them things I've made myself. There seems to be meaning to be had there, I think.

Sounds to me like you just push up the price of scarce goods like housing in areas close to services without the antisocial.

I didn't say it was a good plan, but it seemed more practical than something top-down. Largely because it's what is already happening.

That said, we should, like, build more housing. NIMBYism is one of the obvious pitfalls there.

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