Is a PMC-prole alliance feasible? And what happens if it’s not?

With the scrapheap looming, can the PMC belatedly pull its head in and forge an alliance with the class it’s spent half a century throwing under the bus?

The people of Grasse would shudder for years to come when they thought of that day, although none of them had been present at the scene, none of them had seen anything, none of them had participated.
Patrick Süskind, Perfume, 1985

I don’t think you can do something like that by accident. It was a choice. A choice made even as they told you, told the country, they were doing the opposite. A one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control… The experiment is over. We will deliver what you have asked for – time and again – and we will take back control of our borders… we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.
Sir Keir Starmer, 12/5/25

As much as Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter was maligned, the one thing he did in letting go of so many people, was send a serious signal to the global corporate leadership class - the lights can stay on and you can probably cut even more people than you think.

That was a few years ago! Now they all know that AI is here to stay and will face enormous market pressure to deliver higher returns to shareholders regardless of human cost. Do you think the share buyback era happened in a vacuum?
Brennan McDonald, Brennan McDonald’s Newsletter, 16/5/25

You can coerce people – just about – into saying what you want them to say. But you cannot coerce them into thinking as you want them to… It isn’t unusual for political regimes to insist that their subjects repeat slogans. Havel’s Greengrocer is just one famous example. But what is unusual is for the state to force its subjects to say that the most fundamental distinction between human beings does not exist… I don’t find it funny when the current Prime Minister stutters on camera that women don’t have cervixes, I find it sinister. If they’re wrong about this, what else are they wrong about?
A lot, I reckon.
Louise Perry, Maiden Mother Matriarch, 18/5/25

What would enough influence look like, then? Just how monocultural do you guys want publishing, media, Hollywood, and academia to be? American liberalism has a profound inability to wrestle with its own influence, and this does not help with the common perception that liberals are losers… You can either tell me that efforts to de-white-man-ify publishing are worth doing, a meaningful effort to improve the world, or you can tell me that no white men ever lose opportunity because of that effort and it’s thus harmless. You can’t do both. Liberals doing the “it’s not happening”/“it’s happening and it’s good” thing is insufferable and increasingly inescapable.
Freddie deBoer, 19/5/25

My last post went viral. Well, as viral as a Substacker labouring in obscurity – that is, 99.999 per cent of us grinding away on this platform – can reasonably expect. But it didn’t go anywhere near as viral as a post published a fortnight earlier by Shawn K.

Not that I’ve done the calculations or anything. But, at the time of writing, his post is roughly 20-40X more viral, depending on whether you’re counting likes, reshares, or comments. I’m a reshares and comments man, myself. Those involve at least two taps on a screen – a visceral emotional reaction from a reader nowadays. Not that I care about such vanity metrics, of course. I’m here purely to speak truth to power as the-one-sane-man-left-in-a-world-gone-crazy. Not like certain sell-outs I could ment…

Where was I? Ah, yes…

In his much-liked, reshared and commented upon post, Mr K detailed his descent from being a software engineer pulling in US$150K a year to living in a trailer and struggling to make $200 a day doordashing in his 16-year-old vehicle.

If you haven’t yet read the piece, the predictable protestation is no doubt already forming in your mind:

A well-educated, well-paid professional – someone who, yes, ‘learnt to code’ – simply doesn’t end up in a trailer “on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York Highlands” relegated to a soul-crushingly grim existence in the Deliveroo economy. Not unless something has gone terribly wrong somewhere along the line.

But I did nothing wrong!
Here’s the tl;dr of the post: Respectable knowledge workers – most especially the boringly bourgeois ones who have the type of jobs that facilitate the purchasing of multiple properties – can now abruptly find themselves competing for minimum-wage (or below) scraps at the arse end of the gig economy.

Here’s the extended version: Shawn K got a practical qualification and acquired a skill he reasonably assumed would continue to be in demand. Ironically, he was even early to the AI party and invested significant time skilling up in that field towards the conclusion of his 20-year-long career as a software engineer.

Nonetheless, one day he got laid off.

After being laid off, he applied his software engineer’s intellect and obsessiveness to becoming un-laid-off. He applied for the best part of 1000 jobs. He reached several late-stage interview rounds but failed to receive a single job offer.

Though nobody has presented it as powerfully as Shawn K, this story is not uncommon among software engineers.

A few weeks before Shawn’s courageous confession, one of his peers published a similar account under the cheery headline Anatomy of a Layoff: It takes almost nothing for life under capitalism to fall apart. In it, Scarlet, a single-mother photographer who learnt to code after realising the prospects for content creators were getting ever bleaker, details her last couple of redundancies:

No severance, no warning, paltry thanks for a job well done and a “we’ll pass on your resume to our contacts” and just like that my life was thrown into utter chaos…

The last time I was laid off I waited four months for an unemployment check that didn’t even come close to covering my expenses. I drained my 401(k) and savings to get by, and I was on the verge of defaulting on my mortgage. And here we are again.

Losing a job in the United States isn’t just losing a job. It’s losing all income immediately, it’s losing your ability to see a doctor, it’s losing your feeling of safety, your vision for your future. It is utterly existential. All my plans for the forseeable are deleted. Now I am in survival mode. Hoping that I won’t be one of the many for whom being unemployed for a year or more is the norm.

I’ve seen many similar, if shorter, posts from my fellow content creators on social media in recent times. Sometimes it’s a nervously upbeat screed about how someone has decided to “move on” from their role and wants to hear from those with work – of any kind – to offer. More often, a long-time freelancer dejectedly confesses that “they’ve never seen it so bad”.

I’ve come to think of these bleak appeals as ‘Throwing yourself on the mercy of the LinkedIn crowd’ posts. Unfortunately, the LinkedIn crowd rarely has any work to dispense nowadays.

Falling down
It’s still too confronting a reality for most people to acknowledge squarely. But software engineers, content creators and grads are struggling to find work because the work they used to do has been automated away.

This situation is not going to get any better. Indeed, it will soon get much worse.

We are in the phoney war stage of AI-driven mass automation. The canaries in the coalmine may have fallen off the perch, but most companies have only instituted hiring freezes, rather than hacking into headcount aggressively.

Over the second half of this year, and even more so throughout 2026, the mass redundancies will come thick and fast. It’s simply the inescapable logic of capitalism for businesses to substitute cheap AI for expensive humans as soon as it’s feasible to do so.

Je suis Shawn K. We all are, dear reader.

Do you want to leave your fate in the hands of Bezos, Musk and Zuck?
Here’s a recent quote from Craig Scroggie, the CEO of NextDC, a data centre operator.

We’ve been thinking about lower-cost workforce options for decades. We’ve outsourced to lower-cost countries for decades, but now we have a tech-based knowledge base with the ability to put a workforce’s entire knowledge base in one system,” Scroggie said at the Macquarie Australia conference last week.

In the same AFR article, a muckety-muck from the US notes:

Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett says there are two ways this can go: either companies adopt AI without laying workers off, which will lead to pressure on profit margins and share prices, or AI adoption unleashes a productivity-enhancing wave of unemployment. In the latter scenario, Hartnett argues, “US politicians would move to protect US workers via wealth taxation.”

As our academic friends say, let me unpack the text for those unfamiliar with bloodless corporate jargon. What’s breezily described as “thinking about lower-cost workforce options for decades” is more prosaically termed global labour arbitrage.

That is, exporting all the well-paid union jobs in industries like manufacturing to low-wage developing countries, then importing vast numbers of people from developing countries to push down wages in industries that can’t be offshored, such as agriculture, construction and hospitality.

For obvious reasons, global labour arbitrage has benefited the plutocrats. As is increasingly well-understood, it’s also benefited many time-poor, status-obsessed members of the PMC, who’ve gained access to both a cheap servant class and endless opportunities to posture about how cosmopolitan they are. And do you know what businesses can do once they (a) have access to sophisticated AI tools (like agents) and (b) have captured their human workforce’s knowledge base in one system?

Let’s just say it doesn’t end happily for the workforce in question.

Which brings us to the Bank of America bigwig’s comments.

I’ll bet my left testicle nobody who moves in the circles Mr Harnett does is actually considering the option where they don’t lay off workers, leading to – the horror! – pressure on profit margins and share prices.

That leaves two options, neither of them great.

The best-case scenario is the one flagged – governments tax the newly profitable and lightly staffed/completely unstaffed businesses and use the revenue to introduce a UBI. I’d expect this will be enough to survive on, but not much more.

The worst-case scenario is that the economically unviable – the ‘useless eaters’ – are simply left to starve.

If that sounds unlikely to you, I’d suggest reading some history. You won’t need to go any further back than the 20^th century.

Turned tables
After two world wars and a Great Depression, the working class decided it deserved a decent slice of the pie. The result was what the French call the 30 glorious years – three post-war decades of widely shared prosperity, widespread upward social mobility and abundant social capital.

Since the Keynesian era drew to a conclusion circa 1980, Anglosphere societies have reverted to a historically normative Pareto distribution. That’s meant the top quintile of the income distribution has made out like bandits.

The bottom four quintiles?

Well, they haven’t quite been so lucky. Despite constantly being assured that a rising tide would lift their dinghy any day now.

Eventually, AI-driven automation will Pareto the bejesus out of the Pareto distribution. Absent a drastic shake-up of the status quo, 80-20 societies will become 90-10 ones, then 99-1 ones, then maybe even 99.99-0.1 ones.

(Globally, that’s still leaves eight million of the elect, which should just about cover all the tech gazillionaires and their respective harems/polycules. Hell, they could probably all fit on New Zealand, which is apparently where they’ve all established their Bond villain lairs anyway.)

What’s unusual – divinely retributive, perhaps, for those of a religious bent – about the current wave of technological disruption is that it’s automating away cognitive rather than physical labour. To quote Tyler:

The big story in the short-term is this: Blue-collar workers (carpenters, gardeners, handymen, and others who do physical labor) will become more valuable. And white-collar knowledge jobs, many of which are already near or under the waterline, like legal research and business consulting, will diminish in value.

That’s right, my PMC brethren. Not only will you lose your well-paid, prestigious roles and experience the financial insecurity and existential despair so familiar to Shawn K and Scarlet. You’ll also be enduring humiliating un(der)employment at the same time those reactionary blue-collar types you consider yourself so morally superior to are in increased demand.

After all, someone’s going to have to build and maintain all those data centres.

Paradise lost
The thing about being middle class is that, well, you’re stuck in the middle.

There are always outliers, but those at the top and bottom can expect to inherit their class position. In contrast, those stuck in the middle are gripped by both a fear of falling (down into the precariat) and a dream of rising (up into the ranks of the independently wealthy).

While they weren’t entirely absent, the Anglosphere middle class was less consumed by fear and greed during the Keynesian era. Largely because the gap between the lifestyle available to the small number of ‘winners’ and a far more numerous collection of non-winners was far less stark. Back then, the rich might have been sitting in first class, but they were still on the same plane as the cattle-class commoners.

Nowadays, they fly private.

The Boomer PMCers, in all their wisdom, dismantled the post-war Keynesian architecture and replaced it with devil-take-the-hindmost, largely unrestrained capitalism. Ever since, PMCers (Boomer and otherwise) have been throwing the lower orders under the bus economically while sneering at them culturally.

So, it’s difficult to fault globalisation’s losers for hating the smug, self-interested and endlessly self-congratulatory winners. Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to start electing populists and rioting in the streets over immigration. Things would have undoubtedly gotten much more Bader-Meinhoffy much more quickly if it had been the PMC seeing the value of its labour being arbitraged away by the political class at the behest of their donor class.

So, I can understand why many carpenters, gardeners and handymen would be sorely tempted to sit back and let the economics professors, lawyers, C-suiters and management consultants get a taste of the Schumpeterian medicine they’ve long doled out to others.

But to channel Michael Corleone, the danger of hating your (class) enemy is that it clouds your judgment. AI automation has come first for those of us with email jobs. But those who work with their hands won’t be spared for long. In a best-case scenario, they’ve maybe got 5-10 years until cheap and sophisticated AI-equipped robots will be coming for them too.

A land fit for heroes
It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but relations between the workers and the PMC weren’t always so toxic.

By any measure, John Maynard Keynes was born into a life of (proto) PMC privilege. His father was an economist at Cambridge University. His mother was a social reformer who became Cambridge’s first female mayor. He went to Eton before following in his father’s footsteps. He died a baron.

Nowadays, Keynes would probably get a finance job and focus on enriching himself. (As it happens, he was a pioneering value investor, though on behalf of King's College rather than himself.)

But like many proto-PMCers of his generation, Keynes was more interested in raising up those at the bottom than maneuvering to reach the tippity-top himself.

Nonetheless, Keynes’ theories would never have had the real-world impact they did if they hadn’t been championed by working-class individuals and institutions. That one-two punch – delivered by upper-middle-class left-leaning public intellectuals like Keynes, as well as the political and industrial wings of the labour movement – was enough to sit the plutocratic overclass its arse for a few decades, creating a golden age for both the working and middle class.

I’d argue that it wasn’t too bad an era for the captains-of-industry class either. After all, it’s not like rich people ceased to exist between circa 1945-1975. But the plutocrats chafed against high taxation, powerful unions, insufficiently ‘business friendly’ governments, and an equitable distribution of wealth right from the get-go. (Hayek set up the anti-collectivist Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.)

Capital seized its moment when Western economies went haywire in the late 1970s. Around the same time, the PMC collectively decided its interests would be best served by acting as a courtier class to the billionaires, rather than continuing to try to redistribute wealth from the billionaires to the non-billionaires. That political realignment ushered in four decades of uniparty “social liberalism and fiscal conservatism”.

But the neoliberal epoch is ending and a technofeudalist one is dawning. The PMC and the proles must now choose between hanging together, or being hung alone.