Another interesting, scary Substack from Chor Pharn which looks at how old style capitalism, politics and the culture wars are all being consumed by AI. What it doesn’t do is take account of how the warming planet is likely foreclosing both capitalism and AI itself. It describes what may be coming next, but not what comes after.
(The ‘K’ he talks about refers to how our Western economies are increasingly looking like a K - a rising upper limb of the very rich, and a declining lower limb containing everyone else.)
The first industrial machine needed everyone. Mass production required mass employment. Mass war required mass bodies. Mass markets required mass pay checks. Unions, suffrage, the welfare state—these weren’t just moral victories. They were the settlement price of a machine that couldn’t run without the many.
The new machine is different. Its stack is narrow: chips, compute, energy, models, capital, and a small priesthood that integrates them. Governments know they can’t do without this priesthood. The priesthood increasingly suspects it can do without everyone else.
That’s why the culture war ended so quietly.
Wokeness wasn’t defeated by argument. It was made redundant. It was the theology of the credentialled mediation class—HR, comms, academia, publishing, consulting—a largely feminized layer that ruled not by owning capital, but by regulating legitimacy: who could speak, what language was safe, which injuries required public submission.
It won the university just as degrees lost value. It won publishing just as distribution escaped. It won HR just as firms learned to run on fewer humans. It won the office. The office lost the world.
Now AI comes for exactly that work: summarizing, coordinating, writing, interpreting, producing the moral paperwork of institutional life. The Artificial Middle has met a machine that does artificial-middle work. Meanwhile the tech bros aren’t just coding. They’re pouring concrete. They’re launching rockets. They’re building power stations and buying grid access. They are managing the grit of the real world, not retreating from it. The old industrial worker could strike and stop a factory. The new core already runs its own energy and is prototyping its own planet.
China is the fantasy girlfriend of Western masculine dissidents who imagine it full of engineers, factories, discipline, and a Politburo untroubled by HR. But China isn’t what happens when tech bros capture the state. It’s what happens when the state captures the tech bros. The engineer serves the Party. The Party can’t abandon its lower K because it’s responsible for 1.4 billion people’s employment, reproduction, and political control.
America’s machine elite dreams of secession. China’s machine state dreams of mobilization. Neither has solved the problem of a workable settlement with the masses, but America’s elite is building the infrastructure to make secession from everyone else physical, not just fiscal. That’s the difference.
The lower K hasn’t vanished. It’s just lost the old bargain. It’s moving from worker to ward: transferred money, subsidized entertainment, AI companionship, ceremonial consultation—but no grip on the systems that govern its life. The industrial worker could stop production. The managed population can merely riot outside the data center.
And the young inherit nothing clean. Not the office feminism their mothers won. Not the frontier the tech bros seized. They face a raw choice: they can demand ownership but have no leverage, accept comfortable wardship, submit to mobilization—or simply refuse to reproduce the whole arrangement. No children, no sacrifice, no loyalty to a civilization that has no use for them. That refusal is already underway. It’s not a revolution. It’s a slow-motion general strike with a generational fuse.
Feminism won the office. Tech bros seized the frontier and are hardening the foundations. The young inherit neither bargain, and the new settlement hasn’t been written. But the victors are already pouring concrete while everyone else is still writing memos.
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