It will get much worse before it gets better

Tech Elite are the New Robber Barons—AI will be the new Weimar Hyper-Inflation. Automation will destroy jobs too quickly, and political anger will soar.

In 1923, Germans hauled wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread, and a decade later, Hitler had a nation in his fist. To understand how they got there, we need to look backwards. Specifically, the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919. This treaty ended WWI and included reparations and other punitive measures that destroyed Germany. Not just economically, but spiritually. Pride, humiliation, and pain—it all amounts to one thing: grievances.

Sure, Germany had been the aggressor during the war, and it felt like poetic justice to punish them. But the psychological damage paired with the economic punishment gave the German people enough anger—psychological activation, motivation, and focus—to generate and elevate someone like Hitler, who gave voice and direction to their anger.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Fast forward a century, and the wheelbarrows are gone, but the resentment’s back. Particularly in America. But we don’t have a treaty and war reparations to be angry about. It’s harder to find a “bad guy” and so we’re caught in a vicious cycle of blame games, culture wars, and the memeification of politics.

By and large, all of America shifted right in the last election. You rarely see this much homogenization.

So what’s going on? Why the hard right pivot as though we have Weimar Republic levels of hyper inflation? It’s a slower burn, a longer bleed out. It’s not just white male anger, which is there. Disaffected men and boys have a lot of anger, and are tired of being blamed. Decolonization narrative, DEI narratives, woke narratives—the academic literature has a lot of nuance (even though some of them are based on fundamentally flawed assumptions) but once those ideas leave the Ivory Tower, they get distilled by society. “White man bad.” “Toxic masculinity bad.” “Privilege bad.”

That’s the social psychology side. In the meantime, real wages have stagnated, jobs have gone overseas, and the rich keep getting richer. We’re getting close to Gilded Age levels of wealth inequality. The Weimar Republic shows us what happens when men feel too emasculated for too long—violence rises. The Treaty of Versailles, from an archetypal perspective, was the national equivalent of a castration. Hitler offered them their masculinity back. “You’re not broken men, you’re actually the most genetically superior race on the planet. Your virility is to be cherished.”

Sound familiar?

It all comes down to energy. Any time you see civil strife like this, a huge coordination of a society, it comes from something that gives them focus. Grievances are one way to focus that energy, to build up the energy level enough. Think of it like an electron’s valence. Once the energy shell gets hot enough, it emits a photon. Society isn’t so different, except it will launch a political revolution or a war. There seem to be phase changes, sudden transitions that happen once a nation’s energy level gets high enough.

Why do people keep setting Waymos on fire? It’s a symbol.

In 2024, dockworkers shut down ports over robot cranes; in San Francisco, a crowd torched a Waymo car and cheered. What do they have in common?

Automation. AI. Robots.

Why is it that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are such controversial figures? They are the modern day robber barons. Not that they are stockpiling eggs to drive up prices, this is the same kinda dance, but all new moves. They are symbols of globalism, but more importantly and acutely, symbols of AI and automation. Amazon had 200,000 warehouse robots in 2019. Now they have over 750,000. That trend will not slow down.

“They’re taking your jobs!”

One of the best ways to energize people is to threaten their economic agency. Whether it’s Jews, immigrants, or robots, it doesn’t really matter. From the French Revolution’s bread riots to the Arab Spring’s jobless youth to Weimar’s collapse, it’s the same story: strip people’s economic agency, and they’ll start breaking things.

Economic Agency: The capacity of individuals or groups to exert control over their economic circumstances through active participation in the production, distribution, or consumption of resources, thereby securing financial stability and influence within a market system. It diminishes when external forces—such as automation, policy, or structural inequality—restrict access to meaningful economic roles, often correlating with heightened social unrest.

So what’s going to happen? If history gives us any clues, here’s what I think will happen:

First, the tech elite will continue blissfully pushing for creative destruction, the economic term for “move fast and break things.” That’s how you create progress. The hard part about change is that it actually requires change. Fast change is usually painful for someone. While Elon and Bezos have power and dollar signs in their eyes, and a bunch of politicians stand to gain from self-dealing and insider information. There are even twitter feeds that track Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades because she just seems to do so well on the stock market!

Democrats and Republicans both play this game.

The gleeful march of technocratic oligarchs will continue for the foreseeable future. There’s just too much money to be made.

That is, until the unwashed masses, us proletariat, lose enough economic agency that our anger goes up and we demand change. The quantum redshift of America was a sign. The longshoreman’s strike against dock automation was a hint. The torching of Waymos is an omen.

Elon and Trump are currently trashing the system, expressing America’s collective anger at the calcified establishment, a sort of political catharsis. This is, ideally, democracy at work. However, I don’t think it will be a complete catharsis. Here’s why: Trump and Musk will run into the same problem that Catherine the Great did.

Cathy the G (as my wife calls her) was a progressive empress. I know, sounds like an oxymoron. It was. She was an Enlightenment thinker and wanted to revolutionize Russia. But when push came to shove, and France imploded into civil war, she changed her tune. She was progressive only so far as she could remain empress of Russia. Suddenly, revolutionary noises about democracy and inclusivity were kaput. This is the same lady who hosted the Nakaz forum in 1767, meant to be an inclusive economic forum that brought all Russia together to come up with new laws and theories. Instead, the serfs just complained about broken fences, stolen cows, and crooked tax men. Ultimately, she doubled down on power.

Likewise, Elon and Trump, Zuckerberg and Bezos, are only anti-establishment so long as it benefits them. So what we’re experiencing right now is a partial catharsis. Blame immigrants, blame woke culture, blame globalism and Ukraine. Just don’t blame the tech elite.

But that incomplete catharsis will continue to build up, particularly once AI, automation, and robotics continue to heat up. Everyone from Oxford University to Goldman Sachs are calling for double digit job loss by 2030. I’m sure that no one will mind. My theory of economic agency is simple: there is an inverse relationship between economic agency and political anger.

Still from the Animatrix, which depicts human protests against robots. This is about what we’re heading for.

Change is hard. Change is spooky. New things are threatening, and the current economic landscape is unfair. Long story short, I suspect we’re heading for huge riots and protests in the next few years as AI and robots become more common place. This is part of the negotiation we have across society any time we integrate new technology.

As jobs go away, and times get harder, people will have more and more grievances. Once you have enough grievances, plus something to focus that anger—robots and AI—you get psychological motivation and unified action.

My audience thinks it will get much, much worse before it gets better. I tend to agree.

Long story short: it will get worse before it gets better. Tectonic tension is building, and the three primary parties are tech elite, establishment politicians, and ordinary citizens.

Fast take off will likely be the catalyst.

What is “fast takeoff?” This is a hypothetical inflection point where compounding returns, virtuous cycles, and recursive self-improvement mean that we have the AI equivalent of the Cambrian explosion.