Three Big Questions We Face in the Age of Extinction

Why the Future Is Falling Apart — And Where We Go From Here

Image Credit: Matt Dunham

It’s not looking good out there. And these days, like many, you might feel confused, baffled, even bewildered. You have a lot of questions, circling through your head — and answers are thin on the ground. Is the economy ever going to get better? Why is it doing so badly, anyways? Why does my life seem stuck, or my kid’s, or my friends’? Why are our societies being overrun by hateful lunatics? Is democracy going to make it — and am I?

Let’s talk about all this. This is an age of unanswered questions. Questions like the ones above. And one of the strange things about now is that we’re all haunted by these questions. We ask ourselves about them over and over again. But rarely do we speak them out loud. And so, well, we’re doing a pretty poor job — this “we” means intellectuals, writers, academics, and so forth, people like yours truly, if you want to think of me as any of those things — of providing much in the way of answers. So the first thing to know is: everybody’s going crazy asking themselves questions like these, and the reason we all keep asking ourselves is that we don’t talk about it enough in the first place, suffering in silence.

We doomscroll, hate-watch, and cling to escapism. But it doesn’t help. More than that? We brood. We ruminate. Discouraged, forlorn, disheartened. These things — brooding, rumination, dwelling, repeating and replaying distressing questions and situations — are hallmark signs of depression, by the way. So — first things first — You’re not alone. We’re all asking ourselves the big questions these days, in a kind of grim obsession.

Gently, then — let’s talk.

There are Three Big Questions facing us in the 21st century, and they go like this.

Number one: how are we going to have functioning economies? You can see by now that the economy’s stuck in a kind of strange, surreal place. Pundits say it’s booming and everything’s fine, but the average person and family’s struggling to pay the bills, falling deeper and deeper into debt. What’s going on here? We’ve entered a period of….let me explain. America’s “growing” at 1%, Europe at 0.1%. That’s not growth, really — it’s well within the margin of error. So what is this? Stagflation? Recession? It’s much more than that.

We are now on the cusp of two mega-shocks to the economy, and both of them raise the question: how are we even going to have economies? Inflation is high because prices for the basics are skyrocketing — food, energy, medicine, and so forth. That, in turn, is because of, you guessed, it, climate change. We’re learning the hard way now that yes, hitting the planet’s limits does have real consequences. And so prices for basics have begun to soar to astronomical levels. This shock isn’t going to stop. And so this isn’t going to be some kind of cyclical problem — which is what “recession” or “stagflation” implies. Rather, we’re in the process — the painful one — of adjusting to a new economic equilibrium. The equilibrium of the Age of Extinction — trying to maintain Industrial Age living standards on a planet that’s running out of food, water, energy, medicine, right down to clean air. Good luck with that.

The second shock that’s hitting the economy is AI. In a few months, maybe a year, the first wave of AI-driven layoffs slash firings are going to hit the economy. And then? They’ll just keep going. Executives are going to figure out that a whole lot of work — clerical, administrative, accounting, legal, writing, marketing, customer relations, even decision-making and risk analysis and data analysis — can be automated. AI’s going to be like offshoring, but much, much worse. Offshoring wiped out the working class — AI’s going to finish the job of wiping out the middle class. Offshoring eviscerated blue collar jobs — AI’s going to wipe out some pink collar ones, and a whole lot of white collar ones, too.

And…then what? Those jobs aren’t coming back. So…what are people going to…do? This brings me to the point about the economics of AI that we haven’t really grappled with. The very same person whose job AI is going to take is also going to be very happy to use AI…to find a date, correspond, ironically, LOL, try and look for a new job. Here we have a stark imbalance: the demand for AI is going to be insatiable. And yet what AI is going to do is one better than Marx. It’s not just going to wipe out the proletariat, it’s going to knock the knees out from under the bourgeoisie, too. Who needs a creative director or financial planner or lawyer in a few years time? Anyone? AI’s going to cause a shock to the economy something like this: the labour market as we know it will be absolutely decimated. The number of jobs in the economy is going to suddenly shrink. But unlike the Industrial Revolution, which created new jobs — even if they were dank, grim ones — AI won’t. Not more than it takes, anyways.

That leaves us with a permanent problem. Two, in fact — let’s put AI and climate change together now. Climate change is causing human history’s greatest supply shock — our ability to supply ourselves with the basics, water, food, air, medicine, energy, everything made from them, which is everything, from concrete to glass to steel, is diminishing, and diminishing fast. Meanwhile, AI is going to cause what’s probably going to be modern history’s — maybe all of history’s — greatest demand shock. It’s going rip a hole in what’s known as “aggregate demand,” which is a fancy way of saying “how much money people have to spend,” because, well, it’s going to vaporize jobs explosively like someone setting off a thermonuclear bomb in a Volkswagen bug.

So. We’re hitting a point where we’re unable to supply the basics — the fundamental necessities of civilization, water, air, food, energy, etcetera. Hence, prices are skyrocketing, and shortages breaking out. Meanwhile, AI’s going to rip apart our economies, replace jobs that were once considered safe, secure professions — from medicine to law to accounting to marketing, finance, therapy, and so forth — and that’s going to leave huge, huge numbers of people without much….money.

Now maybe you see why I ask the question this way: how are we even going to have economies? We’re already at the point where people are struggling with the basics — I often use the example of more and more people using buy now, pay later schemes to afford groceries. A dire sign. But if people can barely make ends meet now…what happens when the AI-pocalypse hits in earnest, and suddenly, huge numbers of jobs don’t exist anymore? Then we have a rapid, sudden descent into poverty. At least for most — and a bonanza of a windfall for the owners of this new form of capital, AI capital.

That’s a Really Bad Thing. Why? Let’s go back in history just a few short decades. What did offshoring do? It eviscerated the working class. Their jobs went away — for good. As they did, their towns went broke. Their communities were destroyed. With no tax base left, there was nothing left to invest with, and so the Rust Belt emerged — a once proud region that was left to decrepitude and neglect. And that was what sowed the seeds of today’s right wing authoritarian fascist wave.

The death of the working class didn’t do what Marx said it would. It didn’t provoke a glorious socialist revolution. LOL, it did what it did in the 1930s. The working classes whose jobs had been vaporized by offshoring turned to a new breed of demagogues. Pointing the finger at a new set of scapegoats, or sometimes, very old ones. Trump ascended to power, backed almost religiously by America’s “white working class,” as pundits say, and to this day, nothing — not even a rape trial — can shake their holy faith in their savior and messiah. Meanwhile, in Britain, a figure as comedically gross and malign as Nigel Farage seduced the nation, and led it to embrace Brexit — which meant giving up the right to live and work in all of Europe, breaking up with its largest trading partner, and elevating fanatics and lunatics to power, who are still right there finding new people to hate, to oversee this set of historic, jaw-dropping blunders. In Europe, in Canada, Australia, which had, LOL, a climate denier for a Prime Minister while the country burned — everywhere — the extreme right surged to power in historic ways. All this had its roots in working classes being net losers from offshoring, their lives destabilized, their fortunes shattered, downward mobility now the norm — their class and social groups plunged into sudden, heart-stopping poverty.

So. If my first question is: how do we even have economies?, then my second one is: what happens when we don’t? The answer to that is given to us by history. Not just the history of Weimar Germany. But also much more recent history — how neoliberalism imploded into a new wave of fascism, which I’ve told the story of briefly above.

Right about now, we’re living that, in increasingly disturbing ways. America’s fanatics and lunatics go a little more crazy every day — or a lot. Their circle of hate during the Trump years used to be Mexicans, Latinos, their families, babies. But now? It includes “real” Americans, too. Only if they’re different, and they refuse to accept their place in society, now, they’re persecuted, attacked, and dehumanized. Gay? Trans? Kid who reads books? Woman? Parent of any of the above? Did you aid and abet one? That’s against the law. Now, we control you. We take away your rights, because you live the way we want you to, or else. Or else what? Or else we punish you, use force, right down to violence, against you.

What happens when we don’t have functioning economies? Everything else goes down in flames, too. People begin to lose their minds, and turn to atavism, to demagogues, to seek lost glories and move backwards in time, because for them, “progress” isn’t working out. They see some poor kid who just wants to use a bathroom in peace — and suddenly, they’re the mortal enemy, because hey, the demagogue, was it Trump? DeSantis? Rishi Sunak? Doesn’t matter. Said they weren’t really people at all. And I’m a real person. The only way I can get what I deserve — what I was born to inherit, my birthright, my power, my supremacy — is to take personhood away from people who aren’t really people.

And so the answer to the question — what happens when we don’t have economies that function — goes like this. People turn on each other. Economies that don’t function are zero or negative sum games — for me to win, you have to lose, for me to win, ten of you have to lose. That’s what’s happening in our economies now: for one Bezos or the Creepy Dude who Bought Twitter to Win, a million of us have to lose. But that warps politics, in just the same way, too. It becomes a zero, then a negative sum game, too.

That is why politics in an era where economies don’t work is becoming a game of taking people’s rights away. Political scientists call it “democratic backsliding,” but that’s far too polite — and inaccurate, really — a term. It’s about authoritarian, fascists, theocrats, fanatics of every kind, taking rights away. From everyone else. In America, the GOP’s trying to take rights — inalienable rights — away from…so many social groups…it’s hard to even keep track of anymore. The LGBTQ, kids, their parents, teachers, professors, journalists, women…LOL…Disney and Mickey Mouse. In Britain, the Brexiters literally made Brits give up the right to live and work in Europe…a right so advanced, 99% of the world couldn’t dream of it…and they’re still cheering about it.

This is politics as a negative sum game. For us to win — us 20% of fanatics, lunatics, theocrats, fascists, supremacists, the rest of you, the 80% of you, have to lose. Lose what? Your basic freedoms, even ones that were said to be inalienable. Like privacy. Hey, kid, what’s under that dress or in those pants? What do your private parts look like? Like expression. Hey, kid, is that a banned book you’re reading? Like association. Sorry, you’re a woman — we need to check who you’ve been talking to. What’s that? You aided and abetted a woman? A gay kid? A trans kid? You’re in serious trouble, now. Like speech. Hey, did you “breach decorum” by saying you should have those rights? You’re expelled from this institution, this house, this school, this body.

For the 20% of us lunatics to win, the rest of you have to lose. Negative sum politics. They’ve arrived with a vengeance now. And the stakes are right out there in the open. The majority of people aren’t to have rights, at all. Not really. That’s already the case, not some kind of “exaggeration” — women in America are losing basic rights at light-speed, and they’re literally more than 50% of society. That’s how bad it already is. Book bans, as I calculated the other day, already reach almost 10% of America’s kids — after just two years since the frenzy began, and it’s accelerating. On and on it goes. The goal here is coercion, absolute power, total control: authoritarianism, in order to institutionalize fascism, meaning, a certain kind of person reigns supreme over the rest, who aren’t really people at all. They decide who gets to associate with whom, speak about what, have any sort of power of choice, any agency, privacy’s violated to do it, and the point of all this is to ensure a society’s purity of blood and faith.

So these two questions are intimately linked. How do we even have a functioning economy? And: what happens when we don’t? Negative sum economics breed negative sum politics. Stagnation and poverty breed fascism. Wiping out a working class is an almost sure to way to spark the rise of demagogues. So what will wiping out what’s left of a middle class do? You see, all the above was caused by the last great economic shock — or mistake, take your pick, offshoring. We’ve been paying the political price — fascism, authoritarianism, lunacy — for close to a decade now. But the price of the next one? AI and climate change like two pincers shattering what’s left of the economy, AI vaporizing jobs at the pink and white collar level, while climate change makes prices skyrocket? Shudder. Those twin shocks are going to be worse — much worse — than offshoring. And so they imply that negative sum politics are going to get much worse, too.

All of that brings me to my third and last question. Are we worthy of democracy? You see, the above is what history says will happen. AI and climate change are going to wreck our economies, causing people to turn on each other, accelerating our civilization’s already visible fascist-authoritarian decline. But does it have to be that way? Of course not. History is just a guide. Sometimes, we can break history’s rules, too, and that’s what they’re for: so that we don’t repeat its mistakes.

In America, for example, there are glimmers of hope here and there. Average Americans are punishing the GOP — because they disagree vehemently with its attacks on women, the LGBTQ, things like banning books. That’s becoming worthy of democracy. But there’s a long, long way to go yet. That’s just the first step in a nation reclaiming its democratic soul and fire and purpose.

Let me put this in a larger context. Democracy isn’t a static thing. Every generation — every one — has to prove its worthy of democracy. My grandparents’s generation had to face the Nazis. My parents’ generation had to stand for civil rights. My generation, though? So far, we haven’t risen to the challenge at all. At all. We haven’t demanded much of anything — from a planet to a functioning economy to a better social contract to a future. And now we have kids of our own. That’s just one example of how we’re failing at being worthy of democracy.

I can put that to you in a more concrete way. Turnout in elections is abysmal — and that’s in big ones. In local ones? It’s worse than even that. Hence, the fanatics and lunatics have learned they can wrest control of democracy from the grass roots up, running for positions like school boards and local governing bodies, almost uncontested, because, well, until recently, almost nobody cared. Our democracies have long been in disrepair this way: participating in democracy, when you’re getting poorer, when you can’t make ends meet, is a luxury. But you can’t really have much of a democracy that way.

In this age? We need to prove we’re worthy of democracy. You see, we have a strange, almost backwards view of it. We think of it as natural, an endpoint, an inevitability. It’s not. Most of human history has been profoundly fascist and authoritarian, from caste societies to feudal systems to kingdoms. Democracy is the anomaly — and in the still brief age ofdemocracy, every generation must prove they’re worthy of it, or the project comes to a swift end.

Democracy isn’t a static thing. It’s a project and a process. It is a way of life, and that means something deeper than I think we really fully grasp yet. Not so long ago, “democracy” meant that women and minorities didn’t even have the right to vote. Today, they do. Precisely because every generation’s job is expanding democracy. That means: expanding the circle of personhood. Taking yesterday’s rights, protecting them, and them institutionalizing new ones.

Use it or lose it. Democracy’s like a muscle in this way. If it’s not exercised? It atrophies. Today? It’s not that the authoritarians and fascists are winning. It’s also that we’ve become a little bit — or a lot — unworthy of democracy. Silent majorities rule — think of Britain, where living standards are falling at light speed, you can’t get a doctor’s appointment or an ambulance, the government shrugs, and blames it on, LOL, “boat people,” and nobody much says anything. Think of the way Americans grew apathetic and fatalistic and even nihilistic — not voting, not participating, barely even paying attention. I understand — yes, it’s true — that democracy is hard work, and the point of our systems is to make it such hard work you can’t even do it well or at all. But nobody said it was going to be easy.

Every generation has to prove itself worthy of democracy, by keeping the project going. That doesn’t just mean: maintaining the status quo — it means bettering it. It once meant giving women and minorities the vote. In the 70s, it meant civil rights, in the 80s and 90s, it meant gay rights, in the 00s, it meant…it stopped meaning much at all. And here we are, paying the price. Now, regress rules, and those newly-won rights are already being taken away. Use it or lose it.

So: are we going to be worthy of democracy? Or continue this long, slow, fatal slide into indifference towards it, which is what the authoritarians and fasicsts hope for? Are we going to even have economies — that’d mean reinventing them for this century, instead of living off the fumes of the industrial age. And what happens when we don’t — which is authoritarianism and fascism rising, only in this age, that threatens to go thermonuclear, as AI and climate change wipe out what’s left of our economies, in the most basic terms of supply and demand. 

Three questions. I don’t have all the answers — but I know you’re asking, like we all are, brooding, ruminating, where do we go from here, how the hell did it get so bad, now what….and maybe, just maybe, at least asking the questions makes a little more sense.

Umair
April 2023