THE MIDNIGHT GENERATION + THE DARK AGE THAT'S FALLING NOW

ODILON REDON, MAN ALONE AT NIGHT

We’re stepping off the edge of an abyss. The world is breaking down catastrophically now. How far back will we go, where will we land? This is how dark ages fall. We fall.

And the more that I think about the present and the future, the more I worry, deeply and seriously, that we are entering one. Let me take you through my fears.

Our social structure is now poised to implode. Within a decade, what’s left of the upper middle class will no longer exist. Its members do not seem nearly worried enough about their impending economic annihilation. It’s increasingly certain that their jobs and professions will be replaced. They will be eviscerated, just as the working class was before them.

But what will that do to the political economy? I’ll come back to that question. For now: imagine a society with no working class, no middle class, and no upper middle class. This was the last group clinging onto what was left of the dream, the last rung on the ladder, of post-war prosperity. Their grip will slip like this. Their careers and professions will be turned to ashes in a supernova. Those who were lucky or fortunate will have enough left to live on for five or ten years. And then what? The jobs aren’t coming back, and neither is the social group.

Now consider the labor market in general, beginning with the young. Today we say the job market is “frozen.” That hides a deeper truth: only one sector is creating jobs, healthcare, which masks destruction in all other fields and industries. Within a decade, AI will be embedded into humanoid robots. And then what will be left? Perhaps you’re beginning to see the scope of my worries, but they’ve only barely just begun.

The young can’t find work today. "Entry-level” jobs don’t seem to exist anymore. And the idea is that this is a temporary blip. But why would it be? Are there any indications that it is? It’s more likely that this generation will be the first to have no rungs left on what used to be a ladder at all. They can’t find jobs now, and as yesterday’s middle and upper middle class professions vanish, they won’t be able to develop into them tomorrow, either. We are beginning to see a story, a theme emerging. A ruthless one, in which the young and the white collar are two sides of the same coin: economic annihilation.

So far, so bleak. But a dark age? Not quite yet. So let me continue my story. What happens, for example, to universities, as young people decide that there’s no point to a degree? We humanists will say, of course, education makes a human being whole, but survival comes first, and if degrees don’t pay, then they are just liabilities. And as generation after generation retreats from education, universities themselves begin to become obsolete institutions.

But as universities die, so goes a pillar of our economies and societies. Research, science, art. Knowledge. And that is the point in my example of the death of the university, which is now beginning.

What are the oldest institutions we have as a civilization? Churches and universities. Let’s leave religion aside. We are now going to witness our oldest institutions begin to die. What will remain of them? If that isn’t a warning of what kind of times are dawning, I don’t know what could be.

As social groups lose their place in society, in our economies, what does that mean? What does it mean, for example, to say that the upper middle class will never exist again, or that young people will go their lifetimes without having stable employment? It means that we are rewinding in time centuries now. Back, easily, to the Victorian age, perhaps, the Dickensian era of Industrial Revolution. But this isn’t revolution—it’s devolution. Perhaps for technology it’s growth, but for the rest?

Entire social groups will find themselves useless. Without a place or a purpose. Without incomes, any path towards them. There will be waves of suicides, probably society-altering ones. People will begin to feel there is no point to their lives, and they won’t be right, but in a sense, they won’t be wrong either. A brutal Darwinian game has begun, and in it, the losers will lose everything. People today still don’t understand what that fully means. The will to live, a place in society, a reason to exist.

Can politics do anything about this? You might point to the possibility of revolution. I don’t think that it exists anymore. The leaders who are to come will make Trump look decent and sane. They will have armies of humanoid robots at their disposal, and they’ll have no compunction about using them to seize whatever resources they’re warring over, much less to quell domestic unrest. And of course as AI is granted personhood, people themselves will cease mattering as political agents, and become mere instruments of authoritarian algorithmic desire.

How many thousand people could a humanoid robot kill in a moment? Now imagine one twenty feet tall. Thirty. It’s OK to think in sci-fi terms out loud, we’re just thinking. How many people would it take to bring just one down? How many would be foolhardy enough to try? And what difference will it make when the judge, jury, and law are all AI, too, anyways? How many years away are we from such a reality?

There is little reason to believe that revolution will happen again for some time to come. And the truth is that people’s instincts towards revolution have been neatly vivisected away. The average person is satisfied with The Algorithm, with TikTok and Instagram, or whatever their variants will be tomorrow, as a release valve for their fears, miseries, and frustrations. There is zero impulse in the masses to seize or claim a better life. Gossip, scandal, outrage, titillation. They’re digitally pacified.

So. Already we’ve discussed the death of knowledge, the implosion of social structure, and the impossibility of revolution. But where does all this go?

It is going back towards a medieval place. Consider the features of the last dark age. Scholasticism, versus science. Caste societies, instead of free ones. Imperial conquest and royal bloodlines. And of course tribute-based peasant economies ruled over by dynastic inheritance. The belief too, that all this was inevitable and eternal. This is where we appear to be heading.

We have scarcely seen the way wealth will now concentrate. We imagine the world is unequal today. But when five people who are already ultra wealthy control all the wealth the former upper middle class possessed, or entire generations create, then we are in a different league altogether. The world’s first trillionaires and centi-trillionaires will be able to buy entire cities, seas, mountain ranges, have entire neighborhoods of skyscrapers or palaces to themselves. The world will belong to them in ways we have never really seen in history. Today’s mega-yachts will seem like a quaint memory.

This is dynastic wealth on a scale that will fundamentally alter history, perhaps for centuries. It will easily last generations. And there will be no erasing, changing, or stopping it. Technocapital has already made democracy irrelevant. What can change its trajectory now? The world will be divided into a new class of nobles and emperors who control the technocapital that the peasants and serfs merely pay rent for and to. The peasants and serfs, meanwhile, won’t have remotely modern social structures, professions, or lives. What little income they can generate from one another will instantly flow upwards, as it already does, and so the system will perpetuate itself.

The truth is that in this kind of system, money itself has long ago ceased to matter. What will a loaf of bread cost 25 years from now? Do you think it’ll cost less than three, five, or ten times what it does now? The point is that money is already losing any semblance of meaning, and this is precisely what happens when systems turn feudal and imperial. The idea is already disappearing that one “earns” an income—rather, one takes what one can, while one can, whether through financial or technological arbitrage, and damn the rest.

But when money means nothing, we have gone back millennia in economic development. How will nations function then? They won’t, and in all this, of course, the nation-state becomes a broken, dusty relic. It already is. But as technocapital seizes the world’s wealth for itself, of course, social contracts are things which become impossibilities. Nation after nation will default on its debt, rip apart its basic institutions, sell what’s left for pennies, and that will only accelerate the division of people into peasants and lords again.

How long will this dark age last? The longer that I think about all the above, the more worried I get. I don’t see it ending in our lifetimes. I only see it beginning in them.

Everything around us is dying now. For this, I grieve. We are the midnight generation. We grew up during the golden hours of the day, and have lived long enough to see the darkness fall. History will pity us, but it will scorn us, too. For not protecting our young and our world from the depredations to come. What I’ve described to you is the way a civilization dies. I imagine that it’s a lot for some people to take in. I know. That’s why I tried to be gentle.

It doesn’t do to dwell too long on this. But you must prepare now, for the dark age falling.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)