In his 1974 masterpiece Working, Studs Terkel tried to put words to the quiet dread settling over American labor. He was writing in the midst of what we now think of as the Third Industrial Revolution: the early computerization of offices and the automation of factories, forces that \u2014 along with globalization and outsourcing of labor \u2014 would go on to hollow out entire regions of the country. What haunted the workers facing this disruption most was \u201cthe planned obsolescence of people,\u201d Terkel wrote. \u201cIt is perhaps this fear of being no longer needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much of what is called work today.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rise of AI, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, is now reviving that old dread, but this time it portends a far more volatile political horizon than the last one. It\u2019s now the college-educated, office-dwelling winners of the age of the internet and globalization, who are suddenly discovering that they, too, can become the needless things alongside the blue-collar manufacturing base that Trump and MAGA has thus far failed to revive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We will soon find out which way the political winds will shift in response. The first act of the AI revolution was a content explosion. Generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini flooded the internet in the early 2020s with cheap words, cheap images, and cheap expertise, warping media, education, and the economy of attention into something closer to a hall of mirrors. That phase began bending politics by accelerating misinformation, flattening expertise, and lowering the costs of persuasion. We are now entering a more destabilizing phase: job loss.<\/p>\n
As of 2026, AI \u201ccoming for jobs\u201d is no longer a speculative future-of-work panel at Davos. In a limited sense, it\u2019s already here. By the end of 2025, AI had been cited as a contributing factor in nearly 55,000 domestic layoffs, according to executive-coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The January jobs report was rosier than expected, but the underlying data was grim. Healthcare and social assistance accounted for 124,000 of the 130,000 jobs gained last month, industries essentially dedicated to managing an aging, poorer population. An AI executive at a top consulting firm told me last week that end-of-year updates \u2014 Opus 4.5, the Anthropic model that launched at the end of November; and GPT-5.2, the OpenAI model that launched in December \u2014 have crossed a threshold and can be trusted to handle more complex tasks with fewer mistakes. \u201cMost people don\u2019t realize it yet. Now [AI] is at the level where I think we\u2019ll start seeing real economic impacts this year, and it will snowball relatively fast,\u201d she told me. Investors have noticed, and software stocks are being punished on Wall Street as markets begin to price in the possibility that AI handles the bulk of global programming.<\/p>\n
The snowball may have already begun rolling. In January, American employers announced more than 108,000 job cuts, the worst start to a year since the 2009 Great Recession, with layoffs up 118% year over year and up more than 200% since late 2025. The casualties are not obscure startups. Amazon eliminated roughly 16,000 corporate jobs in a single month as part of a broader plan to trim tens of thousands of white-collar roles. Meta pruned 1,000 jobs from its virtual reality unit Reality Labs. Salesforce\u2019s CEO acknowledged that the company shed 4,000 customer-support workers after AI tools absorbed roughly half of the workload. What we\u2019re seeing now isn\u2019t mass unemployment but a subtler erosion: fewer entry points, thinner career ladders, and a growing sense that the white-collar future once sold as stable and dignified is about to go the way of the video store clerk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about to get worse: CEOs aren\u2019t hiding it anymore; they\u2019re now openly advocating reorganizing firms around AI labor as a cost-cutting imperative. Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20% in the next one to five years and \u201cwipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.\u201d Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is sounding an even louder alarm, predicting<\/a> that most white-collar work \u201cwill be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.\u201d Progressives like MSNBC\u2019s Chris Hayes are calling this development a deliberate class war by Big Tech CEOs against white-collar workers for being too uppity, but this is not a conspiracy against professionals. It is capitalism working exactly as intended. The software doesn\u2019t have to be perfect; if it can get to \u201cgood enough\u201d at drafting reports, writing code, moderating content, summarizing documents, or optimizing logistics, then the $120,000-a-year credentialed professional becomes extinct, as more profit can be extracted. Robots and conveyor belts did this to factories and will continue to do so; now models and chatbots are doing it to the cognitive economy, turning thinking into the next assembly line.<\/p>\n This will upend politics because jobs lie at the heart of America\u2019s social contract. As Franklin Roosevelt warned a century ago, \u201cpeople who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.\u201d We have already seen how downward mobility reshapes politics because we\u2019re still feeling the tremors of the last employment-quake. In the 50 years since Terkel\u2019s Working, deindustrialized and job-starved blue-collar communities lost more than jobs. Factory closures unraveled unions, apprenticeships, and entire local economies, shunting displaced workers into a service sector defined by precarity and downward mobility. Elites sold the transition as inevitable progress and told blue-collar workers to \u201clearn to code,\u201d as if your uncle could simply download a new career. The promised \u201cknowledge economy\u201d absorbed a narrow slice of the workforce, leaving the rest to navigate wage stagnation, disability rolls, and social decay in towns that had lost their reason to exist. Over time, this produced institutional estrangement: trust in government, the media, and expertise waned; participation declined; and resentment grew.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so, the anxiety born of the previous wave of automation and the legitimate economic grievances of blue-collar communities were largely rerouted into a new political identity, one that fused material loss with cultural resentment. As unions withered and Democrats recast themselves as the party of the ascendant professional classes, many working-class voters concluded that no one in power was actually trying to rebuild the world they had lost. Into that vacuum stepped MAGA and a Right-wing populism that promised results but has instead given rise to a politics of recognition \u2014 an inverse woke \u2014 embodied in the unlikely avatar of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n \u201cThis will upend politics because jobs lie at the heart of America\u2019s social contract.\u201d<\/p>\n So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it \u2014 journalists, lawyers, policy staffers \u2014 are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system\u2019s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.\u00a0<\/p>\n Marx, the prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution, would argue that as economic obsolescence metastasizes into political instability, a revolution will soon be upon us. After all, yesterday\u2019s bourgeoisie is soon to become tomorrow\u2019s proletariat. That\u2019s unlikely, but if AI brings about a college-educated jobs <\/a>apocalypse rather than a utopia of zero work<\/a> and universal high income, then we will see a more drastic political shock over the next decade than we\u2019ve seen in our lifetimes. Call it W.H. Auden for the white-collar age. \u201cThe Age of Anxiety\u201d was the poet\u2019s name for a post-WWII world in which the old guarantees had collapsed, and everyone felt one missed-step away from the void: \u201cthe wolves will get you if the moths won\u2019t,\u201d he warned. Large catastrophe or nibbling decay: either way, your previous life is over.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In the short term \u2014 the next one to three years \u2014 the primary victim of this upheaval will inevitably be the Republican party and the MAGA movement. Economy and jobs remain the top issues for American voters. Whether it is fully deserved or not, the electorate will blame the incumbent leadership for the AI-driven displacement. The current administration, having tethered its brand to a return to American greatness and a blue-collar resurgence, will find itself presiding over a white-collar bloodbath. The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a massacre for the GOP as voters react to tariff-driven inflation and rising costs for everyone. By 2030, both parties will face the wrath of young people who are expected to build a life on internships, side hustles, and selling themselves on OnlyFans.\u00a0<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t necessarily a victory for the center-Left or center-Right. Mainstream democrats are trapped between worker-friendly rhetoric and donor-class dependence on the industries driving automation. Republicans are trapped between populist grievance, pro-market orthodoxy, and vying for Big Tech\u2019s hand in political marriage. The lesson that the pandemic-era satire Eddington expertly captured was this pathology: social media trained Americans to see their neighbors as existential enemies based on voting behavior, while the political establishment quietly benefited from the infrastructure boom, tax abatements, and data-center gold rush that accompanied the platform economy. The culture war supplied the noise, and capital captured the signal.<\/p>\n But maybe not forever. We are already seeing the emergence of a new, non-partisan \u201cAI Populism\u201d where something like the \u201cHumanists\u201d square off against \u201cTech Accelerationists.\u201d Across the country, local communities are already revolting against the construction of massive AI data centers, even without the sting of massive job loss. These eerie windowless temples of compute strain local power grids and suck up millions of gallons of water, and arrive with the footprint of a fleet of spaceships: alien, resource-hungry, and indifferent to local life. The political backlash is no joke. These fights are erupting in swing states and battleground districts, animating local elections and straining party coalitions.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Pennsylvania this week, the Montour County commission denied rezoning for a proposed data center tied to a major tech company after residents warned it would hike utility bills and worsen energy insecurity in a region already wary of industrial disruption. In Arizona, grassroots groups gathered enough signatures to put data center siting decisions on the ballot, signaling that tech infrastructure could soon be one of the few issues that actually mobilize voters outside the traditional culture wars. These skirmishes are shaping up to be an early indicator of what the next phase of the AI revolution will look like politically. Not a clean Left-Right realignment, but a messy conflict between those who bear the costs of automation and those who harvest its efficiencies.<\/p>\n The Republican Party finds itself in a weird squeeze on the AI question. Many GOP lawmakers and governors have enthusiastically backed Big Tech\u2019s AI build-out as an economic and national-security imperative. President Trump\u2019s pro-AI infrastructure agenda \u2014 from rapid data center approvals to limiting state and local regulatory power \u2014 has been presented as a key front in a global competition with China. At the same time, rank-and-file voters in data center host states are increasingly troubled by the real costs \u2014 from utility bills to grid strain \u2014 that these facilities impose, leaving Republicans vulnerable to being tagged as defenders of distant tech interests at the expense of Main Street.<\/p>\n Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to make sense of this new landscape. Party standard-bearers like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro have heralded AI as the future of the economy of their jurisdictions, while also awkwardly defending the backlash. Some progressives have embraced calls to slow or regulate data-center construction, framing it as an issue of worker protection, environmental justice, and local control. Others worry that overt opposition to AI infrastructure will hand Republicans a cudgel to beat them with on innovation and growth.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a bizarre alignment emerging where figures as ideologically opposed as Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis find themselves on the same side. In a post on X over the weekend, Sanders said that the key disruptors of the 20th century economy \u2014 automobiles, radio, TV, computers, the internet \u2014 pale in comparison to the revolution AI will bring about. This week, Sanders is traveling to Stanford, the heart of the Big Tech beast, with US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to call for a moratorium on construction of new AI data centers to \u201cmake sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires.\u201d Meanwhile, in December, DeSantis proposed an \u201cAI Bill of Rights\u201d to safeguard Florida residents by addressing the misuse of personal data and allowing local governments to block new data centers. \u201cI really fear that if this is not addressed in an intelligent and proper way, it could set off an age of darkness and deceit,\u201d DeSantis said during a press conference. When a democratic socialist and Florida\u2019s No. 1 Right-wing culture warrior start sounding like joint authors, something real is happening.<\/p>\n If we look a decade ahead, the AI revolution may force a complete rewrite of the old political spectrum of\u00a0 \u201cLiberal vs. Conservative\u201d, which will collapse into incoherence. In its place, we could see a structural realignment around \u2014 to borrow from Marx \u2014 who controls the Means of Prediction.<\/p>\n As AI automates the \u201ccognition economy,\u201d the debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) will shift from Silicon Valley pipe dreams to the center of the debate. Governments will be pressured to tax \u201crobot labor\u201d simply to prevent the total collapse of the consumer economy. If people don\u2019t have wages, they can\u2019t buy the products the AI is making. Just as the 19th-century state had to break up the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age, 21st-century politics will be a battle between the federal government and a handful of what Sanders calls tech oligarchies. These companies now control the world\u2019s primary compute resources \u2014 the digital equivalent of oil or steel. Or we could see the opposite: a command-and-control<\/a> economy, as the state and tech formally merge and the trend of state capitalism takes firmer hold.\u00a0<\/p>\n The danger, I believe, isn\u2019t that AI will produce a single coherent political movement or a technofascist state (so put away your dog-eared copy of 1984). Instead, it may fracture the old coalitions faster than new ones can form, producing a volatile landscape of backlash, regulatory whiplash, and even more opportunistic demagoguery. On the far Left, we see a rise in techno-skepticism and a demand for the abolition of \u201cbullshit jobs\u201d \u2014 the idea that we should stop pretending we need 40 hours of work if the AI can do it in four. On the far Right, nationalist protectionism may not align with the needs of the global AI industry. The future, for better or worse, is up for grabs.\u00a0<\/p>\n From this vantage point, the AI revolution is the final insult to the American worker, but over the rest of the 2020s, it may also represent the final test for American democracy. The Third Industrial Revolution taught factory towns that the future could arrive without them; the Fourth is teaching the same lesson to the laptop class. And when millions of people are suddenly told, by code, that they are surplus, it won\u2019t be the moths that get the elites. The wolves will find them first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his 1974 masterpiece Working, Studs Terkel tried to put words to the quiet dread settling over American…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[149635,345,343,344,149636,83958,85,46,149637,58821,149638,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-295228","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-age-of-anxiety","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-chris-hayes","13":"tag-fourth-industrial-revolution","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-ro-khanna","17":"tag-ron-desantis","18":"tag-studs-terkel","19":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}