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How White-Collar Workers Could Fuel a New Populist Movement
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/30/populist-left-ai-anxiety-00628379In the same way that blue-collar workers turned in the 2010s to populists on the right ... the threat of being replaced by AI increasingly become a factor propelling voters toward a new cadre of populist politicians. But this time it will be white-collar workers driving the charge, and many will turn not to the right but to the left.
Far-left populists are clearly onto this. Taking a leaf out of their far-right counterparts’ playbooks, they have begun to shape an economic narrative that overtly taps into the anxieties of white-collar workers. A narrative which positions the architects and beneficiaries of the AI revolution as the enemy rather than immigrants; and pits the middle class against not the “mainstream media,” the “government” or the so-called “deep state,” but a demonised tech elite: Silicon Valley billionaires and the faceless corporations that replace human labor with algorithms.
In the same way that immigration has become a lightning rod for contemporary politics ... expect AI to become one over the next few years, especially around the issue of jobs.
A white-collar uprising is looming, and mainstream politicians had better be ready for it, armed with both concrete plans and compassion if they want to remain in office. If they are not, those on the more extreme ends of the political spectrum — particularly on the left — are likely to displace them.
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Last edited Fri Oct 31, 2025, 12:32 PM - Edit history (1)
I would have missed it.
Taking a leaf out of their far-right counterparts’ playbooks, they have begun to shape an economic narrative that overtly taps into the anxieties of white-collar workers. A narrative which positions the architects and beneficiaries of the AI revolution as the enemy rather than immigrants; and pits the middle class against not the “mainstream media,” the “government” or the so-called “deep state,” but a demonised tech elite: Silicon Valley billionaires and the faceless corporations that replace human labor with algorithms.
I am no longer in the US, but that would be me. It’s such junk..the worst part is the strategy appears to be to mix in the worthwhile and working parts with worthless junk.
It’s bad for services as well as employees. Only parasitic mediocrities like Marc Andreessen thrive.
They are such outrageously stupid people too. I have been plugging this interview by an environmental writer whose work I really like (Christopher Ketcham) with a scientist/writer Adam Becker because it further highlights just how non-elite the drivers of this are:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mad-religion-of-technological-salvation/
His targets in “More Everything Forever” are the familiar names we’ve come to associate with the great leaps forward in the march of what Becker calls the religion of technological salvation: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Dustin Moskovitz. He also aims his guns at Ray Kurzweil, the man behind the immortalizing digitalization of human affairs called “the Singularity,” artificial general intelligence cheerleader Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the crew of longtermist tech apologists at Oxford University on whom Moskovitz and other Valley barons have lavished funding.
Truly elite workers remind me of this (just too passive in the face of this onslaught).
https://www.brandeis.edu/magazine/2024/summer/inquiry/contested-election.html
Meanwhile, the police response remained tepid at best, Morgan says, since students playing law enforcement roles were reluctant to arrest or use force on their classmates, even symbolically.
“We didn’t count on that at the start,” she says. “Students are very aware of historical trends of police overreacting, so we had to push them a bit. Is this how your group would react in the real world? Do you really think the D.C. police would not arrest people in the Capitol?”
Despite the inevitable moments of awkwardness or discomfort, the simulation received glowing feedback from most of the class, and students seemed to walk away with a deep understanding of how polarized groups can clash
“We didn’t count on that at the start,” she says. “Students are very aware of historical trends of police overreacting, so we had to push them a bit. Is this how your group would react in the real world? Do you really think the D.C. police would not arrest people in the Capitol?”
Despite the inevitable moments of awkwardness or discomfort, the simulation received glowing feedback from most of the class, and students seemed to walk away with a deep understanding of how polarized groups can clash
Except that for most of us this is no simulation, but rather an angering total capture of reality by mediocre narcissists who cannot distinguish the spectacle from human anger.
Oddly enough, while searching for that, I came across this:
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/False-Flags-and-Fake-MAGA.pdf
Huh..awesome. (That whole piece makes one’s head spin-real maga versus fake maga and kremlin and Fuentes. Just chaos..those are extremism researchers. They probably have a more complicated view of reality than most of us surface dwellers. Thats why I think Vance etc are so stupid. Even I know that those far right white supremacists consider Trump a moderate. There are some very baffling intra MAGA wars ongoing.)
The internet gets creepier all the time. I have to use a vpn to even access DU.
Right here on DU I read about this creep:
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga
This is why the internet cannot bleed into real life. I see creeps like these irl here sometimes and that’s going to be a serious problem for my govt when I file complaints as I plan to. Toronto was sane to down Sidewalks Lab. Accelerationism along with unprofessionalism in tech is a recipe for disaster. In retrospect Zuckerberg’s “normalize data leaks” etc.-that’s so irresponsible. It’s not politics even. It’s just unsafe when “stochastic terror” is how that type of extremist operates.
I am glad at least a few people like these are breaking from the ranks where they can afford to. I get that many can’t.
All this being said, I do need to address the elephant in the room: the main reason I’m leaving is that I think Elon has dealt huge damage to Tesla’s mission (and to the health of democratic institutions in several countries). Beyond that, Elon’s leadership and decision making seem seriously compromised. Given his huge (and growing, inexplicably) stake in Tesla, I can’t convince myself anymore that this is the right place to be. This is not just about politics: it’s about lying to the public, manipulating public discourse, targeting minorities and supporting climate change deniers and political forces aligned with the oil and gas industry. I think it’s fairly indisputable that the current US administration is slowing down the energy transition. Unfortunately, speed is critical if we are to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
Reading an old piece by Chauncey DeVega (who really gets it) on how polite everyone is about the death of democracy I was thinking, “yeah really”:
https://www.salon.com/2025/06/10/democrats-disillusioned-clear-the-path-for-rampage/
These guys in tech too irresponsible to be trusted and it always starts out jokey and gets scary. I pushback at my level as much as I can (albeit clumsily). This is not the time for “kayfabe” (a mind numbingly stupid concept anyway).
Sorry reACTIONary. As I said in an earlier post to you (which was how I found this one), this still reads like Trump’s “weave” with many tangential points.
As I said, I am working on my writing but it’s a work in progress ;-/.
I remember your handle because you posted a really funny map years ago about the Qanon-like thought process.
Over the years I have gloomily noted that both my thinking and writing have become more Trump like than I like. Not the content of course, but the same tangentiality and lack of clarity. Somehow I feel that this deteriorating tech environment doesn’t help. And I confess to find these chaotic, largely male types alarming. I always thought of chaos as something to avoid. Yeah I don’t think Nazi order is the alternative. But something recognizably sane is not their mo. No wonder it’s a permacrisis and they scapegoat the wrong people.
I have read 1984 so many times I know some parts of it by heart-well maybe not by heart, but the gist anyway. I have thought of “duckspeak” often over the years. I remember it every time I read Substack and it isn’t someone like Yasha Levine.
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase—'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'—jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front—it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'
Orwell remains as relevant today as ever. His writing style is one I really love. That is an overused word, but in this case it applies.
I hope an abomination like an Orwell bot is not in the works.
That sounds like the kind of desecration this spurious AI gold rush will result in at some point:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/empty-laughter/
Hmmm..looking over this post, my writing and thinking need real work. I should go work on that.
Good post anyway. I really liked it. There, I wove it back to the original point..
The difference between my lefty “weave” and Trump’s is that I get that this is not good writing. And while mind-wandering is one thing, this is not elegant. Well I was an academic scientist not a reality show star, influencer or politician. That seems like an endangered profession lately..
The thing is, the stuff supplanting things is not even high quality work. It’s junk, political manipulation and perception manipulation. In the end it endangers good research in the hard sciences and other areas for “water is wet” crap like this:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/researchers-show-that-training-on-junk-data-can-lead-to-llm-brain-rot/
Contemporary tech basically forces people to think about poor quality AI and ill conceived experiments all the time. It ends up trashing good science.
And it’s so contemptuous towards one’s fellow humans..as if it’s stupidity and mental illness rather than the natural learned helplessness an Idiocracy induces. This article really gets it:
https://theconversation.com/how-neoliberalism-is-damaging-your-mental-health-90565
That article is so awesome I repost it over and over. Who wouldn’t feel unwell in this sort of tech rollout which really should be stopped.
The insidious message about a lot of stuff on brain rot, substance use etc is that it’s your fault that you are like this. There are no other factors. It isn’t as if this society is depressing to a thinking human or anything. White collar workers cannot just reinvent themselves as blue collar workers, let alone anything truly ghastly like some kind of hideous, self-exploiting grifter.
Last edit: well I gave up and the post went off the rails after I read that Network Contagion piece. Well it is a gift to whatever NIST analog exists by 2250, if we don’t end up nuking ourselves. It’s such rubbish again that i give up.
At least I had the restraint to not throw in a piece on Carlson, the cia, some kind of maga war I read about on Salon Mag.
Ffs I just was ever online for low key discussions on environmental issues. Yeesh..
