Last night I made mediocre Korean food. We could all taste it. Bland, tough, sour. 

A gallery of disappointments. 

The fault, of course, was entirely mine. I had failed to review the recipes beforehand, counting on my previous successes to guide me. 

Midway through the preparation, I realized I needed a refresher after all. I turned to a website with great recipes, but like so many, it was presented in a format that's hard to use—especially on a phone, where ads break the flow.¹

Feeling myself clever, I asked the Anthropic LLM Claude to summarize the recipes. It seemed to summarize the first one just fine. The second one it completely failed to… understand. Twice. 

The truth of the matter

The computational services we now call AI – because they have not yet been rendered invisible – require direct supervision. 

They are proposed as workers that are faster and cheaper. And they often are – when directly supervised. The better the supervisor, the more useful the output. 

But implicit in this equation, if not explicit in our society writ large, is a fundamental misunderstanding of value. 

That we should value work less and less.

So radical is our mistake that it belies an even deeper problem: a lack of values. 

The measure of man

We in American society have become so accustomed to having it our way – easy – that we’ve lost the plot entirely. We believe the line only goes up. That we can fly without the effort of flapping our wings, let alone the risk of falling.

You see this myth at work in every aspect of MAGA, which replaces economic output with grift, and the hard work of policy with the spectacle of punishment.

Every MAGA policy can be reduced to a simple, if easily falsifiable, claim: once we find the right scapegoat, our problems will be solved.

Of course, revenge never cured cancer and spite has yet to build a single home. What revenge and spite do, instead, is destroy. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

When all you have is a monstrous accumulation of weapons – legal, cultural, material – designed to defeat the spectre of Terror, every problem becomes an eliminationist campaign without end. You can’t win a real war against an imagined enemy. (Which suits the profiteers just fine, of course.)

But the context for our crisis predates 9/11 and the Great War on Terror.

We lacked purpose long before we attempted to Shock & Awe the Iraqis so as to regain our sense of self. 

The man giving us the thumbs up for a job well done learned how to be a great American serving in our ungodly prison system, our gulag archipelago of crimes against White Supremacy.

If you pull on this thread just a little, past Operation Wetback and the Chinese Exclusion Act, past the Trail of Tears, you arrive at our original sin: labor without cost. Free labor, even.

Some people, you see, are born to work. While others are born to reap the benefits. 

All you need then for this pre-ordained society to function is a supervisor who knows how to crack the whip. 

And, of course, a steady supply of people who exist to toil.

If you feel I’m painting our reality with too broad a brush it’s because I’m neglecting to acknowledge those of us who know the meaning of an honest day’s work.

Every single person who has ever squeezed their own juice can taste a sweetness completely unknown to the people who are paid to ask “is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Anyone who has ever put in the effort to excel at anything – perhaps, even, “bodybuilding” – understands that without toil, without suffering, there is no progress. 

And so we return to our contemporary nightmare. A world where we are promised boundless bounty with decreasing labor – in fact, for those who are closely enough aligned to the slavemasters makers, without any labor at all.

What is crypto, and its central role in our political economy, if not the perfect distillation of this fantasy: wealth without service. 

For those on the inside, reward; for those on the outside, risk.

It’s a compelling myth!

Note how Elon Musk has captured both the popular imagination and his board of directors. A trillion dollars for an evolving promise of heaven on earth – for the chosen.²

Faith without works

The American cults – and they have many names, faces – all share this same cold, dead heart: the conceit that one will be rewarded by a higher power not for one’s labor, not for one’s suffering, but, simply, through destiny made manifest.³

Some people are born to rule. (Born in the USA? Sure! But only to the right parents, right?)

Some people are thus afforded the grace to make mistakes again and again and again and again and again and again.

While others are not allowed even a single mistake.

Of course, we only learn by making mistakes.

All knowledge is built on a mountain of errors.⁴

There is no progress without grace.

For any of us to be free, we must all be equal.

tl;dr

If you read this far, you should appreciate your effort.

I could have started and ended this letter with “tl;dr fascism is fed by the myth of faith without works; the fantasy that one can be “born again” simply by putting on a cross, or a red hat, or a camo face mask and a tear gas launcher. Rather than taking a footstep, let alone walking a mile, under the cross of those who must, always and forever, turn the cheek.

But then, we wouldn’t have done the work and without the work where would we be?

coda

What does work look like in the age of artificial intelligence?

1. End climate change.

2. End world hunger.

3. End disease. 

For starters.⁵

The fact that our overlords are, instead, telling us some people were born to die gives away their lie.

And their rotten laziness.

postscript

Ana, Iñaki and Claude read drafts of this email.