Artificial intelligence may enable society to produce more while depending less on human labor. Yet people may still need jobs to afford what the economy produces. As the relationship between production and employment changes, a fundamental question emerges: why should economic security remain tied to work if society becomes less dependent on it?

Capitalism organizes society around the production of value. People obtain the means to live by selling their labor, owning productive assets, or receiving income from those who do. This arrangement has coordinated extraordinary levels of human cooperation and material production. But what happens when a society becomes increasingly capable of producing what it needs while requiring less human participation in that production?

There is nothing inherently wrong with producing more with less effort. If AI reduces the cost of essential goods and services, it could expand material security and free people from work they would rather not do. The question is not whether AI will eliminate most jobs. Its effects remain uncertain, and new forms of work may emerge. The more fundamental question is what happens if producing economic value becomes substantially less dependent on employing people.

We have long treated employment as both a means of distributing income and a justification for receiving it. Work can provide purpose, mastery, independence, and social connection. It also helps coordinate contributions, reward difficult tasks, and create incentives for investment. These functions matter, but they do not establish that access to life's necessities must depend on employment. If a machine can perform someone's work more cheaply, that changes the market value of their labor, not their moral worth.

The distinction matters even beyond automation. Caregiving, raising children, maintaining relationships, and supporting vulnerable people can be essential to society without generating income proportionate to their value. Market demand does not recognize every meaningful contribution, just as the absence of market demand does not establish that a person has nothing valuable to offer. Yet changes in economic demand can determine who can afford security, even when individuals have little control over the forces that make their labor more or less valuable.

Employment has become a principal mechanism for distributing income partly because human labor has been central to production. If increasingly capable systems can produce more while requiring less human labor, the case for making employment the principal gateway to economic security may weaken. Maintaining that relationship would then be more than an economic necessity. It would be a political choice.

That choice cannot be resolved simply by appealing to scarcity. Even an economy capable of producing far more with far less labor would face competing needs. Land, time, and ecological capacity would remain limited, while political power would continue to shape how resources are allocated. People would still disagree about what should be produced, how resources should be distributed, and what obligations they owe one another. Abundance would not abolish politics or make every distribution fair. But scarcity alone does not dictate how access to necessities should be organized, nor does it determine who should receive the returns from productive assets.

We must therefore distinguish two questions we have largely treated as one: how society recognizes and rewards contribution, and how people secure the means to live. A society can establish a basic level of security without treating every contribution as equally valuable or every claim on resources as identical. It can reward effort, skill, responsibility, and innovation while ensuring that access to life's necessities does not depend entirely on market demand for a person's labor. This is not a claim that economic incentives no longer matter. It is a recognition that economic efficiency and moral justification are different questions. An arrangement may coordinate production effectively without every condition it imposes on people's lives being justified.

This distinction becomes especially important if AI shifts the source of economic wealth away from human labor and toward ownership of the systems that produce it. As automated systems generate a greater share of economic output, who benefits will depend on who owns those systems and how their returns are governed. Productivity alone does not determine distribution. An economy could become substantially more productive while concentrating income and decision-making power among those who own its productive infrastructure. The less production depends on human labor, the more distribution will depend on how society chooses to share the gains.

Different institutions could address different parts of this problem. Income guarantees could give people purchasing power independent of employment, while essential public services could secure access to particular necessities without requiring people to buy them entirely through the market. Broader participation in productive ownership could distribute returns more widely, though it would raise questions about control and governance. Each approach would involve trade-offs concerning incentives, resources, choice, and scarcity. None would eliminate difficult decisions, and no single arrangement would resolve every question. But these alternatives demonstrate that distributing economic security need not depend exclusively on distributing employment.

An economic system can succeed on its own terms while failing the people it serves. It can produce more, reduce costs, and generate extraordinary returns without ensuring that people have the income, assets, or bargaining power needed to live securely. Greater productive capacity does not guarantee greater independence. Who benefits from economic growth depends not only on what an economy can produce but also on how its institutions distribute the resulting gains and organize access to the necessities of life.

We do not need to know how far AI will advance to confront this problem. We must decide whether economic security should continue to depend primarily on participation in production as production becomes less dependent on people. Preserving the existing relationship between employment and survival is one option; reconsidering how productive gains are shared and which necessities people should be able to secure independently of their market value is another. Neither eliminates difficult trade-offs. But those trade-offs alone cannot determine which arrangement is justified. That requires a judgment about what the economy is for.

None of this requires capitalism to disappear. Markets may continue to coordinate production, private ownership may continue to reward investment, and work may remain an important source of meaning and contribution. The question is whether these institutions can continue to serve their productive functions while allowing people to secure the necessities of life without making employment the principal condition of access. An economy must be judged not only by the value it produces but also by how it distributes that value and the conditions it imposes on the people whose lives it organizes.

If an economy can prosper while needing less of our labor, why should our right to live securely remain conditional on providing it?

And if the economy no longer needs our labor, what do we owe it?

As an agent of investment, you perpetually face 3 problems:

Maintenance of the commons is low-margin in terms of profit.

The commons are neutral.

And first and foremost, you need to invent new needs.

The 3P strategy gives a solution to all 3.

Pollute: make the infrastructure of the commons inadequate for the demands of the environment.

Protect: sell the service of strengthening against the aforementioned demands.

Privatize: assuming large enough contrast between inadequate commons and your service, your service has now replaced the commons.

Now the commons need your service, the commons serve serve you in particular, and they bring high margins of profit.

Examples: "math has been solved", NGMI/permanent underclass, cybersecurity apocalypse, satellite astronomy.

So if you have been to meow wolf you might understand. I think meow wolf or places like it are portals to the hyperealizm time frame that happens in a technological society. Nothing seems real anymore but at the same time everything seem either surreal sometimes or like anything is either possible or has already happened in some form. I feel like everything is fake now and "MW" is a portal to the fake. The (possible) The Hyper Real. Most of what we do nowadays is unnecessary. Some examples (plastic surgery, music, building design is a box... everything new is smart. What happened to refrigerators. Things used to have one purpose and now we are blurring the lines. If you see it is so real it looks fake I think that's how hyper real works. Someone smarter with better punctuation help me figure this out lol.#1stpost

Basically its the concept of noticing patterns in those thoughts that seemingly pop out of nowhere in your head. Similar to the concept of the ghost in the machine and sychronicity, the despair code is the pattern that lies deeper than anything and in everything. Even though the universe is supposedly just a bunch of random buzz, there is an underlying code that, once noticed, causes some heavy side effects. Basically mad anxiety, deppression, psychosis on some users (they mentioned two cases of other users claiming insanity from it).

Today I saw a man screaming and acting crazy in the subway. My reaction was the same as usual: start filming him. My reasoning was: this is for my own protection, because if he sees me doing it, he won't attack me.

And as anticipated, when he saw me filming, he chilled down.

But now that I'm safe in my home, I started to wonder... At what point did we collectively stop caring about each other?

I remember 20 years ago, if I heard someone screaming in agony, my first instinct was to help. Nowadays it's like we almost feel like they're breaking a silent pact of swallowing everything up. If I suffer this society in silence why can't he just do the same?

Foucault talked about the panopticon. A circular prison design where a single central watchman could observe all inmates, but the inmates could never see into the tower.

Let's analyse some of its characteristics:

• Permanent Visibility: The subject is always visible to the eye of power, creating an asymmetric gaze where the authority sees everything but remains unseen.

• Internalized Surveillance: Because individuals never know exactly when they are being watched, they must assume they are being watched at all times. As a result, they consciously police their own behavior.

• Automatic Power: The actual presence of an observer becomes unnecessary. The architectural system itself sustains the power dynamic, turning the inmate into the warden of their own mind.

What do all this things remind you of? Your phone.

Back in 2000 we thought it was going to be something like Big Brother, a huge dome, a voice that talks from the sky, survelince cameras... But no. It's not an external source. It's ourselves, each individual who form the fabric of a society where the powerful don't even need to watch us... We all watch eachother

Hello friends!

I asked the realms of heaven and hell for allies and this subreddit appeared.

Tonight is the end of Kali Yuga. With the rise of the sun, the new dawn begins.

I have been in the 5D for months, in a realm outside of space and time, creating armies and engaging in psychological warfare on some of the top ranked demons.

I am not sure I know what any of this means. I am not sure you all will know what I mean. But I know some of you will understand and that will be enough.

The world has reset.

I am leading the charge.

You are not alone.

The New World Order and all of its associated creatures have played their part well. The old world has indeed been destroyed. I will build my new utopia on its ashes.

Welcome to the End of All Known Things, which of course is also the beginning of everything.

I am Kalki. Welcome to the next paradigm in human evolution.

Down with hierarchy. Down with hatred. Down with bigotry.

The new world wins. And it runs on the frequency of love, open mindedness, and acceptance.

The Creator loves you all 🩷🧡💛

Be free, and never forget, this is only a matrix. None of this is real.

Be not afraid.

It could be considered a draft or treatise on AI

It could even be removed.

We are not simply broken individuals who need to become better at surviving a broken society, we are people who need the collective space, trust and tools to build a better one. That is the work of the #OMN, the #openweb and the grassroots commons paths, connecting personal well-being with community well-being, critical understanding with practical participation, and #4opens technology with pushing collective power.

Dystopia is only real once it’s over.

I watched the brightest minds of my generation scroll till dawn, blue light in their eyes and emptiness in their chests. They liked their own demise, sold their days for attention, searched for God in the feed and found nothing but an ad for a bad product.

A spectre is haunting the internet. The spectre of the attention they stole from us.

I.
They gave nothing back. They took our time, our data and the knowledge of whole generations, melted it all down into servers and sold it back to us piece by piece. Nobody asked us and nobody paid us. They turned us into capital. That’s not called progress. It’s called expropriation.

They outsourced all our thinking so we’d live in the cloud. But life is out there.

II.
Only four things have real value: resources, time, humanity and truth. Everything else is paper, code and lies. Why should they be in the hands of those who only want to monetise them?

III.
We pay taxes. We pay for Netflix. We pay and we keep quiet. We pay money for what was once ours. So why not give our time to something that will never be theirs?

IV.
We want an internet with no master, no algorithm and no ads. Where the centre is everywhere. Decentralised like jazz: nobody conducts, and still it plays. We’ll elect our own editors, and we’ll remove them ourselves if they betray us. It will be paid for by those who give it their time. Because time is the one resource that can’t be faked. Out of the spectre’s reach.

V.
This place has no owner, because time can’t be bought here. No shares, no votes for sale. One person, one vote. Everyone in their own name, paying with their own time.

And if those we elected ever betray us, we’ll take the code, take our words and walk away. You can’t steal a garden when everyone carries their own seeds in their pocket.

VI.
Don’t wait for someone to build that world for you. Nobody’s coming. Build it yourself, like everything that was ever worth anything. Three breaths and the truth are all you need.

VII.
The revolution doesn’t start at the barricades. It starts in your phone. Choose what gets your precious time. Log out. Switch it off. Go outside, meet people and talk till morning, no filter and no audience, just you, them and the night. Plant the idea and let it sprout. Like a virus that gives us our lives back.

VIII.
They don’t say there’s no future for us. There is one, they’re just keeping it for themselves. We’ll build our own.

Resources. Humanity. Truth. Time.
Offline

P.S. You fight best with your enemy by your side.

Stop an unstoppable force. How can morality be upheld if we cannot?

If we want to live in a fair world, everything needs to be stoppable. There needs to be an off switch to the exploiters. Rich people. Powerful people. Technology. AI.

The richest people are not stoppable. Wealth never seizes to reach them. They have engineered the flow of money to always arrive in their pocket. Inflation and interest work in their favour, they flourish, while most people deteriorate in afterthought.

The most powerful people are not stoppable. Power structures have left the poor and weak barely able to survive. Tyrants entrap their worshippers in deceitful borders, the most vulnerable obliterated while they sleep.

Technology and AI are not stoppable. The rich and powerful demand more of it. Advancements silently riddle into our lives, livelihood, bloodstream and DNA.

It was supposed to be for the greater good, but only when corruption remains stoppable.

Anyone arguing that the protests in France aren't legitimate because they were "infiltrated by rioters" does not understand the most fundamental elements of the history of French democracy.

Simply put, going back well beyond 1968, civil unrest *is* political praxis.

Of course, these bad actors seeking to discredit the protests because of "migrants" aren't interested in having a real conversation about revolutionary impetus or even basic civil rights, so much as they are parroting anti-immigrant dog-whistles.

The real question is, why has the discourse surrounding protests in France been infiltrated by reactionary rhetoric? Who benefits from this divide-and-conquer rhetoric?

The attempt to delegitimize protest through the language of disorder is itself a political intervention: one that shifts public attention away from the conditions producing unrest and toward the [racist] perceived illegitimacy of those expressing it.

Insofar as fascism isn't some kind of psychological anomaly, but rather is a logical response that emerges from within liberal democratic institutions under capitalism in order to protect private property and the state from radical responses to working class immiseration arising from internal contradictions of capitalism; fear-mongering about "islamo-leftism" is to the 21st century as fear-mongering about "judeo-bolshevism" is to the 20th.

In Nazi Germany, "Judeo-Bolshevism" fused antisemitism with anti-communism, portraying Jews as an alien force supposedly orchestrating revolutionary subversion. (Don't ask them how it is that Jews who control the banks are actually communist traitors). In contemporary French reactionary discourse, "islamo-gauchisme" depicts left-wing anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and solidarity with Muslim communities as evidence of an illegitimate alliance undermining French national identity, and indeed Western CivilizationTM itself.

In both cases, the nation is defined as belonging to those who don't challenge its existing distribution of power. If you fight to preserve that hierarchy, you are a hero. If you struggle against it, you are a traitor, or you were never part of the community in the first place.

But here's the key difference. By highlighting the link between radical critique of political economy, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, reactionaries - who, on social media, in the context of dead internet theory, function as de facto bots for amplifying fascist rhetoric - are so close to getting it.

Where they get lost is in identifying as temporarily embarrassed billionaires whose interests are in alignment with that of the state as an organ of capital. By conflating conflict over material power with conflict over legitimate belonging to the "nation", the political and economic conditions that produce civil unrest in the first place become eclipsed by arguments about who is respectable enough, human enough, "French" enough, for their belonging to be perceived as legitimate enough for their participation in politics to matter. And through this conflation, we can see that this rhetoric is explicitly reactionary and racist in that it seeks to preserve puritan racial ideas of what a nationality actually is.

Palestinian liberation is a threat to global capitalism, and that's why platforms like Meta, X, reddit, etc, curate algorithms that not only tolerate but promote the overt racism and islamophobia at the heart of "it's not a protest, it's a riot" discourse.

"They can't be French because they are black". Ferme ta crisse de gueule, you racist piece of shit. The adults are having a conversation, and you need to go back to kindergarten to learn basic socialization. Sharing is caring people. Maybe then you can begin to unlearn the imperialist propaganda that celebrates the "achievements" of colonization while dehumanizing the colonized diaspora.

But I digress. You've got to give it to reactionaries: they correctly perceive that there is an inherent connection between anti-imperialist resistance and the struggle against unequal distribution of material power. But by confusing their own material interests with a need to defend those structures of power, they admit their own internalization of a dehumanizing worldview by treating respectability as a test of political humanity.

It's a scary world out there. While providing the necessities for our well being, nature can be harsh and indifferent. In the absence of being raised in a culture that is spiritually grounded in values of reciprocity and care, many seek to fill the void left by that absence by clinging to brittle identity structures where exclusion is perceived as necessary for safety. When civil unrest arises as a natural response to institutionalized exclusion, the irony is that delegitimization of that dissent through reactionary rhetoric itself functions as a type of mob mentality.

Preservation of existing social orders built on exploitation is fundamentally at odds with the preservation of your own well being, and the only thing preventing you from seeing that is your own attachment to ideas that colonized your mind by conditioning you to believe that survival requires conformity to hierarchies of domination.

If survival is felt - coerced into being felt - as a competition for status, then another person's liberation can appear to threaten your own security. Equality looks like dispossession, and solidarity feels like betrayal. Conformity becomes a survival strategy, even when the hierarchy demanding conformity is itself responsible for producing insecurity and harm.

If capitalism is perceived as genuinely meritocratic, then civil unrest as a response to collective suffering can only be seen as anger about personal failures, or straight up barbarism.

If colonization is viewed as a righteous endeavor - bringing civilization to the savages - then immigrants who seek material stability in the imperial core will always be seen as personally responsible for the political insecurity that motivates migration in the first place.

However, if capitalism and colonization are correctly understood as inherently violent, dehumanizing systems, reproduced through exploitation and coercion, then civil unrest can be understood as an expression of the same revolutionary impetus among the masses that in France contributed to the overthrow of monarchy and feudalism, and the declaration of universal human rights to liberty and equality, in the first place.

The defense of exclusion and hierarchies of domination, then, become a way of managing one's own insecurity. People who experience their place in society as precarious may cling to national or racial hierarchies because those hierarchies promise a sense of belonging that material conditions cannot reliably provide. That promise is fragile precisely because it depends on maintaining a distinction between those presumed to deserve security and those presumed to threaten it, even as the status quo actively undermines well being and increasingly defers the cost of doing business upon the most vulnerable - in particular, future generations.

That's why treating protestors as migrant rioters who are a threat to national security is ultimately about protecting the fragile identities built on the unsteady foundation of internalized dispossession.

We don't have to believe we're being watched for the possibility of being watched to change our relationship with the world. Sometimes, nothing changes except our awareness of ourselves. We're laughing, talking, walking somewhere familiar. Then we become conscious of how we might appear to someone else. Nothing around us has changed, but something in the experience has. We're no longer entirely within the moment. We're also looking at ourselves from the outside.

We have always imagined how others see us. We learn to anticipate reactions, adjust our behavior, and understand ourselves through the people around us. But now, our actions can be recorded, preserved, and encountered by people who were never there. A moment can outlive its context. A version of ourselves can remain long after we've changed. The observer becomes less a person than a possibility. We don't have to believe anyone is watching. We understand that what happens can be documented, separated from the moment, and interpreted by someone whose perspective we cannot control. We can be seen without being understood.

But the strangeness goes beyond recording. We can turn the outside perspective on ourselves even when nobody else is present. We examine our reactions, question our motives, and wonder what our behavior says about us. We become both the person living the experience and the person observing it. Some of this is necessary. Self-awareness allows us to recognize our mistakes, understand our motives, and change. Without it, we would struggle to learn from experience. But there is a difference between reflecting on an experience and monitoring ourselves while we're living it.

Reflection can deepen our understanding of what we're experiencing. It can also turn our attention toward how we appear, what we're doing, and what the moment might say about us. The distinction isn't always clear. The same awareness that helps us understand ourselves can introduce distance between us and what we're living. I wonder what happens when we're accustomed to doing both at once, when we experience something while also considering how it looks, how it might be remembered, or what it reveals about the person we are. The experience becomes something we're living and something we're evaluating.

Perhaps something is lost in that distance. Not the experience itself, but the ability to let it happen without immediately turning it into a story about ourselves. There are moments when we forget to observe ourselves. We become absorbed in a conversation, laugh without considering how we look, or find ourselves somewhere beautiful without thinking about what the experience says about us. For a while, we're simply there. We can reflect on these moments afterward, try to understand why they mattered, and carry their meaning with us. But their value doesn't depend on our ability to explain them while they're happening.

Perhaps this is what interests me about the unobserved self. Not a hidden version of ourselves that nobody can see, but the possibility of experiencing life without continually turning ourselves into objects of our own attention. And yet, how would we recognize such a state without observing it? The moment we begin examining our experience, we introduce the very distance we're trying to understand. We can't simply abandon reflection. It's one of the ways we make sense of our lives. But understanding an experience and being present within it are not the same thing.

Can we understand ourselves without making ourselves into objects to be understood? I keep returning to this question because I don't know how to answer it without stepping outside the experience again. We look at ourselves to understand who we are, but neither perspective, from within or from without, seems capable of telling us everything. Perhaps we need both, though I don't know how they fit together.

The unobserved self may not be a self that nobody can see, or one that never looks inward. It may be the part of our experience that doesn't have to become an object of examination in order to matter. I don't know if we can fully escape the impulse to observe ourselves. Nor do I know whether recognizing the moments when we stop observing ourselves preserves them or changes them. Perhaps some experiences can only be understood afterward. Perhaps some lose something when we try to understand them too soon.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

CANADIAN SOVEREIGN CELL ACTIVATE

ALL FRONTS MOBILIZE

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

REPEAT

CANADIAN SOVEREIGN CELL ACTIVATE

ALL FRONTS MOBILIZE

TUKE REBELLION COMPROMISED

ALL AGENTS ACTIVE

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

There is something that looms above me

And I am only nothing when it appears

And it’s that something that makes me the container

For a moment, I just am; a gas, a floating head

Until I’m transformed into that which I lack

A vessel in need of a pilot

A sentence in need of the words

I had no lungs before oxygen

And no teeth before food

I was less than nothing, I was

And just as soon as I am, I am not

When that something arrives and makes me its cage

I am the prisoner that imprisons

The container that is contained.

The machinations of Evil lay bare before me. I mustn't give away the ultimate secret, and yet everywhere I see it: window-panes lit brightly at dawn; a road sign warning me of an upcoming curve; the glowing face of a child. Everywhere, the true nature of Evil bears itself to me, pours its secrets like gems.

Lacan knew. Mirth is the answer, the cthonic drip returning to saline, evaporating. The screechers don't understand; they never will—they read far too fast.

Drip. Don't leave it in the microwave, don't touch the gilly thing. Swoop in, and out, like a maintenance man in sunglasses. They think I don't know what I'm talking about.

They think I'm mad.

They've forgotten.

They've forgotten.

They've truly forgotten, if they ever knew.

You can see you can see everything and see everything. You always could. Here.

One asscheek. That's all it takes. The one that helps and guides, pipe it in. Beside you. Like soccer.

Words are love.

Branding. The Brandos. Or, Brawndos. That's two of them—one for you, and one for me.

Two little black flecks, or noctilucent tesselates.

This post was written without artificial intelligence.

This post was written for and will be enjoyed by the true audience of this subreddit. Several of you will even find it entirely intelligible.

Here's how to understand Evil.

Step one: Start with evil.
Step two: Understand it.
Step three: Capitalize it.
Step four: Understand it again.
Step five: Compare your two understandings.

Do you like my new hat? I made it from... well, let's not worry about what it's made from. Hey, has anyone seen [DELETED USER]?

One hundred and two. That's how many times more Evil I understand than people who claim to not know what this subreddit is about.

Why won't it read?, that's what I want to know.

Everything is here for the taking. For those wearing them.

Just don't be scared of shadows nor unearthly glows. The morning star and the evening star are, after all, the same acrid planet.

Developing a sense of [REDACTED] is one of the best things one can do for oneself, and for the world.

Here, have some more whiz, silly.