A faded green Coleman tent pitched on a sidewalk between new glass skyscrapers containing sleek but empty tech offices and $6000-a-month luxury apartments that only childless tech workers could hope to afford. A relic of last century looms in the distance reminding us of our failures.

This is Seattle.

This is the future: fake and expensive.

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The city itself is decaying into the ground. Despite the largely out-of-reach housing costs I saw more condemned buildings and empty lots than back home in Toledo, Ohio. The economics of this phenomenon don’t make sense - how can unused land sit undeveloped if the selling price on housing is so lucrative?

I took the monorail and went to the top of the Space Needle to clear my head of all the decay.

I looked down at the shiny crystal towers and dirty industrial rubble below and remembered that we were once able to build aspirational things fast. The Space Needle was built in just 400 days, the monorail in just 8 months. Neither of them were “essential”, they didn’t guarantee business returns on some spreadsheet. They encased a myth in concrete and steel. A myth that would last for nearly a century then begin to crumble, slowly at first, then all at once. Our myth was that the American future was bright and we weren’t walking but sprinting towards it.

I was recognized in public for the first time from my YouTube channel. I spoke with a group of interns just starting their career. I tried to reassure them that it’d be alright but I’m not sure they believed it. I’m not sure I did either.

They need a new myth. That’s the deeper purpose of my writing and my videos, to find that fucking myth, or even write it myself if I have to. America, the parts worth keeping, deserve it.

But at least progress has been really clearly defined by people that want the best for us.

Progress isn’t real. Progress is defined by whoever holds power. Society conforms and adapts to that definition of progress.

Each technological achievement unlocks new horrors. There were no car crashes before cars. No cryptocurrency hacks before Bitcoin. Progress is a myth, the myth a culture optimizes towards but it is just that, a myth.

Tech was usurped entirely by well-meaning but otherwise retarded management consultants and other “business” people over the last couple of decades. The last well-paid refuge of weirdos, junkies, misfits, acid freaks, mathematicians, autistics, hippies, and self-proclaimed anti-capitalists was first occupied then entirely subverted. These interlopers are the tech elites.

The new tech elites are McKinsey-consultant-types with greased back hair and Patagonia vests. They are incompetent. They can’t code (even with AI). They aren’t creative. All they can do is measure quantifiables; tokens, dollars, headcount. They can market a job replacement machine to the public but they themselves cannot build it. That is their progress. Society is helplessly sleepwalking through the tech elite’s dreams. This is why much of work feels “fake” these days. This is why employees make “Gen Z boss in a mini” TikToks then go back to their unnecessary work as Senior Executive Director of Social Media (a position so lofty and skill based that it pays $40k a year.) Most of the work performed (I mean that in the theater sense of “performed”) isn’t pointed towards doing something meaningful it’s pointed towards making the dashboard go up or the spreadsheet cell turn green or the number having more zeros so it looks better on a power point slide.

They want to track everything we do as a number that can be optimized.

Skeptical? Just this week Microsoft launched an employee name badge that has a camera built into it so AI can watch an employee’s actions and determine how “efficient” they are.

Before I left American Express, above a certain band level you could see exactly when any employee badged in or out to the office because everyone knows 8 hours in an office is more productive than 7 hours and 50 minutes.

None of this is progress, it is theater. Most of society has forgotten that they are wearing masks then wonder why they feel a dull sense of meaninglessness. But, AI of course ushers in an age of abundance so they’ll just take another exotic international vacation and delay having kids until “later” to temporarily fill the uneasy void.

Are you feeling the abundant utopia yet?

Perhaps at the gas pump, or when you buy plane tickets, maybe when you buy steak at the grocery store?

The tech elites sold us the Worker Replacement Machine but they don’t actually know how to build software, so it can’t really do the work for us.

Let’s assume they’re successful despite this. If AI can do the work for us, we are no longer necessary in the eyes of the tech elites. We become an uncomfortable red number on their spreadsheet to be decreased and eliminated. This is already happening to some degree although I don’t have a clear data point for it. Everyone kinda knows this is happening but can’t point to where exactly. Why would they move to Argentina or build private bunkers in New Zealand if they weren’t kinda hoping we’d just go away and stop bugging them?

(You are here) But, today, AI can’t currently do the work for us. Is anyone working less? I’m working more. Nights and weekends. I’m trying to stay on top of the latest tools. Engineering talent becomes irrelevant and disappeared into unmarked self-driving vans from the workforce overnight if they miss the latest feature updates in, well, any AI tool.

And you know what?

I’m hearing it from workers everywhere in every sector. Even outside of tech.

It’s exhausting and it’s draining the life out of us.

None of this feels like abundance. It feels like there are a hyper-limited number of resources that the tech elites want us to fight to the death over.

But at least we have a bunch of new colleagues.

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The AI can’t do the work for us but there are huge layoffs “because of AI” (I told you the tech elites weren’t creative).

The last few American engineers working for American companies are tapped out being asked to 100x their productivity because…AI? So you gotta staff up, only you can’t afford to hire Americans at your American company based in America because you spend your entire company war chest on tokens like a fucking Dave’n’Busters.

Time to sponsor some more H-1B visas and break ground on that Bangalore office!

You’re not allowed to talk about this on social media without being shadow banned because they are spending a lot of money to convince you that the massive numbers of foreign tech workers we are importing, primarily from India, are massively more intelligent than us. Remember, us Americans are just stupid at math and engineering and computers and stuff!

Most big names in the YouTube journalism space have accepted the hush money and will not cover this. They know their bread is buttered by the tech elites and an implicit condition of that money is to not talk negatively about how large corporations are living off of Americans’ money while destroying their career opportunities.

I saw it at American Express when I was coerced by executive leadership into giving lower performance ratings to American employees than Indian nationals due to their H-1B status being contingent on their employment.

Nobody in tech with reach (they will block your reach if you don’t let it go) is talking about how strange it is that a recent study assessed 95% of Indian national IT professionals are completely unqualified for professional software employment. Or, that you can’t name three large tech companies off the top of your head that started in India and became globally successful, can you name one? Or, that the “tech worker shortage” that all media outlets are discussing in concert doesn’t feel like a shortage. I know plenty of American citizens that have a decade plus of experience with incredible outfits on their resume that are out of work and have been for months or years.

It is not racist to believe that our American companies should employ Americans first. It is nationalist and I am a nationalist. Why would I live here if I didn’t think this is (or at least had the potential to be) the best country in the world?

But at least this influx of world culture is making us more open.

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Diversity promised openness. The pitch was simple: bring in the whole world and America becomes bigger, kinder, more dynamic, more alive. More food, more languages, more talent, more neighbors, more possibility. Who could be against that?

They lied to us about the tradeoffs. What we actually got was a migration and labor policy designed by people who do not have to live with its consequences. Executives get cheaper labor. Universities get tuition and prestige. Politicians get moral cover. Real estate interests get permanently growing demand. And ordinary people are told that if they notice their town changing faster than any community can reasonably absorb, they’re just dismissed as backwards racists.

They import workers to depress wages, overload schools and hospitals, intensify housing demand, and fracture local trust and then they stand on stage congratulating themselves for being open-minded.

I am not interested in pretending that every anxiety people have is noble. Some of it is ugly. Some of it is just resentment looking for a target. But elite denial is also ugly. You cannot remake neighborhoods, labor markets, schools, traffic, housing, and public life at high speed and then act confused when people feel like something was done to them, to their country, without consent.

The moral question is not whether foreigners are bad. They are human beings. Many are hardworking, decent, and trying to survive the same machine everyone else is trapped in. The question is why American leadership keeps using human beings as economic inputs to destroy the middle class while demanding that the public describe the process as love.

Real openness requires trust. Trust requires boundaries. Boundaries require leaders who are willing to say no to donors, no to corporations, no to universities, no to every institution that benefits from churn while ordinary families absorb the cost.

Instead, we got a country where everyone is supposed to celebrate abundance while competing harder for the same jobs, the same apartments, the same school seats, the same hospital appointments, the same shrinking piece of stability.

But at least all this endless demand made housing cheaper and easier to find, right?

I rent. Most of my friends whether in the trades or in tech rent. I could buy a house in a seedy area of Phoenix but I don’t commit crimes so why would I live in a neighborhood where crimes are committed?

The time honored way for the middle class to build wealth was to just buy a house and pay it off. It’s largely impossible to do this now for a number of reasons.

Boomers won’t decrease the selling price on their McMansions - they bought the house for $100k 20 years ago but know that it’s worth at least $1,000,000. No buyers at that price? The two of them only need 1500 square feet but they’ll just keep living in their 4000 sqft palace or move to one of their other houses and rent the big one out.

One anecdote. The house I rent was on the market for over a year. It was listed at a delusional price then decreased by $10k increments each month until it bottomed out at a still-ludicrous price that nobody was willing to pay. They converted it to a rental. They lowered the rent three times before I moved in. When I made an offer to buy the house at a reasonable market rate, they wouldn’t budge from the price they had listed it for a year prior. This experience is not unusual, it is indicative.

Anyone who bought when interest rates were low absolutely cannot afford another house at current rates and prices. They’re stuck in 1500 square feet boxes they bought as a couple but now they have three kids sharing a bedroom.

Private investment firms like Blackrock bought up houses as investment properties (which is the same way Boomers view them at this point).

So you can make an offer but you’re going to need to downsize even though your parents didn’t. If you want to make a healthy salary you’ll need to move to Seattle since the boss really needs you back in office 5 days a week. Oh yeah you’ll be competing with the huge quantities of foreigners on temporary(!!!) visa that also want a house.

YouTube, X, every social media outlet hates that I talk across multiple domains. Social media wants you to publish videos in one niche. This is how The Algorithm works. But it’s all connected and I see the entire thing laid out below me like a map. That’s what I do. I connect chaos into something that is understandable. That’s why you subscribe to the newsletter.

You want boohooing about AI, go subscribe to Mo Bitar, you want AI bubble news 24/7, go subscribe to Ed Zitron. If you want to know why everything feels off right now, keep reading my newsletter and share it with a friend who is feeling like we do.

You are not crazy. It feels off right now and there’s a single thread running through all of it. AI bubble market conditions open the door to huge layoffs. Executives say that these layoffs are caused by AI but it’s a cost cutting measure because the real economy (not the stock ticker) is in freefall and every normal working person intuitively knows this at the gas pump and when opting for a staycation this year. You’re asked to train your replacements. Foreigners are imported en masse to happily accept jobs Americans once held. They’re treated like slave labor but the salary and conditions are preferable to how things are back home even though it’s a massive degradation for heritage Americans. The culture of cities changes overnight due to the unprecedented demographic shifts. This sparks backlash, some reasonable and some outright racist and violent. Due to the numbers game you are priced out of buying a home.

The first step in fixing this mess is to realize that all of these things are connected even if the algorithm, by its very nature, is set up to suppress these connections. We will prevail only if we revert to pre-algorithmic means of sharing this information so pass this newsletter along to a friend and start your own.