efficient forced labor for optimal end times

30 May, 2026

Billionaires know what is coming for them if they sit back and do nothing and so, for once in their lives, they have been hard at work concocting a spell against it. That spell is in part AI and their investment(s) in robotics and in another surveillance and restriction of personal autonomy (like forced births and labor). Both of these approaches supplement each other, where the latter functions as a bridge until the former is production-ready—a metric which depends on more than mere technicalities. One needs to lay the groundwork for it.

Robots, as they are depicted in science fiction and which tech moguls are known to be inspired by (especially the dystopian stories!), can be two things: (1) a mirror of humans with consciousness and some special abilities or (2) obedient servants. The former is a more recent conception, which is less interesting for us today, than the latter which originates in the Czech play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek where „robot“ meant „forced worker,“ meaning a slave. This type of protagonist was picked up by many authors like Isaac Asimov who developed the Three Laws of Robotics that control all robot behavior in his fictional universe. The first is the supremacy of human lives, meaning a robot has to protect human lives at all costs; the second is the supremacy of human command, meaning all human commands are to be executed unquestioned unless they conflict with the first law; and the third law is the law of self-preservation (mostly for economic reasons so units do not have to be replaced as much), unless it conflicts with the first two laws. These three laws make for very intriguing narratives that inspired naming the real and scientific field of robotics after the same field in Asimov’s universe. This is not without any consequences for the field itself.

If you read up about what men like Peter Thiel, the guy behind Palantir, envision for our future, it is desolation from which he will be safe from as he will be bunkered up somewhere in New Zealand. But to be bunkered up with people down there when you are as anti-social as Peter Thiel is a grave weak point. When one lives by the belief that one cannot trust other humans who own less than oneself because they would always want what one has, one cannot be bunkering up with others. That makes automation a necessity for anti-socials to survive the world they are actively working towards creating which is the pinnacle of neoliberalism’s alienation from the social. With automata that lack the consciousness to discern right from wrong through logical deduction, Peter Thiel and his ilk can be sure to stay safe from their tools developing a conscience that would overthrow them. Thus, „robot“ goes back to its earliest use: a tool to serve and to follow natural-language orders; no free will and no instinct for self-preservation, only the mimicry of both.

When it is people like Sam Altman who are campaigning for our faith in AGI coming around to solve all of our problems and make Earth a paradise who are also bunkering up for the End Times, you should know something is amiss, that this is a farce to make us believe positive change is possible through Silicon Valley nuts while they work tirelessly, never to attain wealth but to protect it, to accelerate all that we want to slow down, such as climate change—which they pinky-promised to contribute less to just to backtrack from it (because of, you guessed it, AI)—or the constant warring. They fear that if they do not surveil us through Palantir, which is slowly being embedded in every state’s regular surveillance apparatus—switching to a functionally equivalent European alternative is no better—, and keep us huddled up scared of punishment for the most benign things that no one would otherwise know or care about if it were not for this surveillance infrastructure so that we would have less resources to fight back.

But since we can always fight back if we know we should and they cannot mold human nature to their will nor can they mechanically reproduce humans to their specifications (yet?), they had to fall back to what they can mass produce which is bullshit generated by LLMs to create an individualized, „objective“ reality layered on top of existing algorithmic individualization. It is an attempt at molding minds into fighting a culture war that has no reason to exist by reinforcing existing prejudices, from sexism and racism to pseudo-science and strengthening the fear of the unknown, while keeping vulnerable people vulnerable thanks to the culture war.

The vulnerability does not start or end in the culture war because obscene wealth depends on obscene power disparities, such as workers who depend on working in precarious conditions for their survival. How do you increase the number of such obedient workers while still working on replacing them? For starters, by removing any worker protection laws and gutting social services to make them as dependent on their personal income as possible. Additionally, the former works best by precarizing living circumstances of immigrants, by making them always afraid of deportation of they act up in any way, and increasing forced births. Women forced to give birth when they would have otherwise aborted the fetus for economic reasons—the most common reason¹—have to live in precarious conditions because they could not afford a child that they are now forced to take care of. Someone this vulnerable who needs the cash would make for a very obedient worker. A child raised in such a precarious environment would grow up to be poor, as wealth is inherited and not made, and thus produce the next generation of obedient workers. For tech moguls and those who look up to them, that is the best compromise until they can do away with the worker entirely.

A worker who is overworked by unpaid childcare and paid labor, which they are dependent on to make ends meet, is also someone who is short on community. Someone so lonely, especially in times when „the loneliness epidemic“ is so hotly debated, is even more vulnerable to (AI generated) propaganda in their information intake. If they can blame an innocuous minority they have never seen in their lives for all their struggles and feel better afterwards, why would they turn their sight upwards the social hierarchy? Why would they explore the complexity of their predicament and understand what is causing it? How could someone so short on resources even do it? They cannot and will not.

All of these factors come together to serve us a very bleak picture: a world in which we all hate each other instead of the amplifiers of hate and dream of emulating an unsustainable way of life built on the backs of those less fortunate than us all while convincing ourselves that this is freedom and the pinnacle of human development. We start wars over resources where both the war and mining of the chased resources accelerate Silicon Valley’s hotly anticipated End Times of climate collapse in the name of returning to a mythical past of general wealth while the wealth is there, just not shared equitably. War efforts frequently include propaganda which is nothing new, however, what is concerning is the extent to which AI together with algorithmic targeting can increase its effectiveness and individualization, especially in an information deprived environment like Iran that is exposed to an information shock after information deprivation from internet blackouts.

I keep saying „we“ like we are all part of the clique making the rules and directing people to kill and get killed. We are not and that is the point. If every decision was made collectively and not within a clique of tough guys (intransparently at that!), this would not be happening. It is either done in our name or we are directly or indirectly benefitting from it which makes it our responsibility to object to and resist it. But this is where it gets tricky: resistance to war, economic exploitation, and destructive extractivism is almost always legally prosecuted. Look no further than the crackdown on decolonial protesters of Zionist colonialism in the West or bloodily crushed Chinese worker revolts in the East. This is the collaborative part I talked about in the protectors of misery: States around the world are doing capital’s dirty work for them by crushing resistance in the name of protecting the Emperor’s peace using surveillance technologies from the likes of Palantir and automating warfare using drones. This is no hyperbole, but simple extrapolation from current trends towards things thought impossible under systems with the mythologized „Checks and Balances.“

With everything laid out this way, it becomes clear what the way out of this mess does not include: any power concentration presented in this post that may lead to this point again, such as national security agencies and their supplements such as prisons, police, and military forces, and (the legal guarantee of) private ownership. Any proposition of an alternative that leaves at least one of these standing is not worth a second look as it looks to reproduce either a never-to-have existed ideal or an exclusionary one, both founded on nothing but thin air and (the threat of) force. Consequently, any proposition that seeks to decouple deliberation from enforcement, e.g. through automating one or the other, is bound to do the same. So while I see no clear path forward, I know which paths not to tread.

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