Our K-Shaped Nihilism

"America's not a country. It’s just a business."

Killing Them Softly (2012)

The phrase "K-shaped economy" has been making the rounds, reifying the American Dream into a realist's pithy soundbite. It describes the worsening disparity between the haves and have-nots, although anybody not born yesterday would realize this has been a fixture of the American economy since the robber barons. Say what you will about labor exploitation, at least back then we named our companies after the stuff they did. Standard Oil did exactly what it says on the tin. What the hell is a Palantir? C'mon Peter you would have been in great company if you just called it Panopticon.

Anyway, it's hard to articulate my disdain for a term like this that obfuscates more than it enlightens. Our Protestant work ethic and faith in the Line Go Up civic religion necessitates beating around the bush. Maybe my ire should be directed toward the likes of Edward Bernays; after all, public relations and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. You would think that with Occupy Wall Street being within recent memory that we would be more aware of how to draw a critical throughline over time. I suspect the electoral victory of Zohran Mamdani is evidence of a very slowly growing consciousness. Commenting on continuing political polarization is no longer novel, but it should be noted that declining material conditions have followed hand in glove.

This overlaps with another subject I've seen across media, which is the proliferation of financial nihilism. Most young people are stuck, even those with professional and graduate degrees that would have previously been upwardly mobile members of the professional managerial class. They get paid enough to have disposable income for speculating in crypto and the stock market, but not enough to save for mortgage down payments on any realistic timeline (for example, because a large proportion of their take-home income goes to rent). I defer my opinion on landlords to our mutual friend Adam Smith:

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

The game feels like it was rigged from the start, because it is. If you think home ownership is perpetually out of reach, it becomes economically rational to embrace nihilistic cynicism. The rat race is zero-sum, or at best Pareto optimal, so why not bet your entire net worth on BMNR calls hoping to luck into generational wealth? I get the impulse, even though it is ultimately self-defeating and a kind of social cannibalism.

If we are all capitalist realists now, then what is to be done? I'm not even trying to be cute and quote Lenin. Even if AI as such does what they tell us it will do, that doesn't magically redistribute wealth or change who owns what capital. To quote our mutual friend and favorite CIA assassination victim, John F. Kennedy:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

I think the MMT folks have a good handle on how to understand and engineer solutions to this. However, I am not classically trained in piano or economics. In the case of the latter, not to my detriment. What will become of the three Americas as the climate crisis evolves into the climate catastrophe? This isn't SimCity, we can't just enter cheat codes if we screw up.

It's hard not to see this all as an echo of post-Soviet Russia's nihilistic malaise. However, in our case it's by design. I am excited to witness what the future holds. Will I be lucky enough to live in one of Balaji's Startup Cities and be a citizen of the Network State? Or will I be trapped in a defunded FEMA camp for Finger Lakes refugees after a gold rush of AI data centers dump so much thermal energy into Cayuga and Seneca Lake that HABs occur in the dead of winter? Or maybe I will be in a Robinhood Work Camp for Margin Debtors, solving captchas to train AI models, because I leveraged myself on 0DTE MSTR options? Why is it so much easier to imagine a terribly cynical future? I suppose because the material conditions support it.