Unemployed For Life?

For most of human history, the relationship between work and survival was immediate and legible. You worked the land, and the land fed you. You hunted, gathered, built shelter with your hands, and the connection between effort and outcome was as direct as sunlight. Then agriculture scaled, and work became obligation – tithes, taxes, labor owed to whoever claimed the soil beneath your feet. The industrial revolution moved the transaction indoors. You sold hours to a factory and received wages. The work got more abstract, but the deal stayed simple: your time in exchange for survival.

The twentieth century abstracted it further. Office work, knowledge work, service work – entire economies built on the movement of information rather than material. By the time most of us entered the workforce, the connection between what we did all day and anything physically real had become tenuous at best. But the underlying contract never changed. You work, therefore you survive. You trade time for money, and in return you are granted food, shelter, dignity, and a place in society. We rarely question this arrangement, not because it is fair or natural, but because it has been running so long it feels like gravity. It is not gravity. It is a technology. And like all technologies, it can be replaced.

Asleep at the Wheel

I have not come to these realizations all at once. They crept in slowly, and started to really solidify just recently after finishing two awesome books back to back by David Graeber, ‒ "Bull-Shit Jobs: A Theory" and "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" ‒ and through the steady drumbeat of headlines that now define the news cycle. Graeber articulated something many people quietly feel but rarely say out loud: that vast portions of modern employment exist not because they are necessary, but because the system demands the appearance of work. Entire careers built on ritual, compliance, and inertia rather than value. The situation many found themselves in during the COVID pandemic brought this out and paraded it around, but it was a bit too soon for truth to be told.

At the time, this felt like a sociological critique ‒ an indictment of late-stage bureaucracy. In hindsight, it reads more like a warning shot.

It’s important for me to be explicit about something here. I’m not writing this from a position of personal panic. My own work sits largely outside the category Graeber described. I build things that have to exist in the physical world. I fix systems that are actually broken. As an engineer, a coder, a machinist, and a builder, my labor is still anchored to reality in a way that insulates me ‒ at least for now – from the most immediate forms of replacement.

That insulation matters, because it forces honesty. This isn’t fear talking. It’s observation.

The real danger zone isn’t occupied by people who make, repair, or directly interface with the material world. It’s occupied by the vast population performing what Graeber would call bullshit jobs: roles whose primary function is to justify their own existence inside corporate and institutional hierarchies. Those are the jobs most exposed to automation, not because AI is evil, but because those roles were already hollow.

And it’s precisely the people holding those positions ‒ the ones who still believe their badge, title, or middle-management perch guarantees relevance – who most urgently need a wake‑up call. Not tomorrow. Not after the next reorg. Now.

Artificial general intelligence is not just another technological wave. It is a structural rupture, one that threatens to invalidate the central bargain underpinning industrial civilization. The bargain was simple: human labor has value because human intelligence is scarce. That scarcity justified wages, careers, hierarchies, and the quiet belief that if you tried hard enough, there would always be a place for you.

That belief is eroding faster than most people are willing to admit.

What unsettles me is not the capability of the machines themselves, but the collective sleepwalking that surrounds their arrival. We are accelerating down a highway at night, hands resting lightly on the wheel, trusting that the road ahead resembles the one behind us. By the time the scenery changes, it may already be too late to slow down.

I don’t write this as an authority. I’m not an economist, a futurist, or a policy architect. I’m a technician–a person who builds, fixes, and breaks systems for a living. That vantage point matters, because systems fail in recognizable ways, and this one is showing familiar cracks.

We are approaching a moment where expertise itself becomes cheap, where cognition is no longer a moat, and where the stories we tell ourselves about work, merit, and security stop matching physical reality. When that happens, credentials lose gravity. Careers lose narrative coherence. And entire lives, organized around the promise of stable employment, begin to drift.

This blog is not a prediction and it is not a warning issued from on high. It is an attempt to think clearly while the ground is moving – to understand what happens to people, to meaning, and to freedom when jobs cease to be the organizing principle of society.

If we are going to lose work as we know it, we should at least be honest about what replaces it.

The Foundation

If you were to walk into my electronics shop right now, you wouldn't be greeted by minimalism or order in the modern sense. You'd step through the door into a dense, lived-in space where decades of technology coexist in various states of repair and disassembly. Vintage synthesizers and their parts line one wall, shoulder to shoulder, their wooden cheeks and metal panels dulled by decades of hands, smoke, heat, and time. Opposite them are not whole mixing desks, but their remains: channel strips, meter bridges, power-supply frames, ribbon looms coiled like sheep skins. This is not a museum display. It's a corridor – narrow, dimly lit, and dense – lined with the artifacts of past electronic eras, all quietly pointing forward.

As you move deeper into the space, everything subtly funnels your attention toward a single source of light at the back: the workbench. The front of the shop is heavy and still, populated by machines that are dormant, incomplete, or waiting their turn. Dead and silent. The farther you walk, the more intentional the space becomes, until the clutter resolves into purpose.

That bench is where motion resumes. Where my oscilloscope flickers to life, relays click, and circuits that have been inert for years are coaxed back into behavior. This is where electricity starts flowing again with intent. Where boards are debugged, traces repaired, voltages rebalanced. Life doesn't exist in the room all at once – it emerges there, at the bench. Circuits are not displayed here. They are reborn.

I’ve come to realize that I don't quite fit the image of a blue-collar worker, but I'm not the clean abstraction of a knowledge worker either. I live somewhere in between – where thinking and doing collapse into the same motion.

What most people don't realize – what I barely admitted to myself for years – is that this bench isn't new. It didn't appear after some midlife pivot. It was always there, running parallel to the software career like a second circulatory system. For nearly twenty years I wrote code for a living, and during all those years I also repaired electronics, resto-modded vintage cars, installed custom EV drivetrains, and built things for money on the side. The soldering iron never went cold. The shop never closed. I just couldn't call it my real work, because the thing that deposited a predictable number into my bank account every two weeks had claimed that title. The side work was the thing I did because I couldn't stop. The software job was the thing I did because I thought I couldn't afford not to.

Then the first wave of AI shook the software industry hard enough to knock me loose.

I was laid off. And instead of the panic I expected, something stranger happened. For the first time, the parallel work life – the one with the bench and the oscilloscope and the smell of rosin – moved into the foreground. Not as a backup plan. As the plan. I started asking a question I'd never had the breathing room to ask before: what does it actually look like to be unemployed and do my own thing full time?

It looked, as it turned out, like moving to Los Angeles to rebuild a ninety-six channel SSL mixing desk.

That job alone – one massive, intricate, absurdly demanding project – paid for a year. A year of being technically unemployed and practically more productive than I'd ever been while drawing a salary. I was solving real problems on real hardware, problems that couldn't be abstracted away or delegated to a framework. Every channel strip had its own history of damage, modification, and neglect. Every repair was a conversation with the engineer who'd built it thirty years ago and the dozens of hands that had been inside it since. The work was hard and specific and mine.

It was toward the end of that year – hands still smelling like Kester 44 and flux remover, bank account healthier than it had any right to be – that I found a job listing so unapologetically non-bullshit I almost didn't believe it was real. A direct air capture startup in the San Fernando Valley, building physical machines that pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere and turn it into fuel. They needed someone who could think across electrical, mechanical, and software systems. Someone who wasn't afraid of uncharted territories. Someone, frankly, who had spent twenty years toggling between code and copper wire and couldn't be cleanly filed into either category.

I took the job. Not because I needed to go back to being employed. Because the work was real in a way I'd been chasing my entire career without knowing it.

On my LinkedIn profile, I'm an entrepreneur first. Everything else comes second, including my current role at this ambitious startup where I work as a technological hacker and professional generalist – lead technician, if we're being formal about it. Whether that role, or the company itself, will survive the next decade is still an open question. I like to think I know the answer, and the answer is yes – we exist and we are thriving. Our motto is “We will win”! But the truth is, we just don't know. Nobody does. That's the nature of building something that didn't exist before.

But if you think that my electronics shop is just a side hustle, or that my day job represents a stable career path, you may be missing the point. A point that is only now beginning to dawn on the working middle classes.

Employment is an illusion of security.

And the giants of technology are poised to pull back the curtain.

The Great Displacement

We need to talk honestly about what is happening to labor in the age of AI. We are standing on the edge of a species-level event.

Machines capable of performing nearly any cognitive task a human can do–faster, cheaper, and without fatigue–are no longer science fiction. The timelines have collapsed. The people building these systems are openly telling us to prepare within years, not generations.

This is not the Industrial Revolution. When the steam engine arrived, it displaced muscle but increased the value of the human mind. We moved from fields to factories, from factories to offices, and built a global economy on the assumption that human intelligence was scarce and therefore valuable.
That assumption is breaking.

We are crossing from the information age into the age of intelligence, where knowledge is abundant and talent itself is automated. This isn’t about better tools; it’s about a fundamental shift from scarcity of expertise to abundance of productivity.

The working-class human is being eroded systemically. The knowledge worker is not exempt. If your primary economic value lies in processing information, writing code, managing workflows, or performing mid-level cognitive labor, you are standing on thin ice–and the temperature is rising.

I don’t observe this from a distance. I work alongside interns and young professionals every day. I collaborate with them directly–on real projects, real builds, and real constraints. We share engineering notes, assembly documentation, and the pressure of deadlines that actually matter. We don’t simulate work; we ship it. I watch them plan their futures in real time–stacking credentials, polishing résumés, optimizing themselves for a system they believe will still be there when they arrive.

And that’s where the quiet grief comes from.

They’re smart, motivated, and doing exactly what they were told to do. The problem is that the instructions are outdated. The system has prepared them for a world that is already vanishing, one that still pretends stable employment is a reward waiting at the end of the maze.

Sending a young person into the next decade armed only with a traditional degree and an expectation of guaranteed employment isn’t just risky anymore–it’s negligent. If you’re Gen-Z, or Gen-Alpha, and this is you, I’m not talking about a hypothetical future. I’m talking about the floor you’re standing on right now.

If you sell your time for money, you are competing with an entity that has infinite time, no cost of living, and an unlimited capacity to learn. It’s not a fair race. It’s not even a race.

This is why I believe employment, as we understand it, is approaching the end of its historical relevance. Not overnight–but slowly at first, and then suddenly all at once. Wages stagnate. Hiring freezes. The middle of the corporate ladder dissolves.

Which leaves us with a simple, possibly terrifying question: if we cannot work for wages, how will we survive?

Two Futures

The path we choose now will determine the shape of human life for centuries.

One path–the one we seem to be sleepwalking toward–is a sort of technofeudalism.

Thirty years ago, a loose coalition of cryptographers, hackers, and political dissidents discussed in an online email list where they made a wager: build systems that don't require trust, and eventually people will stop tolerating institutions that demand it. They weren't utopians. They were engineers who understood incentive structures better than most economists and cared about power more honestly than most politicians. Their question was simple. What happens when coordination gets cheap, replication gets free, and the entire justification for centralized authority – that someone has to manage the scarcity – disappears?

We are now living inside that question, and most of the public conversation about it ‒ In my humble opinion ‒ is totally worthless.

Start with money, because money is where the confusion is thickest. Money is not a neutral medium of exchange. It never was. It is a technology of control – a shared fiction that lets strangers cooperate across distance, yes, but one whose terms have always been set by whoever holds the largest stakes, ie: power. States and banks have controlled that fiction for centuries, not because they're uniquely virtuous, but because verification used to be expensive. You needed a trusted third party because you couldn't check the ledger yourself.

Cryptography killed that constraint. Distributed ledgers make ownership legible without anyone's permission. Smart contracts enforce conditional promises without courts. Today this already moves trillions of dollars. The technology is not speculative. What it lacks is narrative legitimacy – the story is not widely told – and it’s the story that lends such a mechanism the cultural infrastructure that makes people treat it as real in the way they treat a bank statement or a little piece of plastic they carry around as real.

But here's where the story forks, and where most people lose the plot I think.

When the US Govt. recently announced a strategic hold of Bitcoin, that is not the cypherpunk dream being realized. That is the state incorporating a new asset into the same debt architecture it has been running for centuries. Old ledger, new ink. The obligation doesn't get cancelled or restructured. It gets redenominated and foisted back onto the public in a shinier wrapper. This is not crypto as liberation. This is crypto as an instrument – absorbed into the palace treasury, wielded by the same hands that created the problem.

The actual cypherpunk project points somewhere else entirely. Not a new currency issued from the top down, but systems that emerge from the ground up – where the rules of obligation are transparent, where the ledger belongs to everyone, and where opting out is a design feature rather than a crime.

The same displacement AI brings to labor, cryptography brings to coordination. And once you see that, the post-scarcity question stops being about productivity entirely. Marginal production costs are collapsing? Okay fine. The bottleneck was never output. The bottleneck is distribution. Who gets access to the machines? Under what conditions? Who decides?

Two answers are currently on the table.

The first: platforms and permissions. The techno-feudal model. A handful of companies own the infrastructure, meter access through subscriptions and API calls, and capture the surplus. You use the tools at their discretion. This is the default trajectory, and it is already well underway.

The second: ownership and exit. Not symbolic ownership – not a governance token you can't do anything with – but cryptographically enforced stakes in the systems that generate value. If AI models are trained on the collective output of human civilization, then the returns from that automation can be routed, by design, back to the people who generated the training data. Not through benevolence. Not through tax policy that takes twenty years to pass and another ten to enforce. Through protocol design. Through math.

Someone usually brings up universal basic income here, and I want to be direct about why that framing is inadequate. A stipend distributed by the same institutions that failed to manage the transition isn't liberation. It's dependency wearing a progressive mask. What my grandfather used to call a "Pair of Golden Handcuffs" which –unironically ‒ he was using in reference to state run social welfare programs. I digress — The cypherpunks project was never about receiving allowances from the state. It was about building systems where participation itself generates yield – where showing up, contributing, maintaining, governing are all compensated automatically because the rules are embedded in the infrastructure, not in some politician or corporations's platform.

Think about what actually shifts when production costs hit zero. Markets stop clearing on labor. The massive apparatus of performative employment – careers built on ritual, compliance, and inertia rather than anything resembling value – doesn't just become unnecessary. It becomes structurally impossible to justify. The question "who did the work?" matters less than "who maintains the system, and under what rules?" That's not a philosophical abstraction. That's a governance engineering problem, and it's solvable – if you embed the governance at the protocol layer instead of trying to bolt it on after the money has already been extracted.

DAOs were an early ‒ and in my opinion – clumsy attempt. Many failed, and some deserved to fail. But the core architecture is sound: organizations with transparent rules, auditable treasuries, and incentive structures defined by code rather than charisma. Surplus gets distributed according to predefined logic. Dividends instead of wages. Participation instead of employment. No CEO deciding who gets what based on stock opts. inter-office politics and quarterly earnings pressure.

None of this requires abolishing markets. None of it requires pretending incentives don't exist. It requires recognizing that when intelligence becomes infrastructure – as cheap and ubiquitous as water and electricity – access to that infrastructure has to be treated as a public good. We've done this before. Roads, power grids, water systems were all private luxuries before society figured out that universal access multiplied value for everyone. AI and cryptographic ownership are the same category of problem. We just haven't admitted it yet.

In this version of the future, people aren't "unemployed" in the way that word currently means – discarded, anxious, scrambling. They're decoupled from coercive labor. Survival doesn't depend on obedience to an employer. Work doesn't disappear. It transforms. People build because they want to. Reputation still matters. Contribution still matters. What changes is the existential threat underneath – the part where you starve if you stop being useful to someone with capital.

That distinction keeps getting flattened in public debate: work versus idleness, productivity versus laziness. It's the wrong axis. The real choice is between coerced participation in systems that extract value upward and voluntary participation in systems that distribute value laterally. One produces resentment and brittleness. The other produces resilience. This should not be difficult to communicate, but as I was lamenting to an acquaintance recently, it is. The people with the biggest megaphones have a financial interest in keeping it muddy. And the people who actually understand how to build these systems – the engineers and cryptographers who could set the whole thing in motion tomorrow if you let them – are famously, catastrophically bad at explaining why you should care.

The tools exist. The mathematical foundations have been laid for decades. The models work. What's missing is collective literacy – that is enough people understanding the structural argument to make it politically viable – and the willingness to say plainly that the story about jobs was always temporary scaffolding. It was never the foundation. The foundation is: people need access to resources, and the mechanism by which that access is mediated determines whether a society is free or feudal.

A post-scarcity future doesn't arrive by petition. It arrives the way the cypherpunks always said it would: by building parallel systems until the old ones become optional and eventually obsolete. The math hasn't changed. The tools have only gotten better. What's changed is that the window is now closing ‒ and it’s closing faster by the moment. The default path – platform feudalism, algorithmic landlords, a permanent subscription tier Life Plus which becomes the only thing between you and the machines that replaced your job – is not a distant threat. It is the current business model of the most powerful corporations on earth.

So the question isn't whether the alternative is possible. It's whether enough people understand it in time to choose it.

Beyond Work

Economic displacement is only half the crisis. The deeper danger is the collapse of identity. In our culture, "What do you do?" is the first question we ask strangers – and the answer is how we locate ourselves in the world. Remove work from that equation and a lot of people aren't just broke. They're unmoored. They don't know who they are. I've had that experience – of the self dissolving, of not knowing what's left when the scaffolding falls away. Some of those times were in a therapist's office. Some were on heroic LSD trips. Some were just a Tuesday, after being laid off. Every community already has people who didn't survive that process intact. We walk past them every day. The person talking to no one on the corner, the one sleeping under the overpass ‒ some of them arrived there through addiction or illness, sure, but a lot of them got there through a simpler, quieter sequence: they lost the thing that told them who they were, and they never found a replacement. That's not a character flaw. That's an identity collapse with no safety net beneath it. It happens to a handful of people in every town, every year, and we've learned to look away from it because the numbers are small enough to ignore.

They are about to stop being small. What's coming around the corner is not a handful of people per community quietly falling apart. It's tens of thousands of identity crises a month, rolling through every industry and income bracket simultaneously. White-collar, blue-collar, creative class ‒ nobody is structurally exempt. And we have no infrastructure for it. Psychotherapists will have a field day, assuming anyone can afford to see one. The people who need the most help rebuilding their sense of self will be the same people whose insurance just evaporated along with their job. The math doesn't work. The safety net wasn't built for a wave this size, because nobody in charge believed the wave was real. Well, surfs-up, the wave is coming in like a tsunami.

When machines outperform us at the tasks we trained our entire lives to do, the external validation of being necessary evaporates. For many people, work isn't just income. It's the scaffolding that holds everything else in place – routine, status, social belonging, the quiet reassurance that you matter because someone is paying you to show up. Pull that scaffolding out and things fall apart fast. Not just financially. Psychologically.

I’ve alluded to this, already. I know this because I lived a version of it.

I spent years in software – years where my value was legible, quantifiable, the kind of work that looks good on a résumé and makes sense at a dinner party. When a lay-off came unexpectedly my way I took it as my cue to walk away. Not because I was forced out, but because the work had hollowed out. I was solving problems that didn't matter for SaaS solutions I didn't really believe in, and the big fat paychecks had become the only reason to keep going at it. It had gotten that way long before that lay-off day came. That's a slow poison, and I think more people are drinking it than will admit.

When I stopped defining myself by my job title and started defining myself by what I actually cared about – building things, understanding systems, making broken things work – the path to rebuild my self identity assembled itself. Not neatly. Not quickly. But solidly.

That's the part of the post-scarcity conversation that almost nobody is having. The economic question – how do people survive when machines do the work – is important, but it's the easier problem. The harder problem is: how do people survive psychologically when the thing that told them who they were goes away?

The answer isn't to cling harder to the old scaffolding. It isn't to invent new bullshit jobs so people can pretend nothing changed. And it isn't to hand everyone a welfare check and call it dignity.

The answer is that most people already know what they care about. They've just never been given permission – or the economic breathing room – to pursue it. The retired engineer who builds furniture in his garage. The nurse who writes poetry at 2 AM. The factory worker who coaches Little League with more strategic thinking than most executives bring to a board meeting. The raw material of purpose is everywhere. What's scarce is the freedom to act on it.

A post-scarcity economy doesn't just redistribute wealth. It redistributes permission. Permission to build things that don't have a business model. Permission to care for people without billing for it. Permission to spend a decade mastering something because it matters to you, not just because it's marketable.

This is not the end of purpose. It is the end of borrowed purpose – the kind that was always on loan from an employer, revocable at will, contingent on quarterly results.

For the first time in history, we may be forced to answer the question that work has always answered for us: who are you when no one is paying you to be someone?

That question terrifies people. I guess it should. It's the most important question most of us have never had to face. But I can tell you from experience – from the other side of walking away, from a workbench covered in forty-year-old circuit boards and a shop floor covered with metal-chips and my clothes that smell like cutting fluid – the answer is in there. It's been in there the whole time. We just couldn't hear it over the noise of being employed.

An Invitation To The Future

Everything I've described in this blog – the structural argument, the cypherpunk wager, the collapse of borrowed purpose – is not something I'm watching from the sidelines. I'm building inside it, every day, at a company called Terraform Industries.

Here's what we do: we pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into synthetic natural gas with clever technology we developed, powered by the Sun. Direct air capture. Not as a research project or a slide deck or a carbon credit scheme – as real hardware. Physical systems. Calciners, carbonators, gas processing, closed-loop automation. Machines that do something real, built by people who understand that the energy transition isn't going to be solved by software alone.

If you've read this far and felt recognition – if you're an engineer, a technician, a machinist, a builder watching your industry get hollowed out by automation and wondering what comes next – I want to share a pint and talk with you.

Not because we're offering a lifeboat. Because we're offering the opposite of what's disappearing.

The work at Terraform is hard. It is physical. It requires people who can think across systems – electrical, mechanical, chemical, software – and who aren't afraid to get their hands into a panel that smells like burnt insulation at 5 PM on a Friday because that's when the problem decided to show up. It requires people who build things because building things is who they are, not because it's the best option left on the job board.

Here's what I can tell you about this work: it is not bullshit. Every hour you spend here moves atmospheric carbon into usable fuel. You can see it. You can measure it. You can stand next to the machine you built and watch it do the thing you designed it to do. In a world that is rapidly filling with abstraction – with AI-generated slop content, with financialized nothingness, with jobs that exist only to justify other jobs – that directness is rare. And it matters more than most people realize until they experience it.

I speak directly from experience.

The people who are about to be displaced by AI are, in many cases, exactly the people we need. Not despite their soon-to-be-obsolete skills, but because of the deeper capabilities underneath: problem-solving instincts, systems thinking, the ability to learn fast and adapt when the documentation doesn't cover what just happened. Those capabilities don't expire. They just need somewhere real to land.

We're in Los Angeles. We're growing. And the machines aren't going to build themselves – not yet, anyway. When they do, we'll be the ones deciding how that transition works, because we'll have built the infrastructure it all runs on.

If that sounds like the kind of future worth showing up for, reach out. The door is open. Just send a one page introduction. Skip the LLM generated cover letter. Tell us what you've built and why you care.