AI Is America’s Existential Crisis

Is America still great? Are we an innovative people driving humanity forward into a bold and better future? Is our economy still great? Is it still the growth engine the rest of the world should emulate and integrate itself with? Are we, as an American people, still evolving and moving forward into the future, or are we backsliding into a domestic conflict with fascist ethnonationalism like we have multiple times before? The questions of our era in every direction stem from wondering how full of shit America really is, and AI is the avatar for this existential crisis, filling our feeds with endless amounts of slop lying to us at every corner.

AI must succeed for America to succeed in the 21st century. This isn’t a statement of emotion, but of math. Investment in AI capex like data centers has contributed more to gross domestic product this year than consumer spending, something that typically comprises 70 percent of GDP. Without this AI boom, it’s not unreasonable to suggest we may be in a recession right now thanks to Trump’s idiotic trade war.

And everyone is talking about an AI bubble, even AI executives. All this spending largely comes from seven companies who are run by seven men advertising a product that doesn’t exist yet, providing a gilded metaphor for America’s rampant inequality where consumer spending is shockingly dependent on the stock market’s wealth effect among wealthy people.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is not here, yet it is what current AI capabilities are portrayed as by the industry’s hype merchants–despite Sam Altman’s co-founder saying that AGI is at best a decade away. In Sora 2’s debut video, AI Sam Altman explicitly stated that this technology that looks specifically designed to create revenge porn is simply one step on the road to AGI. This entire AI bubble has been one giant lie by the AI merchants encouraging a dwindling minority of seven magnificently wealthy businesses to invest in a falsehood about what the technology can do at this present moment, and a promise at best about what it can do in the future. AI has so far proven itself to be a far better tool to drive mentally unstable people to the brink and encourage teenagers to commit suicide than be the super-agent sold to CEOS trying to replace all their white-collar grunts’ jobs. The lies that have unfolded around AI to date are painfully American.

AI is an explicit assault on American labor. Silicon Valley elites are promising other elites that they can use this technology to not pay their workers, the platonic ideal of capitalism as demonstrated by capitalism’s rise to global power in tandem with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Labor is going to be most businesses’ biggest cost, and so the logical conclusion of capitalism’s dedication to profit maximalism is to pay their labor as little as possible. That’s the dream of AI as advertised to us. The mask is fully off of capital now.

I don’t often agree with Elon Musk, but I fear that he may be right when he says, “AI and robots will replace all jobs.”

So what happens to workers who have no jobs and no income?

AI & robotics must benefit all of humanity, not just billionaires.

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— Senator Bernie Sanders (@sanders.senate.gov) October 22, 2025 at 2:30 PM

This Is America

The last half century has seen the steady erosion of labor power at the hands of capital. “We’re not above exploiting the precarity of the industry” we’re in is something I have heard multiple owners of capital say in my time working in many American industries. Supreme Court decisions like Janus have written this anti-labor posture into law, and this chart with a generation-long divergence between productivity and compensation is the dream of American capitalists. More for them, less for the people who make their capital work. Capital has built the world they worked tirelessly for from the moment the New Deal was passed into law, and they have succeeded.

But this world they built is crumbling under the weight of the most childish tyrant since the inbred Hapsburgs, all while being rejected by their children and grandchildren. Change has been the only candidate America has truly endorsed this century. The 2008 Great Financial Crisis revealed a world built on fraud and lies, and then that world elected Donald Trump as president, all while a bubble some deem to be larger than the dot com bust inflates around us. It is difficult to not feel like we are living in the first act of a horror movie these days.

AI is a bet on supposed American dynamism while accelerating that fifty-year trend above. Capitalists want to deliver you AI slop from sea to shining sea because it costs them less than I do to write this sentence. The lie is that AI slop can do what I can, which it can’t, because AI slop depends on me to model itself off of. This is journalism 101—primary sources above all—and AI slop invading our world alongside fascism does not seem like a mistake as that core principle around discerning truth from fiction gets obscured more each day. Capitalists are Going For It, and they are proudly declaring they have a replacement for our labor. This is not the first time American capital Has Gone For It either.

They see a fundamentally weak country being reduced to rubble as Congress agrees to terminate Article I of the Constitution and the Supreme Court suborns itself to a deluded tyrant bragging about passing basic cognition tests. Something new must rise in the wake of the collapse of American democracy, and that something is powered by AI in capital’s eyes, they’re just not quite sure what exactly that something is. AI can do more jobs better than people can, say all the AI salesman, and all the Very Serious capitalists have bought this line hook, line and sinker.

Then MIT found out that 95 percent of businesses who use AI lose money on it and everyone started getting nervous and saying the word bubble.

Pop!

Because most people know AI as advertised is a lie. They know America as advertised is a lie. They know this entire era is built on lies. To the world. To ourselves. To each other. About every nanometer of this reality we have constructed around ourselves that Donald freaking Trump was able to decimate in less than a year. It’s all built on lies, and instead of being a holy reckoning, 2008 wound up being a glimpse into a corrupt world that patched itself up quickly with the magic of zero percent interest rates (ZIRP), and went right back to hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein.

Like AI, the greatness of America is a delusion at present. It is a sales pitch for a far more degraded version of itself. Lipstick on a pig, so to speak. There has not been some grand innovation in America since the iPhone (outside the domestic clean energy revolution Trump is destroying because it’s gross and woke), and you can see this existential crisis gripping Silicon Valley’s elite who reportedly are high on drugs all the time, which I’m sure has nothing to do with all these delusions around what AI can and can’t do.

America is not a pull yourself up by your bootstraps nation like we are told. There are countless studies like this one from Pew across generations which demonstrate how those born into wealthier families generally have better outcomes, especially when broken down by race as “the persistence of the black-white mobility gap undercuts the ideal of equality of opportunity, a concept central to the idea of the American Dream.” America is a nation of failsons and faildaughters ruling over everyone else trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Society is run by the idiot children of reactionary capital from the New Deal and Great Society, joining alongside those who exploited the rising monopoly power of this era, so it should be of no surprise that a country dependent on norms collapsed the moment that manchildren fundamentally incapable of acting in any interest other than their own greed took ownership of it. The world looks like its owners, and it’s not pretty.

American capital has bet everything on AI becoming AGI in the next couple of years, which the bubble talk seems to confirm will not happen like the AGI experts have long said. These capitalists lied to everyone, and then violated Biggie’s Fourth Crack Commandment as they inflated the bubble with ever more hysteric promises around eliminating the concept of human labor. Now folks are looking at historically high CAPE ratios and a gold chart that looks like a shitcoin running to the moon and a bond market that has frankly, seen some shit this year, and people are sobering up to a degree. We still don’t have a trade deal with our largest trading partner. Iowa is experiencing Great Recession-level economic contractions thanks to Trump alienating their chief soybean purchaser and then betraying American farmers for Argentinian ones. You can see Trump’s tariffs taking root in various inflation metrics which the Fed has said leads them to be cautious, and these long and lagging effects are becoming more evident, not less. The stagflationary walls are closing in around us as AI-driven hyper-growth continues to be more fiction than fact. We are lying liars now caught in a lie, and it cost us one of our best friends in Canada.

America is over-valued, just like AI is over-valued. AI cultists will argue that both current valuations are simply tied to the level of long-term investment these magnificent seven companies are making in the next iteration of the internet and America, and so the valuation of the market is due to people front-running the growth and establishing a baseline closer to its future value. They could be right, but they better be right, because by every other measure this is the second-most or most over-valued market in America’s history, and the consequences of this bubble popping are harrowing.

“To put the potential impact in perspective, I calculate that a market correction of the same magnitude as the dotcom crash could wipe out over $20 trillion in wealth for American households, equivalent to roughly 70 percent of American GDP in 2024,” wrote former IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath in The Economist. “This is several times larger than the losses incurred during the crash of the early 2000s. The implications for consumption would be grave. Consumption growth is already weaker than it was preceding the dotcom crash. A shock of this magnitude could cut it by 3.5 percentage points, translating into a two-percentage-point hit to overall GDP growth, even before accounting for declines in investment.”

How close are we to a bubble? Wired interviewed economists Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch of the University of Maryland who wrote a book called Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation, and their research suggests our current moment “hits all the right notes. Uncertainty? Check. Pure plays? Check. Novice investors? Check. A great narrative? Check. On that 0-to-8 scale, it’s an 8. Buyer beware.”

Buyers of so-called American greatness beware too, as this era has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt how fundamentally cowardly our elites are and how they hold no values beyond rank greed. “In researching this piece, I interviewed dozens of figures, including lawmakers, private sector executives, retired senior military figures and intelligence chiefs, current and former Trump officials, Washington lawyers and foreign government officials,” reported Edward Luce for the Financial Times last week. “Such is the fear of jail, bankruptcy or professional reprisal, that most of these people insisted on anonymity. This was in spite of the fact that many of the same people also wanted to emphasise that Trump would only be restrained by powerful voices opposing him publicly. At times, it has felt like trying to report on politics in Turkey or Hungary.”

AI is a lie. America is a lie. Our powerful elites are lying to themselves about the feckless cowards they have proven to be. And everyone increasingly knows all of it. America has bet the farm on revolutionizing the world with a new technology before China does, and if we don’t, what are we? The people who were felled by an Epstein-adjacent reality TV show host who brags about wanting to fuck his daughter and his lifelong passion for debunked 19th century economics? What a shameful way to go out.

But that’s our current trajectory.

We Are Not Condemned to Our Present Fate

Just because AI is a lie doesn’t mean that AI has no use, and just because America is a lie does not mean it is bereft of redeeming qualities. Of all the heartbreak around Trump’s mass deportation regime, one of the main vectors of it for me is how immigrants are consistently some of our proudest Americans who embody the values of hard work and sacrifice better than those of us lucky enough to be born here. There are many things wrong with this country, but still people flock to it from all over the world because it is better than what they have, and we must not lose sight of this. The First Amendment for my money is still the G.O.A.T. among democratic innovations by humanity, even if the GOP did cancel it after Charlie Kirk was killed.

We have established a base of norms and values in our Constitution, and just because the old world is dead does not mean we cannot instill its best ideas into any future one. The fascists got a head start on rebuilding 21st century America out of the rubble of the 20th, but look around, they are fumbling the bag everywhere you look. They will fail, whether it is tomorrow or in 2030 is anyone’s guess, but the history of autocrats around the world tells us that not paying the people with weapons, calling them fat and stupid, exposing their friends in unencrypted chats to our enemies, then expelling many of them on to the streets without a job does not end well for dictators—as the American-installed one in Iraq so helpfully demonstrated this century when they turned the Iraqi military into al-Qaeda in Iraq practically overnight.

I firmly believe this calamitous arc of history is bending towards justice, it will just take many people to bend it. And we have those people. No Kings proved it. Zohran Mamdani is so hopeful because he was just a city councilman before this race. Texas state Rep. James Talarico is another local politician fighting for something larger, and we will meet many more like them over the coming year. There are countless people in local governments across the country sick of this shit, and they want to fight the bottomless elite corruption and apathy that defines our era. We are struggling in a long-term battle that previous generations have fought and won against, and success is measured in election cycles, not days.

And not to become AI’s PR guy or anything, but it is a tool that is useful for some things. I have spoken openly about how I replaced Google with it and am not going to quietly delete my ChatGPT tags any longer, as a Google tag is nothing to be proud of either these days. The metaphor here still applies, that we can innovate society with new ways of machine learning and automation and other processes that long existed before bunch of deranged billionaires started the sweatiest ad campaign ever around something they call AI. Like America, just because some out of touch rich assholes lie about all the things AI very obviously cannot do, that does not mean the things it demonstrates it can do have no use either.

As ZIRP has died and high interest rates have raised gambling borrowing costs for Silicon Valley VCs while depressing their companies’ future cash flows, making Marc Andreesen angrier by the day and his head even pointier, it’s hard not to think about this “AI will replace everything” pitch they are making as an existential crisis for an industry which carried America into the 21st century, and has failed to deliver something similar in this new world. America’s Broligarchy are dinosaurs to some extent, as their proven skills exist in a universe that is long gone. The death of ZIRP has revealed many Silicon Valley Emperors to Have No Clothes, and many have no doubt done the bleak math on how their revenue-less companies will survive this bubble that everyone accepts will eventually burst.

Whatever comes out the other side of it will be different than what came before it, the same way we left 2008 a different people. I graduated in 2009 into that job market, and understand firsthand how it led me to this moment where everything looks like a lie to me. I am not alone, and every day there are more of us. The jig is up on America to some degree, the question is what happens next, because the elites of our era are so shameless they are willing to operate a child sex trafficking racket in full view of the world, so who cares if America is one big lie too. At least they’re all still rich and in power.

History tells us that the economy crashing has a way of sobering people up under any kind of government, and loosening that governing class’s grip on society, and this is where Trump’s ineptitude is something of an asset to the cause. The desperation of moments like the Great Depression leads people to the logical conclusion that government exists in the first place because there are simply parts of society that the private market cannot replace. We are in one of those eras again, and the precarity that 2008 unleashed and 2020 exacerbated has only become more salient with time as more and more people grow distrustful of big business and accept a larger role for government in a world where they are proudly promised nothing by our elites and expected to be excited about it.

Last month I wrote about a study on “U-Turn” episodes to autocratization, whose “key finding is that 52 percent of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73 percent when focusing on the last 30 years.” It also found that “The vast majority of U-Turns (90 percent) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy.”

We are very obviously in one of these episodes, and the largest protest of its kind in American history just demonstrated that there is real fervor to U-Turn us out of this mess. The unknown enveloping more of our future every day is what makes this era harrowing, but don’t lose sight of how that makes it a hopeful time too. We have the opportunity to create the future we want for ourselves, the same way that American capitalists worked tirelessly for decades to create our present collapse. This is America’s quarter-century existential crisis, brought to you by AI, and just because we are a little delusional thanks to chatbots right now does not mean we are condemned to our present rate of breakdown forever.