An Open Letter to the Top 20%

The economic devastation that hit the Rust Belt is coming for your office (or home office). I know, because I grew up in it.

An Open Letter to the Top 20%

I want to tell you a story about where AI is taking us. It might seem outlandish. But I’ve lived it, and that’s why you need to hear it from me.

If you’re in the top 20%, that means your household is bringing in somewhere around $130,000 a year or more. Maybe you’re a project manager making $95,000 married to a marketing coordinator making $45,000. Y’all are a $140,000 household. You’re taking vacations. You can afford healthcare. You can afford housing. Your kids are wearing whatever name brand kids are wearing these days. You feel fairly secure, but not totally secure. And both of your jobs are done on a screen.

Here’s what you may not realize. You’re living the life that factory workers lived in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. You’re living the life that auto workers in Detroit lived. That steel workers in Pittsburgh lived. That chemical workers across the Northeast and Appalachia lived. Back then a single income could buy a house, raise kids, take a vacation, and retire with a pension. A GM line worker in the early ‘90s was pulling the equivalent of about $43 an hour in today’s money. That life, the one you’re living right now, used to be the baseline for millions of Americans.

I can tell your future, because for me, it’s a rerun.

I grew up in Appalachia, living in the shadows of what had been. The old-timers talked about a time when the life you're living now wasn't reserved for the top 20%. It was just life. But over decades, fewer and fewer people could reach it. A normal life for most working Americans disappeared in a generation, then kept declining for decades after that, and nobody did a damn thing about it.

The top 10% of earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending in this country, the highest share ever recorded. For you few who still have a quality life, the future I lived is coming for you.

Don’t look out your window. Look at where my people are from.

Detroit went from 1.8 million people to roughly 630,000. The city lost more than a million people. Entire neighborhoods abandoned. The crack epidemic turned whole sections into a war zone. 80,000 buildings left empty. In St. Louis, where the factories closed and the mills went quiet, whole neighborhoods now resemble what the Alliance for American Manufacturing called “a bombed-out war zone, with few vestiges of their former glory.” In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. The birthplace of the American middle class went bankrupt.

There were no other jobs. What was left was Walmart. CVS. McDonald’s. Harder work for less money, and our towns decayed. Despair set in. People turned to drugs to numb the pain, Big Pharma got rich, and 800,000 of our neighbors died. Not in a war. Not in a natural disaster. From opioid overdoses, in the very places where the factories closed and the jobs disappeared. Overdose deaths shot up over 500% in a single generation. Violence spiked. Communities fell apart. We were lost.

Over and over, Americans looked for answers. They turned to the government, because after all it was the government that had pulled us out of the Depression, won World War II, took us to the moon. It was us working together through our federal, state, and local governments that built this nation. We looked for answers in Ronald Reagan. In Bill Clinton. In Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. And then, finally, Trump, hoping we could turn this shit around.

But instead of looking at the greed that caused this, instead of looking at the Wall Street barons, the bankers, and the handful of decision makers who sold us down the river, we turned our eyes toward immigrants. We split up our communities based on race and religion and sexual orientation and whether or not women have bodily autonomy. We did exactly what the people who profited from our decline needed us to do. We fought amongst ourselves while they cashed the checks.

Now the information and administration economy is next.

The economic devastation that happened over 40 years in labor is coming after white-collar workers in four. And it’s coming for the same reason. It makes no more sense to have humans doing work that can be done by machines or programs or robots. They are much, much less expensive. They don’t get sick. They don’t have drama. They don’t have needs.

I know how fast this is moving because I’m living it. I’m starting a PAC called A Fight Worth Having. I was quoted $65,000 a year by a company called Snapstream to record and monitor four TV stations at once. I decided to see if I could do it with AI and four cable accounts. Turns out I could. The same thing happened when I needed an email system, a research hub, a social media monitoring operation. AI is building things for hundreds of dollars that would have cost hundreds of thousands. That’s not a prediction. That was Tuesday.

Add to that, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said at an AI summit in India: “AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me.” He said they may be only a couple of years away. This is the man running the most prominent AI company on Earth, built on technologies we developed as a society and invested in as a people. And he’s telling you his technology will do his job better than he can. Your job is not safer than his.

AI and robotics end in the Garden of Eden or Mad Max. Sadly there is little in-between.

We see where this path leads. An unimaginable life for a handful of people and scraps for the rest of us. If we leave this to the market, the 'owners' will keep the Star Trek economy for themselves simply because they were in the right seat at the right time. I can tell you by looking out my window that the rich don't reckon the poor deserve very much.

We have another path. I’m calling it American Equity.

What it requires is public ownership of the things that are going to replace our jobs. If we don’t own a share, if we don’t own a controlling interest in the entities and technologies that replace American workers, we’re screwed. Taxes and UBI will not solve this. Fighting trillionaires and centi-billionaires that control our means of production is not a fight we need to have.

You, the top 20%, needn’t join me and my fellows in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. We can join you. We can join you in access to a life of plenty through American Equity. That is us, we the people, owning what we produce, owning what our knowledge and generations of labor is leading to.

And to the crowd already warming up the “seizing the means of production” line, let me remind you of something. Over the past 50 years, Wall Street sold our means of production to China and to anybody else who would do it cheaper. They didn’t give a damn about keeping it. They gave it away. So this isn’t about seizing anything. This is about rebuilding what they sold out from under us and owning it this time. AI and robotics can do that. But we have to own it, because these same people have already proven they are too greedy to be trusted with it.

We cannot be conned by words like socialism or communism, because the only alternative to American Equity is American Feudalism.

I’ve seen your future. I grew up in it.

Corbin Trent