From White Lotus to White Collar Extinction

AI, Class, and the End of Work – Is This the Real Life?

Paradise Lost: The Tech Bro Beach Club

Picture it: sun-soaked figures lounging on pristine sand sipping piña coladas, like something straight out of White Lotus, boasting about their AI printing cold cash while they top up their tans and polish their egos.

Meanwhile…

A freelance copywriter and designer sit in silence, their bottle of sun protection almost empty, watching the sun melt into the sea. They know this could be their last real holiday.

Their jobs? Eaten alive by something cheaper, faster, and non-unionised.

Welcome to capitalism's latest reality show: Dance for Your Data, Monkey!”

Is this the world we want? Maybe, if you're the one printing money. But if you're the one being printed out of existence, it's a different story entirely. Truth is, we're not just being turned into performers any more—we're being replaced by performance itself.

Designers, copywriters, illustrators, junior devs, even voiceover artists — the list keeps growing. Real people. Real jobs. Replaced not by talent, but by tools that mimic just enough to get by.

You used to build. Now you prompt. You used to pitch. Now you edit what a bot spat out in six seconds. Meanwhile, the people cashing cheques are the ones building the tools that gut your role. That’s the shift. Not evolution, but extraction. Though you may think you are, you’re not collaborating with AI. You’re being repackaged by it keystroke by keystroke.

Musking over the facts

Industry titans like Elon Musk have become self-anointed gods of the algorithmic age—building and selling a future in which most of the working population no longer figures. They’re not preserving jobs. They’re designing systems that erase them, while profiting from each disappearing role. If hell on earth is economic obsolescence, we’re watching its foundations being laid in real time.

Get a Job, Get a Life, Unless AI Gets There First

In 1988, in a House track called "The Real Life” by Corporation of One (ironically enough), an ethereal, Godlike voice booms…

“Get a job. Get a girl. Get a life."

Forget the dated sentiment; go ahead and replace “girl” with whatever secondary pillar fits—status, security, purpose, freedom, whatever works—and, Hey Presto! You've got “The Life”!

But while “The Real Life” was an underground chant for a bright-eyed generation, what happens when that first step, “get a job”, gets sucked up in an AI vacuum? What happens when “get a job” just isn’t possible anymore…because the ground has shifted.

The ‘Thinking’ Computer

Machine learning—the stuff that made AI possible—was born around the same time The Real Life. During the late 1980s, in tech labs most weren’t aware existed, a revolutionary shift from rigid rule-based systems to statistical machine learning—probabilistic approaches that could actually learn and adapt—was underway. Without these foundational breakthroughs, the neural networks and deep learning systems threatening employment today would never have existed.

At that time we were, quite literally, dancing to the rhythm of our own obsolescence, celebrating a new social order that technology was already beginning—byte by byte, beat by beat—to dismantle. While house music pounded out its mantra of conventional success, computer scientists were busy laying the groundwork for a future where "getting a job" might become an impossibility for most. And the hard fact now is: we’re almost there.

The Trickle-Down Delusion

We’re being sold the ida that AI will create new opportunities. But right now, it’s mostly creating leaner teams—solo founders or co-founders using dozens of tools (AI agents) to run companies with no staff (and getting VC backing to do so). At the same time LinkedIn is increasingly littered with posts applauding this new hyper-efficiency, while whole sectors of human industry quietly die.

The real question isn’t if AI changes the game, it’s whether anyone without equity in this developing paradigm will be allowed to keep playing. Some think the solution to all of this job displacement—to redundancies on a scale never witnessed before—is the Universal Basic Income (UBI). But that’s where things really start to fall apart.

---

👀 Leapfrog the paywall for these bonus bangers!

• The rest of the article (it packs a punch)

• The seminal tune that sparked this piece

• The full AI x Music timeline — year by year, track by track, from 1988 to 2025

All of this and much more, every month, for less than a daily newspaper