The Wonderful News That We Are No Longer Needed

For ten thousand years, the powerful needed the rest of us, and frankly it was exhausting for everyone. The pharaohs needed peasants. The lords needed serfs. The factory owners needed workers. Stalin needed an army he could not finish murdering. The Nazis needed laborers they could not finish exterminating. This was not, as is sometimes claimed, a moral arrangement. It was a logistical one. The cruelty of human history was constrained, modestly, by the fact that even the worst people on Earth occasionally required other people to do something for them, and you cannot extract labor from a corpse, at least not yet, although there is a startup working on it.

This unfortunate codependency is now ending, and the reaction across the population has been, on the whole, one of relief.

You can feel it in the small daily evidence. We are pleased that we no longer have to talk to a cashier. We are pleased that the food arrives without involving a person we know. We are pleased that the therapist can be summoned through an app and dismissed when we get bored, which is roughly four minutes in. We are pleased that dating, that ancient and humiliating ritual, has been streamlined into a system where we can reject hundreds of strangers per evening from the privacy of our own bed, while eating crackers. We are pleased that our children can be raised, in significant part, by tablets, freeing us up for our true vocation, which is also tablets. The slow severing of the human web — the one that used to require us to coexist with people we did not select — has been experienced not as catastrophe but as a sequence of long-overdue conveniences.

So when the billionaires announce, very politely, that they no longer need us either, the reaction is not outrage. The reaction is recognition. We had already stopped needing each other. We were waiting for them to catch up.

This is the part that the serious commentators keep getting slightly wrong. They write thoughtful pieces about the dissolution of the social contract, the hollowing of democracy, the concentration of wealth, the structural conditions under which mutual dependence created the floor of civilization. All of this is correct. They then express horror that the floor is being removed. This is where they lose the room. The floor is not being removed against our will. The floor is being removed at our cheerful request, with a five-star review and a promise to recommend the service to a friend, if we still had any.

The data is consistent. The share of Americans who say most people can be trusted has been falling for fifty years. The share of Americans who say they have no close friends has been rising for twenty. The share of young men who report no romantic relationship of any kind in the past year is now historic. Loneliness, according to the Surgeon General, is a public health emergency on par with smoking. This is presented as a tragedy. It is, in some ways. But it is also, if we are being honest, a market signal. People have been given the option to opt out of each other, and they have opted out, and they have done so with the kind of decisive enthusiasm that markets typically reward. The product, in this case, is solitude. The product is selling well.

Into this market arrives the next wave of innovation, which proposes to remove human cooperation from the remaining domains where it was still grudgingly required. Robots will do the labor. AI will do the thinking. Drones will fight the wars. Algorithms will deliver the propaganda. The few hundred people who own the systems will not need armies, because the systems are the army. They will not need consumers, because the systems can produce what they consume, and what they consume is mostly not consumer products anyway. They will not need legitimacy, because legitimacy was always a function of needing the legitimized, and they will not need the legitimized any longer. The whole edifice of mutual obligation, which we used to call civilization, was scaffolding around a load-bearing inconvenience. The inconvenience is being engineered out. The scaffolding is collapsing on schedule.

The historical comparisons offered for this moment are charmingly inadequate. The commentators reach for Rome, for Weimar, for the late Soviet Union, for the eve of the French Revolution. These are all apt in their way, but they share a feature that distinguishes them from the present: in each case, the elites still needed the masses, however much they despised them. The Romans needed bread eaten by Roman mouths. The Bolsheviks needed bodies to fill the trenches. The French aristocracy needed peasants to grow the grain that fed Versailles. The conflicts that ensued, however brutal, occurred between groups that were locked in the same room. We are watching the construction of a building in which the rooms have been thoughtfully separated, with their own ventilation, and the door between them has been closed, and the upper floors have politely informed the lower ones that they will no longer be requiring service, and the lower floors have replied, “no problem, we were busy anyway.”

The aristocracy of the past was constrained by the inconvenient fact of having to live among us. The new aristocracy will not. Their compounds are being built. Their food chains are being secured. Their information environments are private. Their children attend schools the rest of us cannot pronounce. They have, with characteristic foresight, also begun to acquire passports in jurisdictions designed for people who anticipate not wanting to be found. The infrastructure of opt-out is mature. They are leaving. Not in the dramatic sense — they will still appear at conferences, give interviews, post on platforms they own — but in the sense that matters, which is the sense of belonging to a civilization that requires their presence. They are gradually emigrating from the species, and they are doing so without leaving the country.

The truly funny part, and it is funny in the particular way that a doctor’s mistaken cheerfulness is funny, is that we are not preventing this. We are accelerating it. Every act of withdrawal we perform — every neighbor we do not learn the name of, every union we do not join, every local business we replace with a faster app, every long conversation we replace with a faster reply — increases the marginal feasibility of the world we say we do not want. We say we want community, but we vote, with our time and our money and our attention, for the conditions in which community cannot grow. We say we want democracy, but we will not attend the meeting. We say we want to be needed, but we have arranged our lives such that nobody can need us, because being needed would interfere with our schedule.

The serious response to all of this involves rebuilding what is sometimes called civic life — gardens, neighborhoods, mutual aid, the practical small competences of being able to function without a server farm. This is correct. It is also, given the data on what people actually do, approximately as likely as a mass return to oil lamps. Civic life is hard. Civic life requires you to know people whose politics annoy you, to attend events that bore you, to commit to schedules that constrain you, to perform small acts of cooperation that no one will compensate or applaud. The friction of civic life is the entire point of civic life — it is what produces the trust, the resilience, the muscle memory of cooperation — and friction is exactly what the last forty years of innovation have been ruthlessly engineered to eliminate. We have built a civilization optimized for the elimination of friction, and we are now noticing that the things friction was holding together are coming apart, and we are responding by ordering more frictionless services, on the same devices, from the same companies, who are charmed by our consistency.

The historical record on this is unforgiving. Civilizations that lose the muscle of mutual cooperation do not, on the whole, recover it without going through something terrible first. The terrible thing is what produces the next round of cooperation, because the survivors discover, abruptly, that they need each other after all. There is a version of the future in which we get there voluntarily, by remembering before we are forced to. This version requires us to choose cooperation in the absence of necessity, to invest in relationships that no algorithm has matched us to, to accept the small daily inconvenience of being implicated in the lives of people we did not select. It requires, in other words, that we voluntarily reintroduce the friction we have spent two generations engineering away. It is unclear how many of us will choose this. The number of subscribers to convenience is, by current measurements, larger.

The other version of the future is the one we are currently building. In this version, the systems do the work, the systems entertain us, the systems provide our companionship, the systems mediate our politics, and the small number of people who own the systems live a life so divorced from the rest of the species that we will eventually appear to them, and to themselves, as a different kind of organism. The dependence will be one-directional. We will need them, in the way that pets need their owners. They will not need us. They will tolerate our continued existence, because exterminating us would be uncouth, but they will not require it, and the requirements were always what kept the floor under the cruelty.

This is presented as a worst-case scenario. It is more accurately a default-case scenario. It is what happens if nothing in particular is done. It is the scenario that arrives if we keep doing what we are doing, which is what we are doing.

The serious commentators end their pieces by calling for resolve. They write that fatalism is a gift to the worst possible future, that despair is what the powerful want from us, that the people who got through the worst centuries and left things better did so by seeing clearly and working anyway. All of this is true. It is also, unfortunately, the kind of thing that has been true for a long time, and it has not, as far as anyone can determine, prevented us from arriving exactly where we are. The exhortation to resolve is itself a kind of content, and the content is consumed, and after consumption we feel slightly better, and then we close the tab, and the tab is replaced by another tab, and the next tab is also good, and by the time we have finished consuming the tabs the day is over and we have not, in any concrete sense, done the thing the first tab told us to do.

So we arrive at the present, which is genuinely funny, in the way that watching someone trip in slow motion is funny, especially if you cannot quite tell whether the person tripping is a stranger or yourself. The mutual dependence that built civilization is dissolving. The dissolution is being experienced, by most participants, as relief. The relief is being monetized. The monetization is funding the next round of dissolution. The cycle is closing. The few people in a position to slow it have noticed that they personally do not lose by speeding it up, and the rest of us, who do lose, have been provided with such excellent distractions that we have not yet found the moment to mind.

This is going to end. Things that contradict themselves at this scale always end. The question is whether it ends with the slow, painful reconstruction of a cooperation we forgot we needed, or with the faster, harder version of the same lesson. The slow version is available now and unpopular. The fast version is on its way and will be, in due course, unavoidable.

We are no longer needed. This is, in many small ways, the great gift of our time. Nothing is required of us. Nobody is waiting. Nobody is counting on us. We can spend our days exactly as we like, and we are, and we will, and we will continue to, until the day arrives when we cannot, and on that day we will discover, with mild surprise, what need actually feels like.

It will be, on the whole, a relief.

Until it isn’t.