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Today’s wrong question is this one: “Is the future already decided?”
I want us to actually sit with that for a second. Because I keep hearing two very different groups of people… who both answer that question in the same way.
One group emphatically says, “YES. And it’s going to be a dystopian hellhole. Billionaires plus A.I. inevitably equals techno-feudalism.”
The other group, just as energetically, says, “YES. And it’ll work itself out. This has happened before. New technology inevitably creates more jobs than it destroys.”
Very different futures, of course, but the exact same assumption: inevitability.
Today, I’m going to show you why a belief in ANY inevitable future — no matter how horrifying or how hopeful — isn’t just dangerous, it’s historically wrong.
Why Inevitability Feels So Good
Let’s be honest, inevitability is comforting.
If techno-feudalism is inevitable, I don’t have to do anything. If abundance is inevitable, I don’t have to do anything. Either way, I’m off the hook. I get to observe history instead of shape it.
But that relief is a lie we tell ourselves.
Because inevitability is surrender disguised as sophistication.
It sounds intelligent. Detached. Realistic.
We see this all the time. Tech executives saying: “A.I. will obviously replace most jobs, that’s just how technology works.” Activists saying: “Billionaires will obviously rig the system, that’s just how power works.”
Different predictions. Same abdication of responsibility.
Both groups get to feel smart.
But historically and anthropologically speaking?
Neither of these positions make any freaking sense.
Human beings are not a species that survives by passively accepting dominant power structures.
We adapt.
We organize.
We resist.
We redesign.
If inevitability governed social systems, we’d still be living under the first empire that figured out how to consolidate power.
We’re here precisely because inevitability has never been the final word.
And history has made that painfully clear.
I’ll give you three examples.
For each example, I’m also going to be showing you photography because, as you’ll see, these photos were often a crucial part of shaping a better future. Warning that some are a bit intense.
Child Labor Didn’t Fade Away, It Was Dragged Into the Light
First, let’s talk about child labor.
At the turn of the 20th century, children were basically industrial inputs. Eight-year-olds in coal breaking plants picking slate from moving chutes. Ten-year-olds working twelve-hour shifts in textile mills. Small fingers were useful for fixing jammed machines.
This wasn’t hidden, it was… normal.
Then a man named Lewis Hine walked into those factories with a camera.
Factory owners despised him. He sometimes pretended to be a Bible salesman to get inside.
He asked the kids their names. Their ages. Their hours. And then he photographed them. Let me show you just a few.
Here’s a boy with a cigarette, with other boys, all working at American Locomotive in New York. The smoking boy said he was 14.
Girls in textile mills in North Carolina. The girl on the left said she was 10 years old and had been working there a long time, more than a year. The girl on the right said she was 12 years old.
This boy worked in a coal mine called Turkey Knob Mine in West Virginia.
In 1912, Hine photographed a boy named Giles Newsom in North Carolina.
Giles was working at Sanders Spinning Mill in Bessemer City. A piece of machinery fell on his foot. When he stumbled, his hand went into unprotected gearing. It crushed and tore out two of his fingers.
He was 11 years old.
Seven years later, Giles died of Spanish flu. He was 18.
He was still working in a textile mill.
Those photos detonated something arguments never could.
But even with this brutal photographic truth, reform didn’t gracefully glide in.
Federal child labor laws were struck down by the Supreme Court. Twice. In 1918 and 1922. Industrialists fought. States resisted. The reasoning? States’ rights. Parental rights. “Free markets.” It took the Great Depression, mass adult unemployment, and FDR’s New Deal before Congress finally passed child labor protections that stuck.
That was 1938 — twenty-six years after Hine photographed Giles Newsom.
An entire generation of children worked in those mills while lawyers argued in courtrooms about whether the government had the authority to protect them.
Child labor didn’t just “disappear.”
It was exposed. It was resisted. And then it was forced into exile.
Women Didn’t “Eventually” Get the Vote
Second, let’s talk about women’s suffrage.
I’ve heard this story told like it was some kind of inevitable civic maturation, but it was most certainly not. This was a multi-generational war of otherworldly persistence.
The fight for women’s suffrage lasted over seventy years — longer than the average lifespan of that time period. Women marched. Organized. Petitioned. They were mocked as hysterical. Jailed. Beaten. Tortured.
Here’s the brief story.
In the U.S. we could put the starting point for women’s suffrage in July of 1848, when about 300 people gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women’s rights convention. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, they produced a “Declaration of Sentiments” — basically the Declaration of Independence, but, you know, with women included.
The most controversial demand? The right to vote. It barely passed. Many of the signers later withdrew their names because of the backlash.
But the movement never died.
Seventy years later, in January of 1917, twelve women arrived at the White House gates.
Now I want you to notice what happens in this one year.
The women who showed up at the White House carried banners. They said nothing. They just stood there. Six days a week. They became known as the “Silent Sentinels.”
President Woodrow Wilson did his best to ignore them after they declined his offer to have tea.
In April of 1917, the United States entered World War 1. Wilson declared we were fighting to “make the world safe for democracy” and the suffragists changed their signs…
…to address “Kaiser Wilson.”
People didn’t like this.
Mobs attacked the picketers, tore their banners, and beat them up, while the police stood by and watched.
In June of 1917, the police finally decided to intervene… by arresting the suffragists.
Minor, and false, charges like “obstructing traffic” — they were on a 15-foot wide sidewalk — got the ladies sent to a place called Occoquan Workhouse.
In Occoquan, in response to the rough treatment, poor conditions, and two weeks with only bread and water, Alice Paul started a hunger strike, which led the guards to force-feed her through a tube in her nose. Here’s a photo from the suffrage battle in the UK, where this same fight, using similar tactics, was happening at almost the exact same time.
Then in November of 1917, 31 women picketed the White House. All were arrested, and arrived at Occuquan four days later. The superintendent ordered his guards to “teach them a lesson.”
What happened next became known as The Night Of Terror.
Here’s how History.com describes it:
“[Lucy] Burns had her hands shackled to the top of a cell, forcing her to stand all night; the guards also threatened her with a straitjacket and a buckle gag. [Dorothy] Day (the future founder of the Catholic Worker Movement) was slammed down on the arm of an iron bench twice. Dora Lewis lost consciousness after her head was smashed into an iron bed. Alice Cosu, seeing Lewis’ assault, suffered a heart attack, and didn’t get medical attention until the following morning.”
Remind me of their heinous crime?
Oh right… holding signs.
When the women were finally released, many were too weak to walk. But news of The Night Of Terror spread, and the public was horrified.
On January 9, 1918 — less than two months later — President Wilson announced his support for women’s suffrage.
In June 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and it was ratified the following summer.
72 years after Seneca Falls.
This amendment didn’t pass because time passed. Systems don’t “eventually” yield. They yield when the pressure becomes unbearable.
Workplace Safety Was Written in Ash
Third, let’s talk about workplace safety.
On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City.
Employees tried to escape, but couldn’t.
Why? Mostly because the exits were locked.
Why were they locked? To prevent theft. To prevent unscheduled breaks.
One hundred forty-six people died. Mostly young women.
Some perished from the fire itself, some from smoke inhalation, and some got trampled in the too-small and too-dark stairwell. Some died when the fire escape collapsed underneath them. Some jumped from the windows to their deaths on the street below.
Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory owners, actually profited from the fire. Their insurance paid them $60,000 — about $400 per worker killed.
They were later fined $75.
Not per death. Total.
Two years later, Blanck was caught locking exit doors again in his new factory location. This wasn’t just one jerk boss, it was perfectly standard practice at the time.
Systems, my friends.
But public outrage did help reshape labor law. A few months after the fire, New York created the Factory Investigating Commission and gave it unprecedented power.
Here are a few things the Commission did:
- They investigated 1,836 factories, and ended up passing 60 of 64 recommended laws.
- They rewrote New York’s entire labor code: fire drills, sprinklers, unlocked exits, building codes, sanitation, limited hours for women and children.
- New York went from a kind of industrial hellscape for workers to the most progressive state for labor in just two years.
You’re hopefully seeing how this works. Just like child labor and women’s suffrage, workplace safety wasn’t born out of inevitable progress or enlightenment. It was born out of catastrophe. It was written in smoke and ash. And it wasn’t the fire that actually changed things, but the collective public response after that made change possible.
A week after the fire, people marched — 100,000+ strong down Fifth Avenue in the rain. But this wasn’t just a protest. It was a funeral for the unidentified dead.
What do I mean by “unidentified dead?”
I want to share with you some words from writer and reformer Martha Bensley Bruère in a piece she wrote about that day, called “What is to be done?”:
Well, the fire is over, the girls are dead, and as I write, the procession in honor of the unidentified dead is moving by under my windows.
For two hours they have been going steadily by and the end is not yet in sight. There have been no carriages, no imposing marshals on horseback; just thousands and thousands of working men and women carrying the banners of their trades through the long three-mile tramp in the rain.
Never have I seen a military pageant or triumphant ovation so impressive; for it is not because 146 workers were killed in the Triangle shop… not altogether.
It is because every year there are 50,000 working men and women killed in the United States — 136 a day; almost as many as happened to be killed together on the 25th of March; and because slowly, very slowly, it is dawning on these thousands on thousands that such things do not have to be!
Such things do NOT have to be.
But they very often are — until enough people stand up and say no more.
If you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you’ve heard me talk about the pattern of “gradually, then suddenly.”
Change compounds quietly for years — sometimes decades — before it becomes visible.
Child labor reform didn’t explode overnight. It simmered.
Women’s suffrage didn’t erupt from nowhere. It endured.
Workplace safety didn’t emerge smoothly. It built pressure until it broke through.
And here’s what’s fascinating: when the “suddenly” happens, we look back and call it… you guessed it: inevitable.
Of course women were going to get the vote!
Of course child labor was going to end!
Of course factories were going to become safer!
But during the gradual phase? It didn’t feel inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable. It was fragile. Contested. Uncertain.
Back To The Two Futures
Now let’s return to the two futures we started with.
Future #1: “Techno-feudalism.”
A.I. replaces labor. Wealth concentrates. The owners of machines become the new aristocracy. Have you seen a movie called Elysium? Kind of like that.
It’s uncomfortable to say, but under our current rules, that trajectory is plausible.
- If capital owns A.I.…
- If productivity explodes…
- If ownership remains concentrated…
- If tax structures and labor protections remain untouched…
Wealth will continue to concentrate. We’re already seeing it. The top 1% of Americans now own more wealth than the entire middle class.
BUT… that wasn’t inevitable either. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the rules — tax policy, labor law, antitrust enforcement — changed to allow it. We talked about this in my Economics Is A Lie episode from a few weeks ago; we are living in the world that neoliberal policies built.
So, an extension of the trajectory we’re on now could very well lead to a techno-feudalist dystopia. That’s where current incentives lead.
But THAT is my point.
It’s not inevitable, but it is currently incentivized.
Which means techno-feudalism would not be an A.I. outcome.
It would be a governance failure.
Now Future #2: “Abundance! Relax, the market adapts!”
This group points to history. “New technology always creates new jobs” they say. And honestly? They’re not entirely wrong. But they are leaving out all of the “fight” we saw happen in our 3 examples AND they’re making huge assumptions that some other things will somehow magically happen, that:
- Companies will invest in human development…
- Displaced workers will get retrained for new roles…
- Governments will fund transition programs…
- Education systems will rapidly adapt their curriculum…
The big problem with this future is: none of that is currently incentivized.
Under current rules, companies get rewarded for cutting labor costs, not retraining workers. Shareholders get rewarded for automation and efficiency gains, not workforce transitions. Our government’s current tax policies reward capital investment, not human investment. Our current education system doesn’t rapidly do anything.
So no, the market is not “adapting.” It is following incentives.
And yes, in the past, industrialization has eventually created new jobs — after decades of strikes, regulation, antitrust enforcement, public education expansion, and labor law battles.
The market has never calmly self-corrected when it comes to protecting workers, reducing inequality, or addressing systemic harms. Society eventually restructures around disruptions — but historically, that’s required governance intervention, not market magic.
So, when someone says “it’ll work itself out,” what they’re really saying is they trust that structural and institutional redesign will happen again.
But this kind of redesign doesn’t happen automatically.
It happens when people insist on it.
Both of these “inevitable” futures contain partial truths, but both futures ignore our agency in creating the future.
Both of these “inevitable” futures also make assumptions about the rules.
Future 1 assumes the current rules will stay fixed. I don’t know many people who want that.
Future 2 assumes the current rules will change drastically. But history says that will not happen without people who act.
The real question isn’t which future is inevitable.
It’s who will care enough to shape the next set of rules?
The Future Is Not Written By Technology
We are not in a maintenance era.
We are in a redesign cycle.
Technological foundations are shifting. Economic structures are wobbling. Institutional trust is eroding. These are the times when rules get rewritten.
Believing in inevitability during a redesign cycle is like watching wet cement harden and saying, “Well, I guess that’s just how it sets.”
No.
It sets based on how it’s shaped.
And here’s the part that matters most: this isn’t about guilt. It’s about inheritance. Yours! Every “human right” you now enjoy exists because someone before you refused a belief system of inevitability. They, too, were told the system was natural. Permanent. Fixed.
They refused to believe it.
If progress were inevitable, it wouldn’t have required courage or fight or rebellion.
So when someone tells you collapse is inevitable…
or techno-feudalism is inevitable…
or abundance is inevitable…
remember this:
The future is not written by technology.
It is negotiated by people.
And the only thing that becomes inevitable… is what we refuse to shape.
The Optimistic Rebellion
This week’s Optimistic Rebellion is simple.
For the next seven days, and hopefully beyond, I challenge you to replace the word “inevitable” with the phrase “currently incentivized.”
A.I. inequality isn’t inevitable, it’s just what’s currently incentivized.
Wealth concentration isn’t inevitable, it’s just what’s currently incentivized.
Collapse isn’t inevitable, it’s just what’s currently incentivized.
The question is not whether the future is already decided. The question is whether you believe you’re just watching it… or you believe you can help build it.
Either way, you’ll prove yourself right.
But always remember: if something is incentivized… those incentives can change.
If enough of us care to make it happen.
