The computer was sold to us as a “bicycle for the mind”: something to help us get more done and become more fit in the process, a productivity enhancer that also made us work harder. And perhaps it was for a short sweet spot in the 80s and 90s. But successive waves of digitization have given us instead a mobility scooter for the mind. A handful of us still use our devices to be super-productive, but more and more of us have allowed ourselves to be passively shuttled along the information superhighway, becoming both physically and mentally obese in the process. 

Note: You may notice my Substack has been rebranded, leaving behind the “Commonwealth Dispatches” brand I established while at EPPC, and going with a simpler, cleaner look. As part of this rebrand, I am also “relaunching” after several months of radio silence. Today’s post should be taken as something of a theme statement for my work at American Compass over the coming year, and indeed as a draft opening chapter for a book I am working on. I hope you’ll join me over 2026 as I wrestle through the contemporary crisis of human competence, the political economy of digital technology, and search for a path forward into a more human future.

When I was ten or so, my parents, nostalgic for what they had misremembered as a wholesome family comedy, gathered the kids around the boxy living room TV to savor the spectacle of National Lampoon’s Vacation. In the film, Chevy Chase plays Clark Griswold, a middle-aged father of two, who decides to take his family on a cross-country road trip to their dream destination, a southern California amusement park called “Walley World.” Despite an escalating series of tragicomic mishaps along the way, the Griswolds (minus Aunt Edna and her dog, who have both perished along the way) finally arrive at Walley World, driven by Clark’s manic determination—only to discover that it is closed for two weeks for renovation.

A fitting metaphor, perhaps, for our technological society.

A Post-Work Society?

For the past century or two, our civilization has collectively embarked on a journey in search of the perfect vacation, imagining, on the other side of all our industrial age blood, toil, and sweat the ultimate pleasure-dome of a leisured post-work society. Writing in 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously imagined the “Economic Possibilities for our Granchildren”: a world a hundred years hence in which “the economic problem may be solved,” and human beings will be able to while away their time in almost continual leisure, working just 15 hours a week. Just as each of us has been increasingly conditioned to work just so we can get to the weekend, or our next PTO, when we can really start living, so Keynes exhorted his countrymen to struggle through another couple of generations of economic growing pains to arrive at the broad sunlit uplands on the other side.

Thus far, we don’t appear on the verge of a 15-hour week, or of “solving the economic problem.” But according to our new AI overlords, utopia may be just around the corner. Even now, we are told, a post-work world is dawning, a world of almost limitless productivity and thus almost limitless leisure. Sam Altman promises us a world in which “the cost of labor will fall toward zero” and “People will have more time to spend with their families, more time to be creative, more time to engage in the community, and more time to do whatever they find most meaningful.” And his fellow billionaire Marc Andreesen promises a coming “golden age of the arts” in his essay “Why AI Will Save the World.” We may well dispute the premise: there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether AI can in fact replace anything like as much human work as its boosters claim. We might also observe that for much of capitalism’s history, the increased leisure of the globe’s overclass has been bought at the price of drudgery for toiling millions laboring in windowless rooms in some hidden corner of the planet.

But let us grant the claim—not just for the sake of argument, but because we are already seeing glimpses of a post-work future. Over the past twenty years, labor force participation has declined notably in the United States (from 67% to 62%), with the sharpest declines among prime-age men. And for more and more of those still participating in the labor force, work is more a charade than a calling, as employees in “bullshit jobs” while away their hours on social media when the boss isn’t looking. Recent studies suggest that the average employee is only actually working for 2.5 to 4 hours of an 8-hour workday, with social media alone consuming 1.5 to 2 hours of job time, according to some sources. In other words, in some ways we may already be down to a 15-hour work week, but we are no happier for it. In fact, Americans today are less happy than at any time in the history of the General Social Survey, a trend led by surging pessimism among young people, where unhappiness rates have tripled since the turn of the millenium. Keynes was clearsighted enough to foresee this possibility, expressing the “dread” he felt at the prospect of humanity “deprived of its traditional purpose.” Hannah Arendt echoed his assessment a generation later, warning, “It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”

Rather than arriving at Walley World, then, a pleasure-dome of family fun and entertainment, we find ourselves instead increasingly living in WALL-E’s world, the dystopian future imagined by the 2007 Pixar masterpiece.

The End of Human Competence

I don’t know about you, but when I first watched the film nearly two decades ago, I read it chiefly through the lens of environmentalist catastrophism. The most salient image of the film, it seemed at the time, was the enormous piles of trash that had rendered Planet Earth uninhabitable, with trash-compactor robots like WALL-E condemned to the hopeless task of trying to clean it up while the remaining humans escaped off-world. Thus far, although humanity is generating astounding quantities of garbage and dumping millions of tons of microplastics in the oceans, we are not at grave risk of burying Manhattan under towering piles of refuse. But that, I have become convinced, was not the main point of WALL-E anyway.

Today, the much more salient image is that of morbidly obese human blobs floating along on pods through smooth white minimalist hallways, slurping on smoothies while glued to personal screens, no longer even aware of one another’s presence. These blob-humans will still communicate with one another (perhaps the film’s creators lacked the imagination to anticipate a world in which large masses of the population preferred AI companions), but only through the intermediation of their video screens, arguing over how best to while away their oppressive leisure time. When the screens turn off, and two humans encounter one another face-to-face for the first time, they are bewildered and embarrassed by the experience.

In this robotic future, nothing remains to be done for one another. There are robots to clean the hallways, robots to raise the babies (gestated in artificial wombs, we may well suspect), and robots to repair the other robots. And so we no longer know how to do anything. The hyper-obesity of the humans in the film is more than an imaginative projection of just how much fatter our already historically obese society might get on a full-service space station; it is a synecdoche for the loss of human competence, the loss of human agency. The blob-humans of the future, like the blob-humans we are fast becoming today, have outsourced everything that requires effort, and thus almost everything that makes them human.

Today, as I was writing this, I read an X post by an economist: “I recently spoke with someone from Gen Z who just began dating someone new. He said he will upload entire chat histories of their texts and shared photos to ChatGPT and ChatGPT will analyze the relationship, break down their relational patterns and attachment styles, and advise him how to approach the relationship going forward for optimal outcomes, even crafting exact texts for him to send back to her….According to this guy, ‘all his friends are doing this now’.” Today was not an anomaly. Nearly every day I read similar stories, stories of human beings feverishly engaged in their own erasure, human beings desperate to avoid doing something that until yesterday they were experts at, or at which they could have become experts tomorrow with a bit of effort, human beings tripping over one another to give away their most precious earthly possession: their own competence.

The blob-humans of WALL-E have stopped bothering to do anything human because they have been torn away from the world in which humanity finds meaning.

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