The Head Fake: From Harari to Lutnick, and the Capitalist Lie Behind the New Serfdom
Harari warned of a “useless class.” Lutnick offers them factory work for life. This isn’t dystopia delayed—it’s capitalism delivered. Not by the state, but by the market. Built to exclude. Sold as progress. Designed to be unmade.
Introduction
We were taught to recognise tyranny by the feel of the boot. Orwell’s 1984 gave us the image of the state as a brutal enforcer—an omnipresent eye watching our every move, stamping out dissent with surveillance and violence. Huxley’s Brave New World offered a subtler warning: that domination might come not through fear, but through pleasure—through sedation, distraction, and engineered contentment. For decades, these two visions shaped how we talked about power, liberty, and control. Politicians, pundits, and even school curricula asked us to debate which fate was more terrifying—submission through pain or submission through pleasure. But what almost no one told us—what we were not taught to see—was that these were not competing futures. They were two halves of the same machinery. And the architect was never the state. It was the market.
This is the head fake: whilst the public was trained to fear totalitarianism from above—some socialist state taking away their freedom in the name of safety—what was really taking shape was a totalitarianism from below, creeping in through consumer choice, gig work, and platform dependency. Not a jackboot, but a branded sneaker. Not the gulag, but the algorithm. As people stocked up on firearms to fend off imagined government tyranny, private industry quietly embedded itself into every crevice of daily life—tracking, nudging, monetising, enclosing. The dystopia arrived not through state mandates, but through terms and conditions.
And now, with figures like Yuval Noah Harari speaking coolly of a future “useless class” pacified by drugs and screens, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick proposing hereditary factory work as a new American ideal, the mask slips. This is not the result of failed socialism. It is the inevitable consequence of late capitalism. The world Harari describes is not a theoretical caution—it is already here, structured by capital, administered by tech, and legitimised by language like “opportunity” and “upskilling.” What was framed as a dystopian warning has been taken up as a template—not by governments seeking to liberate people, but by capitalists seeking to control them.
This is not just a failure of imagination. It is the success of ideology. We were never meant to recognise the market as tyrant—only as freedom itself.
Harari and the Invention of the “Useless Class”
At the World Economic Forum and in various high-profile talks and interviews throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s, Yuval Noah Harari emerged as a kind of philosopher-in-residence for the tech elite. In calm, polished tones, he warned of a coming age in which artificial intelligence and biotechnology would render vast swathes of humanity economically irrelevant. This “useless class,” as he provocatively termed it, would not only be unemployed but fundamentally unemployable—surplus to the needs of a world run by machines and governed by those with the data, the algorithms, and the capital. Harari imagined a future in which the rich would continue to upgrade themselves—physically, cognitively, genetically—whilst the rest would be left to drift, pacified by pharmacological interventions and digital entertainment. The language was clinical, even neutral. But the implications were anything but.
These statements caused understandable alarm, but what’s notable is who seized upon them and how. Across right-wing media ecosystems, Harari became a lightning rod—a stand-in for everything the populist right wanted their base to fear. To them, he wasn’t simply describing a plausible future—he was part of the cabal orchestrating it. They painted him as the mouthpiece of a globalist technocracy hell-bent on enslaving the masses under the guise of progress. In their telling, it was the socialist state—WEF-style world government—that would medicate and sedate the working class whilst hoarding wealth and power. Harari’s comments were repeatedly stripped of context and repackaged into paranoia: evidence that “they” were coming to take your job, your autonomy, your future.
But here’s the inversion: Harari wasn’t describing socialism. He was describing capitalism, functioning as designed. There is no collectivist central planning in his vision—no redistribution, no reimagination of value. There is only division: between the upgraded and the obsolete, the owning class and the managed class. What he articulates—perhaps without naming it—is the next phase of capital accumulation in a world where labour has become optional for profit. This is not a break from capitalism but its logical endgame.
Marx wrote extensively about the reserve army of labour—those unemployed or underemployed bodies who serve to depress wages and keep the working class compliant. In the age of AI and algorithmic control, that reserve army threatens to become a permanent caste. No longer a cyclical surplus waiting to be reabsorbed, but a structurally abandoned population, sustained only insofar as they can be monitored, pacified, or harvested for data. Alienation, too, reaches new depths—not just from the product of one’s labour, but from labour itself, and thus from purpose, social participation, and political agency.
Harari’s “useless class” is not an abstract warning. It is the name capital gives to those it no longer needs but cannot yet dispose of. And it was never the socialists who sought to build that world. It was the capitalists who feared their own obsolescence—and built cages for everyone else instead.
The Conservative Rebrand: From Warning to Blueprint
In the aftermath of Harari’s comments, it didn’t take long for the far-right (conservatives and cryptolibertarians) to find a useful villain. Harari—scholarly, secular, Israeli, and WEF-adjacent—was the perfect avatar for the right’s favourite bogeyman: the globalist technocrat. They clipped his interviews, dubbed them over with ominous music, and presented him not as an analyst of capitalism’s trajectory, but as a high priest of neo-totalitarianism. In their telling, he wasn’t warning about a class made economically obsolete by automation; he was planning it. The “useless class” became a flashpoint in the culture war, invoked to rally populist resentment against imagined socialist overlords pushing vaccines, surveillance, and ‘woke’ ideology.
But this outrage masked a sleight of hand. While they accused Harari and his ilk of plotting to enslave humanity through technology and central control, these same voices were actively laying the groundwork for a far more brutal and unaccountable order—one in which the state retreats and capital rules entirely. The very people who screamed loudest about government overreach were building a world where regulation is dismantled, public goods are privatised, and the only remaining authority is the algorithm. Their dystopia wasn’t Harari’s. It was Milton Friedman’s.
This is the core of the ideological inversion: libertarians framed the warnings of thinkers like Harari as blueprints for a socialist takeover, all whilst preparing to implement that future themselves—only stripped of any mechanism for redistribution, accountability, or care. No universal basic income. No worker protections. No democratic say. Just a cast-off underclass drugged and distracted, and a ruling class that sells it as freedom.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps make sense of how this inversion took hold. Ruling class ideas don’t dominate by brute force—they become common sense. They colonise the imagination. The idea that public investment is tyranny whilst corporate control is liberty, that government aid breeds dependence but billionaire largesse is noble, that state surveillance is oppression but platform surveillance is convenience—these are not neutral beliefs. They are hegemonic tools that prevent people from seeing who truly benefits.
And as Slavoj Žižek so acutely observed, the people who warn most loudly about dystopia are often those preparing to enforce it. The dystopia is not an accident—it is a design. A fantasy of total control, total stratification, total predictability. But the genius of this version is that it comes wearing a mask: freedom of choice, flexibility, entrepreneurial hustle. It sells you the cage as a toolkit. It tells you Harari is the threat whilst building a future he merely described—only crueller, colder, and completely under corporate command.
Education as Indoctrination: Recreational Reading and the Death of Critical Thought
It doesn’t begin with the factory. It begins in the classroom.
Long before a person is labelled “unskilled” or “useless,” they are shaped by an education system that quietly trains them to expect less—from language, from life, from themselves. In my 2023 essay “Recreational Reading,” I described how schools no longer teach reading as a way into the self or the world. Reading, once an act of discovery, has become a compliance ritual—extraction over immersion, decoding over wonder. Students are rewarded not for curiosity, but for their ability to navigate disjointed, contextless snippets of information. Standardised testing prizes the fast and the shallow: the quick inference, the technical correctness, the quiet conformity. There is no room for the long, meandering tenderness of a Tove Jansson novel. No value placed on the kind of rich, recursive thinking that emerges when language is lived with, not simply scanned.
This didn’t happen all at once. It has been slow and systematic. Across decades, curricula were narrowed, funding cut, joy removed. Critical thinking gave way to test readiness. Expression gave way to metrics. And through it all, children like me—autistic, gestalt language processors—fell through the cracks entirely. Not just ignored, but misunderstood at the structural level. We make meaning through chunks, echoes, whole ideas—not phonics drills and sentence stems. We are 40% of the population, by some estimates. And yet we are invisible in the eyes of a system designed to flatten language into utility.
I wrote a book about this—Holistic Language Instruction—a comprehensive guide to teaching literacy in a way that honours difference and restores depth. But like so many radical works that threaten the machinery, it was buried by the algorithms. Too niche. Too long. Too thoughtful. Too unwilling to play the game. This is how ideology functions—not just in what it teaches, but in what it makes disappear.
Althusser described education as an Ideological State Apparatus, a tool through which the state instils the values and norms of the ruling class. But in our time, it is more accurate to see it as an Ideological Market Apparatus—where corporate interests, not civic ones, dictate the shape of learning. Schools no longer cultivate minds; they produce workers. And not even skilled ones—just docile ones, grateful for gig work, compliant in the face of surveillance, unequipped to resist because they were never given the language to do so.
The “useless class” Harari describes does not simply emerge from automation. It is produced—methodically, predictably, cruelly—through an education system that erases curiosity, complexity, and community. It ensures that by the time students enter adulthood, they have already internalised the idea that their job is not to question the system, but to survive within it. Preferably quietly.
Lutnick’s Model: Factory Work for Life
In May 2025, Howard Lutnick—billionaire financier, lifelong Democrat-turned-Trump-aligned loyalist, and now U.S. Secretary of Commerce—stood before the press and described the future of work with unsettling clarity. “This is the new model,” he declared, “where you work in these plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” It was not a slip of the tongue. It was a blueprint—one that brought Harari’s “useless class” out of speculative fiction and straight into economic policy. Lutnick didn’t speak of liberation, mobility, or innovation. He spoke of inheritance—not of wealth, but of wage labour. And in doing so, he laid bare the real trajectory of American capitalism.
This is not a return to the mid-century vision of manufacturing as a stable, middle-class pathway. The plants of today are not sites of solidarity, union strength, or collective bargaining. They are algorithmic ecosystems—staffed by a dwindling number of humans and an expanding fleet of machines. The human role is no longer to build, but to maintain. And even that is temporary, precarious, surveilled. Lutnick sells it as opportunity—a $90,000-a-year job for high school graduates. But stripped of context, that figure hides a darker truth: the absence of public services, the collapse of higher education, the eviction of immigrants, and the elimination of alternatives. It is not a ladder. It is a cage—wage slavery wrapped in patriotic branding.
Marx, in Capital, described the deskilling of labour as a hallmark of industrial capitalism. As machinery advanced, workers became appendages to it—easily replaced, easily controlled. Skilled trades were broken down into repetitive tasks, and workers’ power declined with their autonomy. Engels took it further, observing how the working class itself was reproduced—not only biologically, but socially—by conditions that ensured the same poverty, the same precarity, generation after generation. What Lutnick proposes is not a modern economy. It is the reimposition of that cycle—this time under the auspices of “upskilling” and “community investment.”
That Lutnick has traversed party lines so smoothly—spending decades as a Democrat before embracing Trumpian economic nationalism—only confirms what many of us have long known: that the division between the two major parties in the United States is largely performative when it comes to capital. Both uphold the supremacy of the market. Both serve the interests of the owning class. The only real difference is the aesthetic. Lutnick’s appointment to the Commerce Department wasn’t an accident. It was a purchase. A confirmation that in the United States, policy is not made—it is bought, and often by the very people it is meant to regulate.
This isn’t progress. It’s enclosure—not of land, as in the old feudal orders, but of possibility. There is no commons to return to. No alternative path. Just the factory. Your factory. Your child’s factory. Your grandchild’s. A heritage of servitude dressed up as stability. And the door, once entered, rarely opens back out.
The Reality: Not Huxley vs. Orwell—But Both at Once
The tension between Huxley and Orwell—the soft tyranny of pleasure versus the hard tyranny of control—was never meant to be resolved. It was meant to keep us distracted, debating aesthetics whilst the machinery of power evolved past both. In truth, the world we now inhabit doesn’t resemble one dystopia more than the other. It fuses them. It offers the sedation of Huxley—screens that scroll forever, dopamine drip-feed entertainment, pharmaceuticals for mood, focus, sleep, and survival—whilst simultaneously installing the architecture of Orwell: biometric tracking, predictive policing, algorithmic surveillance, economic precarity enforced by policy and platform alike.
We are watched and numbed. Tracked and tranquilised. Not by a state apparatus standing in cold authority, but by a decentralised web of platforms, markets, and private actors who promise convenience whilst extracting autonomy. The boots are branded now. The soma is subsidised. And the telescreen lives in our pocket, waiting to be summoned with a swipe. This is not a totalitarian state. It is totalised capital. And it governs not through law but through design.
Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism—the notion that capitalism so thoroughly saturates our social and mental environment that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But the realism becomes truly devastating when the dystopia no longer needs to convince anyone of its legitimacy—because it cloaks itself in the language of freedom, empowerment, and progress. Lutnick talks of generational factory work not as imprisonment, but as patriotic duty. Harari discusses sedation not as control, but as care. The tests, the training programmes, the job pipelines—all are framed as choices. And in a society where the commons have been burned and the exits sealed, choice itself becomes propaganda.
This is how hegemony works in its most advanced form. Not by crushing rebellion, but by foreclosing imagination. By ensuring that even critique is absorbed, commodified, and neutralised. Orwell taught us to fear the boot. Huxley warned us about the drug. But neither foresaw a world where the boot and the drug were marketed as lifestyle enhancements—sold to you by a grinning CEO who assures you that this is what liberation looks like.
The dystopia is not on the horizon. It’s here. It arrives through updates. It syncs overnight. And it thanks you for your feedback.
Final thoughts …
Harari didn’t create the problem. Lutnick didn’t invent the solution. They are not masterminds—they are mouthpieces. What they articulate, in different registers, is not a future gone wrong, but a present unfolding exactly as Marx said it would. A system in which labour, once essential, becomes burdensome to capital. A system that, having no further use for us, begins to train us to expect nothing more than sedation, surveillance, and inherited servitude. They offer no real divergence in thought—only a variation in tone. One frames it as inevitability, the other as opportunity. But both are reciting lines from the same script: the gospel of late capitalism, now dressed in the robes of AI and automation.
And as always, it is the marginalised who are the first to be cast out. The chronically ill, the disabled, the undocumented, the neurodivergent. We are the first ones declared economically unviable. We are the canaries—though no one likes to hear our song. In 2024, RFK Jr. floated a plan to identify and surveil every autistic person in the United States, under the guise of “public health” and “early intervention.” The proposal barely made a dent in the media cycle before vanishing—but for those of us it targeted, it said everything. We are not misunderstood. We are watched. And those of us who are gestalt language processors—those of us who speak in scripts, in echoes, in deep patterns—are perhaps especially dangerous. Because we see what others miss. We notice when the story changes. We trace the arc between Harari’s forecast, Lutnick’s policy, and our own exclusion. That kind of seeing is not welcomed. It is erased.
But we are not useless. We are surplus by design. The structure was built to exclude us, not because we are incapable, but because we are incompatible—with conformity, with exploitation, with quiet obedience. We are living proof that another way of thinking, of learning, of relating, is possible. And that is a threat to a system that depends on sameness.
Design, however, can be changed. Structures can be dismantled. Narratives can be reclaimed. The first step is clarity—refusing the head fake, refusing the illusion that this was all some natural evolution or unfortunate necessity. It wasn’t. It was engineered. And if it was built, it can be unbuilt. Not by those who engineered it, but by those they left behind. We who were never meant to survive may yet become the architects of something else. Something just. Something free.