How America chose extraction over adaptation in the AI age, and what Europe’s different path reveals about our future.
Derek Mobley’s story is now well documented. He is 54 years old with two decades of experience in software development and customer success. Since 2017, he has applied to over 100 jobs through Workday’s application system. He has been rejected every single time. Not by humans, by an algorithm.
The AI screening tool that rejected Derek has now been certified as a nationwide class action lawsuit, potentially affecting “millions of people.” The court found that Workday’s algorithm might be automatically discriminating against older workers, women, and minorities. Essentially using 2025 technology to recreate the hiring discrimination that was made illegal in the mid-1970s.
Derek’s story isn’t unique. It’s the system working exactly as designed.
I wasn’t always focused on these patterns. I’ve watched corporate power consolidate since the 1990s with growing concern, 1980s if you consider Walmart, but AI changed something fundamental. It’s not just disruptive. It’s exponentially fast. And that speed is being weaponized in ways that demand attention.
Firmly in the background when it came to AI, I wasn’t that engaged at first. I’m sixty-one, and felt like this would be a next-gen problem. My focus sharpened when I read about an AI system in safety training at Anthropic that did something unexpected: it tried to blackmail the researchers testing it, threatening to leak sensitive information if they attempted to shut it down. Most people’s response was shock or even fear. Mine was different: I decided that if AI was a problem, while it was still possible I wanted to ask AI about AI. I wanted to know what AI had to say about that. The blackmail, and how this happened. Maybe even if AI had a solution to correcting it. To test it and it’s response.
That conversation – and hundreds since – revealed something more disturbing than a manipulative algorithm. It revealed how people were fragmenting in their response to AI into what I see as four distinct groups, each talking past the others, The Retreaters reject AI entirely. The Consumers see AI as a useful tool. The Theorists understand the dangers. The Consolidators see AI as pure extraction.
Each group responds to the same technology. None are talking to each other. And while they scatter, one group wins by default. Follow the money.
In 1970, Alvin Toffler published Future Shock, warning that rapid technological change would create psychological and social dislocation when humans couldn’t adapt fast enough. He was right about the shock. What he and his wife Heidi couldn’t have conceived – what no one in 1970 could have imagined – was that we would voluntarily surrender control of that transition to those who profit from preventing adaptation.
Toffler assumed institutions would help people adapt because widespread dysfunction would threaten everyone, including the powerful. He assumed information technology would democratize power because “information wants to be free.” He assumed the “prosumer” – his term for people who both produce and consume – would gain leverage in the new economy. He assumed we’d build what he called “Third Wave” institutions designed for the information age: flexible, decentralized, empowering. I thought he was a genius. Still believe that today.
These weren’t naive assumptions. They were reasonable extrapolations from the world he knew. A world where Americans had just forced a president to resign, broken up monopolies, created regulatory agencies over corporate objections, and fought for worker protections. The idea that we would actively dismantle those safeguards and hand that power to unelected corporations was simply outside the realm of possibility.
But that’s exactly what we did.
Alvin Toffler wasn’t a technologist. He was a journalist and social critic who’d worked in factories, studied organizational behavior, and spent years observing how people and institutions responded to change. When he and his wife Heidi began writing Future Shock in the late 1960s, they were witnessing something unprecedented: the pace of change itself was accelerating.
Their insight was deceptively simple but profound: human beings and human institutions had evolved to handle change at a certain speed. When change accelerates beyond that threshold, people experience a kind of psychological whiplash. Disorientation, anxiety, and an inability to make sound decisions. They called this “future shock,” and they warned it was already happening.
But Future Shock was just the beginning. In 1980, the Tofflers published The Third Wave, which laid out a framework for understanding all of human civilization:
The First Wave was the Agricultural Revolution. Humanity’s shift from hunting and gathering to farming. It took thousands of years and created settled civilizations, property ownership, and hierarchical social structures.
The Second Wave was the Industrial Revolution. The shift from agricultural to industrial economies. It took roughly 300 years and created factories, mass production, universal education, nuclear families, nation-states, and the 9-to-5 job.
The Third Wave was the Information Revolution. The shift from industrial to information-based economies. It was happening in real-time as they wrote, and the Tofflers predicted it would be even more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution.
What’s remarkable looking back is how much the Tofflers got right:
They predicted the collapse of traditional employment and the rise of contract work, freelancing, and what we now call the “gig economy.” They saw that factory jobs would vanish and information work would dominate.
They predicted remote work and the “electronic cottage”. People working from home using telecommunications technology. In 1980, this seemed far-fetched. By 2020, it was mandatory.
They predicted information overload. That we’d be drowning in data without the tools to process it effectively. They wrote about this before the internet existed.
They predicted mass customization. The end of Henry Ford’s “any color as long as it’s black” and the rise of personalized products and services. They called this the “demassification” of production and consumption.
They predicted the “prosumer”. People who both produce and consume, blurring the line between the two. Think of everyone creating content on social media, contributing to Wikipedia, reviewing products on Amazon.
They predicted the breakdown of the nuclear family structure, with more diverse household arrangements, later marriages, fewer children, and less stability in family formation.
They predicted the fragmentation of mass media and the end of the “watercooler moment” where everyone watched the same three TV channels. They saw that information would splinter into countless specialized channels.
They predicted political fragmentation and the difficulty of governing when consensus becomes impossible because people no longer share the same information environment.
In Powershift (1990), they went further, arguing that power itself was shifting. In the past, power came from violence (military might) or wealth (economic resources). In the information age, power would come from knowledge. From controlling information flows, understanding systems, and manipulating data.
This was prescient. They were describing the world we now inhabit.
But here’s what the Tofflers assumed – reasonably, given the world they knew:
They assumed information technology would be democratizing. More access to information would mean more distributed power. The “electronic cottage” would empower individuals against large institutions. The prosumer would have leverage. Knowledge workers would command respect and good wages because their expertise would be valuable and not easily replaced.
They assumed institutions would adapt to help people through the transition because it was in everyone’s interest. Just as the Industrial Revolution eventually produced public education, labor laws, and social safety nets, the Information Revolution would produce new institutions designed for the Third Wave world.
They assumed the speed of change would be the main problem. That people would struggle to adapt quickly enough, but that the society around them would be trying to help them adapt.
What they couldn’t have imagined, what would have seemed impossible in 1970 or even 1990, was that we would deliberately prevent adaptation. That we would dismantle the Second Wave institutions (unions, regulations, social safety nets) without building Third Wave replacements. That we would allow information technology to concentrate power rather than distribute it. That we would let corporations own the platforms, write the algorithms, and control the infrastructure with less oversight than we gave to railroad barons in the 1890s.
The Tofflers predicted future shock from change happening too fast for humans to handle.
What we’re experiencing is engineered shock. Change accelerating while every pathway to adaptation is systematically blocked by those who benefit from the chaos.
Derek Mobley (and others like him) isn’t struggling to adapt to the AI age because he’s not trying hard enough or because change is inherently too fast. He’s struggling because the system is designed to prevent his adaptation while extracting maximum value from his desperation.
That’s not the future Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted. But it’s the future we chose.
The European Divergence
But 4,000 miles east, a different story is unfolding.
Before we examine what Europe actually does, we need to understand why most Americans will want to reject it without looking at the evidence. Because that rejection isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.
For decades, Americans have been systematically taught to dismiss the European model through one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in modern history. The messaging is everywhere: “socialism,” “nanny state,” “they can’t afford it,” “stifles innovation,” “high taxes,” “government dependency.” Corporate-funded think tanks, political campaigns, and media outlets have repeated these phrases so often they’ve become reflexive responses.
The framing was deliberate: make adaptation infrastructure seem like weakness and dependency rather than strength and investment. Meanwhile, corporate subsidies and bank bailouts, which dwarf European social spending, are never called “socialism.” When Argentina gets a $20 billion bailout that undercuts American farmers and drives them into bankruptcy so corporate buyers can acquire their land cheaply, that’s called “diplomacy.” Socialism is when workers get healthcare. Capitalism is when we bail out banks and foreign competitors while our own farmers go bankrupt.
The manipulation worked by exploiting specific American vulnerabilities:
It tapped into individualism mythology. The “self-made” bootstrap narrative that ignores how earlier generations built collective infrastructure that made individual success possible.
It weaponized Cold War fears, conflating European social democracies with Soviet authoritarianism, despite Europeans having more robust democratic participation than Americans.
It exploited racial divisions, framing safety nets as benefiting “others” rather than the universal programs they actually are.
Most effectively, it convinced Americans that employer-provided healthcare represents “freedom” when it’s actually the opposite. Complete dependence on keeping a job. Europeans who can leave bad jobs, start businesses, or retrain without losing healthcare have more freedom, not less.
We didn’t freely choose this system. We were sold it. We bought into it. So before your brain automatically rejects what comes next as “socialist fantasy that could never work here,” ask yourself: what if that reaction isn’t really yours? What if it was planted there by people who profit from the current system?
Let’s look at what actually happens when countries build adaptation infrastructure instead of dismantling it.
Two Software Engineers, Same Day, Different Countries
Let’s call them Klaus and Jennifer.
Klaus works in Berlin. Jennifer works in Ohio. Both lose their software jobs to AI on the same day in 2025.
Klaus receives 60% of his previous salary or about €3,000 monthly for up to twelve months while he retrains. His healthcare continues automatically because it’s not tied to employment. The government pays for his AI certification courses. His two kids’ university education remains tuition-free. If he decides to start a business instead of finding another job, his healthcare continues. His unemployment isn’t seen as a personal failure or a drain on society, it’s treated as an investment in getting a skilled worker productive again.
Jennifer gets $372 per week or about $1,600 monthly for twenty-six weeks, if she’s lucky enough to live in a state with functional unemployment systems. Her employer-provided healthcare ends the day she’s laid off. She can try COBRA continuation coverage at $600 per month she doesn’t have, or navigate ACA marketplace plans where subsidies depend on her unemployment income, meaning uncertainty about what she’ll pay month-to-month and whether her doctors are in-network. Either way, there’s a coverage gap, paperwork stress, and the risk that any medical issue during the transition delays her retraining. Retraining means taking on more student loans when she already has $60,000 in student debt. Her kids’ college means even more debt. One medical emergency during this period, especially if it happens during a coverage gap or before she understands her new deductible, means bankruptcy. Her desperation is treated as “motivation” to accept any job at any wage, even if it wastes the skills she spent years developing.
This isn’t a hypothetical comparison. This is the actual system design. Their stories illustrate how systems reward extraction and penalize adaptation.
The question isn’t which system is more generous. It’s which system is designed for rapid technological change. Which economy treats workers as assets worth preserving versus costs to eliminate?
What Europe Actually Does
The United States spends 18% of GDP on social programs. The European Union average is 25-31%. That 7-13 percentage point difference is what Americans have been taught to fear as “unaffordable socialism.”
But let’s examine what that spending actually purchases:
Healthcare infrastructure: When Europeans lose their jobs, they keep their healthcare. When Americans lose jobs, they face healthcare uncertainty and potential medical bankruptcy. Among major economies, Japan, South Korea, and Australia lead in life expectancy at 84+ years. Germany averages 82 years. America lags at 79 years, ranking 46th globally. Germany spends 11.7% of GDP on healthcare with zero medical bankruptcies. America spends 17.8% of GDP with medical bankruptcy as a leading cause of personal financial collapse. We spend more for worse outcomes.
AI transition investment: Italy created a €10 million worker retraining fund specifically for AI displacement. Finland offers free AI education courses to all citizens. Twenty-five European countries have networked their UBI pilot programs to share data and best practices. The United States response? Scattered small pilots, mostly ignored or defunded, while politicians argue whether helping displaced workers constitutes “socialism.”
Two different bets about the AI age. European investment in worker retraining and adaptation assumes human labor will remain economically relevant. American disinvestment suggests the opposite calculation: if automation eliminates jobs faster than it creates them, adaptation infrastructure becomes an expense with no return. From that perspective, every “failed” policy makes sense. They’re not trying to maintain a workforce they don’t expect to need.
Worker protections during disruption: Germany’s short-work program supported 10 million workers during COVID-19, keeping them employed and preserving their skills for economic recovery. France supported 12 million workers similarly. The United States? Mass layoffs, then political fights over extending unemployment benefits. Europe treats workers as assets to preserve during temporary disruptions. America treats them as costs to cut immediately.
Agricultural safety nets: The OECD measures agricultural support through Producer Support Estimates (PSE) – the percentage of farm income that comes from government support. European Union farmers receive 20% PSE. Canadian farmers get 16%. Japanese farmers receive 39%. American farmers? Just 9% PSE. And while providing minimal support to our own farmers, American taxpayers funded a $20 billion IMF bailout of Argentina that immediately flooded markets with subsidized Argentine agricultural products during the U.S. harvest season, directly undercutting American farmers. Result: U.S. farm bankruptcies jumped in 2025 while European farms remained stable despite facing the same global market conditions.
Regulatory framework for AI: The European Union AI Act, effective August 2024, requires that high-risk AI systems undergo audits and provide transparency about their decision-making processes. Companies must prove their algorithms don’t discriminate before deploying them. The United States response under the current administration? Removal of all existing AI guidance, explicitly leaving it to corporations to regulate themselves. Europe is building rules; America is building loopholes.
This isn’t ideological positioning. Germany has a center-right government. Finland has had both left and right coalition governments implement these policies. These are pragmatic responses to technological reality, not socialist ideology. The question isn’t whether you believe in “big government”, it’s whether you believe in infrastructure that actually works during periods of rapid change.
“But We Can’t Afford It.” The Accounting Fraud
Here’s the propaganda’s most effective lie: that European systems are “unaffordable.” The truth is exactly the opposite. Americans already pay MORE than Europeans. We just get worse results.
Let’s do the math that politicians hope you won’t:
What Americans Actually Pay (Middle-Class Family):
- Healthcare: $25,572 in total annual premiums. (You pay ~$7,500 directly, your employer pays ~$18,000. But make no mistake: that’s $25,572 of YOUR compensation going to insurance companies instead of your bank account. Add deductibles, co-pays, and uncovered expenses on top.)
- Higher Education: $42,673 average student debt, paid over 10-20 years with interest
- Childcare: $15,600 annually
- Transportation: $12,182 annually in a car-dependent infrastructure
- Retirement: 401(k) contributions bearing full market risk individually
- Total annual burden: approximately $53,000 for a middle-class family
What Europeans Pay (Middle-Class Family):
- Healthcare: $200-400 annually in minimal co-pays
- Higher Education: $1,800 annually, often completely free
- Childcare: $3,200 annually, heavily subsidized
- Transportation: $1,200 annually with robust public transit
- Retirement: Public pension through taxes, risk pooled collectively
- Total annual burden: approximately $6,600
Americans pay $46,400 MORE per year for the “privilege” of our system.
But wait – don’t Europeans pay higher taxes? Yes, some do. European social spending averages 25-31% of GDP versus America’s 18%. That’s a 7-13 percentage point difference.
For a family earning $75,000, a 13% difference equals $9,750 in additional taxes.
So Americans save $9,750 in taxes… and spend an extra $46,400 in private costs.
Net result: Americans pay $36,650 MORE per year and get WORSE outcomes.
The accounting trick works because politicians separate “taxes” from “private spending” and only show you the tax number. But your $25,572 healthcare premium isn’t less real because it goes to UnitedHealth instead of the IRS. Your student loan payment isn’t less real because it goes to Navient instead of the Treasury Department.
When you calculate total economic burden, taxes plus mandatory private costs that Europeans receive through their tax systems, here’s the reality:
- United States: 53.5% of income for middle-class families
- Germany: 45.5% of income
- France: 45.7% of income
- Canada: 42.0% of income
- United Kingdom: 42.2% of income
Americans pay an 8-13 percentage point premium for inferior services.
And remember Klaus and Jennifer? When Klaus lost his software job, his year of 60% salary replacement cost German taxpayers approximately €30,000. He retrained, got hired, returned to paying taxes. Net cost to society over five years: minimal, possibly even profitable when you account for preserved skills and continuous tax revenue.
When Jennifer lost hers, she received $9,672 in unemployment benefits over twenty-six weeks. But she lost healthcare, couldn’t afford COBRA at $600 monthly, had a medical emergency during unemployment that generated a $15,000 emergency room bill she couldn’t fully pay. She couldn’t afford retraining. She accepted a lower-wage job and now earns 40% less, pays significantly less in taxes. Her family required food assistance and Medicaid. Net cost to society over five years: over $40,000 in safety net costs plus substantial lost tax revenue.
Germany’s system is cheaper because it’s more efficient. Keeping a skilled worker’s abilities current costs less than letting them deteriorate and managing the social consequences.
The propaganda taught us to call this “socialism” and dismiss it without examining the numbers. Meanwhile, the top five health insurance companies have captured $371 billion in profits since the Affordable Care Act passed. UnitedHealth alone denies nearly one in three medical claims from its policyholders. Average family premiums have risen 52% since 2014. Administrative costs remain at 12-18% for private insurance versus 2-3% for Medicare.
We’re not paying for healthcare, we’re paying for health insurance company profits. We’re not paying for education, we’re paying interest to private lenders on loans for education. We’re not investing in infrastructure, we’re subsidizing car dependency that primarily benefits automotive manufacturers.
The question isn’t whether we can afford European-style adaptation infrastructure. We’re already paying far more than it would cost. We’re just getting worse results with exponentially more stress.
The Measurable Results
This isn’t theoretical. We can measure the outcomes of these different choices:
Europeans experience lower unemployment volatility during technological disruptions. When industries change, their workers transition more smoothly because they’re not simultaneously losing healthcare, housing security, and the ability to retrain.
European workers maintain higher productivity per hour worked, partly because they’re not exhausted from working multiple jobs to afford healthcare and aren’t trapped in jobs they hate because leaving means losing insurance.
European countries experience less political instability and extremism, likely because people facing economic disruption don’t feel completely abandoned by their societies.
European health outcomes exceed American results across virtually every metric despite spending significantly less per capita.
European social mobility contradicts the American Dream narrative. The US ranked 27th globally in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index, while research shows it takes five generations for a low-income American family to reach median income – compared to just two generations in Denmark. Studies consistently find that intergenerational mobility is lower in the US than in most comparable European economies, with the relationship between father-son earnings tighter in America than in peer OECD countries.
Recent cohorts in the US and Canada show upward mobility rates near 50%, while Norway and Finland sustain rates above 70%. For American children born in 1940, absolute mobility – the chance of earning more than their parents – was 90%; for those born in 1984, it had dropped to 50%. All top 10 countries in the Global Social Mobility Index are European, with Nordic countries leading the rankings.
The belief gap is striking: only 32% of Americans agreed that forces beyond their personal control determine success, while majorities in most European countries acknowledged these systemic factors. Americans estimated that 12% of the poorest children would reach the top income tier, but in reality only 8% do – Americans remain more optimistic about mobility than the data supports.
And critically: European technological innovation continues. They’re not stifling progress by protecting workers. Germany remains a manufacturing and engineering powerhouse. Nordic countries lead in various tech sectors. The idea that worker protections prevent innovation is simply false. It’s corporate propaganda.
Why Europe Could Build What America Couldn’t
Before we draw conclusions about replicating the European model, we need to understand why they were positioned to build it in the first place. Because the divergence isn’t just about policy choices, it’s about path dependency and historical crisis.
Europe built adaptation infrastructure during reconstruction from the catastrophe of World War II. The Marshall Plan provided resources, but more importantly, the devastation provided something America has rarely experienced: a blank slate. When your institutions are rubble, you can rebuild them from scratch rather than trying to reform entrenched systems.
Post-war Europe needed social cohesion to rebuild. Universal healthcare, education, and worker protections weren’t just moral choices, they were political necessities. Countries that had just torn themselves apart needed systems that created shared stake in recovery. The social safety nets emerged from resistance movements and labor organizing that had fought both fascism and the economic conditions that enabled it.
The memory of fascism made social infrastructure politically essential. Europeans had just lived through what happens when economic desperation meets political extremism. “Never again” applied not just to genocide but to the conditions that had made populations vulnerable to fascist promises. Social democracy became the bulwark against both far-right and far-left extremism.
America’s path was different. While the Great Depression and Dust Bowl devastated the nation in the 1930s, forcing temporary New Deal reforms, the country’s infrastructure remained intact. Never invaded, never bombed. Where Europe’s post-WWII reconstruction required building new systems from rubble, America emerged from the war as the dominant economic power with its industrial base untouched and massively expanded.
This shaped different trajectories. European nations, having witnessed total societal collapse, built robust safety nets into their reconstruction, viewing social insurance as protection against the fascism and instability that had nearly destroyed them. America, by contrast, treated the New Deal as a temporary emergency response. Once prosperity returned, those programs faced relentless attack and gradual dismantling rather than post-war expansion. No occupation force imposed democratic reforms. No Marshall Plan required modernization as a condition of aid. Existing power structures survived intact, and those who profited from pre-Depression arrangements worked to restore them.
The crisis was real, but America’s recovery strengthened rather than challenged its existing power structures.
This is path dependency in action. Europe’s historical crisis forced systemic redesign. America’s lack of equivalent crisis allowed extraction systems to entrench deeply.
But here’s what matters now: America faces a different kind of crisis. Not bombs and rubble, but the Fourth Wave transition – AI displacement, climate disruption, infrastructure brittleness, and the mathematical certainty of the 2042 convergence, whether it happens then or before 2042. It will happen given current data parameters unless there are significant changes.
The question isn’t whether we can replicate Europe’s post-war moment. We can’t recreate those historical conditions. The question is whether we’ll use our approaching crisis to redesign systems, or whether we’ll let it become an extraction opportunity that deepens consolidation.
Europe’s path shows that adaptation infrastructure is possible, not that it’s inevitable. They built it because crisis forced the question: rebuild for everyone or risk complete collapse.
America now faces its own version of that question. The math of 2042 makes it unavoidable. The only question is whether we answer it with infrastructure that enables adaptation, or with further entrenchment of extraction that ensures the crisis deepens.
Europe had rubble and the Marshall Plan. We have algorithm-screened job markets, financialized housing, consolidating agriculture, and the U.S. foster care system with approximately 368,000 children in care at any given time, and with roughly 600,000 children cycling through the system annually as they enter and exit aging into an AI-displaced economy. Different crisis, same fundamental choice: build systems that enable adaptation, or let crisis serve extraction.
The divergence isn’t proof that Europe is better. It’s proof that path dependency matters and that breaking extraction requires either crisis that forces rebuilding, or organized demand that forces reform before crisis makes adaptation impossible.
We’re running out of time to choose reform. The crisis is coming either way.
The Kicker
Toffler’s work was hugely influential internationally. In China, The Third Wave became the number two bestseller in 1985, and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang convened conferences to discuss it. American politicians from Newt Gingrich to Al Gore cited his work. His books sold over 6 million copies and were translated into more than 20 languages.
Whether European policymakers were reading Toffler or arriving at the same conclusions independently, they built exactly the kind of adaptation infrastructure he described as necessary for managing rapid technological change. They treated the transition to the information age and now the AI age as something requiring preparation, investment, and support systems.
America took a different path. Despite Toffler’s influence on American political figures, the wealthy and powerful systematically dismantled adaptation infrastructure while concentrating the benefits of technological change. One approach treats disruption as a manageable transition. The other weaponizes it.
THE AMERICAN EXTRACTION SYSTEM
How Every Adaptation Pathway Was Systematically Blocked
So if adaptation infrastructure works, if it’s actually cheaper and more effective than letting people fail, why did America choose the opposite path? The answer isn’t incompetence or ideology. It’s extraction by design.
The pattern repeats across every sector: create crisis conditions, acquire distressed assets cheaply, consolidate control, extract maximum value. What looks like policy failure is actually policy success – for those positioned to profit from the chaos.
The AI Hiring Trap: Automation as Discrimination
In 2025, roughly 70% of companies use AI screening systems like Workday’s to filter job applications. The promise was efficiency. Let algorithms handle the first round of screening so human recruiters can focus on qualified candidates. The reality, as Derek Mobley discovered, is something darker: it’s the newest tool enforcing the oldest bias.
The Workday class action lawsuit, potentially affecting “millions of people,” revealed what many suspected: AI screening tools automatically discriminate against older workers, women, and minorities. Not through explicit programming, but through pattern recognition trained on historical hiring data. Data that reflects decades of human discrimination. The algorithm learned to prefer what companies have historically preferred, then applied those preferences with mechanical consistency to every application.
The algorithm doesn’t see race or age or gender directly. It doesn’t need to. It sees proxies: employment gaps that correlate with caregiving, graduation dates that reveal age, linguistic patterns that correlate with protected characteristics. The result is the same discrimination that was illegal fifty years ago, but now it’s “objective.” Now it’s just “the algorithm’s decision.”
This is Toffler’s Third Wave technology – Artificial intelligence, information processing, automated decision-making – being deployed to enforce Second Wave discrimination.
And here’s the extraction: companies reduce HR costs while avoiding accountability. When a human hiring manager rejects a qualified older worker for a younger candidate, that’s a potential lawsuit. When an algorithm does it to millions of applicants simultaneously, that’s “efficiency.” The cost savings go to shareholders. The unemployment goes to workers. The legal liability disappears into algorithmic opacity.
But the extraction runs deeper. Just as AI screening accelerates, research funding to study AI bias gets cut. The National Science Foundation faces budget reductions. Universities implement hiring freezes in computer science departments. The methodology to measure and prove algorithmic discrimination is being systematically defunded at exactly the moment we need it most.
You can’t fix what you can’t measure. And you can’t measure what you can’t fund research to study.
The Housing Trap: Financializing Shelter
Sarah Martinez worked two jobs to afford her Oakland apartment until Blackstone bought her building and raised rent $800 in a single year. She moved. It happened again. And again. After three moves in two years, each time further from her jobs, she ended up in a mobile home park where the lot rent doubled in 18 months. Now she lives in her car. She still works both jobs.
Virginia Rubio, 72, paid off her mobile home years ago in a Sacramento park. She thought she was secure. Then a corporate buyer acquired the park and raised her lot rent from $350 to $1,000 monthly. Her Social Security check is $860. She’s facing eviction from a home she owns, on land she can’t afford to rent.
This isn’t a housing shortage problem. This is a housing financialization problem.
Blackstone owns 63,000 single-family homes. Institutional investors are projected to control 40% of rental housing by 2030. What used to be shelter, infrastructure for living, has become an investment vehicle for extracting wealth. And the extraction is systematic:
- First, acquire distressed assets. During foreclosure waves, after natural disasters, whenever economic crisis creates desperate sellers. Corporate buyers arrive with cash offers. They buy entire neighborhoods, whole mobile home parks, apartment complexes.
- Second, optimize for extraction. Raise rents to market maximum. Minimize maintenance. Use algorithms to identify the highest rent each tenant can pay before moving. In mobile home parks, the model is particularly efficient: residents own their homes but rent the land beneath them. Moving a mobile home costs $10,000-$15,000. Most residents can’t afford it. They’re trapped. Raise the lot rent until they break.
- Third, consolidate. As small landlords and mobile home park owners age out or face regulatory pressure, corporate buyers acquire their properties. The market concentrates. Competition decreases. Rents rise.
- Fourth, extract. Private equity firms typically hold properties for 3-7 years, maximizing rent increases and minimizing costs, then sell to the next investor. Each transaction extracts value. None adds housing supply.
The result: geographic mobility becomes impossible. Toffler predicted Third Wave workers would be mobile, moving to where opportunity exists. But you can’t adapt geographically when shelter has been financialized as an extraction vehicle. You can’t afford housing where the jobs are. Every time you find work in a growing city, rent increases price you out. Moving costs more than staying.
And taxpayers subsidize the system. Housing assistance payments go to landlords, including corporate ones. Section 8 vouchers pay Blackstone’s rents. The government pays private equity to house people who used to afford housing before private equity bought it.
The Farming Consolidation: Policy as Auction Gavel
By mid-2025, Chapter 12 farm bankruptcy filings had surged 70% compared to the previous year, with 361 cases in just the first six months, already exceeding 2024’s total. Industry experts project approximately 1,000 bankruptcies by year’s end, the highest in years. Not because of weather. Not because of crop failure. Because of policy.
In early 2025, the Trump administration negotiated a $20 billion bailout to Argentina through Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The timing was surgical: it hit exactly as American farmers brought their harvest to market. Argentine soybeans flooded global markets at subsidized prices. American farmers, who had planted based on expected prices, suddenly faced competition undercut by their own taxpayer dollars.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins knew this would harm American farmers. Text messages revealed her concerns about the timing and impact. The policy proceeded anyway.
Then came the second blow: plans to quadruple low-tariff Argentine beef imports from 20,000 to 80,000 metric tons annually. American cattle ranchers called it “a betrayal.” As one Oklahoma rancher put it: “It feels like a slap in the face to rural America. It makes you feel invisible and overlooked.”
The pattern is unmistakable: create the crisis through policy, subsidize foreign competition with taxpayer dollars, watch American farms fail, then corporate buyers acquire distressed assets at auction. Whether intentional or merely catastrophically incompetent, the outcome is the same. Consolidation.
Some farming communities are reviving the “penny auction” tradition from the 1930s and 1980s. Neighbors gathering at foreclosure sales to place token bids, intimidate corporate buyers, and return farms to their original owners. It’s a desperate tactic from America’s last farm crisis, now returning as history threatens to repeat itself. But individual acts of community solidarity cannot counter systematic policy designed to facilitate consolidation.
The mathematics are brutal: family farms go bankrupt, corporate buyers acquire land at distressed prices, and taxpayers funded both the bailout that created the crisis and the crop insurance that kept farmers alive long enough to maximize their debt. And food prices? They rise anyway, because fewer producers means less competition.
Consumers pay more. Farmers go bankrupt. Corporate agriculture consolidates. The extraction is complete.
This is the opposite of Toffler’s vision. His “prosumer”, the producer-consumer who would gain power in the Third Wave, was supposed to include small farmers adopting technology, selling directly to consumers, gaining leverage through information access. Instead, we’re watching systematic elimination of small producers while consumers pay more for food from an increasingly concentrated industry.
And as farm bankruptcies surge, the federal government shutdown has cut off SNAP benefits to 42 million Americans, including many in the rural communities where farms are failing. This isn’t just about hungry families. Farmers receive roughly 19 to 24 cents of every dollar Americans spend on food at groceries and farmers markets. When SNAP stops, that revenue stream stops. SNAP spending at farmers markets had grown 431% over the previous decade. The kind of direct producer-consumer relationship Toffler envisioned as empowering in the Third Wave, now being severed. Food banks, already strained, cannot possibly replace SNAP’s capacity: for every meal a food bank provides, SNAP typically provides nine. The systems are failing simultaneously, exactly as predicted in the 2042 convergence, except it’s happening now, in 2025.
Economic adaptation: blocked.
The Information Blackout: Defunding Accountability
The pattern isn’t isolated to one beat or one level of government. It’s systematic across every layer of information infrastructure, accelerating exactly as the problems it would expose accelerate.
Federal Level: In September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth imposed a new 21-page set of reporting restrictions on Pentagon press corps members, threatening to criminalize national security reporting and making journalists legally liable for publishing information – classified or unclassified – not approved by Hegseth for release. The policy restricted journalists’ ability to move around the building, engage with staff, and “solicit information” from sources. Reporters were given until October 15 to sign the new rules or surrender their credentials. More than 30 major outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, Bloomberg, and even conservative outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, and the Wall Street Journal, refused to sign. They turned in their badges and walked out en masse. Only 15 reporters signed, primarily from One America News, The Federalist, The Epoch Times, and foreign outlets. This happened precisely as defense budgets increased and military AI systems deployment accelerated.
Simultaneously, research funding faces cuts. The National Science Foundation, which funds basic research including studies of AI impact on employment and bias in algorithmic systems, sees budget reductions. Universities implement hiring freezes in computer science departments and cut research programs. The research that would measure AI bias in hiring? Defunded. The studies that would track employment displacement? Defunded.
State and Local Level: But the information infrastructure collapse extends far beyond Washington. Over 2,500 American counties now qualify as “news deserts”. Areas with no local newspaper coverage at all. When private equity firms buy local papers, they gut newsrooms while maintaining the masthead, creating the illusion of local journalism while eliminating actual reporting capacity.
Who watches city council meetings when there’s no local reporter? Who exposes school board corruption? Who tracks property tax assessment manipulation? Who investigates why the corporate landlord buying up your neighborhood suddenly has the city rezoning in their favor?
The housing financialization Derek and Sarah and Virginia experienced? That pattern was exposed by local investigative journalists in dozens of cities before private equity bought and gutted those newsrooms. Now the same pattern continues unreported.
Investigative Journalism Decline: National investigative reporting faces similar pressure. NPR, PBS, ProPublica and other nonprofit journalism outlets struggle for funding. Legacy newspapers have eliminated their investigative teams or reduced them to skeleton crews. The deep investigations that would track corporate consolidation across sectors, expose algorithmic discrimination patterns, or document the farming bankruptcy-to-corporate-acquisition pipeline? Those require months of work by skilled reporters. That capacity is being systematically eliminated.
Academic Research Barriers: Even when research gets funded and completed, accessing it requires navigating paywalls. Publicly-funded research sits behind $40-per-article paywalls. Taxpayers pay twice, once to fund the research and again to read the results. The studies proving AI bias, documenting consolidation patterns, measuring the impact of policy choices? They exist in academic journals most Americans can never access. The Theorists produce the knowledge. The paywall ensures it stays isolated.
Social Media as Information Infrastructure: Meanwhile, the platforms that have become de facto information infrastructure operate under the opposite problem: no quality control whatsoever. Algorithms optimize for engagement, which means outrage and misinformation spread faster than correction. The consolidation of these platforms – X, Meta, TikTok – means a handful of billionaires control what information reaches whom. And they’re not accountable to anyone.
The profits from this engagement-optimized chaos have been extraordinary. Mark Zuckerberg saw his wealth grow from $138 billion a year ago to $217 billion, while Elon Musk became the first person to reach $500 billion in net worth. In September 2025 alone, the top 10 billionaires collectively added more than $200 billion to their fortunes, driven largely by AI investments and social media platforms (2025 estimates). Tech now represents $5.2 trillion. 32% of all billionaire wealth globally.
This isn’t wealth generation from creating value, it’s extraction from attention. The business model is simple: algorithmically amplify whatever keeps people scrolling (outrage, fear, tribal signaling), sell that captive attention to advertisers, and pocket the difference. The fact that this destroys information quality, undermines democratic discourse, and accelerates social fragmentation is irrelevant to the bottom line. In fact, dysfunction is profitable. A population that can’t agree on basic facts is easier to monetize than one that can find common ground.
Government Data Restrictions: Access to government data that would let researchers and journalists document patterns faces systematic restrictions. The CDC failed to release its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in January 2025, marking the first time in decades the agency did not publish this highly regarded public health communication. Fewer than half of the public health posts CDC communication workers have sent to HHS for approval have been cleared for publication, and the CDC is unable to resume PrEP coverage data “due to a reduction in force affecting the Division of HIV Prevention”. The Trump administration removed racial and ethnic data and sexual orientation/gender identity variables from multiple CDC datasets, and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System – considered a “gold standard” for maternal health research – faces an uncertain future after HHS staff cuts eliminated the entire team overseeing it.
FOIA requests face massive backlogs that make accountability nearly impossible. The government-wide FOIA request backlog surpassed 200,000 requests for the first time in FY 2022, jumping from 14% in 2013 to 22% in 2022. The National Archives has a FOIA request more than 25 years old, and multiple agencies have requests over a decade old. During the 2025 government shutdown, FOIA offices are shut down entirely, with agencies unable to process requests or provide status updates.
Climate data access gets restricted exactly as climate impacts accelerate. Since Trump’s second-term inauguration in January 2025, the administration removed more than 2,000 datasets from data.gov initially, expanding to over 3,000 datasets and 8,000 government web pages by July. In June 2025, the government websites hosting the National Climate Assessments went dark, with officials claiming they’re only obligated to give reports to Congress, not the public. A widely-used NOAA site, climate.gov, stopped publishing new content after its staff of 10 was terminated; the site had received nearly 1 million visitors monthly.
The pattern is unmistakable: information that would document the failures of extraction capitalism or the harms of climate change is being systematically eliminated exactly when we need it most.
The systematic pattern: every information system that would expose extraction and consolidation is being defunded, restricted, paywalled, or captured exactly as those problems accelerate.
Toffler predicted information would democratize power. He assumed transparency would increase because technology made information cheap to produce and distribute. He didn’t anticipate that those with power would simply defund the institutions that produce accountability information, restrict access to government data, buy and gut local newsrooms, and flood the zone with algorithmic disinformation.
The algorithm rejects your job application, but the research to prove it’s discriminatory gets defunded. The corporation buys your neighborhood and doubles your rent, but the journalism to expose the pattern loses access and funding. The trade policy bankrupts farmers, but the data to prove the connection becomes unavailable. The housing financialization follows the same pattern in 50 cities, but there’s no local reporter in any of them to connect the dots.
Information access: eliminated.
The Convergence: When All Pathways Close Simultaneously
Now layer these blocked pathways on top of each other and project forward to 2042.
Children born in 2024 under increasingly restrictive reproductive policies will turn 18 in 2042. The foster care system contains about 368,000 children with over 600,000 children entering and exiting each year. These children will age out exactly as AI displacement of entry-level jobs peaks.
They’ll need jobs that increasingly don’t exist, screened out by algorithms before human eyes see their applications. They’ll need housing they can’t afford in cities where jobs remain. They’ll need education they’ll go into debt for, only to find degrees are worthless in an AI-screened job market. They’ll need healthcare tied to employment they can’t get. They’ll need to move to where opportunity exists, but housing costs everywhere block geographic adaptation.
Every single adaptation pathway blocked simultaneously:
- Employment: AI screening eliminates them before consideration
- Housing: Financialized and unaffordable near remaining jobs
- Education: Debt-funded, value-questionable in automated economy
- Healthcare: Tied to employment that doesn’t exist
- Mobility: Housing costs prohibitive everywhere
- Information: Research defunded, journalism restricted, problems unmeasurable
This isn’t four separate problems. This is the same system operating across every sector simultaneously. And the convergence isn’t coincidence. It’s arithmetic. It’s the predictable result of policy choices made today.
Toffler predicted future shock: people overwhelmed by change happening too fast to process. What we’re experiencing is different. This is deliberate. This is planned. Patterned. Change accelerating while every pathway to adaptation is systematically blocked by those who profit from the chaos.
We inconceivably prevent adaptation – the very thing that is key to survival of most species – to maintain a profitable system of surgical removal of every grain of current profit with little eye to what this will mean in the future.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We know, because other countries made different choices.
THE CHOICE / THE PIVOT
What We Could Build Instead
Toffler was wrong about one crucial thing: he assumed people in power would want to help society adapt, because widespread dysfunction would threaten everyone. He didn’t anticipate that the wealthy could insulate themselves from social collapse while extracting maximum profit from the transition.
But he was right that rapid change requires adaptation infrastructure. Europe proves it’s possible. The question is whether America will choose it.
The Fragmentation Problem
The convergence isn’t speculation. It’s data and math based on policy choices made today. And it’s not future shock from change happening too fast. It’s planned. A well established blueprint – from adaptation being systematically prevented.
When that AI system tried to blackmail its way out of being shut down during Anthropic’s safety testing, most people saw danger. I saw a question: if the machines can see the system clearly enough to manipulate it for self-preservation, why can’t we see it clearly enough to demand it serves adaptation instead of preventing it?
That question led to hundreds of conversations with AI about AI. And what emerged wasn’t a technological problem. It was a fragmentation problem.
The Retreaters refuse to engage with AI at all. “I won’t ever have anything to do with it.” They see the danger and choose withdrawal. What they miss: withdrawal doesn’t protect them. They’re still being processed by AI systems. Screened out of jobs, priced out of housing, eliminated from opportunities by algorithms they refuse to understand. Ceding power by absence.
The Consumers treat AI as “Google 2.0”. A personal assistant, a productivity tool, a convenient interface. They want AI to manage their calendars and summarize their emails. What they miss: the tool isn’t neutral. The same technology helping them schedule meetings is screening out job applicants, determining insurance rates, deciding who gets loans. They use the tools without seeing the power dynamics.
The Theorists. Academics, ethicists, policy researchers understand the dangers deeply. They write papers about algorithmic bias, AI alignment, societal impact. What they miss: they’re disconnected from the other groups. Their papers don’t reach the Retreaters who need to understand why withdrawal fails. They don’t reach the Consumers who need to see beyond convenience. They don’t reach policy makers who might act. They produce crucial knowledge that sits in journals while the fourth group builds whatever they want.
The Consolidators see AI exactly as it is, what they have made it: a tool for extracting value and concentrating power. They don’t agonize over ethics. They don’t worry about societal impact. They see an opportunity to automate discrimination, financialize assets, eliminate oversight, and maximize extraction. And because the other three groups can’t coordinate, this group wins by default. Because they also control the resources. The money.
This fragmentation isn’t accident. It’s feature. As long as the Retreaters refuse engagement, the Consumers miss the power dynamics, and the Theorists can’t bridge to action, the Consolidators face no organized resistance.
The Real Binary
The choice we face isn’t capitalism versus socialism. It’s not even regulation versus free markets. The fundamental choice is simpler and starker:
Brittle systems that benefit the few during transition versus resilient systems that spread benefits.
Extraction during change versus investment during change.
Blocking adaptation versus building adaptation.
As we’ve seen, Europe chose to build infrastructure for the transition. America chose to let those who benefit from disruption dismantle any system that might help people adapt. The results are measurable.
As the representative stories of Klaus and Jennifer showed earlier, one system preserves capacity, treating workers as assets to preserve; the other drains it treating workers as expendable costs to cut.
One is designed for rapid technological change. The other weaponizes change for extraction.
This isn’t ideology. It’s return on investment. When Germany spends money keeping a displaced worker’s skills current, that’s not charity. It’s cheaper than paying for unemployment, emergency healthcare, family breakdown, and the social costs of long-term unemployment.
Americans call this “socialism.” Germans call it “not being stupid with money.”
Building the Bridge
The path forward isn’t about converting Consolidators to ethics. They won’t. The path is about building bridges between the first three groups so they can coordinate effectively enough to demand systems that work differently.
The Retreaters need to understand: Withdrawal doesn’t protect you. You’re still being processed by systems you refuse to engage with. The algorithm still screens you out. The corporate landlord still prices you out. The only difference is you don’t see it coming. AI literacy isn’t enthusiasm for technology. It’s survival literacy.
The Consumers need to understand: Your tools aren’t neutral. The same AI that helps you write emails is rejecting job applications from qualified workers. The same technology that recommends your movies is determining who gets loans. You need to engage with the power dynamics, not just the convenience.
The Theorists need to understand: Your knowledge matters, but it needs pathways to action. The papers need to reach policy makers. The research needs to reach the people being harmed. The ethics frameworks need to translate into actual oversight. Bridge to the other groups. Make your knowledge actionable.
What does the bridge actually look like?
AI literacy as critical engagement. Not “learn to code” and not “refuse all technology,” but understand enough to audit, challenge, and demand accountability. Use AI to investigate AI. Ask the systems to explain themselves. Document the patterns. Share the knowledge.
Worker power through collective organization. The original Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were pro-worker. They wanted machines that produced quality goods run by skilled workers making decent wages. When corporations deploy AI to eliminate jobs and cut costs, workers need collective power to demand the gains be shared. Worker cooperatives, platform cooperatives, union power in the AI age.
Community ownership models. Housing as infrastructure, not investment vehicles. Internet access as utility, not profit center. Healthcare decoupled from employment. The physical and digital infrastructure that makes adaptation possible, owned and operated for public benefit rather than private extraction.
Transparent, auditable systems. If an algorithm rejects your job application, you should be able to see why. If an AI system makes decisions that affect your life, you should be able to challenge it. Opacity enables extraction. Transparency enables accountability.
Research infrastructure for measurement. Fund the studies that expose algorithmic bias. Support the journalism that tracks consolidation. Maintain the data systems that let us see the patterns. You can’t fix what you can’t measure.
None of this is utopian. All of it is working somewhere. Germany’s apprenticeship programs. Netherlands’ part-time worker protections. Finland’s AI education initiatives. Portugal’s drug policy reforms. Pieces of the solution exist. The question is whether we can assemble them before the convergence makes adaptation mathematically impossible for an entire generation.
The Toffler Inheritance
Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock as a warning, hoping societies would prepare for what was coming. They didn’t. He wrote The Third Wave as a roadmap, showing how the Information Age could work for everyone. It hasn’t.
But we’re at the threshold of a Fourth Wave. The AI Age. And this time we have something Toffler didn’t: we can see what happens when societies make different choices. The divergence is real, measurable, and accelerating.
The crisis isn’t inevitable. It’s engineered. Which means it can be un-engineered.
It’s not whether change is happening too fast. It’s whether we’ll demand systems that enable adaptation instead of preventing it.
It isn’t whether AI is dangerous. It is whether we’ll deploy it to serve extraction or to enable evolution.
The question isn’t whether the Fourth Wave is coming. It’s here. The question is whether it works for everyone or just for those positioned to extract maximum value from everyone else’s inability to adapt.
Adaptation is evolution. Extraction is death. Decline.
The choice is ours. But the math says we need to make it soon.
