journalism

Robber Barons & Resistance

CStreet

11 Aug 2025 — 6 min read

History holds a multitude of lessons right now. Labor in the age of AI inundation seems to one of the most relevant and rarely discussed topics. America is facing a fundamental question at this apex of oligarchic restructuring of our social contracts and workforce expectations. The question we face, and must answer through resistance, is this: are humans expendable in the workforce of tomorrow?

America’s CEOs clearly believe humans are optional and easily replaceable with artificial “intelligence”. Why groom corporate workers to be sycophantic yes men when the ghost in their machines is clearly made for such a task, will bend to every desire of leadership and are dramatically cheaper than human labor? Especially when the massive cost of power to run the artificial workforce is pushed onto the communities who unwittingly host these massive data centers. Externalities in full effect, no need to sweat the details, just jam those artificial structures in place, put the humans on notice to bend to the new “market-driven culture” or get the fuck out.

Here’s the thing. We, as a country, have played this game already. In the late 1800s to early 1900s, corporations controlled everything. They built massive railroad systems on the lives of hundreds of thousands of laborers. They consolidated companies and resources to feed a handful of ultra-wealthy owners, bought every possible politician necessary to look the other way as the exploitation of labor, land, indigenous peoples and resources were placed in the hands of these robber barons. And they built massive complex and centralized banking and insurance structures to move wealth towards the apex predators building these systems of industry.

Immigrants were sourced from eastern and southern Europe to build these machines of extraction in massive numbers. Indentured to build the infrastructure of the oligarchs at the end of a gun. With their massive troves of wealth, these families then shifted to the education system to create waves of obedient and subservient workers, controlling text books, curriculums and teachers to produce their desired outcome. They built university systems in their names; Vanderbilt, Cornell, Duke, Stanford and more and then ensured that the pedagogy at these schools served their desires to remain the ruling class.

Much of the robber baron’s wealth was built on the blood of labor. The sheer volume of death associated with the creation of the industrial revolution is stunning and eventually labor resisted to the point of change. But the trauma of such exploitation reminds baked into our current corporate systems.

The stage was set for the devastation to come in the following decades by the absolute greed of these barons. World Wars, a massive stock market crash, a Great Depression-- and eventually the rise of socialist policies in the ashes of utter devastation. FDR created the social safety nets necessary for a middle class to rise from the desolation of the Depression.

I was blessed to benefit from that middle class rise. My parents were able to live that “American Dream” and I was able to have a comfortable and beautiful childhood. Regan’s trickledown economics and the agenda of the neoliberal class was being written into law while I was playing Star Wars on the playground, but the ramifications of that devastating economic policy wouldn’t be felt until my late 20s.

I chose not to participate in the corporate rat race for my professional journey until my late 40s. By then, I was just curious about the whole structure. And the view from inside corporate tech, at the leadership level where I entered, is a damning indictment of all that’s wrong in the system built by the robber barons so many years ago.

The corruption, exploitation and extraction are built into the very corporate systems that have driven capitalism since the late 1800s. Today’s oligarchs are reviving those playbooks and including those from Hitler’s reign in their push for ultimate power over labor once again. And this time, they bought the presidential candidate-- in the open-- so the laws do not apply to them. (These "titans of industry" have always purchased presidents, but they usually hid the purchase from the public.)

Need to work around some mystery tariff that may or may not happen in the next few months? Show up at the White House with a gold bar holding an “award” for the most ignorant man to ever hold any political office. Need to remove a case from the SEC because your cryptocurrency project is a perpetual scam and has been since 2018? Buy 5 million shitcoins spun up by the president’s idiot children and purchase a “dinner”. Your charges will be dropped in 7 days. Want to jam your weaponized AI surveillance system into government so you can control all the serfs building and buying your products? Purchase a presidential campaign, their VP candidate and then use your satellites to switch votes on election day.

This isn’t conspiracy. The robber barrons are just doing these acts in the open, on the record, for the whole world to witness-- and do nothing about.

If you have a job, you must cling to it in order to survive in the crushing “cost of living” era we are navigating. Keep people on the edge of survival and they’ll do most anything to protect themselves and their loved ones. If you are wealthy and secure, maintaining that place in the world requires playing the oligarchs game to an extent, even if you know it’s wrong. If you don’t have a job, which now includes millions of people who’ve been purged from federal or corporate jobs in the last 6 months, the survival mode required to find another job and keep from drowning leaves no room for resistance.

The only way to save your sanity and survive it all is not to play. Like in the classic hacker movie of the 1980s War Games, the only solution to avoid total annihilation from nuclear war is not to play the game at all.

And that, my friends, is where we stand. We must leave this system of oppression and build our own exit plans and find as many ways to opt-out as possible. I’ve been of this mindset since my early 20s, when my father, who played the corporate game well to support his family, died suddenly 9 months into his early retirement from big tobacco at age 51. I knew at age 23 I was never going to play this game. And my recent breaking of that declaration has had a devastating impact on my health. I know I need to exit again, and am working on just that.

The exit fantasy is something I used to daydream about often; a mild dystopian fantasy that we all could survive and rebuild a social order that was circular and just. But to do that requires the old systems to collapse on themselves. I hoped that would happen in another lifetime, not my own. My desire was to simply write about solutions and help build experimental alternatives through decentralized tech.

Unfortunately, it's happening now, in real time. I’m not at all prepared fiscally for such a collapse, but I did study yoga and religion recently for a reason. I needed a skillset to navigate the utter destruction we are now facing and provide others with the tools to navigate it as well.

We all know where this ends, even if we choose to bypass our reality. We still feel it in our guts. We know none of this modern lifestyle based on extraction is sustainable as it stands and we know the corporate structures many work within or that we pay our hard earned dollars towards for basic goods and services are destroying ourselves, our communities and our country.

But we still play the game of extraction because we lack viable alternatives or simply choose to bypass the reality bearing down on us. We eventually must resist the robber barons because they are clearly working to destroy us and everything that makes humanity the beautiful enigma that it is.

One hope that I cling to with desperation is the possibility of building a more equitable and beautiful society in the ashes of this impeding destruction. There are many among us who see through the charade and who are building alternative economic and social structures that can support such a transition. I know because I’m one of them. We are a vast, decentralized network of rebels and cypherpunks who are building the technology we’ll need to navigate this collapse at scale.