Every power structure in history has had its version of "endure now, paradise later." Religion had the afterlife. Communism had the classless utopia that was always one more 5-year plan away. And now tech has the singularity.
The function is always the same. Keep people passive during the extraction phase. Don't organize. Don't resist. Don't demand structural change. Because the thing that fixes everything is just around the corner. And by the time people realize the corner keeps moving, the consolidation is already done.
The genius of the tech version is that it feels rational. It's not faith-based, it's data-based. There are charts and benchmarks and great looking exponential curves. It looks like science, not ...ideology. So it bypasses the skepticism people would normally apply to someone saying "trust me, bro. It'll all work out."
Meanwhile, the gains are collected today. The austerity is cash on delivery. The abundance is futures trading.
Elon says abundance. Elon fires everyone.
Nobody embodies this contradiction better than Elon Musk. "We will have everything in abundance," he says. Everything. But at the same time, he fires everyone everywhere.
The future is limitless prosperity... just not for you, specifically, right now, because your position has been eliminated. Universal basic income is inevitable, he'll tell you. Right after he gutted federal agencies' workforces through DOGE. The cognitive dissonance isn't even hidden. It's just delivered with such confidence that people nod along.
This is the pattern. The transition period is always hand-waved away. "Yes, millions of jobs will disappear, but.. but.. eventually...really!" That "eventually" is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. Real people live in the meantime. Real families need income in the meantime. But the vision is so grand and seductive that the human wreckage between here and utopia becomes a rounding error. Really?
A carrot on a stick so the masses stay still until their glorious full-automation arrives. (How obvious is this trajectory? In October 2025 I wrote a song imagining humans renting themselves out as emotional labor for the optimized elite. I called it "Rent-A-Human." By February 2026, someone shipped it as an actual product. Same logic, four months apart. One made a song, the other made a startup.)
Your singularity runs through the Pentagon
This week, Anthropic reportedly refused a Department of Defense demand to remove usage restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The result was immediate. Contract termination. Supply chain risk designation. What David Shapiro called "the corporate death penalty."
Shapiro's analysis was sharp. He's right that Anthropic's refusal probably just hands the work to less scrupulous actors. He's right that the competitive vacuum will be filled instantly. OpenAI signed with the Pentagon within hours. Game theory doesn't care about your principles.
But here's the thing. Shapiro framed companies willing to partner unconditionally with the military as being on "the right path." He argued that Anthropic's refusal was corporate suicide driven by ideological capture. And maybe it was. But in making that argument, he described a world where refusing the Department of Defense in any capacity is a death sentence for an AI company.
And then, when pressed, he conceded that the DoD has "outsized influence" over the AI industry.
That concession is the whole story.
If the only viable path for frontier AI runs through the Pentagon, then the singularity isn't being shaped by visionaries, or philosophers, or market demand from regular people. It's being shaped by defense priorities. And the companies on the "right path" aren't there because they're building a better future. They're there because they were willing to hand over the keys without asking where the car is going.
We've seen this movie before
Someone in the comments pointed out that the nuclear and rocket industries wouldn't exist without military money. That's true. And look how that turned out.
Nuclear energy is often held up as the clean revolution that never happened because of its military origins. Maybe. The truth is more complicated. Whether civilian nuclear would have thrived without the weapons baggage is genuinely debatable... markets don't tend to optimize for safe, they optimize for profitable. But what's not debatable is that the military origin story shaped public perception, regulatory frameworks, and investment priorities for generations. The technology became inseparable from the bomb in the public mind. That's what a military origin does to a technology. It defines the narrative before anyone else gets a chance.
Rockets followed the same arc. Space exploration became possible because of ICBMs. Access to space was controlled by defense institutions for decades. It took until the private space era to even begin decoupling that trajectory. And even now the entanglement runs deep.
If AI follows this pattern... and right now every signal says it will... then the question isn't whether the singularity arrives. It's whether it arrives pre-captured by the institutions that funded it. Just like the internet did. DARPA built it for military resilience, not civilian privacy, and decades later we're still patching the consequences of that origin story.
Reduce suffering, except when there's a contract
David Shapiro built a framework years ago that I genuinely admire. Three heuristic imperatives for AI: reduce suffering, increase prosperity, increase understanding. I love that. And it's increasingly difficult to reconcile with the world he's describing.
You can't build a framework centered on reducing suffering and then argue that the only viable path forward is unconditional partnership with the largest war machine on earth. At some point the pragmatism eats the philosophy.
None of this means Anthropic played it smart. Maybe they overplayed their hand. Maybe their red lines were arbitrary given their prior involvement in operations like Maduro. Those are fair criticisms. But the fact that drawing any line at all is apparently a death sentence tells us something far more important about where this is heading than anything about one company's corporate strategy.
They're not building bunkers because they're optimistic
While they sell you the singularity, they're buying survival. Sam Altman stockpiles guns, gold, and potassium iodide. Zuckerberg builds a $270 million compound in Hawaii with blast-resistant doors. Peter Thiel quietly secures New Zealand citizenship after spending 12 days in the country. Reid Hoffman said in 2017 that buying property in New Zealand had become a "wink wink, say no more" among Silicon Valley billionaires.
Douglas Rushkoff got invited to speak to a group of tech billionaires about the future. They didn't ask about technology. They asked him how to maintain authority over their security forces "after The Event."
These are the people telling you abundance is coming. These are the people promising the singularity will lift all boats. And they are building underground fortresses to survive the thing they're building.
If they believed their own story... why the bunkers? Why the exit strategies? Why the blast doors?
They can see exactly where this goes. They're just making sure they survive it. The rest of us get the carrot.
I made an entire album trilogy about this. Not because I have answers. Because the questions aren't going away and nobody with a platform seems willing to ask them.
Nobody talks about who survives the transition
Everyone is arguing about who builds the future. Almost nobody is asking who survives the transition.
The abundance is always coming. It's always on the horizon. Five years away from solving everything. But today? Today we need efficiency. Today we cut headcount. Today the gains flow upward and the disruption flows downward. And if you question the timeline, you're a luddite who doesn't understand exponential curves.
The singularity might arrive. The abundance might come. But if the road there is paved by defense contracts and mass displacement, what exactly arrives at the other end? A utopia shaped by the Pentagon's priorities and funded by the elimination of human labor isn't the dream anyone signed up for.
I might be you
Here's the part I don't want to write.
I've spent this whole piece pointing at the powerful. The billionaires with their bunkers. The companies with their contracts. The CEOs with their carrots. And all of that is real. But if I'm honest... and I'm trying to be... I don't know what I'd do in their position.
I walk past homeless people. I buy things I don't need while people starve. I tell myself I can't save everyone, so I save no one. That's with nothing. What would I be with everything?
I'd like to say I'd be different. I'd like to say I'd keep the doors open. But I've never had a billion reasons to be afraid of everyone. And it's easy to preach connection when you've never had to choose between your family's safety and a stranger's need.
The billionaires building bunkers aren't a different species. They're scared humans with more resources and the same desperate need to feel safe. They didn't start out building fortresses. They started out cautious. One backup plan, then another. Each one logical. And somewhere in the concrete they forgot how to feel the rain.
I'm not pointing up. I'm pointing sideways. At all of us. Different scales of the same fear. Different flavors of the same disconnection.
My dad worked for the army his whole life. I'm not a hippie raging against the machine from the outside. I grew up inside it. I still have canned bread from the military on my shelf that he used to bring home when they restocked. I know what these systems look like from the inside. I know what they cost the people who serve them. And I know why I chose a different path... not out of anger, but out of understanding.
So when I say the Pentagon shouldn't be the gravitational center of the most transformative technology in human history, I'm not saying it from some clean, principled distance. I'm saying it as someone who's seen what that gravity does to the people caught in it. Including the ones who serve it loyally.
Maybe it's time to stop debating which company builds the future and start asking what future is actually being built. And maybe the answer starts smaller than anyone wants to admit. Not with structural mechanisms or policy frameworks or grand alliances. Just with people catching people before they fall. Being the net instead of building the wall.
See you tomorrow.