"Your Job Here is to Realign the Stargate"

Ideally, on Monday mornings, I've got an essay for you. (Schedule of events here at Second Breakfast: Monday’s newsletter: essay, most of it for paid subscribers; Friday’s: the week’s news, yay! the news!, for everyone.)

Although the word “essay” comes from the French essayer (to try), I always want that piece of writing to do, not just try (thanks, Yoda); to contain ideas that are fairly fully-formed, fairly well-conceived, if not well-executed, well-polished. No surprise, Week 1 of Trump’s second administration has proven already to be a total mind-fuck, and I’m struggling to articulate the things I feel need to be said (and said with some urgency), and balance all that with the things that, according to the editorial calendar I’ve invented for Second Breakfast at least, I’ve scheduled to write about for January 27.

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” – John Dewey

I’d planned to say something today about the recent World Economic Forum report on “The Future of Jobs” – about how these sorts of powerful narratives about the future get shaped and spread; what they say about this present moment (or, at least, about the years in which these reports were published: 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023, 2025) and what the implications might be when schools (school policy makers, more accurately) believe this storytelling and shift resources to teach certain skills – skills that appeal to global business leaders but that do not reflect the interests or needs of the students and communities they actually serve, skills that do not even necessarily reflect, incidentally, what the governmental agencies that track labor trends think the “jobs of the future” are likely to entail.

“Prompt engineering” sort of silliness. So yeah. Maybe I’ll come back to the meanings and origins and implications of that phrase, but probably not today.

“The best way to predict the future is to issue a press release” – me

I do still want to talk about the future, however — about the stories we’re told about what our participation in it is going to look like.

Reports issued by the World Economic Forum and the like are a kind of “futurology” – speculation, predictive modeling, planning for the future. “Futurology” and its version of “futurism” emerged in the mid-twentieth century as an attempt to control (and transform) the Cold War world through new kinds of knowledge production and social engineering, new technologies of knowledge production and social engineering to be more precise. (This futurism is different than the Marinetti version, the fascist version. Different-ish.) As Jenny Andersson writes in her history of post-war “future studies,” The Future of the World, these “predictive techniques rarely sought to produce objective representation of a probable future; they tried, rather, to find potential levers with which to influence human action.” These techniques, such as the Delphi method popularized by RAND, are highly technocratic — maybe even “cybernetic”? — and are deeply, deeply intertwined with not just economic forecasting, but with military scenario planning. 

“Security” writ large. 

But also, always: storytelling aiming to shape our beliefs in and fears about the future.

On Tuesday, President Trump, accompanied by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, announced a massive private sector AI initiative: the Stargate Project, which will supposedly funnel $500 billion into new OpenAI infrastructure – specifically, into the “data center infrastructure landscape.” According to OpenAI, “This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.” 

Since the mission of OpenAI explicitly involves the automation of human labor, it seems highly unlikely that, if “successful,” this project will “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs” – not in the long-term at least; although in the short term, I suppose there will be construction work for those building new data centers and power plants in Texas. (The World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs” report does list construction workers as “among the largest-growing job types in the next five years.” That's never the stuff that's touted in headlines, of course: that’s a future of assisting AI to do jobs.)

$500 billion for AI infrastructure, alongside Trump's challenge to President Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI – the one that mandated government agency automation not do harm, misinform, or endanger.

$500 billion for AI infrastructure, alongside Trump's dismantling of DEI initiatives, and presumably, should he and his supporters get their way, civil rights protections for federal employees, for the recipients of federal funding, and (they wish) for all of us who are not straight, white, able-bodied, American-born men.

$500 billion for data centers and power plants. $500 billion to accelerate the global climate crisis.

$500 billion to build infrastructure to build algorithms that are free – hell, encouraged even – to discriminate and do harm.

No wonder the WEF's "Future of Jobs Report” says employers will be seeking workers with “resilience.”