To my friends on the left.
You're about to be sold the most elegant trap in modern history. It will come wrapped in everything you care about: the planet, workers, justice, the climate. If you buy it, it will deliver the exact opposite of everything you've ever fought for.
Let me show you where it comes from.
In 1944, two philosophers of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, wrote that reason and technology, the tools that were supposed to free humanity, had turned into tools of domination. Twenty years later, Marcuse argued that modern technology was the most sophisticated system of social control ever built. Brilliant men, with a real insight. But the lesson a whole generation of intellectuals took from them was simple: progress is suspect, and the machine is the enemy.
In 1968, the Club of Rome was founded. It was a small circle of industrialists, diplomats and scientists. Notice who was in the room. No workers, no farmers, no one from the slums. In 1972 they published The Limits to Growth. The message was that if humanity keeps growing, it collapses. So slow down, consume less, have fewer children, accept less.
Around the same time, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s.
Here's what actually happened. The Green Revolution fed billions. The mass famines never came. In 1980 the economist Julian Simon bet Ehrlich that resources would get cheaper, not scarcer, and he won. Extreme poverty went from more than a third of humanity in 1990 to under one in ten. That didn't come from degrowth. It came from growth, energy and technology.
The pessimists were wrong about almost everything. But they won something more important than the argument. They won the institutions: UN agencies, NGOs, university departments, think tanks, Brussels. Nobody needed to coordinate. The ideas simply became the water everyone swims in. Growth is guilt. Technology is danger. The answer is always less.
Less for you, that is. Never for the people at Davos who fly private to discuss your carbon footprint.
Now watch what happens with AI. They'll connect it to the planet. Data centers drink water, burn gas and raise your electricity bill. Some of that is locally true, and the people living next to those sites deserve to be heard. Last March, Bernie Sanders and AOC proposed a national moratorium on new AI data centers, backed by hundreds of organizations.
So ask the oldest question on the left: who benefits?
A moratorium on new data centers freezes the ones that already exist. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta already built theirs. A moratorium doesn't stop Big Tech. It crowns Big Tech. The startups, the public universities, the open-source labs, the countries of the Global South that were about to build their own are the ones who never get to. It's the greatest gift ever offered to an oligarchy, wrapped in green paper.
And here is what nobody tells you. AI isn't the planet's problem. It's the fastest path we have to solving the planet's problems.
AI is already controlling the plasma inside experimental fusion reactors. It has predicted the structure of nearly every known protein, which opens the door to enzymes that eat plastic and crops that need less water and less fertilizer. It has proposed hundreds of thousands of new stable materials for better batteries and cheaper solar. It forecasts weather and balances electric grids so renewables can actually work at scale.
Every problem you care about is, at its core, an intelligence problem. Clean energy, food, water, disease, poverty. Make intelligence abundant and those problems become solvable. Make it scarce and the solutions belong to whoever owns it.
That's the real trap. Fear of AI won't make AI disappear. It will only decide who owns it.
A world where intelligence is rationed creates a new aristocracy. On one side, a small class with unlimited cognitive labor at its command. On the other, everyone else, dependent on that class for their health, their education, their job, their permission to speak. No chains. Just dependency. That's how every modern form of servitude has worked, and the left used to understand that better than anyone.
Everything the left has ever wanted has never been closer: the end of poverty, healthcare and education for every human being, workers freed from exhausting labor, a planet that can breathe. Marx dreamed of a society where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. That isn't a world of scarcity. It's a world of abundance. Abundance is the only thing that has ever freed anyone.
So stay on the left if you want. Keep fighting for the poor, for workers, for the planet. Just fight with the most powerful tool humanity has ever been handed, not against it.
Because the people asking you to give it up already have theirs.
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