Join the maintenance class, now or never

The only people who ever mattered where the industrialists. The ones holding up the space in which we kids can play. The providers of our post-survival civilization. The maintenance class.

This election has been their comeback. We neglected them, got in their way. And so the vibe has shifted.

This is not a surprise - they have always tried to be heard. But their warnings were turned into political games - climate change, minimum wages, immigration. But reality always catches you eventually, and a certain type of intellectual started realizing this around 2020. The “grey tribe”, the post silicon valley founders, Thiel, Elon, Vivek, etc. Instead of exiting the system and giving up (like the network state folks / burners) they implemented the greatest capture of a political system in history and crowned Trump.

I hope they succeed.

You are not the maintenance class

What is your Reality number, your degrees of separation from truth? How many beliefs do you hold that would kill you if you were wrong? The purpose of humanity is to maximize this number, to be free to believe anything and still survive. Post-scarcity. It is good that astrology and religion and wokeism exist, the same way food waste is a good metric for resilience. But we aren’t there yet, we are only post-survival. Someone is making your food and building your housing, so at the least you can’t unbelief them. You can’t afford to be surprised by the uprising.

But who are they? Who is really running this world?

It ain’t politicians or artists, it ain’t academics nor teachers.

But it is not the working class either. The production of a useless good is still useless. The farmer growing soybeans for biofuels or Christmas trees does not contribute anything. The north Korean factory worker making steel for empty skyscrapers does neither.

It is a group thinly spread through all society, it is the nurse, the tractor engineer, the IT guy at the shipping company, the lonely open source maintainer, the burocrat checking the tap water, the owner of the waste plant. It is this meme:

from xkcd

It is unlikely that you’ve met one of them. They have 20 contacts on LinkedIn, take vacations on cruise ships and never have to sell themselves (wouldn’t know, just stipulating). But they exist, and they are important. If they fail, our kindergarden stops working.

The worry

If you’ve paid any attention, you could have heard them whispering. They’ve tried to not disturb us, and talk amongst themselves, writing actually scientific reports on the climate, the infrastructure, the economy here and there, but vibes are hard to contain. The autistic noticed, our kids noticed, those not yet completely aware that you are not supposed to question the simulation. And sometimes they also made some real mistakes, letting bridges collapse, ships stuck in canals, not containing the virus.

But what are they so afraid of?

I don’t think it’s stagnation, not the “immediate collapse”. Yes, we’ve been starving them of resources so they are struggling with upkeep. They’ve also grown thinner - the elites aren’t sending them enough thirdborns. My interpretation of the worry is that both combined have left them no room for growth. Remember that maintenance is not the useless expense of work - it is the anti-force to the “Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme” (bullshit jobs). So the maintainers HAVE to make the system more effective over time, because they are tasked with growing the post-survival pie. Farms have to become more efficient, energy cheaper, land more plentiful - otherwise the math does not check out.

But this requires effort. Truth ain’t come free. Ozempic doesn’t invent itself, nuclear doesn’t build itself.

So the situation is:

Old infrastructure is not sufficient to upkeep civilization (see South Africa)
Old infrastructure is expensive to maintain (German trains)
Old infrastructure doesn’t scale without causing negative externalities, so you hit population bottlenecks (we can’t just build more coal, see North India)
Training new maintainers is hard (99% of education produces players, not maintainers)
Inventing things is hard
Implementing new infrastructure is effectively forbidden by spoiled players (upholding the status quo is a pure luxury belief) ← [tangent, this is what’s wrong with Europe btw, European farmers aren’t maintenance class, they shouldn’t exist in the first place! If food can be better produced elsewhere, it should be produces elsewhere]
There are only so many maintainers and they are not growing

All of this causes an imbalance between maintenance upkeep and maintenance investment, a downward spiral.

The Rise of SpaceX

To understand this election one must understand Elon. And to understand Elon, I find it necessary to understand what he offers. It is not cars, or rockets. To a large extend those are luxury beliefs. What he offers is the most attractive cult for engineers. An engineer is someone who longs for being in touch with reality. They derive pleasure from being proven wrong by the universe. Exploiting engineers is the most certain way to make money, so Elon build an incredible funnel. From Hyperloop university challenges to buying Twitter, cars in space and cars with rocket thrusters, he captured everyone who is even remotely interested in facing real challenges. But challenges are not guaranteed to be problems.

But then Starlink happened. Suddenly Elon wasn’t just an aspiring oligarch, but an actual industrialist. Actually providing infastructure, having real power. He probably understood the maintenance dynamics beforehand, but that’s hard to prove. Now he had stakes, public ones. And this applies to his employees. It’s not about making fast shit for high-class players anymore. Tesla is an energy company now, SpaceX a communication one.

The same can be said about Thiel with Palantir, Collison with Stripe, Palmer with Anduril (maybe), etc. More and more of the tech bros have become infrastructure, not service providers. A fundamental shift. No wonder the vibes are different.

The revolution is happening. Just differently.

Many people (myself included) have thought the revolution to be impossible. Brain rot, indifference, hyper fast fake new cycles: how can the young really revolt? Why has Fridays for Future not caused more havoc, a real uprising?

But we’ve mistaken the working class for the maintenance class. The revolution of the 21st century will not look like the ones from the 19th. Instead, it will look like this:

It will look like El Segundo, like Saint Louis, like geoengineering and (actually implemented) e/acc. It is our generations time to scrap, build and innovate our way out of this.

Trump, Vance and RFK can’t do any of this. But they are helpful. They will cause enough chaos to keep the fake adults in panic. Giving us room to do our revolution. To go to Mars, build Continous Glucose Delivery devices, kill death, make rain and sunshine, water and peace.

It’s time to build. Join the maintenance class, now or never.

Enter the experience machine last.

Join the maintenance class, now or never
You are not the maintenance class
The worry
The Rise of SpaceX
The revolution is happening. Just differently.