📢 At the start of 2026, one idea began to dominate political and tech discourse: the emergence of a permanent underclass. What’s actually being argued?

The thesis is blunt. As cognitive and physical labor become fully automated, the ability for most people to generate surplus capital disappears. Not “the bottom 95%,” but effectively everyone up to and including all but a microscopic elite. In this framing, 99.99% of humanity becomes economically redundant: dependent, immobile, stripped of real agency.

Power consolidates upward into an extraordinarily small technocratic class on the order of