Welcome to WALL-E's World

Fighting for a human future in the age of the machine

Note: You may notice my Substack has been rebranded, leaving behind the “Commonwealth Dispatches” brand I established while at EPPC, and going with a simpler, cleaner look. As part of this rebrand, I am also “relaunching” after several months of radio silence. Today’s post should be taken as something of a theme statement for my work at American Compass over the coming year, and indeed as a draft opening chapter for a book I am working on. I hope you’ll join me over 2026 as I wrestle through the contemporary crisis of human competence, the political economy of digital technology, and search for a path forward into a more human future.

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When I was ten or so, my parents, nostalgic for what they had misremembered as a wholesome family comedy, gathered the kids around the boxy living room TV to savor the spectacle of National Lampoon’s Vacation. In the film, Chevy Chase plays Clark Griswold, a middle-aged father of two, who decides to take his family on a cross-country road trip to their dream destination, a southern California amusement park called “Walley World.” Despite an escalating series of tragicomic mishaps along the way, the Griswolds (minus Aunt Edna and her dog, who have both perished along the way) finally arrive at Walley World, driven by Clark’s manic determination—only to discover that it is closed for two weeks for renovation.

A fitting metaphor, perhaps, for our technological society.

A Post-Work Society?

For the past century or two, our civilization has collectively embarked on a journey in search of the perfect vacation, imagining, on the other side of all our industrial age blood, toil, and sweat the ultimate pleasure-dome of a leisured post-work society. Writing in 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously imagined the “Economic Possibilities for our Granchildren”: a world a hundred years hence in which “the economic problem may be solved,” and human beings will be able to while away their time in almost continual leisure, working just 15 hours a week. Just as each of us has been increasingly conditioned to work just so we can get to the weekend, or our next PTO, when we can really start living, so Keynes exhorted his countrymen to struggle through another couple of generations of economic growing pains to arrive at the broad sunlit uplands on the other side.

Thus far, we don’t appear on the verge of a 15-hour week, or of “solving the economic problem.” But according to our new AI overlords, utopia may be just around the corner. Even now, we are told, a post-work world is dawning, a world of almost limitless productivity and thus almost limitless leisure. Sam Altman promises us a world in which “the cost of labor will fall toward zero” and “People will have more time to spend with their families, more time to be creative, more time to engage in the community, and more time to do whatever they find most meaningful.” And his fellow billionaire Marc Andreesen promises a coming “golden age of the arts” in his essay “Why AI Will Save the World.” We may well dispute the premise: there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether AI can in fact replace anything like as much human work as its boosters claim. We might also observe that for much of capitalism’s history, the increased leisure of the globe’s overclass has been bought at the price of drudgery for toiling millions laboring in windowless rooms in some hidden corner of the planet.

But let us grant the claim—not just for the sake of argument, but because we are already seeing glimpses of a post-work future. Over the past twenty years, labor force participation has declined notably in the United States (from 67% to 62%), with the sharpest declines among prime-age men. And for more and more of those still participating in the labor force, work is more a charade than a calling, as employees in “bullshit jobs” while away their hours on social media when the boss isn’t looking. Recent studies suggest that the average employee is only actually working for 2.5 to 4 hours of an 8-hour workday, with social media alone consuming 1.5 to 2 hours of job time, according to some sources. In other words, in some ways we may already be down to a 15-hour work week, but we are no happier for it. In fact, Americans today are less happy than at any time in the history of the General Social Survey, a trend led by surging pessimism among young people, where unhappiness rates have tripled since the turn of the millenium. Keynes was clearsighted enough to foresee this possibility, expressing the “dread” he felt at the prospect of humanity “deprived of its traditional purpose.” Hannah Arendt echoed his assessment a generation later, warning, “It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”

Rather than arriving at Walley World, then, a pleasure-dome of family fun and entertainment, we find ourselves instead increasingly living in WALL-E’s world, the dystopian future imagined by the 2007 Pixar masterpiece.

The End of Human Competence

I don’t know about you, but when I first watched the film nearly two decades ago, I read it chiefly through the lens of environmentalist catastrophism. The most salient image of the film, it seemed at the time, was the enormous piles of trash that had rendered Planet Earth uninhabitable, with trash-compactor robots like WALL-E condemned to the hopeless task of trying to clean it up while the remaining humans escaped off-world. Thus far, although humanity is generating astounding quantities of garbage and dumping millions of tons of microplastics in the oceans, we are not at grave risk of burying Manhattan under towering piles of refuse. But that, I have become convinced, was not the main point of WALL-E anyway.

Today, the much more salient image is that of morbidly obese human blobs floating along on pods through smooth white minimalist hallways, slurping on smoothies while glued to personal screens, no longer even aware of one another’s presence. These blob-humans will still communicate with one another (perhaps the film’s creators lacked the imagination to anticipate a world in which large masses of the population preferred AI companions), but only through the intermediation of their video screens, arguing over how best to while away their oppressive leisure time. When the screens turn off, and two humans encounter one another face-to-face for the first time, they are bewildered and embarrassed by the experience.

In this robotic future, nothing remains to be done for one another. There are robots to clean the hallways, robots to raise the babies (gestated in artificial wombs, we may well suspect), and robots to repair the other robots. And so we no longer know how to do anything. The hyper-obesity of the humans in the film is more than an imaginative projection of just how much fatter our already historically obese society might get on a full-service space station; it is a synecdoche for the loss of human competence, the loss of human agency. The blob-humans of the future, like the blob-humans we are fast becoming today, have outsourced everything that requires effort, and thus almost everything that makes them human.

Today, as I was writing this, I read an X post by an economist: “I recently spoke with someone from Gen Z who just began dating someone new. He said he will upload entire chat histories of their texts and shared photos to ChatGPT and ChatGPT will analyze the relationship, break down their relational patterns and attachment styles, and advise him how to approach the relationship going forward for optimal outcomes, even crafting exact texts for him to send back to her....According to this guy, ‘all his friends are doing this now’.” Today was not an anomaly. Nearly every day I read similar stories, stories of human beings feverishly engaged in their own erasure, human beings desperate to avoid doing something that until yesterday they were experts at, or at which they could have become experts tomorrow with a bit of effort, human beings tripping over one another to give away their most precious earthly possession: their own competence.

The blob-humans of WALL-E have stopped bothering to do anything human because they have been torn away from the world in which humanity finds meaning. They have stopped bothering to do anything that requires effort because nothing does anymore; almost before they even know what they need or what they want, a robot knows already, and has done it for them. They have stopped bothering to do anything for themselves because there is no one else to do it for either. (When one of them falls off his pod, he is quickly surrounded by bots who advise, “Please remain stationary; a service bot will be here to assist you momentarily.”)

Rediscovering Our Humanity

Where then do they find their redemption? How do they rediscover their own agency? In the film, transformation comes in the form of the tenderest of earthly objects: a tiny green plant, an almost painfully fragile seedling plucked up by an explorer bot sent to scan Earth for signs of life, and transported back to the space station Axiom in an old boot, along with a shovelful of dirt. The seedling’s arrival provides the catalyst for the film’s main conflict, as the Axiom’s AI system, AUTO, refuses to follow the official protocol of initiating a return to Earth because of a secret overriding protocol which warns that Earth is a lost cause, and the humans should remain in their space cocoon forever. The captain of the Axiom, B. McCrea, every bit as obese as his passengers, and long accustomed to the same daily routine of abdication to AUTO, rediscovers his humanity in what ultimately becomes a knock-down, drag-out fight to preserve the seedling, shut down AUTO, and pilot the Axiom back to Earth. “I don’t want to survive; I want to live!” he exclaims.

In other words, according to the film, in the midst of an artificially engineered pseudo-world of comfort, we rediscover our human agency quite literally by “touching grass”—through contact with the otherness of nature, through the necessity of conflict, and through the demand for care. The film goes out of its way to highlight the contrast between the messiness of the organic natural world and the pristine polished surfaces of the spaceship, as one cleaner-bot, triggered by the detection of “foreign contaminant” dirt, spends much of the film on an obsessive and futile quest to vacuum up the stains left by the dusty and rusty garbage compactor robot WALL-E. But I am particularly interested in the second and third catalysts for transformation: conflict and care. At first glance, these two seem at odds with one another, and indeed, our society frequently struggles to reconcile our appreciation for the “masculine” warrior virtues of rugged strength, independence, and daring, and for the “feminine” nurturing virtues of care, compassion, and patience.

If we are not careful, we can let our politics see-saw between the two extremes, as we have seen in recent years with the Left’s one-sided embrace of empathy and hospitality, and the Right’s reaction in favor of a courage that can border on cruelty. Even within the conservative tradition, however, it can be hard to sort out which is the higher value: independence or dependence. John Wayne is a conservative hero, an icon of the fearless frontiersman who can take care of himself, exemplifying an ethic of “personal responsibility” that has led many conservatives to despise the welfare state and valorize the sometimes ruthless competition of the marketplace. But George Bailey is also a conservative hero, a family man rooted to his town and his place, who discovers over the course of It’s a Wonderful Life what Leah Sargeant has called “the dignity of dependence”: the fact that he is profoundly dependent on all those who have depended upon him over the previous decades.

As this latter example shows, however, the two values of independence and dependence are not in conflict, but rather two sides of the same coin: interdependence. We learn to depend upon others as they learn to depend upon us. In giving we receive, and in receiving we give. We discover our unique and individual human agency in relationship and response to other human agents who, like the seedling in WALL-E, turn out to be surprisingly fragile and needy in some way. They call forth our care almost instinctually. If I see you stumble, I will reach out to steady you. If I see you in pain, I will come near to comfort you. If I see you overburdened with tasks, I will look for some way to share or bear your burdens. Not because I am particularly altruistic or selfish, but because that’s how we are wired as humans. We want to be needed. We need to be needed. Your need will summon me to a display of courage and competence, perhaps beyond what I knew I had, as I seek to brave hardships and develop skills so that I feel like I have something worthwhile to offer to the world, something to give delight to another human being. Thus, at the climactic moment of WALL-E, Captain McCrae discovers his ability to walk on his own two legs and staggers up the floor of the tilting spaceship to wrestle AUTO into submission.

But in the very moment of risking ourselves to care for the vulnerable, we encounter our own vulnerability, our own dependence on others. Even as McCrae fights AUTO, the other humans, finding their own footing for the first time, collaborate to save the plant, passing it from one hand to another, until it can be safely scanned to trigger a return voyage to earth. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any action hero who turns out to triumph on his own; in nearly every film in the genre, the hero finds himself at a critical moment clinging for dear life to a precipice—literally or metaphorically—until another human hand (sometimes one he had till then despised) reaches out and pulls him to safety. In other words, we realize our agency both in discovering our individual competence in the face of perils or obstacles, and in discovering our mutual dependence upon others, in relation to whom we become the best versions of ourselves.

The Friction of Relationships

Indeed, we might also observe that the greatest perils and obstacles that most of us must brave are those of human relationships themselves. There is nothing more dangerous than entrusting your heart to another human being, no obstacle more frustrating than the stubborn barrier of another human’s will. The greatest adventure we are called to is that of life together. And although we fear that we will lose our selfhood, our authenticity, our freedom in this encounter, the reality is that through it, we discover our agency. The athlete becomes strong and fast through his constant struggle against friction and gravity; the musician becomes skilled by mastering the resistance of air and catgut; and every human becomes an individual by struggling against the foibles and frailties of those he or she is called to love.

All of us, in short, must develop competence through friction—the only way that we can get any traction upon the world. And yet it is exactly this that technology promises to take from us. The computer was sold to us as a “bicycle for the mind”: something to help us get more done and become more fit in the process, a productivity enhancer that also made us work harder. And perhaps it was for a short sweet spot in the 80s and 90s. But successive waves of digitization have given us instead a mobility scooter for the mind. A handful of us still use our devices to be super-productive, but more and more of us have allowed ourselves to be passively shuttled along the information superhighway, becoming both physically and mentally obese in the process. And just as with physical fitness, so mental fitness turns out to be a feedback loop. The less fit you become, the harder it is to exercise, and the more you resort to the mobility scooter; the more you resort to the mobility scooter, the fatter you become. Today, our technologists are racing to invent new thought-saving technologies fast enough to keep up with our demand to outsource thought from our flaccid brains.

AI may be a bicycle for some minds, but for most, it is quite the opposite. Riding a bicycle, after all, requires not just muscle but gumption—there’s a non-trivial chance you’ll end up with less skin on your knees and elbows than when you started. The bicycle enhances our agency not just because we can get farther, faster, but because in riding it, we stake ourselves on the venture, we put ourselves at risk. Today, AI is being used to bubble-wrap our lives: rather than taking risks in the midst of uncertainty, we ask a superbrain to predict which choice will have the lowest chance of misfiring...and even if it turns out to be wrong, we can at least console ourselves that it wasn’t our fault; we were just following instructions.

Consider again the Gen Z-er, using ChatGPT to try and take away all of the risk of dating—the fear of misreading another’s hints or tones of voice, the fear of being too forward or too hesitant, the fear of committing oneself emotionally, of being vulnerable. But of course, if I am not willing to be vulnerable, I will never encounter others in their vulnerability—that is, as needing my care or calling for my competence. I will never find true love. Gen Z has been living through the futility of trying to find love without friction for much of their lives. Texting promised connection without contact, conversation on our own terms and our own timetable. Instagram promised affirmation by algorithm, the ability to quantify one’s worth in the world without the work of living. Tinder promised hook-ups without pick-up lines that might fall flat—and pornography offered the guaranteed simulacrum of sexual performance without having to learn what a real woman wants or needs. One can’t help but suspect that AI intermediation of human girlfriend and boyfriend is likely to soon give way to AI girlfriends and boyfriends—and indeed it already has for many.

Such frictionless relationships render us impotent and enervated, incapable of effective agency in the world. This has consequences for our politics as well. Our constitutional order was designed for a highly-engaged, self-disciplined citizenry, their habits formed in a thousand “little platoons” of democratic self-governance in church, school, and temperance club. When citizens become consumers, however, they no longer care about democratic participation—it’s too much work and involves too much friction. No longer maintaining the local power centers of their mediating institutions, they allow power to drift away into immense corporate concentrations, which are best able to supply the most pleasures at the cheapest prices with the least friction. Eventually, these mega-corporations stop pretending to be the “private sector” and effectively take over the business of governance, with CEOs as our new Caesars. So it is in WALL-E, where the orgy of consumption that has buried Earth in garbage has also culminated in the consolidation of a global (indeed galactic) super-corporation, Buy n’ Large, which now serves as the benevolent dictator of the somnolent smoothie-slurpers who float along its spaceships.

Can these trends be reversed? We may well despair, but WALL-E offers hope. Human nature can be buried under many layers of artifice, but it is still there, waiting to be re-awakened. When the screens flicker off, replaced with the needy, fragile, and irreducibly real seedling demanding their action, the blobs regain their humanity. Similarly, this past year, as school districts across America have experimented with banning phones on campus, they’ve been shocked to see just how quickly their students have rediscovered how to be children: playing boardgames, drawing sketches, and yes, buying bicycles.

Nor need this renewal always take the form of unplugging; one of the most intriguing features of the film WALL-E is that its heroes are indeed themselves robots; they are genuinely pro-human AIs (“aligned” AIs, as the lingo has it). WALL-E does not present us with a binary choice for or against the machine, but with a call for a renewed human agency within which machines can help us fight for what matters most if we are clear-eyed enough to see what we are seeking.

Our self-imposed blindness is the result not simply of technology, but of a political economy in which we have allowed our sense desires to be hacked in pursuit of profit, and have outsourced our duties of critical judgment to beneficent algorithms. The political implications of our abdication may be harder to reverse: once power consolidates and escapes accountability, it is rarely relinquished without a violent struggle. But Captain McCrea conquered AUTO in the end. Perhaps we will too.