George Jetson's Job in the Fourth Reich
Trump is promising to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But with the rapid rise of robotics, those factories will be automated. So who benefits?
The “fourth Reich” is a term being used lately, only somewhat facetiously, to describe the weird new alignment of rising authoritarian powers. It points to Trump’s USA jettisoning its longstanding loyalty to democratic Western governments, and the US/Russian alliance that’s emerging; it also draws explicit parallels between the socially regressive policies now being implemented in the US, and Germany in the 1930s.
To be fair, this is by no means a movement limited to or even driven by the United States, but something sinister that’s spreading throughout the world. It’s a transnational planet these days, so its politics are too. The white supremacists currently steam-rolling the constitution are funding like-minded groups in many countries: France, Hungary, Italy, Germany, and Canada. This has been going on for a long time, with symptoms such as media consolidation in the hands of right-wing billionaires, but the end game is coming into focus. It’s a globalization of the conquistador’s system of encomiendas, essentially a set of fiefdoms controlled by private companies, with little or no government to restrain them. There are elections in these encomiendas—just as there are in Russia today—but they’re for show. I’ve talked elsewhere about this kind of government, which is anocracy or semi-authoritarianism.
But what’s it for? Leaving aside George Orwell’s diagnosis that it’s purely about power—”a boot stamping on a human face, forever”—authoritarianism comes with certain economic presuppositions and commitments. It’s closely allied to colonialism. Colonialism happens when one group of people takes control of another group and that group’s land in order to extract wealth from both. Trump has expressed a desire to use economic pressure to control Panama, Greenland, and Canada, and Putin is trying to annex Ukraine. The Chinese are known to have their sights set on Taiwan. The colonial dream would seem to be alive and well in the 21st century.
There are problems with this diagnosis. The fully integrated supply chains of Globalization are about as efficient a wealth-extraction system as you can create. The Fourth Reich will be replacing a powerful wealth generator with a mediocre one. Presumably, the men at the top believe they’ll still come out ahead, but that’s only likely to be temporarily true. The current debt crisis of the United States makes outright invasion of Canada unaffordable—while they could conquer us in a day, the US’s track record of holding conquered territory is abysmal. Just ask the Iraqis, the Afghans, or the Vietnamese.
If the riches to be stolen were once in the form of gold, now they’re fossil fuels and rare earths. And cheaper manpower—offshoring slavery—has always been the other attraction of the system. But none of these are going to retain their value for long.
Conquering a Ghost
The main issue is that while all of this sabre-rattling is going on, new technologies are kicking the legs out from under the economics of colonialism. Here are some factors to consider:
Colonialism occurs because certain highly valuable resources are scarce and can’t be sourced at home. At the moment, in North America, these resources are rare earths and fossil fuels. But it’s that at the moment thing that’s the issue; new, better battery formulas are coming that use elements like sodium or sulfur instead of lithium, so what’s the value of investing in lithium? And rare earths aren’t actually that rare; we just have to develop a domestic industry to extract them.
Scarcity of fossil fuels is a major engine of the world economy, and its inequalities. Half the ships on the ocean at any given time are oil tankers, but this too is changing fast. Even if the Reich were to ban renewable energy within its borders, relying on oil and coal would make it economically noncompetitive with the non-Reich world. For instance, Pakistan (population: 247 million) is rapidly adopting solar power. Vietnam has just tripled its target for installed solar capacity. Countries that go fully renewable can’t be extorted by threatening their energy supplies. Once they have sufficient supply, they can easily keep building into a state of oversupply that increases their resilience and ability to act independently.
Trump’s great dream of America controlling the development of AI seems in tatters, as a single medium-sized Chinese company blew the doors off of OpenAI’s $500 billion AI project with the release of Deepseek. This wasn’t an anomaly: as with Internet technology, AI gets better the more freely it’s shared.
The other reason for conquering (or at least controlling) other territories is to acquire cheap labour. But isn’t Tesla going all-in on robots? If they are (and companies in democracies, such as Hyundai, certainly are), then the Fourth Reich isn’t going to have a manpower problem; it has no use for a cheap labour force, whether at home in the form of indentured prisoners, or off-shored in foreign sweatshops. If it needs a bigger workforce, all it has to do is build it.
Where does this leave the American worker? Or, for that matter, the sweatshop labourers in what we used to call the “third world?” Musk has said that a Universal Guaranteed Income will be essential in the future. Withholding this for political reasons will certainly be tried as a way of controlling people… but again, controlling them for what purpose?
George Jetson had a job. Every hour or so, he had to push a button. He commuted daily and was paid a handsome salary to push that button. But you and I know that in the Fourth Reich, George will not have any buttons to push.
If the labour pool becomes decoupled from the human population, and energy independence becomes the norm in all regions, then traditional colonialism has no value.
The Fourth Reich is cuing up a traditional authoritarian regime but without any of the economic justifications that made such regimes successful in the past. It’s a conqueror whose home country is everywhere and nowhere, ransacking a world where there’s nothing left worth stealing.
The Reich is trying to recreate a power structure that no longer exists, and cannot be remade.
—K