I grew up with Physical friends and family. I was one of the only one of my high school friends to get a degree, which I paid for myself after 4 years active duty Army.
I’ve always felt a distance between myself and my laptop class colleagues who have tenuous to non-existent contact with Physicals outside of requesting/demanding services.
I’m still friends with my high school buddies. After years of living abroad and in other states, I chose to raise my family near my hometown so I could keep this support network of friends who I know will be there for me.
Also, having buddies who have real world skills comes in handy. You can’t really call your laptop class colleagues when you need help with anything non-digital.
The financially successful (except for a couple of rich youngsters) in my neighborhood are chief mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and firemen and delivery drivers who moonlight. "College" has been oversold and is overpriced. As N. Dynamite stated: "girls want guys with skills, Pedro".
Very true and under-recognized by many. Within a decade or two AI will easily lead to massive unemployment of knowledge workers and AI can easily displace everyone from accountants to lawyers to computer programmers. Easily. Not so much with people who make and fix physical things. We shall see an interesting shift in political attitudes as this plays out.
Yes, and the poor white boys, made worse off than ever before because their mamas made certain they got every vaccine imaginable, waste their time listening to Joe Rogan and Q annon... oblivious to the world around them.
It would be good if we could move away from the idea that four years at “college” ending in a degree in English or History or whatever is the ticket to an easy life.
College lets you graduate with zero actual job skills and five or six figures in debt to pay off with the money from your dead end job.
My gal wanted a job that didn’t involve a brass pole, so she did the smart thing - went to RI Community College, took an aptitude test, aced it (clever girl!) and thus qualified for a free three year program that gave her an associates degree and a certification in Diagnostic Medical Sonography.
Graduated and had a job the next day, because the world is short of diagnostic medical sonographers and hospitals will eagerly hire new graduates with the right certification.
“College” isn’t worth shit. An education in a field that is in demand is the golden ticket. You might get that in college, but you have to seek it out and not just follow the default path.
They also think, 'any fool can farm. There is a giant base of knowledge in the physical world they are totally unaware of. This makes them think the peons are easily replaced.
Recently I was in an online discussion where someone said, "Can't we solve the shortage of tradies by reducing apprenticeships from 4 years to 2? After all we can make a doctor in 4 years."
Of course, the "4 year doctor" is actually someone who did another 3-5 year degree first; if they go straight to medicine it's a 6 year degree. And then there's 1-2 years of placement, 1-2 years of residency, 4+ years for a speciality (including General Practice). He kept insisting, "No, it's 4 years to make a doctor." Well, you go to that one, mate, I'll go to the one with 10+ years behind them...
So the Laptop Class simply has no idea the depth of knowledge required to perform a job properly - even another professional job.
I mean you really think it should take that long to make a doctor? Its this kind of reasoning that keeps people out of these jobs. There's plenty of people that could be doctors, especially since 90% of doctors I've seen don't have a fucking clue if they can't run a test. I'd rather go to a 150 IQ doctor with a 4 year degree that a 101 IQ doctor with a 12 year degree. Why do you assume time conveys education?
Most of those years aren't formal education, they're placement experience. So the would-be oncologist gets to work with a lot of cancer patients under the supervision of other doctors who've treated a lot of cancer patients. Likewise the would-be orthopaedic surgeon, and so on.
Anecdotally, this certainly appears to be their mindset in my experience. Perhaps the shortfalls in military recruitment will help correct this particularly problematic misconception among our self declared betters.
My favorite is when some soy boy grows some arugula and cilantro on his 3" x 2" city apartment balcony and starts up a YouTube channel about "urban homesteading" or something. "Yep, buddy. In about two months you'll have a whole plateful of... salad. You're definitely going to survive the apocalpse. Finger snaps!"
Tiexiera is a voice in the wilderness. It’s fascinating to see him warning the left that they are driving away the very “working class and people of color” constituency they rely on, because they consider them deplorable and beneath contempt.
And of course the left ignores him because they still think that Republicans are the class of country club idle rich people, and that the multiracial working class are mostly concerned with pronouns and “Latin-X” and banning gas powered cars.
Keep talking to yourselves, lefties. Nobody else wants to hear your bullshit anymore.
This is so spot on… I truly don’t really care at all if someone gets my pronouns perfectly right (let’s suppose I have many).
I’ll instead really care if home prices go through the roof excluding all the ongoing, recently introduced and future incoming generations from accessing affordable homes. Just one of thousands of examples.
The priorities are extremely backwards: rampant crime, rampant inflation, segregation?
“Yeah sure, but let’s not focus on that… let’s just scream defund the police some more, print more money and let’s protest somewhere 24/7 while we burn down completely innocent businesses in our destructive paths that got nothing to do with anything”
Note that it’s the Laptop Class who is most wound up about AI — they thought the robots would replace the Physicals first, but they ended up threatening Laptop Class jobs instead, since those center around manipulating information of some kind. And computers have *always* been great at manipulating information.
I worked in an academic role for a prestigious west coast University. It was the worst job I've ever had, mainly due to the people. They were some of the most neurotic, self-righteous, humorless, conformist clowns I've ever had the misfortune of knowing.
This is superb. I have to assume you are Canadian based on what you write. I am personally a member of that Laurentian Elite (Raised Montreal West Island, sailed all summer, McGill grad, white collar professional) and I am with you 100%. How can I get in touch?
I'm a proud class traitor. Old life: Six figure tech professional living in Seattle, single, liberal centrist, and cat owner. New life: Health coach to aging women suffering from chronic illness living in a small lake town in South Carolina, married, mother of two, conservative centrist, and dog owner. Oh, also Trump supporter.
Many people in my former life have written me off as a barbaric racist brainwashed conspiracy theorist, etc. Yet you would be surprised.... I recently caught up with an old friend who was a VP at Disney+. I mean she knew Bob Iger personally. We were on a Zoom call and I noticed she did not seem to be in her LA apartment. There was a beach in the window behind her and the walls were plaster. She said she resigned from Disney in disgust, moved her and her family to a small town in Mexico where "kids run the street barefoot and play without phones" and is now a housewife and planning on another child. When I told her my support for Trump she was... interested. A former Disney+ executive!!
The tide is turning. I'm afriad they're going to rig this next election again, and win the battle, but the war is going to be won by the REALS.
What a well written and compelling analysis. Including the successes of the trucker convoy and farm protests is definitely a bright spot in our current darkness. Hopefully the laptop class has taken notice. The entertainment world certainly seems to be taking notice, which is good news for those of us who like quality entertainment.
And bonus points to you for the references to Rome’s defeat and the hands of a barbarian turncoat” and the French Revolution. I consider it possible that the quickest and most effective way to reign in the laptops class arrogance and growing totalitarian impulses would be to compel them to pass an advanced class on the histories of the French and Bolshevik revolutions and the Spanish civil war. Perhaps that would pry the scales off of their eyes. The alternative, I fear, would be a reenactment of those events. And that is something no person of good will should want to see happen.
Everyone knows about WW2 and yet what happened in 2020? People dehumanized their neighbors, the state shut down businesses and some people were calling for the unvaccinated to be put in camps!
2020 was definitely an alarming development vis-a-vis the way the masses responded to a crisis. We were tested and found wanting, to put it charitably. Let us hope that things improve moving forward. As I said in my comment, the alternative is not something anyone of good will should hope for.
This is deep stuff and I agree. Front-line learned by doing here, zero world status, working class roots and glad for it. Living in big cities and urban areas for almost 40 years ( Seattle. San Francisco), I saw the stark divide from my Barbarian level. I often wondered, as the people of modest means were shoved out due to high rents, who would run the basic infrastructure of a city, like transport, retail, etc. I still have no answer as I was one of those shoved out. I live in the sticks and prefer returning to my rural roots. Noble Barbarian here, woman of God, happy to remain grounded in " horse sense " and not just book learning . Thank you again for such an erudite and detailed take on this complex subject!
We don't need more people heading to college. If anything, we should make it easier for people who didn't, by making more use of standardized tests for hiring, and overturning anti-freedom credentialocratic laws and rulings like Griggs v. Duke, or anything that even mentions the wprds "disparate impact".
We also need to rally more around property rights and freedom of association. Freedom of speech alone will not suffice to dig us out of our hole.
Direct agitation would be a good start. Set up some company that hires based on IQ in clear violation of Griggs v. Duke, then take it all the way to the Supreme Court if need be.
There's gotta be lots of good civil disobedience options available. We just need to think more creatively.
You still need people who are educated. Yeah, sure, a lot of degrees arent necessary, but you still need to go to school for basically any STEM job, and that includes the most lucrative and important fields right now. You still need money. You need networks of people. Even if a company did something like your example,(unless they got someone like Peter Thiel to back them it would fail, btw) it doesnt affect the endless legions of bureaucrats that are ideologically motivated holding positions that require credentialed people.
Thats assuming the regime *lets* you operate within their framework and win, which they wont. Even if they do in some circumstances, it doesnt produce radical change. You've got to subvert the subversion. Populist revolutionary tactics wont cut it.
This is a great article. I just subscribed this afternoon, enjoying your writing.
I'm a Brit and a frustrated laptop class person. I am not technically in the PMC, as I'm bottom of the food chain in the public sector (I don't manage anyone!): but just being public sector makes me laptop class I think.
I entered the workforce with a degree, shortly after the 2007/8 financial crisis: and I have done a series of low skilled office jobs since. In retrospect I would have liked to have trained as a joiner: but this was impossible, I needed a job and it's actually quite hard to get the training needed for the skilled and better paid trades, so I ended up staying in office work. Yes it's miserable. Yes it's unfulfilling. Yes I work from home as much as possible. But it pays the bills and I can afford payments on my house and I have a wife and three kids. My wife has to work too (maternity leave atm), if she didn't we would be poor.
My point is that although I'm more than willing to be a traitor to the useless Virtuals, I can't really afford to be. It's actually quite difficult in the UK today to join the Physicals, (whose viewpoints I share on nearly everything), without condemning my kids to the next few years struggling to stay above the poverty line. The time to join the trades is after secondary school, not after uni. And even then if you don't have family in the trades, you will struggle to get an apprenticeship, which is pretty much the only way to become a journeyman tradesman- which you would need to become at the very least if you want your own family
Wow. Way to hit it out of the park. This is a blow-out of a piece. Great aggregation of viewpoints and thinkers, too. Also appreciate the hopeful valence at the end. Thanks, and keep it up!
I grew up with Physical friends and family. I was one of the only one of my high school friends to get a degree, which I paid for myself after 4 years active duty Army.
I’ve always felt a distance between myself and my laptop class colleagues who have tenuous to non-existent contact with Physicals outside of requesting/demanding services.
I’m still friends with my high school buddies. After years of living abroad and in other states, I chose to raise my family near my hometown so I could keep this support network of friends who I know will be there for me.
Also, having buddies who have real world skills comes in handy. You can’t really call your laptop class colleagues when you need help with anything non-digital.
Fantastic breakdown of the situation. The runaway credentialism and expert worship are especially harmful.
The financially successful (except for a couple of rich youngsters) in my neighborhood are chief mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and firemen and delivery drivers who moonlight. "College" has been oversold and is overpriced. As N. Dynamite stated: "girls want guys with skills, Pedro".
Very true and under-recognized by many. Within a decade or two AI will easily lead to massive unemployment of knowledge workers and AI can easily displace everyone from accountants to lawyers to computer programmers. Easily. Not so much with people who make and fix physical things. We shall see an interesting shift in political attitudes as this plays out.
And Pedro (and Jose, and Miguel) has those skills.
Yes, and the poor white boys, made worse off than ever before because their mamas made certain they got every vaccine imaginable, waste their time listening to Joe Rogan and Q annon... oblivious to the world around them.
It would be good if we could move away from the idea that four years at “college” ending in a degree in English or History or whatever is the ticket to an easy life.
College lets you graduate with zero actual job skills and five or six figures in debt to pay off with the money from your dead end job.
My gal wanted a job that didn’t involve a brass pole, so she did the smart thing - went to RI Community College, took an aptitude test, aced it (clever girl!) and thus qualified for a free three year program that gave her an associates degree and a certification in Diagnostic Medical Sonography.
Graduated and had a job the next day, because the world is short of diagnostic medical sonographers and hospitals will eagerly hire new graduates with the right certification.
“College” isn’t worth shit. An education in a field that is in demand is the golden ticket. You might get that in college, but you have to seek it out and not just follow the default path.
Excellent essay Miles! We class traitors have to stick together…
They also think, 'any fool can farm. There is a giant base of knowledge in the physical world they are totally unaware of. This makes them think the peons are easily replaced.
Recently I was in an online discussion where someone said, "Can't we solve the shortage of tradies by reducing apprenticeships from 4 years to 2? After all we can make a doctor in 4 years."
Of course, the "4 year doctor" is actually someone who did another 3-5 year degree first; if they go straight to medicine it's a 6 year degree. And then there's 1-2 years of placement, 1-2 years of residency, 4+ years for a speciality (including General Practice). He kept insisting, "No, it's 4 years to make a doctor." Well, you go to that one, mate, I'll go to the one with 10+ years behind them...
So the Laptop Class simply has no idea the depth of knowledge required to perform a job properly - even another professional job.
I mean you really think it should take that long to make a doctor? Its this kind of reasoning that keeps people out of these jobs. There's plenty of people that could be doctors, especially since 90% of doctors I've seen don't have a fucking clue if they can't run a test. I'd rather go to a 150 IQ doctor with a 4 year degree that a 101 IQ doctor with a 12 year degree. Why do you assume time conveys education?
Most of those years aren't formal education, they're placement experience. So the would-be oncologist gets to work with a lot of cancer patients under the supervision of other doctors who've treated a lot of cancer patients. Likewise the would-be orthopaedic surgeon, and so on.
Depth and breadth of experience matter.
Anecdotally, this certainly appears to be their mindset in my experience. Perhaps the shortfalls in military recruitment will help correct this particularly problematic misconception among our self declared betters.
My favorite is when some soy boy grows some arugula and cilantro on his 3" x 2" city apartment balcony and starts up a YouTube channel about "urban homesteading" or something. "Yep, buddy. In about two months you'll have a whole plateful of... salad. You're definitely going to survive the apocalpse. Finger snaps!"
What we need to do as a species is forget a whole bunch of stuff completely, then we won’t have to spend so much time learning it every generation.
Go back to the basics. Fire … warm? Fire … 🔥 HOT … FIRE BURN!!!! 🔥 🔥 🔥
Tiexiera is a voice in the wilderness. It’s fascinating to see him warning the left that they are driving away the very “working class and people of color” constituency they rely on, because they consider them deplorable and beneath contempt.
And of course the left ignores him because they still think that Republicans are the class of country club idle rich people, and that the multiracial working class are mostly concerned with pronouns and “Latin-X” and banning gas powered cars.
Keep talking to yourselves, lefties. Nobody else wants to hear your bullshit anymore.
This is so spot on… I truly don’t really care at all if someone gets my pronouns perfectly right (let’s suppose I have many).
I’ll instead really care if home prices go through the roof excluding all the ongoing, recently introduced and future incoming generations from accessing affordable homes. Just one of thousands of examples.
The priorities are extremely backwards: rampant crime, rampant inflation, segregation?
“Yeah sure, but let’s not focus on that… let’s just scream defund the police some more, print more money and let’s protest somewhere 24/7 while we burn down completely innocent businesses in our destructive paths that got nothing to do with anything”
Note that it’s the Laptop Class who is most wound up about AI — they thought the robots would replace the Physicals first, but they ended up threatening Laptop Class jobs instead, since those center around manipulating information of some kind. And computers have *always* been great at manipulating information.
I worked in an academic role for a prestigious west coast University. It was the worst job I've ever had, mainly due to the people. They were some of the most neurotic, self-righteous, humorless, conformist clowns I've ever had the misfortune of knowing.
I work on a farm now.
This is superb. I have to assume you are Canadian based on what you write. I am personally a member of that Laurentian Elite (Raised Montreal West Island, sailed all summer, McGill grad, white collar professional) and I am with you 100%. How can I get in touch?
I gather Substack has now added a DM feature - we can test that out
I'm a proud class traitor. Old life: Six figure tech professional living in Seattle, single, liberal centrist, and cat owner. New life: Health coach to aging women suffering from chronic illness living in a small lake town in South Carolina, married, mother of two, conservative centrist, and dog owner. Oh, also Trump supporter.
Many people in my former life have written me off as a barbaric racist brainwashed conspiracy theorist, etc. Yet you would be surprised.... I recently caught up with an old friend who was a VP at Disney+. I mean she knew Bob Iger personally. We were on a Zoom call and I noticed she did not seem to be in her LA apartment. There was a beach in the window behind her and the walls were plaster. She said she resigned from Disney in disgust, moved her and her family to a small town in Mexico where "kids run the street barefoot and play without phones" and is now a housewife and planning on another child. When I told her my support for Trump she was... interested. A former Disney+ executive!!
The tide is turning. I'm afriad they're going to rig this next election again, and win the battle, but the war is going to be won by the REALS.
What a well written and compelling analysis. Including the successes of the trucker convoy and farm protests is definitely a bright spot in our current darkness. Hopefully the laptop class has taken notice. The entertainment world certainly seems to be taking notice, which is good news for those of us who like quality entertainment.
And bonus points to you for the references to Rome’s defeat and the hands of a barbarian turncoat” and the French Revolution. I consider it possible that the quickest and most effective way to reign in the laptops class arrogance and growing totalitarian impulses would be to compel them to pass an advanced class on the histories of the French and Bolshevik revolutions and the Spanish civil war. Perhaps that would pry the scales off of their eyes. The alternative, I fear, would be a reenactment of those events. And that is something no person of good will should want to see happen.
Everyone knows about WW2 and yet what happened in 2020? People dehumanized their neighbors, the state shut down businesses and some people were calling for the unvaccinated to be put in camps!
2020 was definitely an alarming development vis-a-vis the way the masses responded to a crisis. We were tested and found wanting, to put it charitably. Let us hope that things improve moving forward. As I said in my comment, the alternative is not something anyone of good will should hope for.
This is deep stuff and I agree. Front-line learned by doing here, zero world status, working class roots and glad for it. Living in big cities and urban areas for almost 40 years ( Seattle. San Francisco), I saw the stark divide from my Barbarian level. I often wondered, as the people of modest means were shoved out due to high rents, who would run the basic infrastructure of a city, like transport, retail, etc. I still have no answer as I was one of those shoved out. I live in the sticks and prefer returning to my rural roots. Noble Barbarian here, woman of God, happy to remain grounded in " horse sense " and not just book learning . Thank you again for such an erudite and detailed take on this complex subject!
THIS is why we still need to be going to college.
We don't need more people heading to college. If anything, we should make it easier for people who didn't, by making more use of standardized tests for hiring, and overturning anti-freedom credentialocratic laws and rulings like Griggs v. Duke, or anything that even mentions the wprds "disparate impact".
We also need to rally more around property rights and freedom of association. Freedom of speech alone will not suffice to dig us out of our hole.
We're going to do that... how exactly
Direct agitation would be a good start. Set up some company that hires based on IQ in clear violation of Griggs v. Duke, then take it all the way to the Supreme Court if need be.
There's gotta be lots of good civil disobedience options available. We just need to think more creatively.
Newly set up companies are already hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. They can't afford these kinds of stunts.
You still need people who are educated. Yeah, sure, a lot of degrees arent necessary, but you still need to go to school for basically any STEM job, and that includes the most lucrative and important fields right now. You still need money. You need networks of people. Even if a company did something like your example,(unless they got someone like Peter Thiel to back them it would fail, btw) it doesnt affect the endless legions of bureaucrats that are ideologically motivated holding positions that require credentialed people.
Thats assuming the regime *lets* you operate within their framework and win, which they wont. Even if they do in some circumstances, it doesnt produce radical change. You've got to subvert the subversion. Populist revolutionary tactics wont cut it.
This is a great article. I just subscribed this afternoon, enjoying your writing.
I'm a Brit and a frustrated laptop class person. I am not technically in the PMC, as I'm bottom of the food chain in the public sector (I don't manage anyone!): but just being public sector makes me laptop class I think.
I entered the workforce with a degree, shortly after the 2007/8 financial crisis: and I have done a series of low skilled office jobs since. In retrospect I would have liked to have trained as a joiner: but this was impossible, I needed a job and it's actually quite hard to get the training needed for the skilled and better paid trades, so I ended up staying in office work. Yes it's miserable. Yes it's unfulfilling. Yes I work from home as much as possible. But it pays the bills and I can afford payments on my house and I have a wife and three kids. My wife has to work too (maternity leave atm), if she didn't we would be poor.
My point is that although I'm more than willing to be a traitor to the useless Virtuals, I can't really afford to be. It's actually quite difficult in the UK today to join the Physicals, (whose viewpoints I share on nearly everything), without condemning my kids to the next few years struggling to stay above the poverty line. The time to join the trades is after secondary school, not after uni. And even then if you don't have family in the trades, you will struggle to get an apprenticeship, which is pretty much the only way to become a journeyman tradesman- which you would need to become at the very least if you want your own family
You can start by voting Reform in the next election
Already there, brother
Wow. Way to hit it out of the park. This is a blow-out of a piece. Great aggregation of viewpoints and thinkers, too. Also appreciate the hopeful valence at the end. Thanks, and keep it up!