Contempt With a Server Farm

A mother knows the difference between a future and a threat

Somewhere between trying to find my kid’s baseball jersey and helping with the last-minute science project due the next day, I thought I had taken my eye off the ball.

I was planning playdates and potlucks, chairing family fun nights and school fundraisers, and hosting so many boys during the summer that our house felt like sleepaway camp with better snacks and subpar liability coverage. I was drowning in the performance of virtue and the sanctity of stay-at-home motherhood — too busy trying to keep it all together to feel the ground shifting under my feet.

At least, that is what I told myself for a long time. But I am starting to think motherhood didn’t make me miss anything. Instead, it prepared me to recognize danger.

Once you have spent years tending to small, inconvenient human needs, you develop an ear for threats to the humans you are wired to protect. You recognize contempt for human need the moment you hear it. You hear it when dependency is treated as failure. You hear it when messiness is mistaken for weakness. You hear it when the people doing the least care work start explaining how civilization should be organized.

Children are inefficient. So are aging parents. So are sick bodies, grieving friends, disabled neighbors, exhausted teachers, lonely teenagers, and anyone else who cannot be optimized into a quarterly report. A household teaches you that the most important parts of being human are rarely scalable. They are repetitive, embodied, boring, sacred, maddening, and impossible to automate without losing the point.

Motherhood did not make me softer. It made me harder to fool.

So when I went back to work in 2014, something felt off almost immediately. Not dramatically. More like walking back into your house and realizing somebody had moved all the furniture a few inches to the left. The shape of things was familiar, but the proportions were wrong. People seemed more branded, more brittle, more willing to mistake confidence for competence.

By 2016, the whole house had tilted.

Trump did not create the rot, but he made it impossible to keep pretending it wasn’t there. The old adage used to be: if you’re the smartest person in the room, find another room. Suddenly, the smartest people were being pushed out of the room altogether.

The guy with the most money became the visionary. The Fortune 500 executive rolling his eyes at women during nonprofit board meetings was simply being efficient. And people like me, the ones who kept raising a hand to ask inconvenient questions, were handed copies of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People so we could catch up and learn how to be better leaders.

At first, I thought I was watching corporate culture metastasize into the nonprofit world: the obsession with optics, the frantic preservation of image, the smug insistence that every human problem could be solved if only rich people were finally allowed to stop apologizing for being rich.

But over time, it became harder to ignore the darker current underneath it all.

Somewhere along the line, the men in the important rooms stopped acting like businessmen and started acting like prophets. They formed their own theology out of money, hierarchy, optimization, and contempt, then passed it around elite circles like forbidden wisdom. In this new faith, introspection is a roadblock. Empathy is weakness. Loving thy neighbor is hopelessly analog.

Every problem caused by human messiness seemed to invite the same proposed solution: hand the wheel to the richest man in the room, then call everyone who objected “difficult.”

After spending years around wealthy people treated as sages because they could write big checks, even when they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, I stopped giving rich people the benefit of the doubt. I started paying attention.

I started using the word fascist before most people in polite company were willing to say it out loud. I traced patterns backward through history. I wrote about ethnic cleansing. I stayed up all night reading political theory, trying to understand why so many powerful people suddenly seemed so comfortable with domination, control, and the idea that some human beings mattered more than others. Even people I loved, people who should have known better, went along with it.

Eventually, the answer became impossible to unsee: they understood their place in the hierarchy, and they had no intention of giving it up.

That is how I stumbled into the world of Dark Enlightenment thought and the strange constellation of tech elites and self-appointed intellectuals circling around it. The Dark Enlightenment is the polite name for an ugly idea: that democracy is obsolete, equality is sentimental, and society should be governed by those who believe themselves superior.

It gave a vocabulary to something I had already felt in boardrooms and donor meetings: the fantasy that democracy is a design flaw and ordinary people are a management problem. But I still could not figure out why they seemed to hate ordinary humanity so much.

Maybe motherhood made the hatred easier to hear. Care work teaches you to recognize the fantasies of men who have mistaken dependence for failure.

Once you have spent years meeting needs no one can monetize, you recognize the revulsion hiding beneath the language of efficiency. You can hear it when someone talks about dependency like a defect, care like a drag on productivity, and ordinary people like friction in a system that would run beautifully if only there were fewer humans in it.

So when powerful men started talking about the future as if human need were a bug in the system, I recognized the sound. It was not innovation. It was contempt.

You can hear it most clearly in the mythology forming around AGI — artificial general intelligence — a hypothetical machine that does not yet exist, but somehow already has a claim on the future.

Even the careful explainers admit as much. AGI is still theoretical. No existing system has demonstrated the full range of human capabilities associated with general intelligence. There is not even a widely accepted metric for measuring general intelligence in artificial systems.

And yet this not-yet-existing thing is already being used to justify enormous shifts in labor, education, energy, governance, and public imagination.

This predatory class of men — the investors, founders, pundits, and self-appointed visionaries clustered around the mythology of AGI — is building a story in which humanity becomes the obsolete platform.

The insult is that they expect ordinary people to experience all of this as progress. As though we are supposed to smile politely while they openly discuss replacing workers, restructuring education with robots, automating creativity, and rendering entire categories of human contribution obsolete — reducing the rest of us, in their own language, to NPCs.

For those lucky enough to have avoided this particular corner of internet brain rot, NPC stands for “non-player character,” a term used to describe the background figures in a video game who exist only to fill space while the real players move the story forward.

Well, I hate to break it to the tech bros, but our children and grandchildren are not fucking NPCs.

Neither are our parents. Neither are our teachers. Neither are the scientists, nurses, social workers, grocery clerks, artists, bus drivers, disabled people, lonely teenagers, aging neighbors, exhausted mothers, laid-off workers, or anyone else whose value cannot be captured in a productivity metric.

Once you understand the metaphor, you start hearing the contempt everywhere: in the way they talk about replacing workers, automating creativity, “disrupting” education, medicine, government, art, friendship, care, and grief. As if the messy human parts of being alive are inefficiencies to be solved instead of the whole point.

Yesterday, while listening to Wajahat Ali interview Maurice Mitchell on The Left Hook about the broligarchy, AI, and the political class’s dependence on tech money, I heard the quiet part said out loud. The issue is not simply that this crowd is building powerful technology. It is that our political class seems increasingly willing to surrender the future to the people funding it.

The chilling reality is that the architects of this future appear to have already decided ordinary people are not the point of civilization. They see us as the friction.

They are not asking how technology can serve humanity. They are asking how much humanity they can route around. They call it progress. But progress toward what? A civilization without the inconvenience of most people in it?

Because the rest of us are still here.

We are raising children, caring for parents, teaching classrooms, stocking shelves, making art, burying loved ones, checking on neighbors, surviving layoffs, navigating healthcare costs, and holding together the human world in ways these men seem neither able nor willing to understand.

We know babies do not arrive scalable. We know children are not products, grief is not a sprint, care is not a backlog item, and love cannot be automated without ceasing to be love.

Any vision of the future that requires pretending otherwise is not intelligence. It is contempt with a server farm.

And what the privileged, smug broligarchy never learned is that the people they dismiss as NPCs are the people who have survived everything. The people they call inefficient have endured poverty, violence, racism, misogyny, illness, grief, abandonment, debt, layoffs, and systems designed to grind them down. But they’re still here because they learned how to live inside broken things. They know how to keep going when no one is coming to save them.

They also know how to starve a machine that threatens their children.

And what about the women? Because we are not passive infrastructure. We are not background code. We are not here to quietly hand our children over to be trapped inside some billionaire’s twisted dystopian fever dream.

There is nothing weak about a mother’s ancestral call to protect her children. There is nothing sentimental about the primal roar that rises in a mother when men who mistake themselves for gods come for the babies she would burn the world down to save.

They can call it progress all they want. A mother knows the difference between a future and a threat. And we are prepared to respond accordingly.

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