An Anticapitalist Mutiny: Noam Scheiber on the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's April 7, a Tuesday, new book day. It was an interesting, piece last week, by my guest, Noam Scheiber, writer on The New York Times. Why college graduates feel betrayed. It's part of his new book about the rise and revolt of the college educated working class. The book is out today. It's called Mutiny. And I guess it's about, the betrayal of college graduates. They go to college to avoid becoming part of the working class, and then they end up spending tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars and joining the working class. Is that fair, Noam? Is that the summary of your book that all these college graduates, all these people are going to college to avoid becoming part of the working class, and then they end up in it?

00:01:23 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. I think that's fair. My book is, on some level about how enraged college grads get when good paying, satisfying, high status jobs disappear. And it's obviously something that's very front of mind for a lot of people as artificial intelligence is looming. You know, lots of people are wondering what's gonna happen when AI cannibalizes millions of white collar jobs. And there is, some discussion of AI in my book, but, really, the point of the book is we don't have to wonder about how college graduates react when these good jobs go away because they've actually been quietly disappearing for fifteen, twenty years now. And the frustration over the disappearance of those jobs has really been building and kind of hit a fever pitch, over the last few years, kinda started, in the early days of the pandemic, and it's really just increased since then. And so, my book kinda takes a look at how these downwardly mobile college grads react. And I guess in a word, you can say they get radicalized. They, they start picking fights with employers. They form unions. They go on strike. They vote for left wing political candidates like, Zohran Mamdani in New York City. And I think, you know, that's probably gonna be our future on some level as, AI begins to bite and exacerbate this problem.

00:02:46 Andrew Keen: It's interesting that your book isn't called Revolution. It's called Mutiny. I'm not sure whether you chose the title. I looked up Mutiny on Wikipedia, which is produced by a nonpaying working class or an unpaid working class, and it's defined as a revolt amongst a group of people to oppose change or remove their superiors or orders. Why did you choose to entitle the book Mutiny as opposed to Revolution, which is, of course, in the nineteenth century, the old Marxist notion of the proletariat and the inevitable revolution in capitalism. Is there a difference between mutiny and revolution?

00:03:32 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. Well, the way I saw it is, you know, I think on some level, mutiny is, kind of a workplace term. Right? You have, sailors on a ship that have lost confidence in the captain of the ship, and they take matters into their own hands. So it's, on some level, a sort of workplace uprising or a workplace rebellion. The other thing that I thought was that it a little bit taps into the changing sociology of these workers. I graduated from college in 1998. I sometimes say that that was maybe the best year in the history of the world to graduate from college. You know, the stock market was booming. The labor market was really tight. They were just handing out equity, almost, it seemed, in a start up as you graduated from college. And, and so it was very easy for people in my generation to, to imagine themselves as, sort of management adjacent, future, you know, leaders, future owners of businesses, future managers. But I think very quickly in a few years, certainly after the great recession, the mindset of people graduating from college started to change. And instead of imagining themselves as professionals or management adjacent or future managers themselves, it has become this sort of deep suspicion of the people in charge. And I think, you know, that reflects all the frustrations we've been talking about, the lack of good paying jobs, a certain kind of lack of respect that they feel, and a lack of, sort of involvement in the enterprise that they felt entitled to get. And so I think you've just seen this shift in the attitudes specifically toward the leaders of companies, toward the employers, toward the managers, that went from kind of feeling yourself to be, on the same level as them, feeling yourself to basically be, a future version of them to really, being deeply suspicious of the managers and at times trying to seize control of the operation from them. So I think, you know, it's, you know, it's not like a violent uprising, but in a number of cases, we've seen college educated workers seek to unionize. And the specific goal of the unionization has been to claw back some control from the managers who they've lost confidence in and feel like have too much control over their work lives.

00:05:56 Andrew Keen: Is there a personal element to this book? This is your second book. Your first book was about the economics of the Obama administration. You know that you graduated in 1998. You weren't a typical college graduate, though, Noam. As you know, you did brilliantly at Tulane University. You graduated in economics, and then you went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, the highest, the highest the the toughest scholarship to get. You could have chosen to do anything. You clearly had a belief in education. How does your own story fit in? I mean, you have a decent paying job, but given that you must be very good at economics and mathematics, I would assume you could have earned a lot more money.

00:06:42 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, as I say, certainly, when I graduated from college in 1998, the labor market for college grads was very good. You know, lots of people were joining startups and getting equity, and, you know, others were going to investment banks or to management consulting firms and doing very well. So it did, it you know, there there was a bit of my resisting the gravitational pull of some of these other opportunities. You know, so I think in in some ways, idiosyncratic. But in other ways, I sort of represent my generation and, you know, people fifteen, twenty years younger than me represent their generation. And what I mean by that is, when I graduated from college, you know, I think there was a real faith in, in free markets, in globalization, in kind of what, you know, what might now derisively be called the neoliberal worldview. But back then, it was not it was not derisive. You know? It was just a sense that this is the way the world is going. You know? You had leaders like, Bill Clinton in The United States and Tony Blair in The UK who were very much champions of of this worldview, you know, on top of that deregulation of financial markets. And when I graduated from college, this was just kind of in the ether. You know? It wasn't something that people really thought to question. It just felt like historical inevitability. And I think that fifteen, twenty years later, not even, you know, maybe ten, fifteen years later, people who graduated from college, even very good schools, even people who won Rhodes Scholarships, you know, who who, graduate with sort of very elite credentials, I think had really begun to question that. There was a real questioning of globalization, of free markets, of deregulation. And I actually did a story, three, four years ago now where I looked at Rhodes Scholars who were my cohort, in the late nineties, and I looked at Rhodes Scholars who, who went to Oxford and won the scholarship in the post-great-recession era. And you really did see a real shift among this cohort even, you know, these very well credentialed people. There was one union organizer, who was kind of the main focus of the piece. A person I write about in the book too named Jaz Brisack, had gone to the University of Mississippi, then won the Rhodes Scholarship, studied intellectual history at Oxford, and then left after one year. It's a two year scholarship, typically. They left after one year and went to Buffalo and began organizing workers at coffee shops in Buffalo and really helped kick off the organization, effort at Starbucks. But what what's interesting is, you know, even though it's strange and unusual for a Rhodes Scholar to go become a labor organizer, what I found reporting that is a lot of the people that they, you know, that were getting the Rhodes Scholarship that were at Oxford at the time, they their worldview wasn't that different. You know? They they were pretty left. They were pretty skeptical of globalization. They were pretty skeptical of capital markets and financialization. A lot of them were very pro Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in, you know, the in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries. I just found that the sort of cohort of people who get these elite credentials had really shifted to the left. And on some level, that reflects what I'm writing about in the book too.

00:10:10 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting. You you mentioned Clinton. Of course, he was a Rhodes scholar, and he probably was quite different from your union activist, associate. He went on to become president. You talk about your generation, Noam. I saw last night a new movie called The Drama. It's a dark romantic comedy about Gen x's. And what struck me, and maybe I'm generalizing being a bit unfair in terms of defining the morality of generations. But but it does seem as if the generation that you're talking about, your generation, is on the one hand intensely moral, but on the other hand, sometimes lacks a kind of meta historical view of where they stand. So everything becomes morality. I'm not sure if you've seen this movie. It's a

00:11:06 Noam Scheiber: I haven't. No.

00:11:07 Andrew Keen: It's it's worth seeing. Yeah. I think you'd enjoy it. It's a it's a comedy about school shootings, which may not

00:11:15 Noam Scheiber: [laughs] Yeah.

00:11:16 Andrew Keen: Very edifying, but it's pretty funny. I'm not sure if I'm, articulating what I'm trying to say very clearly, but do you think when it comes to your generation that it has a particular kind of morality, which is being manifested in politics. You mentioned Mamdani, who, of course, is the the poster child or the poster guy for all this new radical politics. But what you're writing about hasn't really manifested itself in the kind of labor politics, perhaps, broad labor politics of the nineteenth century because, of course, it's mixed up with our social media age and this new, sense of morality, this moral prickly prickly pricklyness. Does that make any sense, or am I not really making much sense?

00:12:15 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. Well, I'd say a couple things. So one, I'm older than the folks that I write about. I'm a, you know, I'm a very much a Gen Xer, and the people in my book are typically kind of younger millennials and Gen Zers. But I do think, you know, for that generation, call it the, you know, the [unclear] generation. I think it is interesting. I think you're right. There is a, there's very much a kind of, a morality in their politics, but it's often not rooted in a kind of, class consciousness. You know, it's I guess it's ironic that I would say that because my book talks explicitly about the working class. But I think, I think you're right. I mean, I think, you know, certainly, a century ago, you know, when we had a real, uptick in, in union organizing in The United States, that there was a real class consciousness in a sense of, you know, kind of, labor versus capital. And, and, you know, people, you know, people probably didn't read Marx necessarily, though some did, but they were sort of they understood the, the kind of vocabulary and the conceptual framework. And I do think that there is now, you know, young people, there's less of a sort of, a kind of class politics, than, you know, ideas about morality and solidarity. And, you know, it's kind of cause driven in a lot of ways, and maybe that's a little what you're referring to with your allusion to social media. You know, you see, the way support or opposition to different causes really can kind of get traction. Gaza, for example, is something I write about in the book. And if you look at polling, kind of broken down by generations on Gaza, you see overwhelming suspicion of, the Israeli government post October 7, on Gaza among people under 35. And so I do think you're right. You you see it very much a kinda cause driven politics, but less a kind of, a sort of a kind of Marxist worldview that's fully filled out and a kinda specific class consciousness. You know, the kind of thing that would result in, you know, say, an attempt to build a sort of worker focused party. You know? In The US, we don't really have a kind of you know, unlike in Europe where we have explicit labor parties, we don't really have that in The US. And various points over the course of the last hundred years. There have been attempts to do that, and it's never really gotten off the ground. So there may be something sort of baked into our politics more broadly, but you would think that, as we get this proletarianization of workers, that I write about, that might, become more attractive. But I think you're right. I don't think we really see that. I don't think we really see a focus or attempts to build working class political parties and working class infrastructure, but we do very much see people invested in causes. And, they kind of have ideas about solidarity that they act upon at the workplace, you know, when they go to vote, when they canvass for Zohran Mamdani. So I do think you're right. There is a little bit of an interesting tension there.

00:15:33 Andrew Keen: You've written about a lot of these issues for the times. I think you really got your finger on the pulse of what's happening. You you wrote a piece recently about whether the GOP can really become the party of the workers because whether one likes Donald Trump or not. Certainly, he might, in his own angry, bizarre way, speak more clearly to, to some of these college graduates who are so disappointed. You've also talked to them and the book itself, is the story of, disappointed, angry college graduates. You wrote a piece about the newest face of long term unemployment, the college educated. So you've talked to a lot of these people. How is it manifesting itself, Noam, in your sense in politics? Is there much difference between a populism of the right and the left? Are they just as likely to embrace Trump as Mamdani?

00:16:28 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, I think, the simplest distillation of this, which has some truth to it, is that when, people without a degree get very frustrated, about their economic situation, they tend to move right. And when people with a degree, get very frustrated about their economic prospects, they tend to move left. And, you know, certainly, we've seen that. A lot of working class, folks without a degree voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 and '24. We saw this so called diploma divide really open up. And certainly a lot of, college educated folks voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, and voted for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor's election last year. I think one, you know, one really stunning, statistic that I didn't put in my piece of the book, but, I think it's worth dwelling on for a second is the percentage of college graduates under 30 who voted for Mamdani was about 85%. I mean, it's just like a staggering number of people. Almost unanimity among college grads under 30 who voted for Zohran Mamdani. But so I think that works as a kind of first pass approximation. But in my book, and certainly toward the end in the epilogue, I do try to complicate that a bit. And I think there are two data points that I found very interesting when looking at polling data among college grads over the past, you know, five, ten years. The first was, you know, we think of the revolt against overly lenient immigration policies as very much a right coded thing. Obviously, it was, something that Donald Trump, seized on and elevated and was important to his political success, in, you know, as early as 2016, but certainly in 2024. But if you look at the polling data, actually, the, the opposition among college grads, almost it came very close to converging with the opposition to overly lenient immigration among, non grads. So we saw a kind of convergence whereas in the late twenty tens, you had college grads much more supportive of immigration. By 2023, the you know, they hadn't completely converged, but the college grads had shifted way to the right on immigration. So something that we think of as primarily a kinda working class revolt, actually very much, was on the minds of college grads as well. And then the other thing, I think that kinda moved in this direction, but also complicates the picture about the kinda left wing, right wing populism is crime and policing. Same thing. College grads had been not especially concerned about crime, and pretty sympathetic to police. Oh, oh, sorry. And less sympathetic to police in the twenty tens. And and then if you look in the kinda twenty two, twenty three, twenty four period, they become they started to become much more concerned about crime, in a way that, that non college folks were kind of all along. So those two things really start to converge and kinda complicate the picture of, you know, the college educated folks moving left and the non college folks moving right. You know, that said, I I still think that, you know, you look at the increasing interest in socialism. You know, Pew Research has interesting data about, you know, just whether you approve or disapprove of socialism or capitalism. And between 2010 and 2020, college grads almost doubled their, sympathy for socialism from, like, 20% to 40%. So you certainly, a large, increase in interest of left wing politics, but it's not universally the case. You know, you have some of these issues like immigration where it is, much more complicated.

00:20:14 Andrew Keen: What does betrayal feel like? You've talked to a lot of these people who feel betrayed, neither they are betrayed. No one's owed a living or a job, whether or not they go to college. But what does betrayal feel like in, in your experience in terms of these conversations? Are people angry, disappointed, or they lost self confidence? You know a belief in a rising belief in socialism, whatever that means. It's just an it's a word that, to me, often just is used as an alternative to capitalism.

00:20:46 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. I think that's right. And I think your point is an interesting one that it's less of, a sense that I have a very well worked out alternative and more just a kind of rejection of the status quo and a frustration with the status quo. So I think that is a very common thing. I think there's a kind of, some combination of disillusionment and cynicism too, and I think a lot of people, specifically felt that toward their universities. You know? As I say in the book, this was a generation of folks who did probably more to prepare to go to college than any generation in history. They went, to school. Their school days were longer. They did more homework. They did, you know, many more of them took AP classes, advanced placement classes, which is where you can take, college credit in high school. They spent more money on SAT prep, you know, preparation for, standardized tests. They took out more loans than any generation in history. And then, you know, they come out having done all this to prepare and then made all these investments, and, you know, the money just you know, the money just didn't seem like it was well invested. So it's kind of the, the kind of cynicism and disillusionment. And and the one example that I would point to in my book that I think, kinda illustrates this maybe more vividly than any other is you have this explosion of, high school students, going to college to study video game design. And this was something that no one did in the nineteen nineties. But beginning in the early two thousands, there was this uptick in interest in video games and video game design. And between the early two thousands and the present, we've just had this explosion of college degree programs in video game design. And the way that the schools market them is typically to say, oh, you know, do this thing that you love, and this is a booming industry, and you'll be able to get jobs at these studios that make the games that you've, you know, that you've been playing since you were a kid. And so tens of thousands of people a year, get, get degrees in video game design, and yet only a tiny fraction of those people are actually, you know, able to make a living designing video games. You know, a lot of them can kind of do it on their own and do it in a sort of indie way, but, typically, they need a day job to support that happen. It's a very small fraction of people actually end up being able to support themselves and make a decent living doing this. And I think just a lot of frustration, with the schools because they feel like there's a bit of a bait and switch that went on there. The marketing of this, it wasn't it wasn't a lie, but it just, it kind of, painted a rosier picture than the reality of what they were getting into when they applied to these programs.

00:23:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I I mean, you're being polite, Noam. You're a New York Times reporter, but one could be impolite too. I mean, there is and we've done shows in it. A couple of weeks ago, I had the president of Brandeis University. He was talking about the reinvention of the university, blah blah blah. That's all these people ever talk about. But they charge more and more for an education, which, my sense at least as a parent, is worth less and less, not just in the workplace, but perhaps intellectually too. So there is an element of the scam about the university, isn't it, which I assume comes out in this sense of betrayal. These kids go to school. They're told. They go to if they go to university, they've made it. They go to a better university, they've made it even better. So they invest more and more time and money in this thing. And as a, a dysfunctionality or about the system itself, it it speaks to I don't know whether it's a cultural, political, economic crisis in the American system. Maybe not American capitalism, but the American meritocracy.

00:24:37 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. I think that's right. I think there is a sense among students who graduate from these schools and with these degrees that the system has become kind of extractive. You know? It's just trying to shake them down for as much money as it can shake down from them. And that's, you know, enabled by the fact that the federal government is the one typically subsidizing the loans. So, you know, they don't even they don't even have any skin in the game, themselves, so it creates what economists would call a moral hazard problem. Right? We someone else is paying for this, so we can just take all your money and have no particular obligation to make sure it's money well spent. So I do think there is a sense that this is on some level a scam. You know, I think a couple of things within the system that really, you know, I think are little appreciated, but once you see them, you can't unsee them. And that is you go to a university whether it's, you know, in the in the in the book I write about the University of Texas at Dallas, and I write about the video game design program. So whether you're going to the University of Texas at Dallas or whether you're going to Harvard or Yale or Columbia, they charge you the same regardless of what your degree is, more or less. I mean, you can find some exceptions. But, basically, you get charged the same even though we know that someone with an engineering degree coming out of a school like this is just gonna make vastly more money on balance than someone with an art history degree. And so it's it's bizarre that, we charge the exact same thing. It would be like, you know, being able to buy, stock in Apple or Microsoft for the exact same price as, like, a failing grocery store or something. You know? Like, there's no other part of the economy where we would say the things two things that have vastly different returns, could can be acquired for the same price, and we can we'll lend you as much money as you want for either of them. So I think there is a sense that there's a kinda scam going on. And, you know, the other thing is this is this is, come up in conversations with economists about this is, you know, when you buy a stock, or you make, an investment, you buy a home, say, there's all kinds of regulatory, language around that. You know, they have to disclose certain things. They have certain conflicts of interest that they're forbidden from taking on. But, when you, market a degree program at a university, there's no, government agency agency that regulates what you can say about that. You know? There's no there's no sort of truthful advertising, in the way that there is for, you know, for financial assets. Now I guess you could argue that the Federal Trade Commission could, you know, theoretically come in and and prosecute them, but, but there's no specific, you know, legal regime that regulates that in the way that there is for housing or financial markets or for employment or for many other places where we have these large economic transactions.

00:27:15 Andrew Keen: You've written about the political economy. You you your your previous book, The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery. Couple of days ago, I did a show with the Princeton historian, Julian Zelizer, on what he calls the Joe Biden tragedies. Just edited a book of first serious historical analysis of the Biden administration, the presidency of Joe Biden, in which he argued that the tragedy of Biden was that he was a New Deal president in a post-New Deal age. You've given the subject, obviously, of the the political implications and opportunities of the of the world you're writing about in some detail. Do the Democrats get it? I mean, maybe, Mamdani does, but, obviously, Biden didn't, Harris didn't. What advice for the Democratic Party comes out of this book, Mutiny, the rise and revolt of the college educated working class? Because this is this is a critical political issue in the twenties and twenty thirties, especially in a post Trump world, isn't it?

00:28:33 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. I'd say, you know, in general, the book is a political book with a lowercase p rather than a capital p. But, I do, in the end, try to think through some of the political implications. And I guess the thing that jumps out at me most obviously, and I emphasized it a bit in that, that excerpt that you mentioned in the times, is that, there's been a lot of discussion about the diploma divide or the gap between the way that college educated, voters have voted in the past few elections and people without degrees. So it got to be about 15 points in the twenty twenty four election. College educated folks were about 15%, you know, in favor of Kamala Harris, whereas people without degrees voted, Trump by a margin of about 14%. So similar split in both directions. And the point I make both in the book and in that excerpt is if you look, strictly at economic issues, there's actually been a pretty stark convergence between people with college degrees and without college degrees. Over the past twenty years or so, there's, interesting political science work about this, by a guy named William Marble at Stanford. And beginning in about 2004, you know, so well, let me go even further back. In the in the eighties and nineties, college graduates were, significantly more conservative than people without a degree on economics. You know? So whether it's taxation, redistribution, financial regulation, unions, the college guys were generally right leaning, and the people without degrees were left leaning. Beginning about 2004, that starts to shift. The people with college degrees start moving left. And by 2012, they're basically in the exact same spot. And then by 2020, the college grads are even slightly to the left of the people without degrees. And so it's interesting to me that we've made so much of this divide among college and non college folks, and it certainly exists on, you know, cultural issues, race, morality, certain, you know, certain certain issues that, that end up taking a lot of oxygen in a political campaign. But if you look on economics, there's actually been a fair amount of convergence. And to me, that is a big political opportunity really for either party. This idea that, that if you have a pretty economic focused message and are somehow able to elevate economic issues above these cultural issues that have been pretty divisive, you have a, like, a pretty large majority coalition. And I think that's kind of sitting out there. And it you know, obviously, it's not that easy. Cultural issues, you know, tend to get a lot of media attention. They, get a lot of traction on social media, and, certainly, that's been the case in the last few elections. But if you're if you have a candidate, you know, like a Mamdani, I think, who's been able to center, economic issues, affordability, costs, you know, downward mobility. That is something that, the data show us is a there's a huge constituency for that, transcends, you know, education. It even transcends ideology on a whole variety of other issues. So to me, that's that's the kind of, where the action is politically, and I would expect that we'll we'll see some of that debate play out in the presidential primaries, really, in both parties in 2028.

00:31:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's funny whether we need a younger Bernie Sanders or whether a younger Bernie Sanders would just be another version of the Biden tragedy. What about the role of unions and corporations? You've written extensively on it, and I know the book deals a lot with the development of new kinds of labor agreements and disputes. You wrote, for example, about, Starbucks and union struggle, and they eventually agreed to mediate. You've also written about Amazon, coders, their jobs becoming more and more like warehouse work. Are some of these companies better than others? Starbucks, for example, a little better than Amazon. And and are we talking about traditional unions, Noam, or is it a postunion labor organization? We've done a lot of shows about new kinds of unions in our, in our age of the precariat rather than the proletarian.

00:32:45 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. I so I think the two most, relevant facts, I think, that you have to understand about labor unions in The United States is about 70% you know, it varies between the upper sixties and low seventies, but call it, you know, close to 70% of Americans support unions like the idea of a labor union, but only about 10% are actually in unions. So we have this huge gap between what you could call demand for unions and the actual, membership and unions. And I think there it's really difficult to, understand that gap without understanding the role of the of the company, of the employer. The, labor law in The United States gives employers a lot of influence, and a big ability to affect whether their employees unionize or not. They can, you know, be explicitly hostile to the idea of a union that's well within their legal rights in The United States. They can basically tell, workers that they do not wanna see a union. They think it'll harm the workplace. They think it'll harm the company. They think it'll harm the workers. They are free to say this. And anyone who's ever thought of, you know, even, challenging their employer on a particular narrow issue, much less organizing a union, which is an incredibly, involved undertaking, knows that it's it's scary to challenge your employer. And when the law gives the employer the right to very explicitly say, we don't want you to do this, most people will not do it. That's just the fact. We see that, again, in the gap between the percentage of people who say they favor unions and the number of people who are actually in them. So I think as long as labor law is what it is and employers have a lot of, leeway to push back on a union, the only sort of viable way for, for workers to, kind of claw back some power and control at their workplaces is, you know, on a large scale, is gonna be through alternatives to a traditional union. Now, again, I mean, we've seen and I write about them in the book.

00:34:54 Andrew Keen: Right. And you've written about the gig drivers — for example, efforts to unionize in California. Uber drivers.

00:35:02 Noam Scheiber: Drivers. And, you know, I mean, you mentioned Amazon and tech, and I think the tech workplace is one very interesting example. Very few tech workplaces, even as there's been a ton of frustration rising among tech workers over the past, you know, five, ten years that I've written about, you know, hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off in the past three, four years. Lot of frustration over how the technology is used, you know, whether it's by the Department of Defense or ICE, things like that. Lot of lot of kind of, frustrations roiling tech workers, but we have not seen very much actual unionization. The company Kickstarter, which is this crowdfunding platform, they have successfully unionized, but there just aren't many other examples. But what you do see is, a lot of organizing that happens outside of a kind

00:35:45 Andrew Keen: of Right. I mean, you read a good piece. You mean, the the title for the times on this was despite the crackdown on activism, tech employees are still picking fights. Is that because they're a little more confident? They they know they can get work elsewhere, they're better paid or smarter or simply more aggressive?

00:36:03 Noam Scheiber: Well, that was the case up until about, up until you could argue about 2022. Then in 2022, we had two things. We had the Fed raise interest rates, and we had ChatGPT. Those two things in combination led to a lot more precarity, to use your word, among tech workers. So that really began a wave of layoffs, and then, you know, increasingly, companies are using, generative AI to code in a way that has kinda commoditized the skills that, that a lot of tech workers have. So I think over the past three years, you've had this real anxiety and precarity, and it's led to organizing in ways that aren't a traditional union, but still seem to be kind of accomplishing something. And I think, you mentioned that Amazon story. Amazon has a group called Amazon employees for climate justice. There are similar groups like this at, at Google, at, Microsoft. And these workers, you know, they don't have a formal union election, but they know that, that labor law, that National Labor Relations Act gives them certain rights that protect collective action. So, you know, you can write petitions. You can collectively pressure your bosses for certain concessions. You can walk out. You can stage protests. All these things are protected if you're doing them, for kind of collective, self, you know, to kinda protect yourself as a as a class of workers. And so they've they've done these things. You know? We've had walkouts. We've had petitions. At Google, they have formed what's called a minority union, which is, an actual organization. It's called the Alphabet Workers Union that hasn't won an election but still, you know, comes together to try to advance certain priorities. One of the priorities they pushed in the last few years was getting, a better severance benefits for Google employees who are laid off. The company actually did improve them. The company says it did so of its own volition, but it you know, if nothing else, it does look like the union kind of elevated that issue within the company. So I think we're gonna get a big or a continued increase in these alternative forms of organizing. And, of course, you know, I think a lot of workers, tech workers, and other workers in this generation also see their political involvement, you know, as a as a as a kind of form of organizing. We we ran a few stories about this that there were just very large groups of people in their 20s and 30s who were downwardly mobile, who were very involved in the campaign. And it became a kind of collective action exercise. You know? People finding each other and doing this together to try to get someone elected who they thought could improve their life.

00:38:50 Andrew Keen: Finally, you mentioned ChatGPT changed everything. Of course, we live in the age of AI now. You you had another very good piece in the times about has the decline of knowledge work begun. I wonder in conclusion: clearly, something big is happening, and there's no doubt about that. You're not the first or the last person to write about it. But I wonder whether the best way to frame it in historical terms is whether this revolt that you write about, a mutiny, whether it in historical terms, it's gonna be more like the Luddites or maybe the industrial working class. Is there a danger of all this mute of this mutiny becoming just the next chapter of the Luddites, noble but inevitably failed, tilt at progress and technology, are there chapters in history which are warnings to the mutiny that you write about? Are the Luddites what we want to avoid or maybe want to emulate?

00:40:00 Noam Scheiber: Yeah. Fair question. Clearly, there are moments, when you have these kind of uprisings that just fizzle into nothing and maybe even leave people worse off, than than when they started. I think what's interesting and unique about college educated workers getting involved is that historically, we've seen that when the college educated become politically radicalized, that does tend to lead to real shifts. And we saw that, you know, you've, you we've seen it, in, you know, in nineteenth century China, in the Bolshevik revolution, in Europe. We've seen, you know, even post great recession in certain countries like Spain and Greece, it really completely upended the politics of those countries when the college educated became very frustrated and joined with the traditional working class.

00:40:52 Andrew Keen: And you saw it in Poland, of course, with solidarity.

00:40:55 Noam Scheiber: Sure. Yeah. No. No question. And and so I think, you know, the thing that, you know, the another example is very relevant today is Iran. You know? In in the late nineteen seventies, you had this kind of coalition of college educated folks with more traditional working class folks who really did, help lead to the revolution in '79. You know, I think that the thing that makes the college educated a really important piece of a coalition and potentially, politically decisive is, they tend to have a real sense of agency. You know? When you see, people aggressively organizing, you see people voting in large numbers, you see people contributing to political candidates and going and showing up at town hall meetings to yell at their representative. The college educated tend to do that disproportionately. You know, they tend to do that. They're overrepresented in these activities. And so when they get radicalized, when they get frustrated, they tend to mobilize, and they have a way of getting the attention of the political class in ways that, that others, don't do at quite the same rate. So I think it's, it's always possible that this sort of fizzles, and we kind of go back to some, you know, some, kind of, muddling through, that, you know, you could argue that we've done for the past twenty years. But I do think that, a rise of a radicalized college educated demographic is something that historically tends to disrupt politics, and I would expect it to do that in our country too. The form of that disruption, I can't predict and probably wouldn't be wise for me to predict. But I do think that we know historically that it does tend to be a very disruptive political force.

00:42:38 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. As always as so often in conversations about politics in America, it all comes down to agency. The book is out today, Mutiny, the rise and revolt of the college educated working class, probably the most important issue of our AI age. Noam Scheiber, thank you so much. Really interesting conversation. Much appreciated, and best of luck with the book.

00:43:01 Noam Scheiber: Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.