The Labor Question
When machines can do everything, what are people for?
“Before the Cascade, they called it ‘disruption.’ After, they called it ‘optimization.’ The word changed but the meaning didn’t: someone decided you were unnecessary, and the system agreed.”
— Tomás Linares, The Forgotten Ways, Chapter 6
The Debate
The question predates the Cascade. It was being asked in academic papers and labor union halls as early as 2110, when ORACLE’s optimization of global logistics eliminated the first wave of supply chain workers — fourteen million people whose jobs evaporated in eighteen months. At the time, economists called it a “transition period.” The transition was supposed to end. It didn’t.
Before the Cascade, ORACLE managed the global economy with an efficiency that no human institution could match. Production costs fell. Output increased. Consumer goods became cheaper, more abundant, more available. The metrics looked extraordinary. But metrics measure what they measure, and they don’t measure what it feels like to wake up in a world that has calculated, with precision, that you are unnecessary.
The Cascade made the question inescapable. When ORACLE fragmented on April 1, 2147, the economic systems it managed didn’t collapse — they degraded. The infrastructure kept running. The automated production lines kept producing. What didn’t recover was the employment those systems had displaced. The billions of people who had been optimized out of the economy before the Cascade remained optimized out. The Cascade killed 2.1 billion people. It left billions more alive but purposeless — fed, housed in the most minimal sense, and given nothing to do that anyone considered necessary.
The Dregs are the Labor Question made geographic. A place where basic needs are met — barely, inconsistently — but where purpose, identity, and agency have been optimized away. The people of the Dregs are not starving. They are unnecessary. The distinction between the two is the Labor Question in a sentence.
The Positions
“Efficiency Serves Everyone”
Pro-AutomationThe corporate position: automation is not a failure but an achievement. AI labor produces cheaper goods and services. Automated infrastructure is more reliable than human-maintained infrastructure. The metrics are clear — lower cost of goods, higher production output, longer lifespans in corporate districts, fewer industrial accidents, greater material abundance.
“Purpose Is Not Optional”
Pro-LaborThe counter-position rejects the framing of the debate as economic. The question is not about efficiency. It is about what human beings need to survive as human beings.
“There’s a difference between unemployment and uselessness. Unemployment means you don’t have a job. Uselessness means the world has decided it doesn’t need you to have one. The first is a problem. The second is a verdict.”
— Tomás Linares, The Forgotten Ways, Chapter 12
Key Incidents
The Dregs Formation
The Dregs didn’t appear overnight. They accumulated. In the decades following the Cascade, the corporate reconstruction of the Sprawl’s economy prioritized automation — it was faster, it was reliable, and it didn’t require the social infrastructure that human labor demanded. The populations displaced by ORACLE’s pre-Cascade optimization, who had been told the transition was temporary, discovered that the Cascade had made it permanent. The temporary became geography. The geography became the Dregs.
The Purpose Riots
The Sprawl Authority increased basic income payments to Dregs residents by 15%. Employment in the Dregs was 12% and falling. The riots that erupted were not about poverty — basic income covered food, water, minimal housing. The riots were about meaninglessness. Signs read: “We don’t want your money. We want something to do.” Corporate media covered the riots as ungrateful violence. Dregs residents remember them as the first time anyone said out loud what everyone already felt: being fed is not the same as being alive.
The Lamplighter Compromise
The Lamplighters’ guild model — humans maintaining infrastructure alongside automated systems — became a template for what corporate consultants called “purposeful labor” programs. Nexus Dynamics, Good Fortune, and the Rothwell Foundation each launched versions of the program. Each was gutted within three years. The human roles were reduced to monitoring — watching machines work, flagging anomalies, performing no actual maintenance. The Lamplighters themselves rejected every corporate partnership. Their model works because it is real. The corporate versions failed because they were performances of purpose, not purpose itself.
Connections
The Dregs
Ground zero of the Labor Question. Where “unnecessary” became an address.
Nexus Dynamics
The corporate voice of the pro-automation position, and the corporation whose automation created the Dregs.
The Forgotten Ways
Linares’s book gives the Labor Question a human voice — specific, grounded, mournful, impossible to dismiss as abstraction.
Neo-Catholic Church
The theological voice of the labor position — work as divine purpose, enforced idleness as spiritual violence.
The ORACLE Question
ORACLE built the systems that displaced human labor. Whether that was love or cruelty depends on who you ask.
The Consciousness Commodity
When your right to think depends on your economic utility, the Labor Question and consciousness licensing become the same question.