Learn These Words. You're Going to Need Them.
Six terms from cultures that have survived far worse than A.I. layoffs — including one that might just point to a way out.
A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
I’ve been in a strangely upbeat mood the last week. It’s undoubtedly a function of an early summer here in California, relaxed mornings as my kids sleep in rather than struggling to get out the door to school, a little bit of financial breathing room thanks to my new contributor role at CNN, and the arrival of stone fruit.
But I’m pinning it to the Pope.
As we covered here last week, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas — his new teaching exhorting the world to fight off the worst temptations of A.I. — is a piece of truly thoughtful scholarship, attuned to some very subtle threats posed by the consolidation of power and compression of agency in this technological and political moment. And as I wrote in my final column for Hard Reset last week, it’s part of a modern tradition of Papal language making its way into real change for normal people.
In that column I mentioned Monsignor John A. Ryan, the priest-economist who took the 1891 encyclical of the last Pope Leo — in which Leo XIII argued that human beings have God-given value — and turned it into an argument that they also have a God-given right to a decent wage. Through Ryan, those ideas eventually became law and helped inspire the New Deal.
So I’ve been geeked on language, and its power to make change. When our Pope Leo writes about the harvesting of “vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter,” he’s helping all of us name a real problem, and maybe — just maybe — start thinking about how to fight it.
The New Vocabulary We Need
I have several times pointed here to the book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by the economist Albert O. Hirschman, in which he argued that any functioning society/company/government has to give its people/customers/citizens the right to walk away, speak up, or stick it out. Without those three choices, we fall into something dark and dysfunctional. I love the concision of that argument — it’s a wonderfully short book — and the way it helps me articulate today why clicking “Yes” or “No” on a Terms of Service agreement before using a new iPhone just doesn’t quite feel like we’ve been given all the choices we deserve before letting that technology and that company into our lives.
I was listening to the Optimist Economy podcast this weekend (two wonderfully clear-eyed thinkers blow up assumptions about fairness and progress and richness each week, it’s great stuff), and they mentioned the German word Zugzwang, which describes the moment in a chess match when the only moves left to a player are ones that put her into an increasingly bad position.
The news has been full of college seniors booing their AI-apologist commencement speakers — you go, kids — because they’re clearly seeing only Zugzwang ahead of them. Zugzwang is exactly how it feels to work in a company where the people who refuse to use A.I. heavily will clearly be axed, but where using A.I. will clearly hasten the axing of more or less everyone eventually. Zugzwang is an improvement on the English term "hegemony" — the way the dominated get enlisted to prop up their own oppression — because even in the hell of hegemony you get to make a living.
I’d never heard the term before, so it got me looking into cultures that have experienced real oppression and real multigenerational struggle to get out of it, because, I reasoned, there have to be more great, proven terms for the stuff we’re facing right now. Here are a few choice terms I’ve found, from cultures familiar with this sort of trouble. The first few help describe the problem. The final ones describe a solution.
