Somewhere between Wall Street’s dopamine spasms and Silicon Valley’s glittering worship of vapour, the honest notion of work was quietly shot in the back and buried beneath a pile of branded tote bags and influencer merchandise. No obituary was published. The funeral was officiated by the high priest of Mecantalism.
Let us not be fooled by the pageantry. Once upon a delusional age, the American Dream was forged in foundries and factories. People sweated, bled, and occasionally lost a few fingers to the machines that made the nation great. But those were the days before labour was reclassified as icky, before manual work was outsourced to distant lands populated by people with troublingly strong work ethics and suspiciously few hedge funds.
Today, the modern American elite finds itself mortally allergic to the concept of effort. Not intellectual effort, mind you. They still hold TED Talks. But real work? With hands? Muscles? Dirt? That’s for the niggers.
Historically, those others were enslaved Africans, later rebranded as sharecroppers, then immigrants, then robots. Anyone but the man in the tailored suit. Labour, has always been somebody else’s burden. America’s unique innovation was not industrial production, but industrial delegation.
We must applaud the consistency. From Jefferson’s plantations to Bezos’ warehouses, the ruling class has remained impressively committed to the belief that wealth should come without labour. The Founding Fathers dreamt of liberty. Yes, but preferably the kind that rides on someone else’s back.
Fast-forward a few centuries and the picture is even more elegant. Manual labour has been thoroughly racialised, commodified, and then ceremoniously banished offshore.
The aristocracy of app developers and financial alchemists now delights in telling schoolchildren that they, too, can be billionaires, so long as they never waste time learning how to make anything. In America today, the production of goods is considered a form of national embarrassment. Far better to make content, or better yet, make nothing at all and call it a lifestyle brand.
Meanwhile, in a place once dismissed as a land of bicycles and rice paddies, something suspicious has occurred. The Chinese, in a reckless act of civilisational masochism, decided to work. Yes, they built factories, ports, highways, railways, and microchips.
Outrageous! Instead of exporting “inspiration” like their Western counterparts, they exported real products. This insidious habit, production, has brought them economic growth, geopolitical leverage, and the kind of infrastructure that doesn’t collapse when it rains.
Naturally, American elites responded with the most potent weapon in their arsenal: PowerPoint presentations. “We need to innovate,” they declared. By which they meant: we need better marketing, not better machines. While China built high-speed rail, America built Hulu originals. While China trained welders, America trained wellness coaches. While China powered up its semiconductor industry, America pondered whether TikTok dances might qualify as a form of GDP.
Of course, there are those who still believe in work. They are called “essential workers,” which is modern capitalist dialect for “expendable people we briefly applauded during a pandemic before throwing them back into the meat grinder with no healthcare.”
The rest of the economy is now a parade of illusions. An entire class of citizens has emerged whose job is to sell you things that don’t exist: derivatives, data, dopamine.
They call themselves creators, entrepreneurs, influencers and thought leaders. But remove the Wi-Fi, and most couldn’t build a chair if their lives depended on it.
And yet, paradoxically, the more removed one is from actual production, the more exalted one becomes. A hedge fund manager who moves money from one pocket to another is hailed as a genius. A tailor who sew the pockets is considered unambitious. This is no accident. It is the culmination of centuries of labour-loathing masquerading as (mis)information age.
The result? A nation that cannot manufacture a lightbulb without importing the filament. A generation that cannot change a tyre but can code a startup to sell tyres with free shipping. A culture that idolises billionaires but treats plumbers as punchlines.
But make no mistake: the plumbing still matters. The bridges still need fixing. The power grid still groans. The shelves still need stocking. America’s infrastructure, like its moral compass, is in visible decay. Not for lack of money, but for lack of interest. In spite of the fact that the empire is collapsing no one wants to do the welding.
If the soul of a nation lies in what it honours, then America has chosen screen saver over substance, branding over building, and narrative over action. You cannot repair a bridge with memes. Yes, memes. Those bite-sized bursts of cultural nonsense masquerading as communication. You cannot electrify a rural town with NFTs. Ah yes, NFTs, or as one might reasonably decode them: Not Functionally Tangible. They are the crowning jewel in the cathedral of capitalist abstraction. You cannot feed a child with a quarterly report.
One might suggest that America revive its respect for labour. Not in political speeches, but in policy. Fund vocational schools. Pay tradespeople well. Build things—roads, trains, turbines. Let the teenagers learn a trade before they learn to monetize their trauma on social media. Dignify work not because it is appealing, but because it is necessary.
But such ideas are rarely welcome in boardrooms or brunches. They smell too much of sweat. And no one wants to stain their linen shirts with the scent of reality.
So here we are: a digital Versailles atop a crumbling Rome. Where the poor labour invisibly, the rich speculate publicly, and the middle-class anxiously crafts LinkedIn posts about “personal branding” while the lights flicker above their heads.
History will not judge this kindly. Then again, history is not trending on Twitter.
Let America rediscover the glory of brain and hammer, before it finds itself buried under the weight of its own glittering emptiness.
So, where does African stands in all this? *Wohoho! Ana babbakar giwa, wakajin kaurin jaba.*
