The Butterfly Revolution
In the last week, two graduating classes booed their commencement speakers off the stage.
At the University of Central Florida arts and humanities ceremony, a Florida real estate executive named Gloria Caulfield told the arts and humanities graduates that AI was the next industrial revolution. The boos started before she finished the sentence. She paused. “Oh, what happened?” She tried again. “Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?” A graduate yelled back, “AI sucks!” The footage traveled.
Days later, in a Figure AI warehouse in San Jose, a humanoid in dark coveralls with Jim stitched on the chest worked an eighty-one-hour shift, processed 101,391 packages, took no breaks. Jim. The friend of your dad who shows up with a truck on moving day, the man your mother trusted to look at the furnace. Somebody in a Figure conference room reached for that warmth, paid a branding firm to engineer it, and stitched it onto the chest of the robot built to take that man’s job. In a separate trial, Figure 03 raced a company intern over a ten-hour package-sort. The intern, who had stepped away to the bathroom, lost.
On May 15 at the University of Arizona, the former Google CEO told another graduating class, “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on. The rocket ship is here.” The booing persisted through the rest of the speech.
The Trump administration’s federal program, Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan, launched its summit on the same podcast where the Perplexity CEO appeared a month later. He said: “The reality is most people don’t enjoy their jobs. Even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to.” The plan’s introduction compares it to the moon landing.
Tech and government have married.
The Book Nobody Read
We have done this before.
In 1872, the transcontinental railroad, financed by overbuilt track and the conviction that the West would absorb whatever the men selling the future built, collapsed into the Panic of 1873 and six years of depression. In 1999, the fiber bubble did it again; half a trillion dollars in cable laid for an internet economy that did not yet exist, and eighty-five percent of it sat unused for years.
In each case the men selling the future shorted their own customers’ future. In each case the word temporary did the work it does now.
The current data center buildout is the same shape on a larger scale. OpenAI has committed $1.4 trillion on $13 billion in revenue. Oracle has taken on $43 billion in debt for $300 billion in OpenAI performance obligations. The financial press calls it circular equity investment. Ninety percent of firms report no productivity impact from AI; three percent of people pay for the product.
But somebody saw the whole sequence coming seventy-six years ago.
The author had spent years designing the anti-aircraft systems that became the first computers; in 1950 he set down what he had learned in a single sentence: “The automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.” The machines, he warned, would come for the office as well as the assembly line; a country that followed “our traditional worship of progress and the fifth freedom, the freedom to exploit” would face “a decade or more of ruin and despair.”
Wiener meant: put a machine that works for nothing next to a human (a line worker, a clerk processing forms at a desk) and the human’s wages collapse. A country that keeps making this choice earns a decade or more of ruin.
The title was The Human Use of Human Beings. They read it as a manual for the future.
The Chrysalis
Every September in the eastern United States, a monarch caterpillar finishes eating, crawls to the underside of a branch, spins a small button of silk, and sheds its skin. Underneath, a hard green casing has already formed. It seals.
The same digestive enzymes the caterpillar used on milkweed now break down the caterpillar itself. Muscles dissolve. Gut breaks down. Most of the nervous system is dismantled. Cut the chrysalis open at the right hour and a green soup of the body that used to be pours out. Almost nothing survives.
The exceptions are imaginal discs, dormant clusters of cells inside the caterpillar from the day it hatched, carrying the blueprints for the wings and eyes of the adult while the caterpillar fed for weeks not knowing the cells of its replacement were inside it the whole time. When the hormones drop, the discs activate. They use the dissolved body as fuel. Organ by organ, a new creature is built from the soup according to plans the caterpillar never knew it was carrying.
In April 2022, a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin named his plan to reorganize the United States government.
He published it on his Substack as The Butterfly Revolution. The American republic is the caterpillar; the imaginal discs are an alternate regime, waiting. The metamorphosis requires a Chairman of the Board (Trump, who would “caper in front of the cameras”) and a CEO who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments.” His seven steps: campaign on autocracy, purge the bureaucracy, ignore the courts, co-opt Congress, centralize the police, shut down elite media and academic institutions, turn out your people.
Yarvin published the plan. The administration executes it.
The blogger’s first step had a name in 2012: RAGE, Retire All Government Employees. In January 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminated 270,000 federal jobs in eleven months while defying federal injunctions on deportations, ICE became a mass-deportation force deployed to cities, the Department of Education was dismantled, and DOGE used ChatGPT to cancel 1,400 humanities grants. His plan, on the page, in 2022. The administration’s actions, on the news, every week since.
The discs are activating. The chrysalis has not split yet. The wing is forming under the skin. The next president, when he or she walks out of the casing this administration is building, will inherit the unitary executive he imagined, a presidency in which the courts are “purely ceremonial and advisory.”
What We Are
When did we opt in? None of us remembers. Could it be the moment we scrolled past the legal disclaimers without reading them? You lift your face, then the phone unlocks. The algorithmic slot machine sorts itself into what reaches you and what stays hidden. A search bar somewhere is finishing the question you have not yet typed. Terms of service ran forty-seven pages. We were already inside.
ChatGPT crossed 900 million weekly users in February, with 330 million prompts a day from the U.S. alone. 54 percent of American teenagers run their schoolwork through the app. 70 percent of all chatbot use is non-work — the things people will not say out loud, are asked of the machine instead of a friend.
But the chatbot is not the only feeding. It runs the recommendation that played the song before this one, the ring camera that watched the package arrive at the door. Opting out is not really available. Systems are no longer additions to ordinary life — they are ordinary life now. We were already inside.
For forty-two years the country watched for the chrome humanoid that walks out of an all consuming fire with red eyes, who cannot be bargained with, feels no pity, and will not stop until you’re dead. The country watched the wrong door. What has been unleashed has no chrome. It was built by the tech geeks who wrote the plan in 2022 working in lockstep with the men signing the executive orders now, in suits at desks, the killing machine was never going to be a robot. Chrome was the seductive lure of attention capture. “Trust me, this will make your life easier,” the hook.
Where do we sit within all this as we open the laptop at eleven? The phone, the television, the watch on the wrist — we kept them. This very essay arrived by the feed. For weeks the caterpillar fed; inside it the whole time were the cells of its replacement. Each prompt is a calorie fattening the larva inside. And feeding it requires no hands of theirs; they just need our thumb swipes.
The people embedded in government now built a robot to replace a worker who took a bathroom break. Telling the employee that the displacement was temporary; they told their shareholders it was the final product. They published the plan and waited to see if anyone would read it. Most never will. Graduates booed while the market kept building. The chrysalis is almost ready.
It’s hard not to wonder, what robot did they teach us to watch for?
Notes & Sources
UCF graduates booed Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Company, after she called AI “the next industrial revolution” at the College of Arts and Humanities commencement on May 8, 2026. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/she-mentioned-ai-in-her-graduation-speech-and-got-booed
“AI sucks!” was shouted from the crowd as Caulfield tried to continue. https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/orlando-area-news/ucf-students-boo-commencement-speaker-over-ai-praise/
Figure AI’s humanoid robot “Jim” sorted 101,391 packages over 81 hours at the company’s San Jose warehouse, livestreamed, running on the Helix-02 AI system at one package every three to four seconds. https://en.sedaily.com/international/2026/05/17/figure-ai-robot-sorts-100000-packages-in-81-hours-without
The Figure 03 robot raced a Figure AI intern named Aime in a 10-hour package-sorting challenge on May 18, 2026. Aime sorted 12,924 packages to F.03’s 12,732; CEO Brett Adcock wrote, “This is the last time a human will ever win.” https://www.thehansindia.com/tech/man-beats-robot-in-figure-ais-10-hour-sorting-challenge-1076868
The human intern took bathroom breaks during the 10-hour challenge; the robot did not. https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1402955-last-human-victory-figure-ai-ceo-reacts-after-intern-wins-man-vs-machine-challenge
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed throughout his commencement speech at the University of Arizona on May 15, 2026, including for the line “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. The rocket ship is here.” https://www.aol.com/articles/google-billionaire-eric-schmidt-booed-130826000.html
The Trump White House released “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan” on July 23, 2025, at an event co-hosted by the All-In podcast and the Hill & Valley coalition at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium. https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/07/white-house-unveils-americas-ai-action-plan/
The plan’s introduction frames the moment as “an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the All-In podcast in March 2026 that “most people don’t enjoy their jobs” and that “even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to.” https://fortune.com/2026/03/24/perplexity-ceo-ai-layoffs-not-bad-people-hate-jobs-entrepreneurship/
The Book Nobody Read
The transcontinental railroad financing collapse triggered the Panic of 1873 and a six-year depression. https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/september/panic-of-1873
The 1999-2001 fiber-optic glut: roughly 85 percent of installed long-haul cable sat dark for years.https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB992810125428317389
OpenAI has committed approximately $1.4 trillion in spending against roughly $13 billion in revenue. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-made-a-300-billion-bet-on-openai-its-paying-the-price-205441863.html
Oracle took on $43 billion in debt against a $300 billion performance-obligation contract with OpenAI as part of the Stargate project. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/13/openai-spending-spree-powering-much-of-tech-oracle-latest-example.html
Oracle’s remaining performance obligations climbed to $523 billion by late 2025, dependent on OpenAI’s ability to pay. https://247wallst.com/investing/2025/12/26/is-oracle-a-sinking-ship-or-a-buying-opportunity/
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), source of the “precise economic equivalent of slave labor” passage and the warning about “a decade or more of ruin and despair.” https://archive.org/details/humanuseofhumanb0000norb
The Chrysalis
Monarch caterpillar metamorphosis: imaginal discs, enzymatic dissolution of the larval body, organ-by-organ reconstruction. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterfly-metamorphosis-explainer/
Curtis Yarvin’s April 2022 essay “The Butterfly Revolution” laid out the chairman-of-the-board / CEO framework and the larva-to-butterfly metaphor for a Trump secondterm https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug
RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) was Yarvin’s 2012 proposal at the BIL conference; DOGE is the operational form. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminated more than 270,000 federal jobs in the first eleven months of 2025. . https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-year-after-trumps-doge-cuts-workers-whose-lives-were-upended-ask-what-was-saved
DOGE used ChatGPT to flag more than 1,400 humanities grants for cancellation at the National Endowment for the Humanities. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/05/07/doge-neh-humanities-grants-ruling/
What We Are
ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/03/24/perplexity-ceo-ai-layoffs-not-bad-people-hate-jobs-entrepreneurship/
The 42-year reference is to The Terminator (1984), screenplay by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. The “cannot be bargained with or reasoned with… will not stop, ever” monologue is Kyle Reese’s.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
Pew teen ChatGPT use, 2025: 54 percent for schoolwork. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/
OpenAI/NBER study, September 2025: 70 percent of ChatGPT use is non-work. https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/
AI, and the previous era of industrialization, would be acceptable, even laudable, if the rewards were distributed more evenly among the population.
There has always been the concept, and hope - perhaps dream - that modernization would mean less work and more leisure time for the general population. So far, the spoils seem to go to the "1%."
I've started reading Piano Player by Kurt Vonnegut, published some time in the fifties and it seems just as relevent today as whatever concerns he had when he wrote it. Machines replacing humans will never benefit the masses.