The Rise of the Knowledge Economy
At the same time, rapid improvements in computing and communication technologies helped birth a new class of knowledge workers: data modelers, software developers, system designers, financial analysts, and network engineers. This new class served as the middleman for increasingly discongregated flows of capital, resources, information, and commodities. Members of this class enjoyed relative stability by receiving larger shares of corporate profits, either directly through higher wages or through their ownership of equity. This subset of labor became the managers and facilitators of post-Fordist capitalism and saw their standards of living and capacity to consume comfortably rise.
In the minds of advocates of globalization, these new jobs were supposed to offset the losses resulting from deindustrialization. Yet the gains distributed by these jobs were highly unequal, with a small sector of upper-income households reaping most of the benefits: the Gini index for income inequality in the United States, for instance, grew from 0.45 in 1971 to 0.59 in 2023, a level last seen only prior to World War II.
In North America, this upper crust of workers thus reaped most of the benefits of globalization; in Europe, higher taxation somewhat mitigated this divergence, redistributing part of the gains made by the new middle classes to a broader class of workers through what remained of the welfare state. But in reality, both models were rather disconnected from where a large proportion of profits were being generated — in the factories of China and Mexico, and the mills of Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Emblematic of this new economy is the Swedish fashion retailer H&M. In 2024, the company posted an operating profit of $1.8 billion. It paid an average tax rate of 24.9 percent, with virtually none of it in Bangladesh, where around 20 percent of its garments are produced. A clothing designer at H&M can earn up to $100,000 a year, while the monthly minimum wage for a textile worker in Bangladesh was only recently raised to $113: a measly $1,356 per year.
Generative AI and the Inward Turn of Capital
In recent years, the small subset of workers who have benefited from the globalized economy have started to feel the pinch. The rise of generative AI and the widespread anxiety about its effects can be read in this light. Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, it has become increasingly clear that myriad forms of labor — graphic design, copywriting, programming — are rapidly being subjected to the same logic of discipline that was once centered in the factory.
While much unjustified hype has accompanied generative AI, and the technology is indeed far from perfect, its capacity to write computer code or generate product design and marketing imagery is rapidly improving. It is no longer entirely unreasonable to conclude that something akin to a process of industrial proletarianization might gradually reach forms of informational and creative labor that had thus far been immune from these shifts.