Redundant Biomass: The Diagnosis Is Right. The Despair Is Optional.
Redundant Biomass: The Diagnosis Is Right. The Despair Is Optional.
David Shapiro names the trap. He cannot see the door.
Markus Maiwald – Frankfurt / Budapest, May 2026
A few days ago, David Shapiro — AI researcher, systems theorist, and one of the more intellectually honest voices in the post-labor discourse — published a video titled “I’m worried about where things are going”. The thesis: full automation is not a future risk. It is a present trajectory, overdetermined by geopolitics, capital, and individual rationality. And the humans it displaces are not a “useless class” or a “permanent underclass” — they are redundant biomass. The phrase landed hard. 10K views in a day. Hundreds of comments. Most of them scared.
This essay is a response. Shapiro’s diagnosis is largely correct. His prescription — or rather, his lack of one — is not. What follows respects the man enough to engage with his strongest arguments, then shows the door he cannot see.
Shapiro has given the post-labor discourse its sharpest term to date. Redundant biomass. Not “useless class.” Not “permanent underclass.” Not the academic euphemisms that preserve the polite fiction of civic standing. Just biomass: the cellular and metabolic substrate, superfluous to the production function.
The phrase works because it tells the truth that “class” launders away. A class implies standing. Standing implies recognition. Recognition implies a polity that recognizes. Strip the standing and what remains is the body, occupying space the system would prefer to use for something else.
Shapiro deserves credit for refusing the comforting vocabulary. The thesis is honest, the diagnosis is largely correct, the historical instincts are sound. So before we put a bullet in his prescription, let us first stipulate what he got right.
I. The Realist Theory of Rights Is Correct
Shapiro’s central philosophical move is to junk the Enlightenment delusion that rights are natural. Rights are not granted by the universe; they are not endowed by the Creator; they are not even endowed by the Constitution. Rights are extracted. Through strikes. Through revolts. Through coercive withdrawal. The poets and philosophers come after the blood and write the pretty justifications post hoc.
We agree. The Exitarian frame says the same thing in different language: Exit is the epistemological primitive. A claim is credible because people who can walk away from it choose not to. A right is real because it can be defended — either by force, or by the credible threat of departure, or both. Without one of those two, you do not have a right. You have a hope wearing a costume.
This is congruent. File it as common ground.
II. The Overdetermination Argument Is Real
Three vectors all point at the same outcome.
Geopolitics: US-China competition turns AI and robotics into permanent state priorities. No nation that wants to remain a nation can opt out of automation.
Capital: The largest private mega-project in human history is the AI buildout. The market has voted with trillions. There is no reform package that reverses this.
Individual rationality: Every household, every business, every state, when offered a cheaper option, takes it. Multiply that across 340 million Americans and 8 billion humans and the attractor state is fully automated production. Humans are slow, expensive, error-prone. The transition is not a policy choice; it is the integral of a billion local economic decisions.
He is right. The trajectory is overdetermined. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling a comfort blanket with a tax-deductible markup.
III. The Historical Parallel Is Structurally Sound
Shapiro reaches for Corvée labor under the Chinese empires and the Nazi term useless eater. Both gestures are uncomfortable; both are accurate.
Under Corvée, peasants were not slaves — they were a renewable resource that could be expended on canals, walls, and tombs because the river valleys produced another crop of bodies next year. The system did not need to value them. It only needed to use them faster than they died.
Under full automation, the system does not need to use them at all.
That is a genuine historical inflection point. Shapiro is not catastrophizing for clicks. He is reading the structure correctly.
So Where Is He Wrong?
Three errors. They are interconnected. Together they make his despair feel inevitable when it is, in fact, a choice he is making on your behalf.
Error One: The Frame
Shapiro treats the polity as the unit of analysis. His “collective veto” is labor leverage inside an existing nation-state. Strikes. Mass withdrawal. The classic 19th and 20th century playbook. He correctly notes that this veto is eroding as automation reduces labor’s bargaining power.
He never asks why the polity itself should be the frame.
The labor veto was a specific historical mechanism for a specific historical configuration: industrial capital that required masses of physical workers in fixed locations. That configuration is dissolving. Mourning the loss of the veto inside the old configuration is like mourning the loss of cavalry charges in the age of artillery. Yes, the cavalry is finished. The question is not how to revive it — the question is what the new tactical primitive becomes.
The new primitive is not bargaining power. It is unbargainability.
You do not negotiate with what you cannot capture.
Error Two: The Symmetry
Shapiro assumes the elite can monopolize automation. They cannot.
The Kenya Rule says it plainly: every primitive that ran on a hundred thousand dollars of NVIDIA hardware in 2024 runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 today. Ternary inference. Quantized weights. Distilled models. The cost curve does not respect class boundaries; it descends on everything equally, and it descends faster on the small end than the large end because the small end gets the compounding benefits of every research paper published upstream.
Mesh networking. End-to-end encryption. Sovereign identity. Sovereign cryptography. None of these require permission. None of them can be effectively banned without breaking the substrate the elites themselves depend on. The technology is symmetric.
The lord who builds the AI moat is also the lord who has placed the moat-construction tools into commodity supply. You cannot un-publish a one-billion-parameter ternary LLM. You cannot un-publish post-quantum signatures. You cannot un-publish gossip protocols.
The peasant with a Raspberry Pi running BitNet, plus a mesh radio, plus a sovereign key, plus an offline-tolerant packet queue, is not useless biomass. He is a node in a distributed cognitive network with no central point of capture. Multiply him by a million. That is the actual asymmetry, and it cuts in the opposite direction Shapiro thinks it does.
Error Three: The Geography
Shapiro’s darkest scenario is the self-sealed elite: robotic security at every supply node, automated surveillance walling off the rest. He concedes the scenario sounds conspiratorial but argues we cannot rule it out.
He should rule it out. The geography does not work.
Self-sealing requires defended perimeter. Defended perimeter requires the perimeter to be smaller than the resource base it depends on. The “redundant biomass” sits on top of every input the elite needs: land, water, energy, rare earths, atmosphere, transit corridors, undersea cables. You cannot wall off a continent. You can wall off a compound — and the compound becomes the strategic vulnerability. Every fortress eventually meets the asymmetric weapon that ignores its walls.
The historical pattern is consistent. Walled cities lose to siege. Gated communities lose to the larger economy around them. The Forbidden City fell. Versailles fell. Every elite that has tried to seal itself off has discovered that the seal itself becomes the target.
The elite cannot escape the planet. Which means the elite cannot escape negotiation. Which means the redundant biomass is structurally not redundant — it is the substrate the elite is sitting on, and the substrate retains the option to refuse.
The Third Path Shapiro Cannot See
Shapiro offers two options. Both are dead ends.
Option A: Hope the elites are nice. He correctly calls this delusional.
Option B: Maintain the collective veto through labor leverage. He correctly notes it is eroding.
He stops there. The video ends with a warning and a vague hope that something will be figured out. The book promises more analysis. Analysis is not a treatment plan.
There is a third option. It has been the actual answer for two centuries, and the engineering only got tractable in the last ten years.
The third option is to become uncapturable.
This has two halves. Both required.
The Settler’s Covenant. Withdraw consent without relocating. Make the lord’s claims on you legally and technically null while still inside his nominal territory. Sovereign identity that does not require his registry. Sovereign currency that does not require his bank. Sovereign communication that does not require his platform. Sovereign cognition that does not require his cloud. You do not need to leave. You need to make leaving optional and therefore make staying voluntary.
The Pilgrim’s Protocol. Build the parallel stack. Chapters. Federation. Mutual credit. Sovereign infrastructure any group can fork, run, and federate without permission. The new polity is not a territory — it is a protocol surface. You join by running the software. You exit by uninstalling. There is no border guard because there is no border; there is only the protocol and the people running it.
Together: you do not preserve the labor veto. You make the labor veto irrelevant by becoming uncapturable in the first place. The lord cannot wall you off because you were never inside the wall. The lord cannot grade you as useless because you stopped depending on the system that does the grading.
This is not theory. This is shipping. RFCs. Specs. Compilers. Identity protocols with formal proofs of forward secrecy. Routing fabrics that survive border seizure. Sovereign serialization formats. Quantum-resistant key hierarchies. The work is half done, the engineering tractable, the deployment underway.
The Closing Cut
Shapiro is the licensed heretic of the post-labor discourse. He names the disease with unusual honesty. He cannot prescribe the treatment because the treatment requires defection from the polite institutional frame he is operating inside.
That is not a personal failing. It is the structural position. Right diagnosis, wrong treatment, no moral is the licensed heretic’s signature — the institutions that name the problem own the problem-maintenance industry. He gets to keep talking about the trap precisely because he never proposes the actual exit. The book tour requires the trap to remain.
Watch the original video. Read the argument at its strongest. Then come back here for the door.
Libertaria proposes the actual exit. Not as ideology, not as utopia, not as another manuscript to be written and dated and nailed to the wall. As infrastructure. As running code. As the substrate that makes “redundant biomass” a category error before it becomes a verdict.
You are not redundant.
You are uncaptured infrastructure waiting to be activated.
Source: David Shapiro, “I’m worried about where things are going” (YouTube, May 2026). If Shapiro is reading this: the offer to argue stands. Public or private; your choice.