> This is all to say that it seems the fundamental social contract of capitalism - that the benefits of innovation are redistributed to everybody through compet

> This is all to say that it seems the fundamental social contract of capitalism - that the benefits of innovation are redistributed to everybody through competition and growth, employing more people in new industries and lowering real prices of machine manufactured goods to almost nothing - seems seriously threatened going forward in the AI and super-internet-company age. This isn’t the social contract. There are two classes, workers and capital owners, and each tries to get as much for themselves a they can. But the capital owners have an advantage since they can more easily band together. This has been pointed out since Adam Smith (or that’s the oldest one I know). But of course it is correct that normal people have benefited from capitalism as well. But you can’t disentangle that from the centuries of class struggle which fought against the tendency of capital taking all the gains for itself. But this fact gets whitewashed as a “social contract”, i.e. a cooperative arrangement, when really the only reason why the so-called middle class thrived in the 50’s USA was because of concessions between the two classes after the struggles of the 30’s and 40’s. (A sort of We Were Friends All Along history.) Which is just to say that there absolutely never was a cooperative balance between these two classes under capitalism. There have just been different degrees of imbalance and then class struggle in order to try to correct for that.