The Leisure Class of AI

The leisure class, in Veblen's original framework, demonstrated superiority through conspicuous abstention from production — the distance from productive labor was the measure of social standing. The AI economy has produced a class structure replicating essential features while disguising replication beneath vocabularies of meritocracy, creativity, and visionary leadership. The new leisure class is not idle — extraordinarily busy directing, evaluating, specifying, envisioning, curating, exercising 'higher-level' work forms. But the busyness serves the same structural function as old leisure: establishing distance from production. At the apex are computational infrastructure owners (controlling models, data, inference capacity, platforms). Below them are creative directors (the taste-makers, judgment-exercisers deciding what should be produced). At the bottom are displaced cognitive workers whose productive role has been automated, experiencing frustration of the instinct of workmanship.