The AppetiZIRP

Key Highlights

• “ZIRP Phenomena are really just little glimpses into the future. AppetiZIRPs, if you will, for the much wilder main course.”
• “The world is going to keep getting much weirder, really fast.”
• Most striking stat (from Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works): the share of the US population working as farmers declined from 83% in 1800 to 1% today — and the economy had to find new work for everyone displaced.
• In America, fewer and fewer people need to work to meet basic survival needs — a combination of productivity growth and globalization. What do we do with that surplus?
• The Vonnegut vs. Asimov tension on automation:
  • Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano, 1952): automation creates widespread unemployment, unrest, and ennui. “It seemed to him that scientists in those days wanted to mechanize everything and take care of everybody… But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.”
  • Isaac Asimov (Whatever You Wish): machines allow humans to be more human — educated in literature, arts, and philosophy. Work becomes entirely elective. “Every field will be an elective, and the only guide will be ‘whatever you wish.’”
• “If you think that the creator economy or monkey jpegs or tech PM day in the life TikToks were ZIRP Phenomena, wait until you see what people do with their time when they get paid just to be alive. UBI Phenomena will make ZIRP Phenomena look quaint.”
• Not everyone will drift — some will “want to dedicate their lives to solving the hardest challenges facing humanity — like nuclear fusion, lunar mining, and the whole Good Quests list.”

Connections

• Packy McCormick — author of the piece, writing in his newsletter Not Boring.
• Automation — the central engine of the essay: productivity growth shrinking the share of people who must work, from farming’s 83%-to-1% collapse onward.
• Universal Basic Income — the projected next phase (“UBI Phenomena will make ZIRP Phenomena look quaint”) once people get “paid just to be alive.”
• Creator Economy — cited as a quintessential “ZIRP Phenomenon,” an appetizer for a weirder post-work world.
• Kurt Vonnegut — the pessimistic pole of the automation debate via Player Piano (1952): mechanization breeds unemployment, unrest, and lost dignity.
• Isaac Asimov — the optimistic counter via Whatever You Wish: machines free humans for literature, arts, and philosophy, making work elective.
• Abundance — the underlying thesis that productivity and globalization push more people past basic survival needs.
• Historical Futurism — the frame for reading present “phenomena” as previews of a much stranger future.
• Science Fiction — the Vonnegut/Asimov tension that structures the essay’s argument about a post-automation society.