A soft-landing manual for the second gilded age
March 9, 2026
AI is arriving fast, the old economic arrangements are visibly failing, and the dominant narratives about what comes next have split into 2 equally unhelpful camps: utopian accelerationists who believe the market will sort everything out if we build fast enough, and existential doomers who’ve convinced themselves that the only possible outcome is either human extinction or permanent mass unemployment. Both camps share a singular trait: they’ve decided the future is already determined and that human agency is irrelevant to whatever happens next.
Joan Westenberg is one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable people I have ever had the privilege to know. Everything she writes, and she writes voluminously, is worth reading. But this is a particular is a standout piece.
I simply recommend when you have a few minutes, you take the chance to read it and sit with how it makes you feel. Perhaps relief from the anxiety you might feel about how AI is upending so much of what we have taken for granted for decades. Perhaps anger and opposition. Sit with that. Ask yourself what about this is challenging to you what do you believe that it questions.
The world does change not often but when it does, that change isn’t gradual.
There seems little doubt that we are in the midst of a transformation that hasn’t been seen for generations, one which will upend many things we have taken to be foundational to our society and culture. Facing those challenges honestly, including those things we held to be immutable is the challenge of our time.
Joan holds out hope for what that transformation might bring.
