You have put into words here what I have been feeling for the past couple of years. Most of the people in my family's social circle are laptop class, but I am one of the ones responsible for the movement of tangible goods. It has affected relationships to say the least. Thank you for this.
One August my other half began freaking out and buying in hay, (thats the last month of winter here in New Zealand), we went all spring and summer without rain. He checked with our neighbour, he and his father had journals from 1902 since they farmed the land here - in over a hundred years there had never been a spring drought, I still don't know how he knew.
From across several fields my other half can see something is wrong with a horse or cow. I have researched his 'regenerative | agroecology' approach to farming, but born on the land he will know things, like an instinct, I never see. This is both from a deep knowing of place and being anchored in nature ... To take that away from people is to destroy their very soul, what we see echoed in the sadness of indigenous people generations after such loss.
Weather warfare is destroying our forests, and reducing CO2 doesn’t help. All the crap they’ve sprayed into the atmosphere in their arrogant attempt to limit the sun’s driving of warming has made our soil and the air we breathe toxic. In their insane efforts to manipulate climate, they’ve now come to depopulation and are engineering famine. I believe we are headed to a man-made extinction level event. [By “they” I mean the part of Davos, and the militaries they have co-opted to delivering the toxic brew and the weather warfare systems.]
I really enjoy the way you pull history into the now -- you couldn't be more right about the workers and sit-around-ers. The Frilled shirts. lol. I was just reading Fanny Trollope from 1830 complaining that Americans spent too much time "working" and not enough time "developing their sense of taste" and then she bemoaned that American children were only educated enough to read, write and do enough math for "bookkeeping." She thought that our country would not survive unless the "leading members of society" spent their time reading Cicero until they were at least 22.
I think the major mistake of the laptop class was the assumption that “we are all in this together”. This was the mantra that justified their authoritarianism. For those of us whose businesses, work, and social lives were shut down two years ago, the laptop class became the enemy. And the laptop class considers us the enemy because they are convinced that we are the reason Covid-19 wasn’t eradicated.
They convinced themselves of this to justify their self righteousness. The relentless, vicious coercion for leaky vaccines and ineffective NPIs are why this dragged on.
As a man with a B.A. in English Literature and Writing, who could have been a "bluecheck" but chose instead to learn how to build a house and grow more food than I can eat, I could assure you Mr Bloomberg, you would die of hypothermia or dehydration before you starved to death, if I set you down on 40 acres and told you to build a farm from your own labor, even if you were 40 years younger.
As for my gray matter I think and analyze circles around the best of your PMC, who might commit mass suicide if the internet went out for more than a week, wailing and gnashing their teeth about the unfairness of it all; and then where would you be without your foundation of marionettes and courtieirs?
Let them eat training. That is what I have heard from the likes of Bloomberg on down to the typical Dem urbanite, about the ongoing 40year decimation of the the working class. Methinks this winter might be a test of who is going to eat what, laying waste to a lot of pretensions.
Oh, man, what I would do with 40 acres... my livestock could be completely self-sustaining between pasture rotation and hay harvesting. That would be like being handed a chest of gold to me.
Oh, how I wish I could afford land. Land and just a few animals. Land with trees, but still room to plant enough for myself. I've dreamed of it since I was a child, but have not had things "go my way."
N.S. Lyons wrote a great piece on this, during the Canadian trucker thing. He called them “physicals” and “virtuals,” I believe.
Since then, I see it everywhere. It explains why the “stay home, stay safe,” mantra was so insidiously out of touch with reality. One of the worst offenders I knew was a lady who preached incessantly about our duty to stay home and keep our kids home, “I KNOW, I know, even if it’s hard, but it’s your duty to our fellow man!” She typed these things from her now-$1M home. While occasionally escaping (responsibly, of course) to her family’s second home in a warmer climate.
I have a sister-in-law who I’ve always thought was nice, but I’d never get into an intellectual sparring match with her. And maybe I felt a little bit superior over that. But this year, she decided she needed another bathroom in her home. So she built one. Learned how it all worked and BUILT ONE. Come the apocalypse, she’s gonna be ok. No one will need my extensive knowledge of the players in the War of the Roses then. 😆
Brilliant reference to Gone with the Wind. Literature is likely littered with this dichotomy, as well, and I’ve never given it much thought. Definitely going to snag your Court Martial book.
Ha ha! Well I’m always looking for readable military history, and don’t put much stock in Amazon recommendations. So maybe that works out in its favor.
This ends badly for those who don't know how to take care of themselves - which is just about everybody here in the USA! Bloomberg is an idiot along with all the people who don't know about gardening naturally. Its not easy, it requires a magnitude of more thoughtful interactions than anything any high tech worker has to deal with.
This author is coming closer to being on my list of paid writers. Too many choices so I am allowing for time to winnow out the best.
This is excellent Chris. Your retelling is a pleasure. If I understand you, the tension is almost an age old class divide. In my own circles this seems to work fairly well. Probably like most, I don't have many friends with a drastically different social status to my own. I am a teacher in Australia which puts me around about middle class and almost all my friends are blind, happy sheep. In contrast, I was brought up by a mechanic, son of a share farmer... FREEDOM!!!!!!
This is the consequence of the miseducation of our "educated classes."
Civilization has always had a "laptop class" of some size, even if you have to substitute papyrus and clay tablets for glass screens deeper back in history. Modern industry now allows this class to be far larger than it ever was in the historic past, which creates problems. But miseducation makes this class poisonous, and is the real problem.
There is a certain virtue in driving a forklift all day. But there's also utility in sitting at a desk using a computer to optimize warehouse layout so the driver knows which pallets to move where to make the most of his time. Or in designing a website to take orders so there is reason to move product around to begin with. I won't hazard a guess with numbers, but some fraction of the "laptop class" does work that is directly useful in that way. Others (diversity consultants?) are foppish wastes of space who poison the minds of children.
A well educated member of the laptop class will do all he can to be sure that his "symbol manipulation" work is truly useful in the real world. The salary market was a good signal, but distorted these days with political mandates to spend on things that no businessman thinks will lead to profit or productivity.
But that is not all. Such a man will regard, as critical to his education, training and familiarity with practical skills. Shop class - long derided and now virtually extinct, especially in college-prep high school curricula - was an old marker of this. Someone who actually sat at the knee of a master gardener for a year (and actually paid attention) would never say something as boneheaded as that Bloomberg quote.
A personal sense of the knowledge and skill required to perform any of a host of "real world" jobs would go a long way to bridging the gap. Much better use of everyone's time than more diversity training and indulging troubled schoolchildren with abstruse gender theory nonsense.
This problem is not unique to our country and our moment, but we do have a pretty bad version of this problem affecting us right now and our theory of what makes for a good education is actively making things worse.
This is a very real divide, and the lack of intelligibility between the laptop class living in their virtual hyperreality and the truck class living by their labor in the world of atoms is certainly a major contributing factor to the political rift.
I'm in the Zoom class myself, but my distaste for that class is almost certainly a function of my upbringing - my father's family were rural working class rather than the suburban managerial class from which the majority of my colleagues were spawned. The last two years have made it repeatedly clear to me that the virtuals have no capacity to empathize with the perspective of the physicals; it doesn't even occur to them to try.
The cultural divide itself is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the political cold war. It's the demand from one side that the other order its lifeways according to first side's demand that turns divide into conflict. In the case of the Civil War, it was the North demanding the end of slavery (which the aristocrats knew full well would end their lifestyle); in the modern era, it's "you will own nothing".
There's also an intriguing contradiction implied in this analysis, which you note obliquely yourself. The intellectual resistance to the delusional overreach of the virtual class arises precisely within a renegade subset of the virtual class - highly educated and Very Online intellectuals. We're the ones who originated 'soy boy' as a slur. At a structural level I suspect this is essentially an attempt at alliance between a disenfranchised part of the elite with a disenfranchised social class, with the goal of overthrowing the established order and installing a new elite.
"The intellectual resistance to the delusional overreach of the virtual class arises precisely within a renegade subset of the virtual class - highly educated and Very Online intellectuals."
Interesting, and yes. Hard to work out how all of these relationships fit together, and to see exactly where they come from.
"...the virtuals have no capacity to empathize with the perspective of the physicals; it doesn't even occur to them to try."
Look at my lawn sign, you Nazi -- "Hate Has No Home Here!" In this house we believe in kindness! NOW GO BACK TO YOUR TRAILER PARK YOU NAZI PIECE OF SHIT!
It's really amazing to watch. The more signaling about kindness and compassion, the nastier the piece of work who lives behind all those lawn signs. I live right in the middle of this, and wow.
Spent the week in the San Bernardino mountains last week. The amount of virtue-signaling yard signs was more than I expected to see. Had that odd moment of realizing that these people were essentially outing themselves as the most intolerant of the intolerant. Oh, the irony.
"The more signaling about kindness and compassion, the nastier the piece of work who lives behind all those lawn signs. I live right in the middle of this, and wow."
The reverse is also true, in my experience. The people most likely to signal a tough exterior that celebrates toxic masculinity, 'intolerant' traditional virtues, and to enjoy a good racist joke, are also the ones most likely to treat other humans with actual compassion. It's the old thing where white libs talk down to minorities, while white cons speak to them the same way they speak to everyone else; similarly, Haidt's research showing that libs have precisely zero insight into the conservative minds, while right-wingers understand lib psychology perfectly well.
I moved last year from NYC to a beef and hog ranch. Husband switched jobs from cybersecurity to truck driving. We were fleeing covid tyranny but had planned the change years earlier. The intolerable climate of public health simply gave us the push.
This article hits at the heart of our country's ideological divide. And there's a lot more to say.
i do all my own yard work with the exception of hardscaping & using chain saw... for which i hire muscle bound men and am eternally grateful for their help💕🐱💕
postscript... i appreciate all men, actually, including those who are not as physically talented... as long as you use your God-given gifts, everyone has them, for the positive, good.
Growing up there was a very small number of neighbors in our largely middle class suburb that had a housekeeper come in maybe once a week and gardeners. I asked my parents, who both worked outside the home, about it once.
They stated in no uncertain terms that "you shouldn't own more than you can care for. " Dad was frustrated as over the years car manufacturers made it harder and harder to repair your own.
We are being actively herded into the DoorDash class as aggressively as possible. It's the natural evolution of market capitalism- a rentier model is the most profitable thing you can do- predictable revenue and a captive market.
It's hard to know how to dig out of it. We've created large dense populations that can only survive this way, and politicians clearly find this desirable as it creates great dependency on controllable systems.
"It's hard to know how to dig out of it." It's de-skilling and infantilizing. If you sell people their lives as a service, they have to buy their lives from you. It's really insidious.
That's exactly what I mean. Especially as I get older (early 40s), I often ask myself, "what am I capable of actually, realistically getting a job doing if X got taken away from me?"
Honestly, the so-called "automation revolution " is going to hurt the laptop class more than others. A lot fewer of them will be needed once they get the algorithm-powered infrastructure they crave, and no one's going to hire anyone to retrain them with the endless supply of young pliant migrants we're all supposed to be happy about.
I recommend learning, at a minimum, to change the oil and tires and test the battery in your car. You can still do this with the vast majority of modern cats and nearly anyone can learn. You'll find it very empowering and save a little money.
As a farmer. An organic farmer. Even more useful (for not just human health, but earth health) a regenerative farmer. Combined with becoming a Naturopath, specialising in mitochondrial health (kinda freaking important btw) and an active certified yoga teacher (specialising in energy medicine and yin yoga)....I'm going to try to muster every ounce of grey matter and neurological powers to respond eloquently....actually it's more entertaining for all if I just let him answer for me...https://mobile.twitter.com/UnitedW00217110/status/1518678700572639232?s=20
“This isn’t politics, but the whole range of daily choices that turn into politics without much thought about the underlying premises.” Best statement in the piece. Unintended consequences managed (and reframed) to best suit the current power structure. Hence, phony “social justice” advocates who polish the image of 21st century “slave holders” who throw pennies at their servant class.
You have put into words here what I have been feeling for the past couple of years. Most of the people in my family's social circle are laptop class, but I am one of the ones responsible for the movement of tangible goods. It has affected relationships to say the least. Thank you for this.
One August my other half began freaking out and buying in hay, (thats the last month of winter here in New Zealand), we went all spring and summer without rain. He checked with our neighbour, he and his father had journals from 1902 since they farmed the land here - in over a hundred years there had never been a spring drought, I still don't know how he knew.
From across several fields my other half can see something is wrong with a horse or cow. I have researched his 'regenerative | agroecology' approach to farming, but born on the land he will know things, like an instinct, I never see. This is both from a deep knowing of place and being anchored in nature ... To take that away from people is to destroy their very soul, what we see echoed in the sadness of indigenous people generations after such loss.
have come to conclude that EM radiation is damaging flora & fauna and targeted geo-engineering of the weather is occurring.
Weather warfare is destroying our forests, and reducing CO2 doesn’t help. All the crap they’ve sprayed into the atmosphere in their arrogant attempt to limit the sun’s driving of warming has made our soil and the air we breathe toxic. In their insane efforts to manipulate climate, they’ve now come to depopulation and are engineering famine. I believe we are headed to a man-made extinction level event. [By “they” I mean the part of Davos, and the militaries they have co-opted to delivering the toxic brew and the weather warfare systems.]
Thank you for this. There is beauty in us.
I really enjoy the way you pull history into the now -- you couldn't be more right about the workers and sit-around-ers. The Frilled shirts. lol. I was just reading Fanny Trollope from 1830 complaining that Americans spent too much time "working" and not enough time "developing their sense of taste" and then she bemoaned that American children were only educated enough to read, write and do enough math for "bookkeeping." She thought that our country would not survive unless the "leading members of society" spent their time reading Cicero until they were at least 22.
The best of our leaders from those days could run a farm AND read Cicero.
I think the major mistake of the laptop class was the assumption that “we are all in this together”. This was the mantra that justified their authoritarianism. For those of us whose businesses, work, and social lives were shut down two years ago, the laptop class became the enemy. And the laptop class considers us the enemy because they are convinced that we are the reason Covid-19 wasn’t eradicated.
They convinced themselves of this to justify their self righteousness. The relentless, vicious coercion for leaky vaccines and ineffective NPIs are why this dragged on.
As a man with a B.A. in English Literature and Writing, who could have been a "bluecheck" but chose instead to learn how to build a house and grow more food than I can eat, I could assure you Mr Bloomberg, you would die of hypothermia or dehydration before you starved to death, if I set you down on 40 acres and told you to build a farm from your own labor, even if you were 40 years younger.
As for my gray matter I think and analyze circles around the best of your PMC, who might commit mass suicide if the internet went out for more than a week, wailing and gnashing their teeth about the unfairness of it all; and then where would you be without your foundation of marionettes and courtieirs?
Let them eat training. That is what I have heard from the likes of Bloomberg on down to the typical Dem urbanite, about the ongoing 40year decimation of the the working class. Methinks this winter might be a test of who is going to eat what, laying waste to a lot of pretensions.
Oh, man, what I would do with 40 acres... my livestock could be completely self-sustaining between pasture rotation and hay harvesting. That would be like being handed a chest of gold to me.
Oh, how I wish I could afford land. Land and just a few animals. Land with trees, but still room to plant enough for myself. I've dreamed of it since I was a child, but have not had things "go my way."
N.S. Lyons wrote a great piece on this, during the Canadian trucker thing. He called them “physicals” and “virtuals,” I believe.
Since then, I see it everywhere. It explains why the “stay home, stay safe,” mantra was so insidiously out of touch with reality. One of the worst offenders I knew was a lady who preached incessantly about our duty to stay home and keep our kids home, “I KNOW, I know, even if it’s hard, but it’s your duty to our fellow man!” She typed these things from her now-$1M home. While occasionally escaping (responsibly, of course) to her family’s second home in a warmer climate.
I have a sister-in-law who I’ve always thought was nice, but I’d never get into an intellectual sparring match with her. And maybe I felt a little bit superior over that. But this year, she decided she needed another bathroom in her home. So she built one. Learned how it all worked and BUILT ONE. Come the apocalypse, she’s gonna be ok. No one will need my extensive knowledge of the players in the War of the Roses then. 😆
Thanks for mentioning that N.S. Lyons essay -- I should have linked to it here, because it's about exactly this, and it's great.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
Brilliant reference to Gone with the Wind. Literature is likely littered with this dichotomy, as well, and I’ve never given it much thought. Definitely going to snag your Court Martial book.
Amazon says the court-martial book is #1,237,471 on the book marketplace this morning, so you'll be joining a very exclusive club.
Ha ha! Well I’m always looking for readable military history, and don’t put much stock in Amazon recommendations. So maybe that works out in its favor.
This ends badly for those who don't know how to take care of themselves - which is just about everybody here in the USA! Bloomberg is an idiot along with all the people who don't know about gardening naturally. Its not easy, it requires a magnitude of more thoughtful interactions than anything any high tech worker has to deal with.
This author is coming closer to being on my list of paid writers. Too many choices so I am allowing for time to winnow out the best.
Excellent theme, top article.
This is excellent Chris. Your retelling is a pleasure. If I understand you, the tension is almost an age old class divide. In my own circles this seems to work fairly well. Probably like most, I don't have many friends with a drastically different social status to my own. I am a teacher in Australia which puts me around about middle class and almost all my friends are blind, happy sheep. In contrast, I was brought up by a mechanic, son of a share farmer... FREEDOM!!!!!!
I think that a healthy society has friendships, or at least comity, across lines of social status. It disturbs me a great deal that we mostly don't.
Yep. People that do "real" work are too far below the "laptop" class to be bothered with.
This is the consequence of the miseducation of our "educated classes."
Civilization has always had a "laptop class" of some size, even if you have to substitute papyrus and clay tablets for glass screens deeper back in history. Modern industry now allows this class to be far larger than it ever was in the historic past, which creates problems. But miseducation makes this class poisonous, and is the real problem.
There is a certain virtue in driving a forklift all day. But there's also utility in sitting at a desk using a computer to optimize warehouse layout so the driver knows which pallets to move where to make the most of his time. Or in designing a website to take orders so there is reason to move product around to begin with. I won't hazard a guess with numbers, but some fraction of the "laptop class" does work that is directly useful in that way. Others (diversity consultants?) are foppish wastes of space who poison the minds of children.
A well educated member of the laptop class will do all he can to be sure that his "symbol manipulation" work is truly useful in the real world. The salary market was a good signal, but distorted these days with political mandates to spend on things that no businessman thinks will lead to profit or productivity.
But that is not all. Such a man will regard, as critical to his education, training and familiarity with practical skills. Shop class - long derided and now virtually extinct, especially in college-prep high school curricula - was an old marker of this. Someone who actually sat at the knee of a master gardener for a year (and actually paid attention) would never say something as boneheaded as that Bloomberg quote.
A personal sense of the knowledge and skill required to perform any of a host of "real world" jobs would go a long way to bridging the gap. Much better use of everyone's time than more diversity training and indulging troubled schoolchildren with abstruse gender theory nonsense.
This problem is not unique to our country and our moment, but we do have a pretty bad version of this problem affecting us right now and our theory of what makes for a good education is actively making things worse.
But the fork-lift driver could organise things? He isn't allowed to.
This is a very real divide, and the lack of intelligibility between the laptop class living in their virtual hyperreality and the truck class living by their labor in the world of atoms is certainly a major contributing factor to the political rift.
I'm in the Zoom class myself, but my distaste for that class is almost certainly a function of my upbringing - my father's family were rural working class rather than the suburban managerial class from which the majority of my colleagues were spawned. The last two years have made it repeatedly clear to me that the virtuals have no capacity to empathize with the perspective of the physicals; it doesn't even occur to them to try.
The cultural divide itself is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the political cold war. It's the demand from one side that the other order its lifeways according to first side's demand that turns divide into conflict. In the case of the Civil War, it was the North demanding the end of slavery (which the aristocrats knew full well would end their lifestyle); in the modern era, it's "you will own nothing".
There's also an intriguing contradiction implied in this analysis, which you note obliquely yourself. The intellectual resistance to the delusional overreach of the virtual class arises precisely within a renegade subset of the virtual class - highly educated and Very Online intellectuals. We're the ones who originated 'soy boy' as a slur. At a structural level I suspect this is essentially an attempt at alliance between a disenfranchised part of the elite with a disenfranchised social class, with the goal of overthrowing the established order and installing a new elite.
"The intellectual resistance to the delusional overreach of the virtual class arises precisely within a renegade subset of the virtual class - highly educated and Very Online intellectuals."
Interesting, and yes. Hard to work out how all of these relationships fit together, and to see exactly where they come from.
"...the virtuals have no capacity to empathize with the perspective of the physicals; it doesn't even occur to them to try."
Look at my lawn sign, you Nazi -- "Hate Has No Home Here!" In this house we believe in kindness! NOW GO BACK TO YOUR TRAILER PARK YOU NAZI PIECE OF SHIT!
It's really amazing to watch. The more signaling about kindness and compassion, the nastier the piece of work who lives behind all those lawn signs. I live right in the middle of this, and wow.
Spent the week in the San Bernardino mountains last week. The amount of virtue-signaling yard signs was more than I expected to see. Had that odd moment of realizing that these people were essentially outing themselves as the most intolerant of the intolerant. Oh, the irony.
Rainbow flags and In This House signs are the Confederate flags of the 21st century.
YES.
"The more signaling about kindness and compassion, the nastier the piece of work who lives behind all those lawn signs. I live right in the middle of this, and wow."
The reverse is also true, in my experience. The people most likely to signal a tough exterior that celebrates toxic masculinity, 'intolerant' traditional virtues, and to enjoy a good racist joke, are also the ones most likely to treat other humans with actual compassion. It's the old thing where white libs talk down to minorities, while white cons speak to them the same way they speak to everyone else; similarly, Haidt's research showing that libs have precisely zero insight into the conservative minds, while right-wingers understand lib psychology perfectly well.
I moved last year from NYC to a beef and hog ranch. Husband switched jobs from cybersecurity to truck driving. We were fleeing covid tyranny but had planned the change years earlier. The intolerable climate of public health simply gave us the push.
This article hits at the heart of our country's ideological divide. And there's a lot more to say.
You just get better and better, Chris! Thank you. This was really some exceptional insight.
Thanks!
i do all my own yard work with the exception of hardscaping & using chain saw... for which i hire muscle bound men and am eternally grateful for their help💕🐱💕
postscript... i appreciate all men, actually, including those who are not as physically talented... as long as you use your God-given gifts, everyone has them, for the positive, good.
Growing up there was a very small number of neighbors in our largely middle class suburb that had a housekeeper come in maybe once a week and gardeners. I asked my parents, who both worked outside the home, about it once.
They stated in no uncertain terms that "you shouldn't own more than you can care for. " Dad was frustrated as over the years car manufacturers made it harder and harder to repair your own.
We are being actively herded into the DoorDash class as aggressively as possible. It's the natural evolution of market capitalism- a rentier model is the most profitable thing you can do- predictable revenue and a captive market.
It's hard to know how to dig out of it. We've created large dense populations that can only survive this way, and politicians clearly find this desirable as it creates great dependency on controllable systems.
"It's hard to know how to dig out of it." It's de-skilling and infantilizing. If you sell people their lives as a service, they have to buy their lives from you. It's really insidious.
That's exactly what I mean. Especially as I get older (early 40s), I often ask myself, "what am I capable of actually, realistically getting a job doing if X got taken away from me?"
Honestly, the so-called "automation revolution " is going to hurt the laptop class more than others. A lot fewer of them will be needed once they get the algorithm-powered infrastructure they crave, and no one's going to hire anyone to retrain them with the endless supply of young pliant migrants we're all supposed to be happy about.
totally agree... like to do things myself... would love to be able to fix my own car.🐱🙏
I recommend learning, at a minimum, to change the oil and tires and test the battery in your car. You can still do this with the vast majority of modern cats and nearly anyone can learn. You'll find it very empowering and save a little money.
do know how to do oil & battery... never changed tire though 🐱
Heck, that's even easier than those other two. If you've got a tire iron, learn it today!
meow!
👏👏👏👏👏👏
As a farmer. An organic farmer. Even more useful (for not just human health, but earth health) a regenerative farmer. Combined with becoming a Naturopath, specialising in mitochondrial health (kinda freaking important btw) and an active certified yoga teacher (specialising in energy medicine and yin yoga)....I'm going to try to muster every ounce of grey matter and neurological powers to respond eloquently....actually it's more entertaining for all if I just let him answer for me...https://mobile.twitter.com/UnitedW00217110/status/1518678700572639232?s=20
LOL at that link. Good times.
Beautiful. Exactly how I feel.
Lol
“This isn’t politics, but the whole range of daily choices that turn into politics without much thought about the underlying premises.” Best statement in the piece. Unintended consequences managed (and reframed) to best suit the current power structure. Hence, phony “social justice” advocates who polish the image of 21st century “slave holders” who throw pennies at their servant class.
Douglas Adams' A and C arks...getting rid of the B arks and then all dying seems to be a close analogy.