What Was Quietly Sold Off Before It Came
Gen X grew up inside systems that worked.
They weren’t glamorous.
They weren’t innovative in the modern sense.
But they were stable, legible, and predictable.
- The lights came on.
- The water ran.
- Phones worked.
- Schools taught basic competence.
Public institutions were boring — and boring is what infrastructure is supposed to be.
Then, almost without debate, everything changed.
Not because the old systems had failed — but because they were declared inefficient.
The World Before the Flip
The 1970s and early 1980s are usually remembered as an era of economic turmoil:
inflation, oil shocks, labor conflict, stagnation.
What’s rarely acknowledged is what didn’t collapse.
Despite financial stress:
- power grids stayed up
- water systems functioned
- phone networks worked
- public education persisted
- transportation systems held together
These systems absorbed stress because they were designed to.
They were regulated utilities, not speculative instruments.
They prioritized continuity over growth.
They were engineered to survive downturns.
They were dull.
And they were resilient.
The Privatization Fetish
The response to economic stress wasn’t repair.
It was ideology.
Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, a new doctrine took hold:
- anything boring must be inefficient
- anything regulated must be broken
- anything public must be ripe for extraction
Privatization wasn’t presented as a radical experiment.
It was sold as common sense.
Utilities were “modernized.”
Education was “reformed.”
Public goods were “unlocked.”
Markets were “liberated.”
What actually happened was simpler.
Stable systems were converted into revenue streams.
From Infrastructure to Casino
Privatization didn’t improve infrastructure.
It financialized it.
- Electricity became a commodity instead of a service
- Water became an asset instead of a guarantee
- Telecommunications became rent extraction
- Education became credential debt
- Housing became a speculative instrument
The design priorities inverted.
Instead of:
- resilience
- redundancy
- long-term planning
- universal access
We optimized for:
- quarterly returns
- cost-cutting
- complexity
- opacity
The result wasn’t efficiency.
It was fragility.
Chaos Wasn’t an Accident
By the 1990s and 2000s, the consequences were visible everywhere:
- rolling blackouts
- crumbling infrastructure
- exploding education costs
- regulatory capture
- environmental degradation
- institutional distrust
Systems that once failed slowly and predictably now fail suddenly and catastrophically.
This wasn’t because society became more complex.
It’s because the systems were no longer designed to hold.
The Winners
Privatization did exactly what it was designed to do.
It made a very small number of people extraordinarily wealthy.
On the order of a few thousand individuals globally — owners of financial instruments, privatized utilities, asset managers, and infrastructure-arbitrage firms — captured value that once circulated as public stability.
This wasn’t innovation.
It was enclosure.
Gen X: The Witness Generation
As children, Gen X watched the collapse of:
- calling a phone without fees
- attending affordable public universities
- trusting basic institutions
- seeing infrastructure as neutral background rather than constant crisis
They didn’t inherit the old system.
They watched it be dismantled.
They were told it was progress.
The Singularity Arrives on Broken Ground
Now comes AI.
Not as a sudden rupture — but as the logical endpoint of a forty-year trajectory.
AI is infrastructure-scale technology built atop:
- public research
- shared knowledge
- collective cultural output
And once again, the reflex is familiar:
privatize first, justify later.
The danger isn’t AI itself.
The danger is repeating the same design mistake — treating foundational systems as luxury goods.
What Was Lost
We lost:
- predictability
- shared baselines
- institutional trust
- functional competence
- boring reliability
In exchange, we gained:
- volatility
- financialization
- permanent crisis management
- decorative innovation
- extreme wealth concentration
This isn’t nostalgia.
It’s systems analysis.
The Choice We’re Repeating
AI can either:
- restore capability as a public good
or
- accelerate enclosure beyond anything seen before
Gen X knows how this ends if we choose wrong.
They’ve already lived through the first half.
The lesson of the last forty years isn’t that public systems failed.
It’s that selling stability for growth destroys both.
A Theme Worth Repeating
This isn’t a call to return to the past.
It’s a warning from people who watched a functioning world be dismantled for ideological purity and financial gain.
The singularity isn’t arriving in a stable society.
It’s arriving in the wreckage of one.
And this time, the stakes are higher.
