France Is on Fire, and It's Going to Help Le Pen (Why Change Always Feels Hopeless)

TL;DR: Peaceful protest gets you nothing. Violent protest backfires. And when AI starts taking jobs, I’m afraid we’re going to do what we always do. Blame ourselves.

France is on fire right now.

On October 17 about half a million people marched across France. It started with students angry about overcrowded classrooms and teaching jobs nobody’s filling, and it grew into anger about the cost of living and a government that’s cutting another €61 billion out of the budget. Most of it was peaceful.

Then it wasn’t. Masked groups torched cars and attacked public buildings in Paris, Marseille, Nice, Bordeaux, Lille and Strasbourg. In Limoges the 19th-century City Hall burned so badly the roof caved in. The justice minister says around 3,000 shops were looted. Police arrested at least 1,800 people. The interior minister admitted the police “lost control” and offered to resign.

And I’ll tell you exactly who wins from this. Marine Le Pen.

France has a presidential election next spring. Le Pen was already leading. (A court cleared her to run back in July, though with an ankle monitor attached, so there’s still some drama there. If it’s not her it’s her guy Jordan Bardella, who was polling around 35% before any of this happened.) She went right on X and blamed the rioters for spoiling the protest and tied it all to Mélenchon on the left. That’s the whole game. Every burning car is a campaign ad for law and order.

I’ve seen this movie before.

People forget how violent America was in the early 1970s. Bryan Burrough wrote a whole book about it called Days of Rage. The FBI counted more than 2,500 bombings in an 18 month stretch in 1971 and 1972. One retired FBI agent said, “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.”

Nineteen hundred bombings in one year. And we forgot.

So what did all that get the radicals? Nixon won 49 states in 1972. We got more conservatism. More police. More law and order. Society hates aggressive protest. It always has.

So think about where that leaves you. A peaceful protest gets you nothing. A violent protest backfires. The only conclusion I can ever come to is that it’s hopeless.

It’s always hopeless.

And it still shocks me that change is this hopeless. And it’s always disheartening to watch people defend the system that’s crushing them and then turn around and blame themselves for their situation.

I see it with homeless people all the time. It’s their fault they’re homeless. They’ll tell you that themselves.

They never bring up the fact that we shipped Akron’s jobs overseas. Akron was the Rubber Capital of the World. In 1964 the rubber industry here employed about 37,000 people. By the 1990s it was down to around 5,000. One economist figured Akron lost 35,000 manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 1990. The whole rubber industry just left the city.

Some banks came in. Some healthcare came in. But for the people who relied on those factory jobs, those jobs were gone. And a certain percentage of them just weren’t able to transition into something else. That’s how you get the income inequality we’ve got now.

Those were the people who couldn’t make the jump into knowledge work. Joe Biden famously told coal miners, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.”

Learn to code.

Well, how’s that going? Coders are probably going to be the first people AI unemploys.

We saw this with manufacturing and we blamed the people. We blamed the people of West Virginia for not educating themselves. For not stepping up. And we’re going to do the exact same thing to knowledge workers who chose a path that’s about to get decimated by AI. There are going to be many, many jobs like that.

If your job is to manipulate things on a computer, you are highly vulnerable.

Now take somebody who’s anti-AI. Their whole plan is that somebody keeps hiring them to work on a computer with no AI involved. Employers are already asking people in interviews if they’re comfortable working in agentic environments. That’s the word. Agentic. Will you work with agents?

There are people who won’t. And they’re going to be the first ones severely affected by what’s coming. By what’s already here.

And they’ll be the ones blaming themselves too. They didn’t work hard enough. They didn’t step up. It was their fault they ended up unemployed, or underemployed, or homeless, or addicted.

It’s always their fault.

The system is this perfect trap of cyclical self-hatred. And the system works. If the system isn’t working for you, it’s because you’re fucking up. I don’t see any way out of it.

I’ve seen people on Reddit say that if AI brings 50% unemployment, society will finally react. Maybe. But what if it’s 10%? What if the unemployment numbers keep looking fine, but it turns out people aren’t working in jobs that pay a livable wage?

My guess is that as long as unemployment stays under 15%, people are going to chalk it up as no big deal. We don’t have a problem. Meanwhile we’ll have masses of people who are underemployed, working jobs where they can’t afford to live.

And 15% unemployment is huge. Right now the official rate is 4.2%. The broader number, the one that counts people stuck in part-time work and people who’ve mostly given up, is 7.6%. And people who stop looking altogether don’t show up in the headline number at all. The real numbers are going to be staggering.

And we’re only going to blame ourselves.

Then when somebody finally throws a brick through a window and says they need better schools, they’re going to get more police. More lockdown. And they’ll get villainized even more.

Just like France.