Highly interesting, but arguably neo-Marxist, essay in support of the truckers. Where Marx had the proletarians and the bourgeoisie, Lyons has "the reals" and "the virtuals." The problem, however, is that Lyons' analysis is very, very convincing. People who work with tools and machines in reality have a very different outlook from those who work with information. Historically, managers and workers both dealt with reality---and so never thought as differently as Marx claimed they did. But the new virtual economy seems to have created a world in which a significant percentage of the population believes the world has infinite plasticity. Men can become women; women can become men; and everyone can make babies (I think the WEF has a little more work to do on that one, but it is coming. I will not be participating. Men carrying babies is weird.)
Henry Ford had more in common with his workers than Mark Zuckerberg. (It is interesting here that the one billionaire who seems most sympathetic to us, Elon Musk, makes cars and rockets, things that have to work in the real world. Bezos seems to fall in the middle as he has to move goods in the real world but does most of his work in the virtual, and Zuckerberg and Gates are total lunatics who work entirely in the computerized world.)
Nationalism was something society needed to counter class: By undermining nationalism with a globalist agenda, the "virtuals" seem to have actually produced the class dynamics that Marx had hoped for. The "bourgeoisie" of the world united at Davos before the workers ever did. (And yes, the virtuals also live in the city. They are, in fact, the bourgeoisie.)
Of course, this does seem to cause issues for Objectivism which had always held that the titans of industry and those who work with their minds had the strongest orientation towards reason and reality. Computers seem to have changed that---with many of the "most productive" being people who live in fantasy worlds computers provide them.
Hopefully a renewed nationalism can provide us with a way to bridge the growing class-cognitive divide. The truckers still believe A is A, a man is a man, and a woman is a woman---that there is no such thing as a permanent emergency. So, I have to choose the side that favors reason and reality; I choose the truckers.
Here is the link to his essay:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back?utm_source=url