It started, as most catastrophic ideas do, in our editorial Slack channel at 2pm on a Tuesday. Someone — and I won't name names, but her pronouns are she/her and she once described her career as 'midwifing narratives into the world' — posted a link to a paper about AI-assisted central economic planning. Within forty minutes, we had a shared Google Doc, a bottle of natural wine opened over Zoom, and a collective conviction that we were about to demonstrate, scientifically, that a post-capitalist society would absolutely still require someone to run a wellness newsletter.
Reader, it would not.
The Setup (We Were Very Confident)
The premise was elegant in its simplicity. Each member of our seven-person team would submit their full professional history, skills inventory, and stated passions to an AI prompted to act as the Central Labor Allocation Bureau of a hypothetical communist state. The AI's only directive was to maximize collective output and assign each citizen to the role where their contribution to societal survival would be greatest.
We were giddy. Marcus, our culture editor, typed up his credentials with the energy of a man who had never once considered that 'deconstructing superhero cinema through a post-colonial lens' might not appear in a harvest quota spreadsheet. Priya submitted her background in 'trauma-informed life coaching and somatic wellness facilitation' with the serene confidence of someone who assumed the revolution would need its feelings processed. I personally included, and I'm not proud of this, a bullet point that read: 'experienced in curating digital spaces that foster authentic community engagement.'
Photo: Priya, via southindianactress.in
Photo: Marcus, via c8.alamy.com
The AI took approximately four seconds to respond.
The Results (Delivered Without Mercy)
Marcus: Stone fruit harvesting, Sector 7.
Priya: Root vegetable processing, collective farm rotation.
Jamie, our SEO strategist: Irrigation infrastructure maintenance. (The AI added a note that his 'demonstrated ability to follow systematic processes' made him suitable for 'repetitive essential tasks.' Jamie has not spoken much since.)
Our graphic designer, who submitted a portfolio link and a paragraph about her 'visual language exploring the liminal space between nostalgia and futurity': Apple picking, northern agricultural zone.
Me: Citrus groves. Seasonal. Reassignment pending performance review.
The only partial exception was Dev, who had buried in his résumé a two-year stint working at his uncle's restaurant before pivoting to 'content strategy.' The AI assigned him to collective kitchen operations. He is insufferably smug about this. He would be. He gets a roof.
The Part Where We Argued With a Language Model
We did not accept these results graciously. What followed was forty-five minutes of increasingly desperate re-prompting that I can only describe as the digital equivalent of arguing with a border control officer.
'But surely a planned economy needs people to communicate its values to the public?' we typed. The AI acknowledged that state media would require some personnel and allocated that function to individuals with backgrounds in journalism, broadcasting, or documented writing for publications with verifiable circulation figures. Our website's analytics, which we had been generously describing internally as 'growing,' did not meet the threshold. Citrus groves, it reiterated.
'What about mental health infrastructure? Priya has a certificate.' The AI noted that in a resource-constrained planned economy, mental health provision would be prioritized for workers in critical sectors. Priya would be in a critical sector. She would be the patient, not the practitioner.
Marcus tried submitting his credentials a second time, this time leading with the fact that he had 'strong opinions about organizational systems.' The AI assigned him to warehouse inventory. He briefly cheered up before realizing this meant a warehouse, not a mood board.
What The Algorithm Understood That We Didn't
Here is the uncomfortable truth that settled over our Zoom call like a particularly heavy fog: the AI wasn't being cruel. It was being logical, which in this context felt worse.
A planned economy, whether you find the concept romantic or horrifying, runs on calories produced, infrastructure maintained, goods manufactured, and people kept alive through winter. It is, at its mechanical core, a system for answering the question: what does everyone actually need to survive? And when you strip away the market's somewhat chaotic method of answering that question — where enough people apparently need film criticism and personal branding consultants that a price emerges — you're left with a much starker inventory.
People need food. They need water systems. They need construction and medicine and fuel. They do not, in any immediate survival sense, need someone to write 1,200 words about their situationship using the word 'liminal' four times.
The economy we had each individually trained ourselves for — the one that had rewarded us with LinkedIn endorsements and newsletter subscribers and the occasional speaking slot at a conference — was not a natural landscape that communism would simply reorganize more fairly. It was a specific, peculiar ecosystem that had grown up around surplus and discretionary spending and the strange human luxury of paying for things you don't strictly need. Pull the market out from under it, and most of what we did simply evaporates.
The Grudging Bit At The End
None of us are economists. None of us are farmers, either, which is somewhat the point. We spent an afternoon poking at a thought experiment and came out the other side with fruit-stained metaphorical hands and a somewhat deflated sense of our own indispensability.
The AI didn't teach us that communism is good or bad. It taught us something more uncomfortable: that we had been enthusiastically advocating for an economic system while having essentially no model in our heads for how it actually works. We knew the aesthetics. We knew the vocabulary. We knew which tote bag to carry. We had simply never followed the logic all the way down to the part where someone has to grow the food, and quietly assumed that someone would not be us.
Priya has since enrolled in a weekend permaculture course. She says it's for personal growth. We are choosing to believe her.
Marcus maintains that a truly advanced communist society would recognize the value of cultural workers. He is currently 47,000 words into a Substack series making this argument. The irony has been pointed out to him.
And me? I'm choosing to see the citrus groves as an opportunity. I've already drafted a pitch for a newsletter about mindful harvesting.
The AI has not responded.
Yuki Ostrovsky is a writer for Actual Life Under Communism. Her labor classification remains under review.
Photo: Yuki Ostrovsky, via i0.wp.com