Where this was said
The New Deal: Big Tech Must Forge a Social Contract with Humanity
At 10:20 · chapter starts 8:30
Jones pivots to a direct address of the tech community. The original New Deal was a contract between government and the people — forged because that was where power lived. But power has moved. The future is no longer written in laws in Washington D.C.; it is written in code in Silicon Valley [1] — Van Jones "Power has migrated from Washington lawmaking to Silicon Valley code-writing, and there is no social contract governing that shift. Jones ca…" 09:58 . And there is, as yet, no new deal to govern that shift. Jones is blunt about the failure of tech's dominant narrative: no one believes the promise that AI abundance will automatically benefit everyone. He uses a simple but devastating analogy — wheeling a barrow of diamonds and gold into a room and dumping it all on one side. The room technically becomes richer. But the people on the other side don't feel richer. They feel left out, ashamed, and increasingly dangerous.
Jones warns that AI-driven wealth concentration risks not just mass unemployment but mass humiliation, which is historically the most dangerous social condition.
Job losses are bad, but humiliation is worse. When AI concentrates wealth on one side of the room and leaves everyone else watching, the shame and humiliation that follow are more dangerous than the poverty itself — a lesson Jones learned in the toughest prisons on earth.
Power has migrated from Washington lawmaking to Silicon Valley code-writing, and there is no social contract governing that shift. Jones calls for a new deal between big tech and humanity — and says nobody believes the 'abundance will trickle down' line anymore.
Jones argues the locus of societal power has shifted from Washington D.C. lawmaking to Silicon Valley code-writing, demanding a new social contract.
Dump a wheelbarrow of gold on one side of the room and the other side doesn't feel richer — they feel poorer and ashamed. Tech companies think they're scaling abundance; the people left out experience it as scaling scarcity.
