From Cheap Intelligence: What Freedom Looks Like When Labor Is Free — a short book on why freedom on paper isn't freedom in practice, and what cheap AI does to the gap.
Cheap Intelligence: What Freedom Looks Like When Labor Is Free, by Spencer Shulem (Context Limit, 2026). ~15,000 words, 16 chapters. A long-form essay on political economy, AI, and freedom.
American freedom is mostly theoretical. The law says you can leave your job — but your healthcare is tied to it. It says you can switch platforms — but your data is trapped inside the one you want to leave. It says you can vote them out — but the money in politics means it mostly won't matter. The gap between rights on paper and rights you can actually use is the biggest political problem nobody is working on. Cheap AI is about to blow it open in one direction or the other.
This book is about which direction.
What the book is about
The premise is simple to state and hard to sit with: for most people, the freedoms we celebrate are freedoms they can't afford to use. You have the right to quit. You do not have the practical ability to quit, because quitting costs you insulin. The right exists. The choice doesn't.
The book makes the case that we are running toward a fork. Labor is getting cheap — not scarce, cheap — and when the cost of getting things done falls toward zero, one of two things happens. Either the value of that cheapness spreads out and buys ordinary people real options, or it pools at the top and the rights on paper stay on paper forever. The technology decides nothing here. The incentives decide everything.
To reason about it, the book introduces one tool and one framework.
Liberty Realism is one question applied to everything: does this expand or constrain people's practical ability to make and act on choices?
Not the abstract right. The usable one. Run any policy, product, or platform through that question and the answers stop lining up with parties. Some land left, some land right, some land nowhere in particular. That's the point — it's a test, not a team.
Collective Capitalism is the other half: what markets look like when incentives are structured around that question instead of against it. It is not a rejection of capitalism. It is capitalism asked to answer for whether the choices it creates are ones people can actually take. Cheap intelligence is the moment that becomes possible to build — and the moment it becomes possible to lose.
Two names come up a lot when people talk about this future, and the book takes both seriously. When someone like Elon Musk says AI will make work optional, most people hear I lose my job and the top 1% owns everything. A few hear freedom. The book argues the fear is mostly a failure of imagination — and then does the work of imagining the alternative properly, trade-offs included.
Why I wrote it
I watched people react to that "work becomes optional" line, and the split bothered me. Not because the fear was stupid — it's rational — but because it treated the current arrangement as physics. It isn't.
The 40-hour week is about 85 years old. It is a policy, not a law of nature. Other rich capitalist countries have loosened the link between working and surviving — universal healthcare, stronger safety nets, shorter hours — and none of them collapsed. They just made different trades. So the question "what happens when AI takes jobs" is not actually a technology question. It's a question about what we decide survival should be attached to. We've changed that attachment before. We can change it again.
I didn't want to write a manifesto. I wanted to write down the alternative clearly enough that you could disagree with the specifics instead of the vibe. That's the whole book: here is a fork, here is a way to think about it, here are the costs of each path. Then you decide.
Where it sits
This is a small book in a room full of bigger ones. It helps to say plainly where it fits and where it doesn't.
| Book | What it shares | Read it instead if |
|---|---|---|
| Abundance — Klein & Thompson | The same shape: why systems that promise something fail to deliver it. | You want that argument aimed at housing, energy, and building — not labor and freedom. |
| Utopia for Realists — Bregman | Closest in register and ambition — the case that a saner arrangement is within reach. | You want the broad "why not" version rather than one narrow question pressed hard. |
| Power and Progress — Acemoglu & Johnson | The core claim: technology's gains go where power sends them, not where the tech "wants." | You want scholarship. This is heavier, better sourced, and far more rigorous. Read it for that. |
| Bullshit Jobs — Graeber | The cultural half of the same argument — what work does to us when survival is chained to it. | You want the diagnosis of the present rather than a picture of the alternative. |
| Player Piano — Vonnegut | The whole anxiety, on the nose. The novel got here first, in 1952. | You'd rather feel the future than argue about it. |
If you want the definitive academic treatment of automation and power, this is not it, and I'll point you at Acemoglu and Johnson myself. What this book offers is compression — one question, one framework, one fork, in the time it takes to fly somewhere.
Who this isn't for
Two kinds of reader will be disappointed, and I'd rather say so now.
- If you want peer-reviewed economics or a policy monograph, this isn't that. It's ~15,000 words — closer to a long essay than a treatise, and it says so on the first page. It argues; it does not prove. The footnotes are not the point.
- If you want a partisan book, you'll be annoyed by all of it. It is deliberately neither centrist-mushy nor tribal. Run something through Liberty Realism and the answer lands left, right, or neither depending on the question — and I let it land wherever it lands. If you need every answer to confirm your side, this will feel like betrayal about every third page.
What it is for: anyone who feels the gap between the freedoms they're told they have and the ones they can actually use, and wants a clear way to think about it before cheap intelligence makes the gap permanent.
Freedom in America is already mostly theoretical. The law says you can leave your job, but your healthcare is tied to it. The law says you can switch platforms, but your data is trapped.
That's the first line. The rest of the book is the argument for why it doesn't have to stay that way — and what it would cost to change.
If the gap between rights on paper and rights you can actually use is the kind of thing that keeps you up, subscribe to the Context Limit newsletter — that's where the next idea about freedom, work, and how people actually think shows up first.