A quiet revolt is brewing among white-collar, educated young people. Not against capitalism in the traditional sense, but against the tech elite accelerating AI disruption with no plan for the people it will displace. This new ‘white-collar precariat’ class is up for grabs, and this is the right’s opportunity to seize it.

The liberal elite, degree-holding cohort who once looked down on manual labour now watch their tradie mates rake it in while they fret about securing ‘AI proof’ work.

Where fears of automation once fuelled right-wing populism among the working class, AI has the potential to ignite a backlash of its own from a traditionally well-off middle class.

You’ve never heard of a tradie fretting about losing their job to ChatGPT, but I hear it constantly from young working Australians, university students and grads.

What we’re witnessing is a rewriting of the social compact that once promised job security in exchange for years of education and debt.

Remember the days when the elites told us ‘Learn to code’? Well, today computer science majors face the worst employment prospects of all graduates. A generation that played by the rules is now understandably angry. They’re taking their frustration out on ‘capitalism’, but the villains aren’t capitalists in the classical sense. They’re a small class of techno-feudalists, the tech bros, relentlessly pursuing the AI slopification of everything with little regard for the middle class they’re hollowing out.

Sam Altman openly gloats that AI will eliminate entire job categories. Elon Musk suggests it may eliminate human labour altogether. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, has warned that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear within five years.

The emerging new Australian right has a choice: either embrace these newly dislocated voters more likely to wear AirPods than hard hats, or cede them to the left, as appears to be happening in New York. The left will try to claim this territory, but they’re compromised. Big Tech and progressives are bedfellows who move fast and break things – cheerleading progress for its own sake even as it devours their own base.

In a world where many young people feel there’s nothing worth conserving, the dignity of work may become one of the few authentically conservative values left. Traditional capitalism creates value through the creation and exchange of goods and services, but Big Tech doesn’t create anything; it just extracts rents.

Some populists will be tempted to respond to AI-driven lay-offs by targeting migration. If you can’t shield citizens from technological disruption, at least you can shield them from competing workers, and it’s easier to blame foreigners than technological progress.

But while there are legitimate arguments for reducing mass migration, housing affordability and cultural integration chief among them, Australia’s predominantly unskilled migration intake does little to slow AI adoption in ‘skilled’ white-collar industries. If anything, reducing immigration makes labour more expensive and only incentivises AI replacement.

But there’s an even more immediate reason for the right to turn their attention to the AI revolution: the bread and butter of politics  – power bills.

In Virginia’s ‘data-centre alley’, the world’s largest cluster of data facilities, wholesale electricity prices have jumped as much as 267 per cent in the last five years.

In Ireland, Europe’s tech haven, power prices have risen nearly 50 per cent in four years and are now the highest in the world. Data centres there consume more electricity than the households of Ireland combined.

And unlike Australia, these are nations that embrace nuclear power.

Here at home, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts that data centres will consume more than a tenth of national electricity demand by 2050, a sixfold increase from today. OpenAI, just one of the multitude of AI companies, expects its operations to require as much electricity as all of India by 2033, while producing twice the carbon emissions of ExxonMobil.

Yet politicians remain obsessed with ribbon-cutting ceremonies at new data centres, eager to boast they are ‘winning the AI arms race’.

But what does winning actually mean? Mass unemployment, soaring surveillance, and unprecedented corporate power concentrated in the hands of a billionaire tech-broligarchy. And, of course, another round of fantastical promises that data centres will ‘create jobs’, just as we were told renewables would create more jobs than they destroyed. But governments are so desperate for productivity gains that they’re willing to sell out their constituents, and their social licence, to get them. Despite the accelerating disruption, few governments have enacted meaningful AI regulation.

Populists should propose something simple: tax the companies driving the disruption and use the revenue to subsidise household electricity bills, unemployment benefits and retraining costs. The message is simple. Your job is disappearing, your electricity bill is climbing, and your privacy is being monetised, all to enrich a cabal of Silicon Valley billionaires.

This is the clearest political villain populists could ask for.

We saw this in the coal-mining towns that became Trump country, abandoned by climate elites who shrugged at their declining industries. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. A 2024 study in the US found that Americans in occupations most exposed to AI risk have shifted from backing Democrats to favouring Republicans.

Culturally conservative but economically insecure – these voters are natural populist territory.

Today, white-collar workers –  HR professionals, coders, journalists, lawyers, actors, creatives –  are watching their jobs evaporate while their power bills rise to fuel the very machines replacing them.

Already in the US, Democratic victories have come from senators accusing the Trump administration of cosying up to Big Tech while failing to protect constituents from power prices caused by data centres.

Here in Australia, Big Tech workers are also beginning to unionise in a Frankenstein moment, as they realise the AI they brought to life is beginning to turn on them.

So, with Australian conservatives having largely settled their internal battles over net zero emissions, perhaps the next frontier is ‘Net Zero AI’. We can’t eliminate carbon or AI entirely from our economy but, just as renewables need constraints, AI can’t expand recklessly without government managing the consequences.

When AI becomes less about making your job easier and more about replacing the meaning of work itself, and driving your power bills higher, a chasm will emerge between the tech bros and the public, and it’s a new voter base waiting to be won.

The only question is which side gets there first.