My last few articles are about how fear is driving so many aspects of business and the world we live in. This is an argument over how AI doomerism is impacting our world, our business, our governments and how doomerism is wrong and preventing some of the best of what is to come.

On the night of October 17, 2026, a Palestinian flag went up over the Monument à la République in central Paris. The French flag it replaced came down with a crowd cheering below. A car was already burning nearby. By midday the French authorities had counted around 140 protests across the country and more than 32,000 people in the streets. Hundreds were arrested. The town hall in Marseille was breached. The tourist office in Lyon was set on fire. The protests had started weeks earlier over teacher shortages and crumbling school buildings. Roughly 200 schools had been blockaded by students demanding adequate staffing.

By the night of the 17th, the schools were not what anyone was talking about. They were talking about Palestine.

Something is off with the frame. Start with the most obvious thing. There is no active war in Gaza. The Trump-era twenty-point peace framework was signed. The ceasefire is holding, shakily, into October 2026. If the point of a protest tonight is to stop a war, there are other wars to stop. The one in Ukraine has not stopped. The one in Sudan has displaced more than ten million people and is still accelerating. Neither got a flag on the Monument à la République.

France itself is one of the few Western countries that formally called for a Palestinian state. France has among the most generous social programs in the developed world. If you had walked those streets looking for French flags you would have found very few of them, and no demand that the Fifth Republic do anything about French schools at the scale the night was now operating at. The thing that started the march was the thing nobody still in the street was there to talk about. Something else had taken over.

That something is this piece.

If you are leading anything right now, this is for you. For the board member watching her 24-year-old associate quietly lose interest in the career ladder. For the CEO whose engineering Slack has gone sideways about something nobody is paying the company to care about. For the investor whose consumer-sentiment thesis has decoupled from consumer-spending. The street in Paris and the comment thread inside your company are the same story. The mental model you need to read both correctly is what this piece is for. Get it wrong and you will keep misreading your market, your clients, and your people. Get it right and the operating environment every leader is now in starts to make sense.

A note on the title. Free Paristein is a play on Free Palestine and a nod to Frankenstein. The thing standing in that Paris street is a cause stitched together from borrowed parts, taught to walk on its own, and no longer resembling any of the parts that went into it.

Paris is not an isolated case. The same week, students clashed with police in Brussels and Liège. Italian student marches in Turin and Milan turned into looting on Via Torino, with hundreds detained. Diesel shortages, panic buying, and farmer blockades spread across southern Italy. Belgium’s own interior minister called the violence “organised.”2 Spain has a general strike called for November and a snap election on the twenty-ninth. The United States has a lighter version of the same mood, visible in this weeks election cycle whose dominant genre is grievance. Any one of these can be dismissed as local. All of them together rhyme with a very old pattern.

Mark Twain’s line is that history does not repeat, it rhymes. The rhyme of 2026 is loud enough to hear.

The Industrial Revolution did to agrarian life what AI is now doing to knowledge work. Mills and factories pulled in a generation that had spent five hundred years tied to the land. The generation stuck in the middle lost both the identity of the old world and the belonging of the new one. Luddites smashed looms. Revolutions tore through Europe in 1848. The British Chartists demanded political voice for workers the economy had just conjured into existence.

Then came the Spanish flu, the First World War, the Dust Bowl, the Second World War. The flu took 20 million to 50 million lives. The trenches killed an entire generation of young European men and left the survivors with a nothing-matters nihilism we called the Lost Generation. The Dust Bowl erased the farms of the Great Plains in a decade and sent families walking west with everything they owned in a Model T. The Second World War ended one global order and started another, and the men who came home were different men.

The World Wars themselves were Frankenstein-like anger coming together into revolutions across the globe. The themes are the ones showing up today in miniature. Anti-globalism dressed up as anti-imperialism. Racism of every strain, from the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust to the religious wars that followed decolonization. Competing economic ideologies going to war with each other. Each side believed the fight in front of it was the whole fight, and each side was, in part, fighting about everything else that had broken underneath.

In each of these, the economy left people in the dust, sometimes literally. Mass movements grew out of exactly this raw material. Communism rose across Russia and Eastern Europe. Socialism took hold across much of Western Europe, as a softer version of the same answer. The Cold War that followed was a forty-year contest between two answers to the same question, and the side that eventually won over China, Russia, and Vietnam, for good reason, was the one that produced a middle class. Some of these movements promised a future. Some promised to burn one. All of them were built on people who had been promised one future, got a different one, and could not find a seat in the new arrangement.

What those years also eventually produced was a mission. Rebuilding. Infrastructure. The Marshall Plan, which pulled Western Europe back from rubble on American money and American political will. The G.I. Bill. The space program. A sense that the next generation would have more than this one. The mission came late, after enormous damage, and it was always imperfect. It was still a mission, and it worked.

We are standing in the before-the-mission part of our own version.

A generation told they do not matter

The young people in those streets did not come out of nowhere. The last 20 years did real damage.

A generation was told that a four-year degree was the only onramp to a middle-class life. They borrowed accordingly. Universities responded by raising tuition to a sticker price that embarrasses the word tuition. The number of degree-holders doubled. The economic premium on the degree did not. By the time these students graduated, they were carrying a mortgage without a house, against a wage that was somehow smaller than the one their parents had earned without the paper.

Then the mood turned on them. Every headline for a decade told them AI would take their job. Every panel at every conference told them........

© Fortune