Intro
Welcome to The Cameron Journal Newsletter. Each week, Cameron Lee Cowan wraps up the headlines with commentary, helping you navigate today’s media narratives, how they are affecting our Culture, Lifestyle, and Society.
The World is Hard, This is Not
If you’re new here, my name is Cameron Lee Cowan M.A. MFA, and I’m the Creative Director here at The Cameron Journal. You can learn more about me on the about page. I do research and commentary on politics, culture, and the world around us. Each week I send out the latest headlines, the latest videos from The Cameron Journal and commentary about the week’s events.
Remember, The World is Hard, This is Not.
Update from Cameron (we moved to Substack!)
You’ll notice that the newsletter looks a little different this week. Last week I took off from the newsletter because I was very unhappy with how WordPress was presenting the newsletter and the complete lack of data coming out of Jetpack. So, I decided to move everything over to Substack, which will be our new home that sends out the messages that put the newsletter in your inbox. If you are a Cameron Journal+ member, you’ll be automatically a premium member on Substack. If you’re reading this at CameronJournal.com, thank you for reading and if you want to sign up for this newsletter, you can continue to sign up right on the website, we’ll take care of moving you over!
Anyway, the time change threw me for a loop, and I’ve been feeling a bit off this week. I decided not to do the Newshour. I really reclaimed the time and just took a break, but today I have a full newsletter for you as we continue to break through these news narratives!
We’ve got a nice group of topics, and I’ve made up for my absence with a nice long newsletter for you! See you on Monday for the Newshour.
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The Headlines
Don’t forget to join me on Monday for The Cameron Journal Newshour to catch on everything happening in the world!
Layoffs, GPUs, and AI
Aakash Gupta on X has made an insight that no one is talking about, but I think deserves to be talked about a great deal: companies are to layoff humans to buy more compute for AI. Here’s what he says:
“The layoff wave tells two stories, not one.
Tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are cutting to fund GPU purchases. Their revenues are growing. Their stock prices are climbing. They’re firing people to free up cash for compute. This isn’t cost-cutting during a downturn. It’s a forced reallocation from payroll to datacenter capacity. The math is brutal: every percentage point of headcount reduction funds another batch of H100s…..
… Meanwhile, UPS, Nestlé, Ford, and Target are cutting for the opposite reason. They’ve already deployed AI tools that work. Customer service automation, supply chain optimization, generative design systems. The productivity gains are real and compounding. These companies don’t need to buy massive GPU clusters. They’re renting inference from hyperscalers and cutting headcount because the math finally works.
The timing matters. We’re at 10% enterprise AI adoption, heading toward 50%. History says this phase moves fastest and generates the most wealth. But that wealth is concentrating in compute, not labor. The gap between market cap growth and wage growth has never been wider. This isn’t a recession. It’s a rebalancing. And most workers are on the wrong side of it.”
It appears that we may be already reaching a crisis point re: employment, especially in white-collar professions. The observation that AI is going to do to white-collar work what globalization did for blue-collar work is quite likely quite apt. However, I am still wrestling with what we heard from Ron Hetrick in his recent appearance on the show. With demographics being the way they are, could this not be a problem in 5 years because demographics are not in our favor? He also mentioned that AI isn’t going to work and that technology could be making jobs like roofing far easier, and it just isn’t. What about the cost of human labor for certain things and in certain industries? There will be knock-on effects throughout the economy. Also, combine with the fact that the only part of the economy that is growing is AI, without AI related companies, stock markets would be flat on the year. Growth would also be flat. What can we conclude? AI is eating the economy (sort of).
However, I am the news narrative guy, and so I’m also looking at what is really being said about all this. The fact that companies are laying people off to buy compute (assuming that is the case) confirms our worst fears about AI, and the fact that no one is saying that out loud is interesting. The reaction would be stark and there would be backlash, and so many companies are hiding behind various excuses, including advancements in AI. But I think there’s two narratives at play as well. One narrative is about AI and I think that is more real than we want to admit, despite pronouncements from Ron Hetrick, but the other is that the economy is stalling due to tariffs and the rising cost of living that has left most people economic adrift. Home foreclosures are up, car repos are up, and credit card debt is rising and defaulting. The consumer is tapped and the top 10% account for 50% of consumer spending. That means the other 90% aren’t spending much money on non-essentials. And that was before the government shutdown.
The AI narrative is possibly covering up a bubble and a slowing economy that simple needs fewer humans than it did before. Meanwhile, we still aren’t solving the real problems in our world. However, it appears that if we need to build new power plants and such, we may need to figure out how to re-purpose all the humans we just put out of work. I don’t know if a data analyst can pour concrete, but we may soon find out.
Blue Waves and Off-Off Year Elections
Democrats are buoyed this week with stunning electoral victories nationwide. However, I’m not hopeful. A handful of races (especially Virginia governor) does not a blue wave in 2026 make, and it certainly won’t do much to halt the Trump administration in the mean time. I think much of this is a lot of hype. Democrats are desperate for any shred of good news these days, and California passing prop 50 to redistrict without a commission and winning state level races throughout the country is about the best news Democrats have had a couple years.
The march of the Trump administration continues, although right now, it is poorly funded with the government shutdown stretching into November. People inside the party have demanded that Democrats “do something” about the Trump administration and when Chuck Schumer got the tiniest bit of leverage, he used it and hasn’t backed down yet without a list of demands. The list is long but it involves reversing many of the cuts the Trump administration pushed through Congress in the initial budget and also attempting to save pandemic-era ACA healthcare subsidies.
Narratively, this is an interesting week for Democrats. On the one hand, there is all this good news from Virginia, New Jersey, and California, but on the other hand, the shutdown is being firmly blamed on them. However, the anger about the shutdown did not stop voters from decisively choosing democrats.
The narrative that this is a “rejection of Trump” is a bit far-fetched, but the Left media does like to do that. The Right media will continue to bang on about the shutdown and how New York City has fallen to socialism by electing a democratic socialist in Zohran Mamdani.
Is It All Just Entitlement
As you all know, my new book, America’s Lost Generation is out now, and so I’ve been active on social media talking about the ongoing internet conversation about Millennials, Gen Z, economics and why the world has gone so wrong. Indeed, I’ve spent most of my career writing about what has gone wrong with the world around us and guiding us through these news narratives. However, I want to drill down on one specific type of statement in this debate, and that involves sacrifice and entitlement.
Millennials have been called many things, but whiny and entitled always lead the pack. They are grave accusations. This tweet I think outlines why the “entitlement attitude” seems so insufferable. Indeed, the explanation is right in the text: “It’s not the toast and coffee. It’s the entitlement attitude, the unwillingness to sacrifice.”
That part is important. Let’s break it down and say it another way: it’s not about what you buying or even the fact that you’re buying it, it’s that you won’t stop buying it in order to get other things. In other words, it’s the real message behind the much memed millennial avocado toast argument. The edict is simple: if you want to buy a house or have savings you have to sacrifice, sometimes a lot, for those things to happen. There’s another underlying message too: accept a much lower standard of living.
As we know from my book and elsewhere, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Someone making a modest salary won’t have a down payment to purchase a $500,000 house anytime soon. Not only because of existing costs of living, but because it will be decades before that down payment can be saved. A young person making $50,000 a year after taxes, might be willing to sacrifice to buy that house, but they will be well into their 40s before they can achieve it and if they decide to have children or do anything else in the mean-time, the whole schedule gets thrown off and that down payment becomes even more distant. All the while, they are trying to make more money, take a new job, go back to school and that’s all time and money that isn’t flowing into savings. But do you know what would make that much easier? Higher wages and a lower cost of living.
That’s where the resentment of older generations quickly kicks in. When young people find out how easy it was to get a job or how cheap things were relative to income, it seems like 2 generations of people have been sold a bad deal of goods. Indeed, that is why populism has become so prevalent on both the Left and the Right. In the past couple weeks, Marjorie Taylor Greene (yes, her) has been on The View and other shows asking when the GOP is going to fix healthcare, cost of living and deliver for the American people. She’s 10 minutes away from campaigning with AOC and Bernie at her current rate of progress. I’ve agreed more with her in the last few weeks than when she burst onto the scene with Lauren Boebert.
The reality today for anyone under 40 is a stark one. The job market is seizing up, education guarantees nothing, there’s a globalized workforce that is actively competing with them, and the cost of everything is higher than it was 7 years ago while wages for all but the very top and the very bottom have stagnated or gone down due to inflation. Young people are living at home, older Millennials have roommates and are figuring it out. And that brings me back to sacrifices. It is rather insulting to say that young people just aren’t sacrificing enough. Many of the people I write about (including myself) have made plenty of sacrifices. No one that I interviewed was waiting for the world to do the dirty work for them. They took what jobs they could, moved and uprooted themselves. They saved and went without. But that’s the point of the tweet that started this section. It has nothing to do with the material sacrifices: it’s all about the narrative. The narrative is easy: significantly lower your standard of living, and you might make something, someday, if you’re lucky. And the narrative is always more powerful than the reality.
America’s Lost Generation is Out Now! Get Your Copy!
I’m excited to announce that America’s Lost Generation is out now! It’s available everywhere books are sold or through The Cameron Journal directly. You’ve been hearing me talk about this book for a long time, and you’ve read the Millennials collection on The Cameron Journal. Looking to Japan for guidance (and a cautionary tale), I told the story of Millennials through their voices.
Articles of Interest
Keep up with The Cameron Journal Podcast and The Living Joke
The Interview:
The Cameron Journal Newshour:
There was no newshour this week due to technical issues.
The Living Joke:
The Halloween Show:
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