“Welcome to the Useless Class”: Ewan Morrison in conversation with Irvine Welsh

Ewan Morrison is one of my favourite writers from these islands. Since his debut novel Swung, he’s always charted his own course and remained relentlessly ahead of the curve.

His new novel For Emma, is a perfect illustration of this. It’s a troubling but utterly human dive headfirst into the big issues of our age; the corporate techno state ruled by oligarchs and fuelled by big capital, the power of algorithmic suggestion, the advance of artificial intelligence, the compromising of the human spirit and the decline of freedom and equality, the impotence of opposition, the end of the state as a redistributive force and enhancement of it as a punitive one with its increasingly brutal war on its citizenry, culminating in the inevitability and futility of terrorism.

So yes, a ton of dystopia to consider.

Most writers shy away from all or at least most of this stuff. He takes them all on head-first, AND in the form of a page turning thriller.

I suppose it was time to fight through my writerly jealousy and ask him how he did this…

IW: Can you identify the genesis of the novel?

EM: There’s this genre that I love, you could call it, “the underdog revenge” genre. Or maybe “the little nobody taking revenge against the system that crushed them.” It’s maybe something we love in Scotland as we tend to see ourselves as underdogs. So, within this there’s all these classics like Dog Day Afternoon, Fight Club, Taxi Driver, Joker as well, and this crosses-over into classic outsider/anti-hero stories like Catcher in the Rye, Crime and Punishment, Trainspotting and American Psycho. So, I’ve been reading these for years, it’s pretty much the only genre I can relate to, being a bit of an outsider myself, and for a long time I wanted to write about a character who loses everything and decides: “Screw it all, I’m going to die for a cause because I’ve got nothing left to live for”. So, this is Josh, in the novel, father of a girl who dies in a Silicon Valley AI brain chip experiment and his act of revenge is homicide/suicide against the CEO of the Biotech company who was responsible and who covered it up with the help from government agencies. “I’ll take the bastard with me when I go,” Josh says. It’s his final act of love for Emma.

The genesis – there was definitely a much more personal element to this too and it came from the Covid pandemic. My wife has a serious heart condition, so we went pretty hard on the lockdown protocols and lived with a lot of fear and medical precautions during the pandemic, basically secreting ourselves away to a little cottage in the Scottish wilderness. From pretty early on, I worked out that we were not being told the truth about the origins and nature of the virus, and that it was being hidden for political reasons by our governments, and I got thinking, what would I do if this virus were to kill my wife?

How would I deal with the fact that governments and bio tech industries were working hand in hand to suppress the truth and to cover their asses? I worked out that I would probably exhaust myself on appeals to government agencies and law courts to get justice, but that ultimately, I would have to accept defeat, silencing, as a nobody whose little life is just part of the cover-up. I would most likely go insane. From obsessing about that, as I watched my wife walking round with a mask on all the time, I thought, I would do something, I would have to, I would have to strike back against the powers that be. Even if it would kill me. How would I do that, who would I attack, a bio tech company? The government? It's like a flea attacking a mammoth. Pathetic, but a mind could get stuck in obsessing about that, just like Raskolnikov obsesses about the murder he feels he must commit in Crime and Punishment.

So, I thought the best (and safest) way to work this out was to make this character who has nothing left to lose and to see how far he can go and how he copes. And what loss would hurt me the most – my daughter, so I wrote about a little nobody of a man who loses his daughter to a secret experiment that is covered up by forces so much more vast than he can even grasp. And I started to care for him.

The book is also, I think, me finally coming to terms with the bi-annual depressions that I’ve been suffering from since the age of 17, and a deep dive into what depression, addiction and helplessness feel like and how they can motivate us to desperate acts, especially when we feel that our love and our lives have been stolen from us. The depressions, as you know, have seen me on the point of giving up writing more than once over the last decade, and if it hadn’t been for the support of your good self and few others, this book and the two before would never have come into existence.

So, the genesis was really the coming together of those personal things with the political. Yes, it’s all about the little nobody taking revenge against the system that’s crushed them and maybe that’s the story I’ve been trying to tell for a hell of a long time, and one that we maybe share in common.

IW: The themes are the rapacious, accelerationist nature of technology and our lack of control and agency in this process against the power of the corporate state, what people will do for love and revenge when utterly desperate. Is human progress inherently dystopian now?

EM: We do feel an increasing lack of control and agency, for sure, against the techno-state and its growth. It seems to want to control all our behaviours and reduce us to data that can be monitored and managed. This has been bothering me for a while and it came to a head when the Nostradamus-styled futurist, Yuval Noah Harari declared that a great mass of humans will lose their jobs as they’re replaced by AI and automation and they will become a “useless class” who will have to be kept “pacified” with distractions like virtual reality games, entertainment, and drugs.

Government administered heroin, or molly, or SOMA as Huxley said in Brave New World. The prediction seemed pretty far-fetched only a year ago, but now feels more like a description of our unfolding reality as AI has begun relentlessly culling jobs. Many of us have friends or folks we know who have suffered job loss or drastic loss of income due to AI. In the arts, I hear all these reports from folk who work in concept design, graphic arts and journalism, as employers have replaced them with cheap AI. Welcome to the Useless Class.

Some are throwing in the towel, like one graphic artist friend said, “I just can’t compete with these AIs that were built on scraping our art. I’m done. I’m out.” I know a journalist who is looking for a new career after having seen how well the new DeepSeek AI programme can write copy. A friend on X contacts me every week to ask if “it is over”- by this he means the hope of ever having a career as a scriptwriter. He’s twenty-three and feels lost and suicidal on-and-off with every news story that comes in about AIs developing the ability to write fiction. How can he get started if AI demonetises the entire sector and steals all the content?

It's really fucking offensive to be told by people like Harari who get nicely paid to lecture at the World Economic Forum that you now belong to the ‘Useless Class.’ I think I’ve been in and out of the useless class most of my life, but for folks to realise they are no longer valuable or needed for the first time, replaced by machines - that’s going to hit very hard.

So, I think for many of us the future does seem dystopian, and it seems this is all being done just so the billionaire tech overlords can have even more control and power, and worse than that it does feel like technology is a runaway force, that ultimately this feedback loop of technological advance and state power is beyond the control of any one person or group. As the technologists love to say, progress can’t be stopped. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

The problem I should say, is not even that I believe in the coming of this vast AGI superintelligence that will have exponentially more intelligence and power than humans, like the transhumanists dream of. No, that’s just snake-oil hype talk and a techno investors wet dream. What worries me is that even with the limited narrow AI that we have today, this dumb AI that talks to you like a customer services bot, the technologists already have all the tools required to create very oppressive surveillance societies, with our health, money, mobility, relationships and language turned into data that is processed by surveillance algorithms that dish out micro-punishments and rewards. You see this already in the experimental Social Credit System in China and their system of 700 million surveillance cameras which they (it’s no joke) have named SKYNET. We’re not far from this “total care society” that reduces us all to spreadsheet data and there’s the powerlessness and lack of agency that comes from that. Your life micromanaged by narrow AI systems that don’t understand your need for questions and human contact and the unknown. Your language planned, your sexual partner pre-assessed, your food and travel limited. And on top of that you have the forced unemployment caused by AI.

That sense of being useless leads to learned helplessness and depression. I’ve been in that hole more times than I like to think about and what Harari warns about seems accurate to me – what will they do with a populace who no longer have meaningful work to do, when millions of jobs are replaced by advanced non-conscious algorithms that can perform faster and cheaper than humans. What will they do to stop the “useless class” bursting out into revolt, or acts or random violence. Yes, we will be kept pacified with games and drugs. Terrifying to think that governments might actually be considering universal drug pacification programmes. Renton in Trainspotting walks away from drugs for a reason, actually Renton walks away from the whole society. This is definitely an impulse that I and many others feel. We don’t want to be the pacified useless class. How can such a future not make us furious?

IW: How do we build a positive future for humanity when the main driving forces of change; capital, technology and the nation state are now all co-opted (and are assimilating) fewer people and simultaneously narrowing the emotional bandwidth of those people? Are we destined to become technoserfs in those great fiefdoms?

EM: I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do in the face of this techno-dystopia just because the dangers of admitting defeat are huge, they take a toll on us, rob us of all energy. I spent a few years in bed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I don’t have any time left for surrender. I suppose, part of the impetus behind writing the book was to see what little freedoms our anti-tech rebel, Josh, could discover along the way, even though he is destined to blow himself and maybe his enemy to pieces. What freedoms emerge unexpectedly when we accept the worst? It’s a pretty drastic but maybe liberating way to look at things, more empowering, if fatally, than accepting that we are fated to become technoserfs. And in his case, being forced to accept that his daughter’s death was just collateral damage to be swept under the carpet, in the ongoing unstoppable march of technology.

And why should we let the technologist be the only ones who get to talk optimistically about their positive future for humanity. Won’t it be amazing they say, when we are all implanted with brain chips and can contact each other telepathically. A kind of happy version of the Borg in Star Trek.

This happy utopian vision of the technologists and technocrats is quite terrifying and tone deaf. Even ‘thought leaders’ like Klaus Schwab of the WEF, in his talk of the amazing emancipation promised by full automation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution can’t help but use the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the coming flood of technology and our impending inundation. Don’t people drown in tsunamis? Crushed to death? Don’t they lose their homes and families and savings and livelihoods? The technocrats keep using these mass-death metaphors, with a smile. These are the same techno-thought-leaders of the WEF, who predict, in their Future of Jobs report that 85 million jobs may be displaced by AI and automation by the end of 2025.

So why not take them at their word - a technological tsunami is coming to destroy the useless class, so what do we do, those of us who know it’s coming? If you possess a tsunami/mass destruction early detection warning system, then, unlike everyone else, you’d be wise to get prepared, you will have ‘grab bags’ ready for the emergency, you will know where the high ground is and what the fastest possible evacuation route is to your second survival location, you will have stashes of medical and food supplies, alternative ways to contact people beyond the zone of damage, you will, yes, most of all be prepared. You will not go paddling or swimming or sailing in the waters of the new technology while hoping for the best.

This is what I’ve been working out – when you know the tech-tsunami is coming to destroy your way of life, you would be wise to use the time before it hits to create back-up plans, locating types of work that will not be impacted, you may have to start a second career, you may have to downsize, retrain, to find an area of work that will not be taken over by AI. Why not assume the worst and take Harari and Schwab’s warning at face value. Don’t just build a lifeboat or run, get together with other folk who are ‘in the same boat’ and build an arc.

Doing nothing and hoping for the best isn’t an option, there is only one other path I can see and that is that you join the ranks of those who are doing the opposite of the accelerationists, by trying to decelerate and reign in AI. Those calling for regulations and new laws or reinforcements of existing laws to protect copyright from theft by AI companies. Those calling for eco-regulations to stop the rapid growth of data centres with their colossal and wasteful use of power. As a decelerationist you can campaign for your governments and your unions to compensate people for the damaging effects of runaway AI venture capital growth. You can get together with other anti-AI activists and spread counter information about the promise of AI and try to discourage investment in it, you can try to burst the AI bubble and push for an AI economy crash - that might hold AI back for a few years.

But at the same you should know that you are just slowing down the tsunami, building small walls and dams and barricades together and it might not work, because AI has now entered an international economic race to the bottom, and when that happens every country is fearful of missing out and losing opportunity, so they deregulate faster than the others. It becomes an accelerating storm.

This is not an either-or, we can do both – prepare for surviving the tsunami by building up a secondary livelihood beyond the reach of AI, while at the same time working to try to hold the tsunami back.

This is my attempt at being optimistic and it's maybe not a positive view for humanity as whole, because this is a bit more like a Noah’s arc situation, maybe it’s just a positive view for the survivors who plan ahead.

IW: Are we replacing ourselves with AI because on a cosmic, subconscious level we inherently know that we’ve reached our limitations as human beings?

EM: Have we reached our limitations as human beings? Jesus. Cut to the heart of it, man! OK, I think this is all to do with a huge frustration that Western societies have been having with human beings and human nature since the French and American revolutions and the ‘death of God’.

So, the idea with these historic liberations was we have to shake off the ancient belief that human beings are broken, flawed things, ‘fallen’ according to the Christian worldview. And instead, we have to replace this old belief in our flawed and limited human nature, cowering in all our failures beneath the all-powerful God, with the radical new idea that there is no God and no human nature. The result being that we are then free to build any society that we can imagine, and since the human being really has no fixed human nature, we can make it a blank slate and create new perfectible human beings.

This was the big inspirational utopian project that exploded out of the French and American revolutions – man is born free but is everywhere in chains, and so humans must shake off all their shackles. And this ran on a hatred of human limitations, a refusal of any kind of timeless flaw in humans, because if there is such a thing as an unfixable flaw then it’s going to drag us back down into all the vices that kept us at each other’s throats for millennia and that spoiled all our plans for a perfect society – all the lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. So, we were sick of human nature way back with the enlightenment and the 20th century was really a huge attempt to shake off all that came before and create Utopias on earth.

Of course, you and I lived through the tail end of those great projects of emancipation, we saw the dream of communism collapse with the USSR in the ’90s and also we maybe try to make ourselves forget that fascism had been a utopian attempt to create a new mankind and a new society too. So, yes, by about the ’90s, when you were unleashing Trainspotting and many other artists were showing the dark, and sometimes hilariously flawed side of human nature, there was a big sense that utopia was done. A stupid plan that ended up killing a hundred million. It’s finished, and so we just had to accept our limitations as human beings, maybe even laugh at ourselves. A lot of our culture at that time was about accepting that humans just can’t be fixed. We’re a broken, lustful, addicted, vengeful species. Deal with it. A lot of great books and movies came out of that period of human scepticism in the ’90s.

Well, that didn’t wash with Silicon Valley, and it was founded in the ’70s and ’80s with the help of many refugees from the failed ’60s Californian Utopia. You even see people like John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead announce that the internet will be the new Utopia, with his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. And he proclaims: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

So, cyberspace and AI were developed as a way to, as you say, shake off all human limitations once again, due to a kind of disgust with human nature and this long chain of failure in human history. A renewed Utopianism, which now, with people like Musk and Bezos, aims to fuse humans with machines through invasive brain chip technology so we can become part of a vast superintelligence, and to take humans to the stars, or with people like Kurzweil, the messianic transhumanist guru, to make humans immortal and to achieve a digital deity through AI – a SuperGod.

You’re right, there is this fear and almost loathing of human limitations behind all of this, and the problem with the transhumanists and their desire to fuse us with machines, is that there is a disgust with existing humans that comes with it.

There is a transhumanist philosopher, David Pearce (I’ve argued with him on X), who has published papers on his plans to re-engineer human beings and all other animals through bio-tech, so that they will no longer be able to suffer or to inflict suffering on others. It’s an insane plan, utterly Utopian, which would result in 8.7 million species on earth becoming bio-engineered to be uber-vegan; all those animals lined up every day for their cruelty-free food pills. But it would also result in so much DNA alteration that all the original species would come to an end.

In the name of replacing humans with a Post-Human 2.0 upgraded model that can’t feel pain or cause harm, Pearce’s plan, like that of Kurzweil would result in the mass genocide of Humans 1.0. So yes, the transhumanists are disgusted by human frailty, human immorality, human cruelty and lust and suffering and probably even human humour too, because humour is all about accepting our pathetic limitations – and so the transhumanists are essentially just against humans.

It is alarming just how many people in Silicon Valley hold these quasi-religious belief in a coming tech utopia in which transhumans and then posthumans populate the universe. Even more alarming to see how much the transhumanists are fusing with the American government.

Maybe like yourself, I came of age witnessing the failures of 20th century utopianism and took that as a warning, so I don’t get a sense that 21st century tech utopianism will do anything but lead to a new bigger, faster, more intrusive, all inclusive and more controlling totalitarianism.

IW: Humans do beautiful, soul-nourishing things like love, art, sport… but our technology seems to focus on turning those activities into performance outcomes. Are we creating a post culture society, making people into robots so our convergence with technology will be easier?

EM: I think that’s spot on. As far back as I can recall we’ve heard the scientists announcing that “humans are biological machines”, “consciousness is computation”, recently we had Harari claiming that “humans are algorithms”, then you’ve got Kurzweil, saying the quiet part out loud and predicting that humans will merge with machines and become superhuman by 2045, in what he calls ‘the singularity”. And you’re right, what they’re doing is lowering the bar of what it means to be human, so they can claim that this project they’ve invested in – to create human level artificial intelligence or AGI – can be more easily reached. Part of this is just hype they generate to secure billions in venture capital finance – look they say, computers are becoming super smart and lo and behold humans are just bio-computers so the gap to achieving synthesis is tiny, so invest billions in our project and you can share in the profits of making the evolutionary step that fuses humans and machines.

One day, the tech pushers and transhumanists, say we will map the entire human brain, and prove there is no subconscious, no soul, nothing but algorithms, and then ‘visionaries’ like Kurzweil add, once we can map and store entire human brains within our computer systems, and personalities are saved within circuits, humankind will achieve immortality. On the one hand this is just snake oil sales-pitch, it’s like street sellers selling you elixirs for longevity or bakers selling you bread that they claim will bring you virility, but on the other hand this reduction of all that is human to calculable systems, opens the doorway wide to the return of this horrific idea of 100% mapped and planned human behaviour, created by a fusion of big tech with the big state.

We saw this before in the 20th century. This reduction of humans to data on spreadsheets was the bedrock of totalitarianism. There’s this image that’s hard to get out of the head, of the numbers tattooed on the arms of all the prisoners in the Nazi death camps - they were part of a spread sheet punch-card system designed by IBM, with the tech also supplied and maintained by IBM.

‘People are machines.’ To live or die is a ‘performance outcome’.

When people are reduced to numbers in systems, we’re in the land of dehumanisation. For all their talk of saving humanity and immortality this is where the transhumanists are leading us, and at a hell of a speed. And what can we do about it? How can we fight back against the runaway acceleration of technology? How do we stop ourselves from becoming just algorithms controlled by the algorithm writers?

There’s not really a plan or society opt-out on the cards, other than some kind of anti-tech luddism – smash the machines – so I think we will see an increasing number of irrational and violent eruptions against the technologists and the techno-state. I have to say, I can feel where that’s coming from and I sympathise. When I was writing the book I did want Josh to be successful in the revenge-killing of the big tech CEO. I was rooting for him and I felt his violence was justified. People tell me that it alarms them too how much they sympathise with a man who is planning a murder. But, at the same time I understand that these kinds of eruptions of anti-tech rage can make things worse.

IW: Terrorism and state control have long been a symbiotic relationship with each other in terms of a feedback loop of atrocity and control. Are both inevitable?

EM: I’ve been thinking about this a lot because the act of Josh, the father in the book, is framed by his enemies as an act of terrorism, and so people ask me ‘are you advocating terrorism?

Your question is better as it's not based on the assumption that if people wanted terrorism to go away it could be made to vanish. You’re right, there is a mutually dependent relationship between the state and terrorism. Like they say, if terrorism didn’t exist then the state would have to invent it to justify citizen surveillance and vast spending on new high tech security programmes. Ask Edward Snowdon. So, yes, terrorism and the surveillance state are inevitably caught together in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

I recall years ago reading this excellent essay by Umberto Eco (the Name of the Rose) and he was talking, as a socialist about how the Brigade Rosso – the Italian red brigades – Marxist Leninist armed terrorist groups in the 70s and 80s - had made things worse because in kidnapping and killing heads of state and industrialists, in the attempt to “strike at the heart of the state” they had ensured that the state dispersed itself, so there would be no longer any one centre to attack. The same was really true of the Baader Mienhoff in Germany and the Weather Underground in the USA. We understand why they arose and can sympathise (in fact my peer group idealised them like they were pop stars back in the ’90s). Both terrorist groups emerged at times when the left was in retreat and the causes of international socialism seemed helpless, so violence seemed to be the only option, but they did usher in through their kidnappings and bombings, even more authoritarian states in Germany and the US. They hadn’t just “exposed the violence of state power” as per their plan, the terrorist groups provided the alibi from the growth of new surveillance technologies and new snooping and arrest laws which made life for everyone in those countries more oppressive.

We like to think that the surveillance by the state is remote from us, and only affects people involved in subversion, but it’s surprising just how close some of us everyday people are to government spying operations and even to terrorist suspects. There was an exposé in January 2025 (in Bella Caledonia) about the history that M15 in the UK had or has, of spying on Scottish radicals and Scottish writers - there was some speculation that you, Irvine, were on one of those surveillance lists along with Scottish writers as benign as the great poet Noman McCaig.

I know for a fact that my father, who was a Scottish poet back in the ’70s-’80s, had ‘a file’. We found this out after the Blair government came to power and a friend of a friend of the family who worked in the new govt had to go through security clearance, and he told us that my father’s paranoid anxiety that we used to laugh at – this belief that his phone had been tapped by the British secret services and was in fact true. A huge file on my father, apparently, lots of transcribed phone calls, probably about really non-terrorist things like the World Cup and the weather.

It was told to us in a joking manner, because my father couldn’t have hurt a fly and preferred a drink and rant to any kind of action, but he had made one huge mistake in his past and that was what got him on a Govt. terrorist watch-list. He had written a patriotic poem in support of Major Boothby, a Scottish nationalist military and paramilitary leader, the founder of the “Tartan Army”, and as the story goes the poem was found among the possessions of Boothby in a raid after his arrest.

I don’t know if my father was aware that the Tartan Army was involved in hoax bomb threats and throwing bricks through windows, or that in 1975 it conducted bombings at electricity pylons and oil pipelines in the UK and even attempted a bank robbery, but my father’s poem made him ‘a terrorist’. And in the ’80s the Scottish National Liberation Army took over where Boothby left off and things accelerated and they conducted 27 letter bomb attacks – against Margaret Thatcher and Diana, the princess of Wales among other figures of the UK establishment, so they were a genuine threat. They also sent a functioning letter bomb to Dounreay Nuclear Power station which was only twenty miles from where I grew up and so no doubt there was reason to keep my father under surveillance for even longer.

I’ve been wanting to write about average people, total nobodies who get pulled into terrorism, for a long time. And the question plagues me, what do they achieve by going over the edge into actual planned attacks. So often the venting of rage leads to an even bigger clampdown.

I think about Ted Kaczynski – the Unabomber – and his vague and random, but lethal attacks on people associated with technology in the USA. A terrorist, yes, unhinged, yes, but it is a strange and alarming fact that some of the pioneers in Big Tech and AI respect the anti-tech manifesto Ted K wrote. You have Elon Musk saying of the Unabomber that “he might not have been wrong” about the rise of tech creating too many problems for humanity. You have transhumanist guru Ray Kurzweil, quoting the Unabomber manifesto from the section where it says that our dependence on technology will increase over decades without us realising it until we are entirely controlled by AI systems. Kurzweil is saying this is true and unstoppable and a good thing. And, here’s the co-dependence of the terrorist and his enemies again. They’re assisting each other in pushing society into acceleration and the technologists are all accelerationists.

This is really the nightmare in the novel, that it’s possible that what the technologists need to grow their power and influence and to harness investment from the big state is a violent attack against them. And so, what does the desperate person who has no other choice but to fight back against the techno-system do? That’s the question Josh grapples with in the book and that I want to leave us with. We can see the high-tech, total-control surveillance state growing around us, so what the hell are we going to do to stop it? I think it’s something we have to answer together and not be tempted by solitary desperate acts.

Ewan Morrison’s new novel For Emma is published by Leamington Books on 25th March, 2025.

Irvine Welsh’s new novel Men in Love is published by Jonathan Cape on 3rd July, 2025.

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