Extinction Is profitable

The truth is, many of us are tired of being told to wait for progress while we watch our children struggle to secure the very basics their grandparents took for granted. We have been told that Agenda 2030, the global plan for sustainability, known formally as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is the roadmap to a better world, a solution to poverty, inequality, and climate change.

Let’s stop talking in acronyms and start speaking in feeling. The promise of global development often feels like a beautiful, gold-plated cage, and if we, as the resilient children of the Caribbean diaspora, do not look closely at the fine print, we risk becoming the biological batteries that power someone else’s manufactured utopia.

The most devastating impact of this agenda is that it is rapidly making our inherent right to exist dependent on our ability to purchase our survival.

“This is the profitable commodification of survival.”

I am here to tell you that the narrative we are being fed, that global digitalization and rapid automation are just inevitable steps toward modernity, is subtly but surely priming us to accept a brutal reality: one where the value of a human life is minimized, and exclusion is simply a market outcome.

Automation is sweeping across industries, displacing human workers globally. Studies project that between 400 and 800 million people worldwide could be displaced by 2030 as advanced robotics and artificial intelligence take over tasks. For the Caribbean, where economies often rely heavily on services, retail, and manufacturing, this threat is existential.

We are seeing a new kind of social stratification emerge, based on digital compliance and economic utility. As automation accelerates under the banner of innovation promoted by Agenda 2030, the benefits tend to accrue to highly skilled workers and capital owners. Meanwhile, our hardworking people in low- and middle-income sectors face job losses and wage suppression, exacerbating the inequality we are striving to overcome.

This system is designed to reduce the “human surplus.” We must ask ourselves: when tourism is automated and our service sector is outsourced to AI, what is left for the community? We risk becoming islands of beautiful resorts and highly managed data hubs, surrounded by populations deemed uneconomical.

The second pillar of this systemic restructuring is the aggressive privatization of essential systems. We are talking about the things that keep us alive: food production, water, healthcare, and energy.

When access to these fundamental resources is shifted from public institutions to profit-driven corporations, accountability plummets, and costs skyrocket. For families struggling in Kingston, Port-of-Spain, or Bridgetown, this shift means that basic survival is now dependent on purchasing power.

This is the dark heart of the “market-driven selection” framework. Economic forces, rather than social or ethical considerations, determine who survives or thrives.

For our communities, this resonates with deep, historical pain. We know what it means for external forces to control the resources of our homeland. Privatization, dressed up as efficiency and part of the modern developmental model, makes real food and essential services a luxury. The outcome, as some theorists warn, can resemble “evolutionary suicide,” or “selection-driven self-extinction,” where optimization for profit leads to the collapse of life-sustaining systems. In short, the system profits even if the people don’t survive.

This erosion of public infrastructure, combined with rising costs, is the predictable outcome of global policies that prioritize economic growth and elite control under the guise of solving inequality. The structural causes of poverty (like colonial legacies and global patterns of exploitation) are masked by the focus on quantifiable goals and market-driven solutions.

To accept such fundamental shifts, the public must be psychologically prepared. This is where the brilliant, unsettling work of strategic storytelling comes in, the very tool that primes us to accept our marginalization.

We are flooded with consumer culture and distractions, making us less aware of these structural changes. Movies and media subtly shape public perception, normalizing technocratic governance and the inevitability of automation. Films depicting dystopian futures—where only the wealthy, or technologically adept survive, subtly reinforce the idea that stratification is unavoidable.

Think about the narratives we consume: The Matrix literalizes being farmed for value while distracted by a manufactured world. The Hunger Games ritualizes the culling of youth as entertainment and social control. They Live directly metaphors ideological priming with hidden commands like “OBEY” and “CONSUME” visible behind the consumer distractions.

This cultural conditioning, often funded or influenced by corporate interests, makes it easier for society to accept policies that entrench inequality, because we have already been told, through entertainment, that this is just “the future.” We are conditioned to see absurd, dehumanizing administration as inevitable modernity.

As a people accustomed to resisting colonial and systemic pressure, our strength lies in our ability to see past the façade. The most critical information being kept hidden is that this stratification is structural, a predictable outcome, not a societal accident.

We must recognize that digitalization initiatives and public-private partnerships, while sounding beneficial, often serve to further entrench inequality by making access to essential services dependent on wealth, or digital compliance, rather than universal rights.

We must reject the notion that individual competition is the only path forward and resurrect the strength of collective rights and public institutions.

“For the Caribbean community, resisting this commodification means demanding transparency and accountability in every development initiative.”

For the Caribbean community, resisting this commodification means demanding transparency and accountability in every development initiative. It means refusing to let essential resources like water, land, and healthcare become profit centers for external entities. It means prioritizing human value over market efficiency.

We need to turn off the manufactured distractions and look at the hidden commands on the wall: Prioritize profit. Accept exclusion. Normalize inequality.

It is time we stop reading the script they wrote for us. We must activate our community-first lens, harness our emotional intelligence, and reclaim the narrative, ensuring that survival remains a universal right, not a market-driven selection process.

Our resilience demands it.