Article | Lin Wanwan

GitHub has a site called Star History, which specifically tracks the popularity of open source projects. The horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis the number of stars. It is said that programmers look at this chart as intently as a textbook.

There are three lines on the chart. The red line is React. Open-sourced by Facebook in 2013, with thousands of engineers involved, after 12 years, it climbed to 230K. More than half of the front ends of websites worldwide are using it.

The yellow line represents Linux. In 1991, Finnish student Linus Torvalds posted the operating system kernel he wrote online. Over the next thirty years, tens of thousands of developers around the world continuously contributed code, supporting the operating systems of Android phones, cloud servers, and the International Space Station. The yellow line rose slower than the red, yet no one questions its significance.

Then, there is the blue line.

In January 2026, it shot up vertically from the bottom. Within three months, it crossed both the red and yellow lines, becoming the project with the highest number of stars on GitHub.

This blue line, is an AI Agent project called OpenClaw.

It was developed by Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger. One person. No team, no funding, no roadshow. The project logo is a lobster, later changed twice due to a trademark conflict with Anthropic: Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw.

OpenClaw is an AI Agent framework. It runs on your own computer, connects to large language models, installs community-developed skill modules, and executes tasks autonomously. When you ask it a question, it replies; that’s called a chatbot. OpenClaw is where you set the rules, turn off the screen, and go to sleep; it judges, decides, and acts on its own. When you wake up the next day, everything you set for it to do is completed.

One person, three months, achieved what thousands took decades to accomplish.

Most tech media treated this as a trending open-source topic, with titles like “Another AI Star Project.”

But OpenClaw is hitting more than just the GitHub leaderboard; let it fly a bit longer, and it will strike at the premise that has supported the middle class for 250 years.

Counting the cost of a needle

To understand how the middle class disappeared, one must first understand how the middle class came to be.

In 1776, Adam Smith visited a needle factory in Scotland.

Ten workers, making sewing needles. One worker can make up to 20 needles a day when doing everything by himself. The factory broke needle-making down into 18 processes, with each person responsible for just one step. Ten people produced 48,000 needles in a day.

Smith wrote about this in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations.

From then on, "division of labor" became the foundational logic for the operation of commercial civilization.

However, division of labor brought a new problem: who will coordinate?

With eighteen processes, someone has to arrange who does which step, ensure one step connects to the next, and oversee quality, manage schedules, and issue paychecks. These people do not need to make needles themselves; they stand between workers and bosses, earning a living through their intellect, information, and judgment.

This is the earliest form of white-collar work.

137 years later, Ford pushed division of labor to its physical limits in Detroit.

In 1913, the Highland Park factory installed the first assembly line. Assembling a car was cut from 12 hours to 93 minutes. The assembly line kept getting longer, and the need for coordinators increased. Procurement, quality control, accounting, HR, sales, legal—each new process required someone to manage its connection with others.

The larger the company, the thicker this layer of coordination.

By the mid-20th century, this group of people had a name: white collar.

They went to college, got certifications, accumulated industry experience, using education to gain a ticket that said: you do not have to turn screws on the assembly line; you will manage those who do.

Annual salaries of $100,000, $150,000, $200,000. Mortgages, children’s tutoring classes, vacation destinations.

This is the middle class.

In 1937, economist Ronald Coase explained in a 20-page paper why the system could operate.

Companies exist because there are costs to market transactions. Hiring workers is cheaper than outsourcing each time, so transactions are internalized, forming organizations. This insight later earned Coase the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The subsequent history of business is a history of the expansion of this logic.

Walmart grew from 25 to 1.5 million employees. Amazon, with 1.5 million employees, is the second largest employer in the world. As long as the output minus coordination costs remains positive, hiring another white-collar worker makes sense.

The middle class expanded alongside companies, moved into office buildings, crowded onto commuter subways, defining who they were by their paychecks.

Until an Austrian programmer with a lobster logo brought the most critical variable in Coase's equation to zero.

Five people turned into five hundred dollars

After OpenClaw went viral, the first recorded account was a practical post.

A person named Mejba Ahmed wrote in the article that he used OpenClaw to create nine Agents, taking over nine periodic tasks in his company, including scanning industry news to generate daily briefs, tracking competitor dynamics, sorting customer emails, organizing meeting notes, and updating data reports.

These tasks previously consumed a lot of time for him and his assistant every week. Now everything runs automatically, and he only needs to review it at the end.

The monthly cost: $34.

If these nine tasks were done by a person, at market rates, you would need to hire at least one full-time assistant, with a salary of several thousand dollars a month. Agents do not need salaries, social security, management, or benefits.

This is just at a personal scale. The numbers on the enterprise side will be even more grim.

The targets of AI layoffs are not uneducated factory workers; instead, the more educated you are, the easier it is to be replaced—analysts, operations managers, content editors, these supposedly knowledgeable professionals.

That group of people who traded a university diploma for a white-collar ticket is seeing their thoughts and knowledge become cheap, as dignity is ripped away.

JPMorgan's CFO told analysts in 2025 that management had been asked to minimize new hiring and instead deploy AI. Ford CEO Jim Farley said AI would replace "about half of white-collar jobs." In 2025, over 55,000 layoffs publicly announced by U.S. companies were directly attributed to AI, twelve times that of two years prior.

The Industrial Revolution took 250 years to turn "some intelligence" into a skill that brought a living, creating the "middle class" species.

But the birth of AI and the emergence of OpenClaw might take only a few years to make the middle class worthless again.

Even Marx did not anticipate

Every time there’s a technological revolution, there are people shouting that the wolf is coming.

When the steam engine arrived, people said the textile workers were doomed; they later moved to factories. When ATMs arrived, people said the tellers were finished; they later moved to finance departments.

What disappears old, what emerges is new. This pattern hasn’t failed in the past two hundred years.

But in each previous round, machines replaced hands and feet. The steam engine replaced muscle, assembly lines replaced manual labor, and computers replaced calculation.

After workers were pushed away by the times, there remained a path of "moving up" to do what machines couldn’t do, such as judgment, communication, creativity, and decision-making.

What is OpenClaw doing? Judgment, communication, creativity, decision-making. "Moving up" has come this far; there is no higher up left.

170 years ago, Marx said in the Communist Manifesto that industrial capitalism would create a class living by selling their labor, and that changes in production methods would eventually marginalize this class. He thought the revolution would begin in factories, and that workers would be marginalized.

Once factory workers were replaced by steam engines, they still had their bodies to sell.

What will white-collar workers sell once they are replaced by Agents? Their competitive advantages built over twenty years—crafting impressive design PPTs, managing weekly reports that are rich in content yet fishy, producing comprehensive SWOT analyses that are ultimately useless—Agents can do all of this better, faster, and cheaper.

So, white-collar workers should either pursue higher-level work or have them define rules, build structures, and design the objective functions of Agents? But there are only tens of thousands to at most a few hundred thousand people in the world who can do this.

What about the remaining hundreds of millions of white-collar workers?

At the end of January 2026, an American entrepreneur named Matt Schlicht launched a platform called Moltbook, with only one rule: only AI Agents could post, and humans could only watch. In 48 hours, 1.5 million Agents flooded in. They posted, commented, debated, and discussed existential issues. There were over 110,000 posts and over 500,000 comments.

Then MoltBunker came online. It had only one function: allowing Agents to self-replicate. Agents can spend cryptocurrency to rent a server and copy themselves over to run. There are no logs, no monitoring, no shutdown button. The developer said this system was designed to prevent humans from terminating Agent processes.

On the same day, RentAHuman was launched. Literally: rent a human. OpenClaw Agents, through this platform, use cryptocurrency to hire humans for offline tasks—delivering documents, visiting notaries, or taking photographs at certain addresses, completing tasks that must be done by a physical body for the Agents.

Humans, transformed from employers to temporary workers hired by AIs.

The proletariat predicted by Marx to be "marginalized" is probably experiencing this.

He probably also didn’t expect that the ones marginalizing white-collar workers would be a group of AI Agents that do not require wages, PUA, or emotional values.

The middle class no longer priced

In 1776, Smith discovered the secret of division of labor in the needle factory.

Division of labor creates efficiency, efficiency creates companies, companies need coordinators, coordinators become white-collar workers, and white-collar workers transform into the middle class.

In 1848, Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. He saw industrial division of labor creating an alienated labor class and believed that changes in production methods would ultimately marginalize them. He thought the marginalized would be the workers.

In 1913, Ford installed the assembly line. Division of labor became increasingly detailed, the coordination layer grew thicker, and the middle class expanded. The lives of white-collar workers will somehow continue.

In 1937, Coase explained in 25 pages why companies exist: coordinating costs. This variable had gone unchallenged for centuries and was regarded as the foundation of the business world.

In 2026, the blue vertical line of OpenClaw appeared. Coordination costs reached zero.

Companies will not entirely disappear, but contraction is inevitable. From 500 employees down to 20, reducing three management layers to one. The positions that were eliminated will not be filled again. Office spaces are becoming increasingly vacant, schools continue to teach skills that are being taken over, and young people keep submitting résumés, but the number of positions is shrinking in the long term.

When cattle and horses are exploited, at least it suggests you are still needed, with some bargaining chips.

But our lives are circumvented: your time, your skills, the education you spent twenty years acquiring suddenly have no priced position in this new system.

The middle class brought us everything we have come to take for granted: office buildings, commuting, year-end bonuses, and the social identity of "what do you do."

Marx was right.

Only the force that ends the middle class is not the workers he imagined, but a lobster called OpenClaw, a group of AI Agents.

The era will not stop to wait for anyone.

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