➺ May 28, 2026

That William Gibson line tech bros trot out to prove they've read a book — "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" — is only half right. The future is distributed fairly evenly; its positive and negative externalities are not. The working class gets the 230kV lines, drained aquifers, and a 24/7 hum. The elite get Claude and the Claude-authored discourse about Claude. A new map of America's hyperscale data centers, pieced together by no less than Erin Brockovich, drives home the point. California and New England [1], which together generate nearly a fifth of U.S. GDP and collectively account for roughly 30% of U.S. AI usage, host precisely zero hyperscale builds. Nearly half of U.S. data centers sit in census tracts with above-median social vulnerability.

Brockovich's return will only surprise those too distracted by Julia Roberts' décolletage to follow the film. In the 1990s, while a file clerk, Brockovich proved that PG&E had poisoned the groundwater of Hinkley, a poor desert town, with pipeline coolant. She is an expert at bringing the negative externalities of the future to the attention of unevenly distributed elites – the ones currently engaged in discussions of white-collar job loss that border on science fictional. She knows the electricity bills in Lordstown, Ohio, are as real as the hexavalent chromium in Hinkley's groundwater. She knows the future is here. She knows it's not very even.

Pleasure isn't a particularly useful word; it seeks to describe far too broad a range of sensations. Sure, a bar of chocolate is pleasurable, but so is raw bar. So is a Barre class. That's why, before he got smooshed by a laundry van, the French philosopher Roland Barthes broke pleasure into two parts: plaisir, the simple, comfortable kind, and jouissance, the bracing, uncomfortable kind. The distinction is critical to understanding how the upper-middle class differentiates itself from the lower-middle class. We consistently choose jouissance over plaisir. Better-educated Americans prefer bitter tastes and are more likely to engage in kinky sex [2]. The median household income of an amateur triathlete is $126,000. Your boss has a cold plunge.

The upper-middle class's taste for acquired tastes is itself an acquired taste, which is why new Wesleyan grads order natural wine, associate attorneys order Islay scotch, and tenured profs order Negronis. The desire for jouissance peaks in midlife, when plaisir becomes affordable, accessible, and therefore less desirable to those unready to give themselves over to anything simple. Arguably, that's what the midlife crisis has become.

The term “yuppie” has become antiquated cultural shorthand for the kind of pat-of-least-resistance climbers you meet in line at Dean & DeLuca. Horsebit Loafers. Tacchini whites. American Psycho haircut. A successful, unserious person.

But, as historian Dylan Gottlieb argues in Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, the schmucks that swarmed NYC in the 1980s changed not only the city, but the country. The left a massive legacy: precarity, disparity, crudité. Successful, unserious people worthy of a serious book.

Upper Middle spoke to Gottlieb about plunder, cocaine, jogging, and the financialization of Ivy League graduates’ hearts.



The yuppie has mostly faded into cultural caricature. Brie and bottled water are normal now. You argue they are critical to understanding America. How did you come to that conclusion?
The book started with me trying to solve a mystery while finishing my PhD at Princeton. Every year, a large portion of my graduating seniors headed to Wall Street. These kids were talented historians; they wrote with style. Their decisions forced me to think about incentives and that pipeline, which we now take for granted, but had to be constructed. The yuppie is a historical creation. It’s what happened when economic forces narrowed the range of possibilities.

First jobs and campus recruiter are a big theme in the book. Why did big banks get so focused on recruiting from elite schools in the 1980s?
The industrial corporations that thrived in the middle of the century started struggling to compete in the 1970s. Financialization became the key driver of the economy. That led to deregulation as both parties dismantled the New Deal's regulatory apparatus. Banks become the center of the economy and they needed smart, young people to do the daily work of chopping up, merging, and taking over corporations in pursuit of short-term value.


Yuppies never expected to become plutocrats. The deal was that they would get cut in on what was happening. That was too good a deal to turn down. The share of Penn graduates going into banking jumped from 3% to 35% in just a decade.

A lot of the book is about what it actually means to get cut in on a deal that’s not great for the rest of the country. Why did “yuppie scum” become a thing?
The rise of yuppies depends on the fall of other people. It’s a plunder dynamic. A full third of the Fortune 500 ceases to exist in the 1980s — chopped up, merged, taken over — and each transaction is money for the firms that advise them. Also layoffs. There's a direct geographic transfer of wealth: The middle managers who used to go to Rochester to work at Kodak are going to Wall Street instead. There’s a lot of economic violence.

It’s worth noting that there’s real violence too. In Hoboken, thousands of people got displaced by intentional fires. The yuppies weren't lighting the matches; landlords were. But yuppies are creating the dual city we know so well. Service workers earning almost nothing. A thin scrim at the top.

How did the yuppies rationalize their role in the economy?
In the 1950s and 1960s, the C-suite, the bankers, and their lawyers were all WASPs who played squash at the Yale Club. Exclusion by design. By the end of the 1980s, 40% of law students are female, and anyone credentialed by a top school — regardless of race [3] — can use career services to land a finance job. The demand for talent supersedes the demand for connections. That shift lets yuppies say: ‘We're here because we worked harder, we're smarter, we did this on our own.’ It legitimates their perch on top of the economy.

There’s also no mass political pushback – at least not in Washington. The person getting the most money from Wall Street in the early 1980s isn't a Republican, it's Chuck Schumer.

There's a sadomasochistic quality to all of this — the suffering doesn't end at the office.
To justify your spot atop a brutal hierarchy, you have to prove your fitness in every sphere. A partner at a white-shoe firm in the 1960s billed 1,600 hours; at a takeover firm in the 1980s it was closer to 2,600. That’s 70-hour weeks for 50 weeks a year. 

The yuppie work ethic doesn't stay at the office — it leads to a lot of jogging. Is this where today's Whoop-band, sleep-score, marathon-PR self-optimization culture starts?
I interviewed dozens of people who still remembered their marathon finishing times from the early '80s. That self-optimization culture is the water we all swim in now, but it begins here. It's almost Calvinist. You have to suffer.

But cocaine helps….
Cocaine is the perfect drug for the moment. Acid was about ego death and oneness; cocaine is a stimulant that lets you work an eleven-hour day at the office, then go to Limelight.


It seems like the tech industry has supplanted the yuppies in the sense that it plunders different industries. It seems like that’s happened to such a degree yuppies are now on the receiving end.
Precarity has moved up and up the class ladder, especially as urban housing has skyrocketed past inflation. The same methods of harvesting value from workers that hit lawyers in the 1980s are being rolled out to ever more prestigious professions — private equity might own your hospital now, or your newsroom, and it wants to harvest more value and lay people off. There are two routes from here. One is to take the bargain even harder: Young bankers leave for hedge funds and private equity because that's where the real money is [4]. The other is opting out.

It does seem like there’s a character that exists now that didn’t use to exist: a yuppie with a social conscience and some interiority. Do you believe in such a thing?
Some yuppies, especially the most immiserated bottom ranks, are saying: ‘Maybe I'm not just a handmaiden to capital. Maybe I have more in common with my DoorDash driver or my nail technician. Maybe I'm also a worker.’ Are corporate lawyers ready to ask themselves those questions? I don't know.