阶层滑落不得翻身 解读社会吃人逻辑 美国斩杀线 Citizenship is Dead. Welcome to Survival as a Service (SaaS) ｜艾森 Essen

Welcome back to Essen's channel. Recently, a term has become very popular: the "Kill Line."

What is a "Kill Line"? In the oil drilling industry, there is a pipeline that usually doesn't do much work but is a matter of life and death. Its name is the "Kill Line."

This Kill Line sounds terrifying. What is its function?

When a well kick occurs and high-pressure underground fluids are about to cause a devastating explosion, engineers will press a button to force high-density mud through this Kill Line into the bottom of the well.

Either you forcibly suppress the pressure, or the system faces total destruction.

This is the origin of the Kill Line. But actually, the reason this keyword is so hot online isn't because of oil drilling, but because many people want to know how, in the US, a respectable middle-class person, like a Microsoft programmer or a veteran, can be taken out by a "combo" within just a few months.

Today's video isn't about criticizing the US, but about deeply deconstructing the social phenomenon of the "Kill Line," to see clearly an extreme logic of social operation: When the system eliminates all "inefficient redundancies" in pursuit of maximum efficiency, why does it become a tragedy for an individual if they accidentally slip down the class ladder, unable to climb back up?

Why does it ultimately turn into a tragedy?

Friends living in North America, do you have this feeling?

That every month, your bank account feels like a "debuff" hanging on you.

Online gamers know a term called DOT: Damage Over Time.

Continuous damage.

In the game server known as the US, from the moment you are born, you are covered in various DOTs.

Property tax is a massive bleed every year, health insurance is a fixed monthly HP loss, and then car loans, mortgages, student loans are all long-term toxic damage.

You must work non-stop, essentially "farming mobs," to regenerate health.

Once you stop to catch your breath, or get hit by a monster—say, getting sick or losing your job— and your regeneration speed falls below the drain speed, then your health bar, meaning your cash flow, hits zero, and the system declares your character dead.

In real life, many people call this "survival pressure" or complain about inflation.

But actually, this isn't just the evil fruit of a business model, it is also the inevitable evolution of capital's pursuit of extreme efficiency.

The reason the Kill Line exists is that high maintenance costs do not allow you to pause. Once your income stops, high maintenance costs instantly turn into debt.

This is the economic principle behind the formation of the Kill Line.

To some extent, in key areas like housing, healthcare, and credit, the US is more like a giant, stratified "paid membership platform" stitched together by contracts, scores, and risk control rules.

You live like a citizen, but the operating logic makes you more like a "user."

Here, so-called "citizenship" is outdated, replaced by "usership."

In this system, there is nothing you truly own.

All your rights—residing, seeing a doctor, traveling, even the legitimacy of your existence in this society—have become a monthly subscription service.

In the internet industry, we call this model SaaS: Software as a Service.

But in today's story, SaaS means "Survival as a Service."

As a player in this game, the first thing you need is a place to live, right?

In traditional economics textbooks, rent is determined by supply and demand.

If too many houses are vacant, landlords must lower prices to recover funds.

This sounds reasonable, right?

But in the US, this ancient law is failing.

There is a company called RealPage that collects real-time transaction data from millions of rental units.

AI algorithms analyze this massive amount of data to precisely calculate the "maximum willingness to pay" of the entire rental market.

Then it instructs all landlords: "Even if the unit is empty, do not lower the price.

We need to lock the price at this high level."

Because for capital, vacancy is just a loss of cash flow, but lowering prices could lead to a collapse in asset valuation, triggering a bank's Margin Call.

Just like that, companies like RealPage use algorithmic collusion to manipulate the market, becoming the "behind-the-scenes pricer" of the US rental market and causing market failure.

Because the algorithm calculated that maintaining high rents across the board yields far higher returns than filling every vacant room.

This strategy of "better to leave it empty than lower the price" directly broke the balance of supply and demand.

This explains why there are empty houses everywhere, yet rents are still so expensive.

And investigations show that in communities using this company's software, rents were artificially pushed up by more than 25% in a short time.

For tenants, this is a desperate situation.

Because you find that no matter which apartment you ask, the prices are shockingly consistent.

You are no longer facing individual, scattered landlords, but a "digital landlord" with absolute information superiority.

And what's most terrifying is that this subscription model doesn't just control rental prices; it also controls "access eligibility."

Because now in the US, rental applications often need to go through SafeRent, a third-party screening service.

If you are a low-income individual holding a housing voucher, or if you are African American or Latino, even if the government has guaranteed your ability to pay rent, you might still be instantly rejected by the landlord.

Why?

The algorithm doesn't just look at your income; it also looks at your various history records.

For example, if you've had medical debt, student loans, or even a late electricity payment from years ago.

Data from these credit records will be judged by the algorithm as a "low score."

Encountering a financial crisis just once could get you permanently marked in this system as a "low-reputation user," forever blocking you from the quality housing market.

Renting is so hard, should we just buy a house?

Have you heard of the term "Build-to-Rent" (BTR)?

It's an exploding sector in the real estate world.

Just in 2023, these "rent-only" communities in the US grew by 102%.

Since 2008, giants like Blackstone have poured over $50 billion into the market, buying tens of thousands of single-family homes just to rent, not to sell.

This directly raised the threshold for buying a home.

Their logic is simple but cruel: Why let users buy out the hardware with a one-time payment?

We want to turn housing into a SaaS service.

We want to not only earn your money today but also lock in your cash flow for the next 30 years.

Visual Capitalist compiled data from 1985 to 2025.

In these 40 years, the median US household income grew by 255%, but the median home price surged by over 415%.

In 1985, an ordinary family could afford a home with 3.5 years of income.

By 2025, this number becomes 5.1 years.

If you live in a super city like Los Angeles, this number is 12.5 years.

Currently, the annual income required for US homebuyers needs to reach over $120,000, which is 40% higher than the average income.

So this means for the vast majority of young people, buying a house is basically an unattainable option.

They have been forcibly locked into the identity of "lifelong tenants."

So the rent young people pay every month can no longer convert into their own net asset value, but becomes a pure service fee flowing to Wall Street.

Actually, it's not just housing that has become a subscription for Americans; cars, phones, everything has been included.

Before, when you bought a car or a phone, you bought it out completely.

You used it however you wanted, and fixed it however you wanted.

But in the SaaS version, all hardware is just a carrier that exists to sell software.

The most absurd example happened in the automotive industry.

Carmakers like BMW and Audi are using Over-the-Air (OTA) updates to lock functions inside your car.

For example, you clearly have the seat heating hardware installed, but when you press the button, it doesn't actually activate the heating function.

At this point, a popup on the screen tells you: "Please pay the monthly fee to unlock the butt-warming service."

Even more exaggerated is that sometimes acceleration performance or driver assistance, functions related to safety, are also locked behind an invisible paywall.

American farmers now can't even repair the tractors they bought themselves.

Companies like John Deere have put layers of encrypted software locks on tractors.

The big machine farmers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on cannot be repaired by them if a part breaks, because that's "copyright infringement."

He has to pay a high price to hire official authorized repair personnel to enter a code.

What is this called?

This is called the loss of the Right to Repair.

My own personal experience: Two days ago, my home printer automatically updated its firmware.

The result was a remote lock that disabled all the third-party ink cartridges I bought.

And the official ink cartridges sell for more than the printer itself.

The manufacturer actually uses the internet to implement ultimate control over the device the user has already purchased.

For this kind of garbage, we shouldn't tolerate it.

Throw it away and buy a new one, and never touch this trash brand again.

Since the subscription business model was introduced by Apple, it has been abused to an absurd degree.

Some apps, due to cloud services or frequent follow-up updates, I think do have sufficient reason to be supported by monthly payments.

But the vast majority of these apps don't actually provide any other value beyond their basic functions or services.

Turning them into monthly payments is pure nonsense, purely to milk the user dry.

In economics, there is an indicator called the Subscription Economy Index (SEI).

In the past decade, this index grew by 435%.

The capital market is cheering because this is a victory for the business model.

But for us ordinary people, it means that on our bank accounts, countless automatic deduction agreements have attached themselves like barnacles.

On average, every American family unknowingly gets deducted at least $219 per month.

74% of people can't even calculate clearly how many services they have subscribed to.

This kind of "painless deduction" is a carefully designed psychological trap, exploiting our cognitive inertia to draw blood, bit by bit, draining away our disposable income.

So, while we have various tubes attached to us drawing blood, let's take a look at where we can find blood packs to replenish ourselves.

Let's look at the bottom first.

The gig economy.

It's not just about driving Uber or delivering food.

Under this model, people are stripped of their "employee" status and turned into "independent contractors."

This means no minimum wage, no health insurance, no overtime pay.

Most importantly, what manages you is an algorithm.

This management style is called the "Algorithmic Panopticon."

Panopticon." Uber drivers are under surveillance at all times.

The algorithm uses gamified design to induce drivers to continue taking orders even when fatigued.

When you try to go offline to sleep, the system will pop up a notification: "Just one more order and you can reach today's goal."

This fully exploits human addictive psychology to lock you tightly inside your car.

But this isn't even the most extreme.

The most extreme case is at Amazon.

The annual turnover rate of Amazon warehouse employees often exceeds 100%, reaching up to 150%.

This means every 8 months, everyone in the warehouse is replaced.

In Amazon's system, a high turnover rate isn't seen as a management failure, but rather as a special feature of the system.

This is a very deliberate system characteristic.

By breaking work down into extremely simple, repetitive labor, Amazon allows any newcomer to get up to speed within hours.

Because senior employees might ask for raises or organize unions, these simple, repetitive tasks don't need experienced senior employees kept around.

Amazon can fire you at any time, and can convert this work into fully automated robotic work at any time.

In the eyes of managers, this is like a giant bio-battery slot.

Workers are just batteries.

When this system was designed, it wasn't intended to nurture workers long-term or let you "recharge."

For Amazon and many other similar companies, the cost of swapping in a new battery— meaning the endless stream of new immigrants and young people— is far less than maintaining old batteries, meaning senior employees' career development, salary raises, or benefit demands.

This is why Amazon's turnover rate is as high as 150%.

Because this isn't a failure of management; this is a victory for "Consumable Economics."

You might think, "Luckily, I don't work in an Amazon warehouse.

I'm a senior white-collar worker in an office, I'm middle class, so I'm safe."

Actually, you are completely wrong.

Because the logic of "Survival as a Service" has similarly captured the elite class.

You consider yourself a modern elite, but your office job essentially doesn't stem from natural asset appreciation, but from your own "super labor."

There are many senior white-collar workers in Silicon Valley or Wall Street with salaries of hundreds of thousands, looking glamorous.

But to maintain this status, they must work 80 to 100 hours a week.

They must pay extremely high subscription fees to maintain their class.

This form of wealth is extremely fragile.

Because unlike land or bonds or other types of assets, it's more like a "premium membership" qualification.

Once you get sick, overworked, or even stop to catch your breath— say, stopping payments— your social status and standard of living will collapse rapidly.

So in this SaaS-ified society, whether it's a food delivery driver or a senior engineer writing code, they are essentially "consumables" of the system.

The only difference lies in whether you are a cheap disposable battery or a more expensive high-performance battery.

On the other hand, as a "human mineral," if you work desperately and your body breaks down, what happens?

At that point, you will face the cruelest side of society: Healthcare.

We all know how expensive US healthcare is.

But actually, the trap runs deeper.

To some extent, you might even feel that healthcare is no longer a service to save lives and heal injuries, but an inescapable financial harvest targeting your body.

For example, in the US, antibiotics themselves are actually very cheap.

At Walmart, they might only cost $4.

But in reality, you just can't buy them.

Why?

Because you don't have "access permission," which means you don't have a prescription.

To get this piece of paper, this prescription, you must make an appointment with a doctor and pay a consultation fee of $150 to $300.

This isn't like registering at a hospital in China, where you can see a specialist for a few dozen RMB.

Right?

If you don't have insurance, or if you can't afford this $300 consultation fee, then even if you are clutching $4 for medicine, you can only watch helplessly as a small tonsillitis evolves into sepsis.

This is the extreme of the "Survival as a Service" logic: The hardware, the medicine itself, isn't worth money.

What's worth money is the subscription permission that allows you "legal access," which means the prescription and doctor's orders.

Since 2000, health insurance costs for US families have soared by 297%.

In 2024, it has already exceeded $25,000.

But this isn't even the deadliest part.

The deadliest part is the rise in "deductibles."

What is a deductible?

It means that even though you paid expensive insurance premiums, when you actually get sick and go to the hospital, the insurance company says, "Dear user, you need to cover the first $5,000 yourself.

We only reimburse the part exceeding that."

So you will find that many Americans impoverished by illness actually have health insurance.

This is different from what many people imagine.

Reports show that in 2024, 36% of US households carried medical debt.

This is the so-called "medical impoverishment."

Moreover, the complex US healthcare system is filled with all kinds of mines: Complex coinsurance ratios and the most despair-inducing "out-of-network" doctors.

Once, for example, someone has a sudden heart attack and is sent to the ER.

The hospital is in the insurance network, no problem.

The patient or family feels relieved.

But result?

The anesthesiologist performing the surgery or the radiologist reading the films happens to not be in this insurance network.

After being discharged and going home, physically recovered, they receive a "Surprise Bill" for tens of thousands of dollars.

Situations like this are truly impossible to guard against.

For instance, there was an American man who, after a relative passed away, received a hospital bill as high as $195,000.

But later, with the help of AI, he found that a large amount should not have been included in his bill at all.

In the end, the payable amount was cut to $33,000.

Before AI, ordinary people had no possibility of figuring out all the twists and turns inside.

So even if you have medical insurance, the various pitfalls existing within can still turn seeing a doctor into a gamble.

And this is how the nightmare of class sliding begins.

You start falling into a death spiral: Can't pay the bill, bill goes to a collection agency, your credit score plummets.

In the US, a credit score is your social pass.

Once the score drops, landlords will refuse to rent to you, employers, especially in finance or security industries, will refuse to hire you.

You see, you might have just gotten sick once, but you lost the eligibility for housing and work.

This is the brutal Kill Line.

Even if an American lives to old age peacefully without disaster, they might still be unable to escape this glinting cold knife.

Now, many nursing homes are bought by Wall Street private equity firms. A common trick they use is called "asset stripping."

They buy the nursing home, then sell off the land and property to cash out, then lease it back to the nursing home.

The money goes into the investors' pockets, while the nursing home, in order to pay debts, can only lay off staff.

What is the consequence?

Research data coldly tells us that in nursing homes acquired by private equity, the patient mortality rate is 10% higher than in ordinary nursing homes.

To save money, nursing homes have to reduce the number of caregivers and instead feed the elderly large amounts of antipsychotic drugs to keep them sleeping all day, so they don't need as many hands to care for them.

Since the incentive mechanism pushes the quality of care in nursing homes to the lowest compliance line, the rise in mortality risk becomes a completely predictable byproduct.

And for those poor people who can't afford nursing homes, state-provided Medicaid isn't a free lunch either.

There is a terrifying clause many people don't know about called the "Estate Recovery Program."

If you are a low-income senior and used Medicaid to pay for long-term care fees, after you pass away, the state government has the right to forcibly auction your house to repay this money.

We can imagine a very poor family whose only wealth might be an ancestral run-down house.

They hoped to leave it to their children as capital for the next generation to turn their lives around.

But some state governments in the US say, "No, you used medical services, so this house belongs to me now."

Just like that, it brutally severs the only path for intergenerational wealth accumulation for some lower-class American families.

Here is a very real story.

The protagonist is named Bennie Coleman.

He was a Marine Corps veteran living in Washington D.C.

This veteran owned a house worth $197,000, which was his life savings.

One day, due to negligence, perhaps also due to his dementia, he missed a property tax payment.

Guess how much he owed?

$134.

But just because of this $134, the local government sold the lien on this tax debt.

A private investor bought it and initiated foreclosure proceedings.

Although Coleman's son later scraped together the money to pay off the property tax, because they couldn't afford the subsequent high legal fees of nearly $5,000, this house worth $200,000 was eventually forced into auction.

And after deducting taxes and fees from the auction proceeds, the remaining surplus of over $100,000 was not returned to the veteran either, but was taken by the investor and the government.

The veteran was forcibly dragged out of his own home by marshals, breaking down in tears on a chair on the porch.

This is the legal logic of certain US states: You owe me $1, and I can take away something of yours worth $100.

Although in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in a case that this practice is unconstitutional, and although strictly speaking, it's not even that the US state government wants to rob the veteran's house, but rather a result of the securitization of tax liens.

But on the level of actual operation, in real life, for ordinary American veterans who don't understand legal procedures, this kind of predation just happens.

Friends in China might find it hard to understand why a mere $800 car repair fee in the US can crush an American.

Let's put aside all emotions and look at a very cold math problem.

In the US, $800 can cause a liquidity crisis.

An American middle-class person's assets might be positive because they have a house and a car.

But once there is a problem with their cash flow, their entire situation, their financial status, is extremely fragile.

We can imagine: Once the car breaks down, he needs $800 to fix it.

But because he doesn't have that much cash, he just can't pay to fix it.

Then, once he can't fix the car, he can't go to work.

In many places, you essentially cannot rely on public transportation.

In this situation, once absent for more than three days, he will be fired.

Once fired, he loses income.

Once income is lost, he can't pay some bills, and will default on credit.

At this moment, the system initiates an "accelerated combo."

Because you are unemployed, your car loan interest rate triggers a default clause and instantly skyrockets.

Because you have no salary records, the landlord initiates eviction proceedings.

This isn't someone specifically trying to persecute this person, but every subsystem— the bank, the dealership, the landlord— is automatically executing loss-stop procedures for their own risk control.

And when all these procedures are triggered simultaneously, that is the Kill Line we see.

This explains why among the homeless in the US, we often see veterans, and even some programmers.

They didn't lose due to work ability, but lost to the systemic domino effect after their cash flow broke.

Many people see "Gold Medal Lecturer" (a viral homeless vlogger) in videos, wandering in the US, eating fried chicken, collecting relief funds, and think his life looks pretty good, right?

The Gold Medal Lecturer lives like a "person" because he is a social media creator.

He has a phone, traffic, and cash flow from fan donations.

But for those ordinary homeless people who have no phone and lost their address, they eat free fried chicken, but in a sociological sense, they are already dead.

This is a "despair with a full stomach."

The US financial system has designed a most extreme "dark mode" specifically for the poor.

Once your class slides down, you will find traps everywhere, pitfalls everywhere.

To climb out from the bottom of society, honestly, is extremely difficult.

For example, you should have heard of overdraft fees.

Just overdraft.

For instance, you are tight on money at the end of the month, right?

You only have $3 left in your account.

You want to buy a $5 coffee, so you overdrafted $2 from the account.

At this time, the bank will charge you a $35 overdraft service fee.

For banks, this is actually a huge business.

Data shows that in 2019, banks relied on this to collect $15.5 billion.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that 9% of so-called "low-quality users"— of course, for banks, they are certainly high-quality users— contributed 79% of overdraft fees.

The average daily balance of these users in their bank accounts is usually less than $350.

In other words, the banking system's profits are achieved by precisely harvesting this group of the poorest people.

This is a fine targeting poverty.

And when you are "banned" by the formal banking system because you can't pay these fines— meaning your account is closed— you can only turn to "shadow banking," which is Payday Loans.

Payday Loans.

Payday loans.

The interest here is as high as 300% or more.

This is not a loan at all, but the SaaS-ification of usury.

Payday loan stores are densely packed, opening in black and low-income communities.

Their business model's core is called "Rollover."

They don't hope, don't expect you to pay off the principal.

They hope you can forever only afford the interest, but forever owe the principal.

Data shows that out of every five payday loans, four will be renewed indefinitely.

This business model converts a one-time emergency funding need into a solidified, permanent high-interest debt subscription.

You are like running on a treadmill, running until you cough blood, but on this social ladder, you basically haven't climbed a single step up.

And living in this kind of abject poverty long-term, what does it mean for the human body?

There is a very vivid metaphor in sociology called "Weathering."

Just like rocks slowly peel away under wind and rain, human bodies under long-term social pressure will also wear down acceleratively.

At the physiological level, this pressure is deadly.

To cope with continuous crises, your body must chronically secrete high levels of cortisol.

This stress state, although it can help you get through immediate difficulties like today, in the long run, it will corrode your blood vessels and destroy your immune system.

Data shows that the telomere length of Black American women —a marker of biological aging— is significantly shorter than that of White women of the same age.

It's not hard to understand why many people have to rely on other things, like alcohol, to muddle through their days.

It is already very hard on financial and physiological levels, but on mental and cognitive levels, there is another very important challenge.

There is a term called "Bandwidth Tax."

Poverty and material scarcity aren't just about lacking money; they occupy the cognitive bandwidth of the lowest social strata.

If every day you have to worry about where your next meal is, how to pay the rent soon, how to fix the broken car, then your brain will be chronically in a state of "tunnel vision."

This lowers your fluid intelligence, makes you dumber, and makes you unable to spare attention to care about your long-term development and your personal career future.

This explains why poor people often find it hard to make long-term plans.

Not because they are shortsighted, not because they are stupid, but because the immediate survival crisis has already exhausted all their mental CPU.

Isn't there a welfare system to provide a safety net?

Some people might ask, "Aren't there social relief funds?"

Actually, when I first arrived in Canada, I also used to think a major advantage of US/Canadian society compared to China is that because of the social welfare system, even if you slide down in class, there is a safety net.

On the surface, it indeed looks like this.

But actually, the process of claiming relief funds is a kind of "dissuasive interaction design."

Data from 2024 shows that at least one-eighth of eligible food stamp recipients were kicked out by the US system because they couldn't handle the tedious paperwork.

For example, missed phone interviews, failed file uploads.

Even for some people, printing documents and finding a place to upload them are extremely difficult material obstacles to overcome.

Including obscure and hard-to-understand forms, all these are not just bureaucracy; to some extent, they objectively constitute an administrative or cognitive burden.

Because for those paid by the hour, without stable internet, without computers, or even without smartphones, the bottom-tier users, this kind of "time tax" is something they absolutely cannot afford.

The US system, by making the user interface extremely hard to use, to some extent, cleverly lowers the welfare redemption rate.

Isn't there still the church?

Many people will say.

But actually, honestly, the church isn't as holy and beautiful as everyone imagines.

There is a female US influencer who recently conducted a social experiment.

She claimed to have a two-month-old baby who had been out of formula for a whole night, and the child was starving.

So she also prepared baby crying sounds as background noise.

Then she called over 40 religious organizations for help.

Her request actually wasn't excessive.

She only asked for a can of baby formula or a little baby food, not long-term support or demanding large amounts of cash.

But what was the result?

Among the 40+ religious organizations contacted, about three-quarters directly rejected her request.

Fewer than 10 were willing to lend a hand.

Some say she deliberately took things out of context, but based on my personal experience, this statistical result is very valuable for reference.

Some people also say, "Why don't Americans rebel?"

Actually, there is a very cruel game theory logic here.

Historical experience tells us people are often most likely to resist, most likely to rebel, when they are at "low HP," meaning 20% health.

Most likely to rebel.

But the efficiency of the SaaS system lies in that through high debt and overtime work, it keeps you chronically at "half health," meaning 50% state.

This is a very fatigued state, but one where you still see a glimmer of hope.

But once you fall, it will brutally use the Kill Line to instantly beat you into a "near-death" state with HP close to zero.

So this system perfectly avoids the rebellion zone.

When you are busy working three jobs to pay off loans, you have no energy to rebel.

When you are wandering the streets looking for your next meal, you have no ability to rebel.

Do you remember at the start of the video we mentioned the Kill Line?

When the system pressure— meaning the wealth gap, social contradictions— is big enough to be about to blow out, the system won't choose decompression or reform, but chooses to open the Kill Line, injecting high-density mud— which is the systematic forceful stability maintenance measures we see in the news.

In all SaaS platforms, what is the severest punishment?

It's a "ban."

In online games, a ban means you can't log in anymore.

In the platform of real society, the specific manifestation of a ban is eviction and forced vagrancy.

In the US, credit scores were originally just used to assess your ability to repay loans.

But they have been alienated into evaluating "your value as a human," a very fundamental indicator.

In most US states, car insurance rates depend on credit scores.

A driver with a poor credit score but a perfect driving record pays double the premium of a driver with a good credit score who has had an accident.

This is simply a fine levied on poverty.

And employers, when hiring now, will also check your credit score.

If you ever had your credit damaged due to unemployment or illness, then it's hard for you to find a good job.

This is like because you didn't have money to pay membership fees, the system locked your ability to earn money.

And once your file has an eviction record, you are permanently branded with the digital mark of a "bad tenant."

This will cause you, even if you have money later, to be unable to find quality housing, only able to flow into more dangerous and more marginal gray zones.

After this, you will find yourself trapped in a terrifying identity death spiral, which is the famous "ID Paradox."

To find a job or apply for cheap housing, you need an ID.

To get an ID, you need to provide a residential address.

But you were just evicted, so you don't have your own residential address.

Because there is no address, you can't get an ID.

And because there is no ID, you can't rent a house, you can't find a job, and you won't have an address.

So this is a deadlock loop.

Added to this is the US Patriot Act, the anti-money laundering regulations: Without an address, you absolutely cannot open a bank account.

And in this era of digital payments, having no bank account means you cannot receive wages from formal employers.

You are completely excluded by the system.

So you can only go work illegally, sell blood, or beg on the street.

So up to this point, do you see it?

The homeless, because they lost the "address," this key piece of metadata, are directly isolated by the system firewall outside of modern society.

Earlier we talked about the automatic stop-loss after cash flow breaks.

Now we enter a more foundational logic: The system removes low-cost survival options from the legal space, leaving you no route to choose a downgrade.

Speaking of this, let's make an interesting comparison.

Because many netizens like to compare China's "Sanhe Gods" or current "Guabi" bros (slump bros) with US homeless people.

Comparing them.

The usual conclusion is: China has rural areas, has hometowns, has a way out.

If we don't discuss grand narratives but look purely from the perspective of system design, the biggest difference between the two actually lies in system compatibility.

This brings up another concept: Minimum System Requirements.

When I first went abroad, I noticed a phenomenon: Any remote small town has standard configurations of McDonald's and Walmart.

Wherever you go, the restrooms anywhere are bright and clean, have heating, have toilet paper.

They might even be more comfortable than the configuration of an office building in China.

Honestly, I admired that back then.

That implies this system's minimum configuration is quite high.

But now I see the other side of the matter.

In certain corners of China, you will find massive amounts of low-cost survival crevices.

For example, 5-yuan noodles, 30-yuan beds in urban villages, and if you are willing to return to your hometown, there are self-built houses that don't require paying any property tax.

Survival states like these, honestly, are definitely marginal and not considered decent.

But please note: They exist very legally.

That is to say, the system allows you to run in "low resolution," "low graphics" mode.

But in the US, unfortunately, the system logic is completely different.

To maintain the user experience of the entire platform and asset values, the system eliminated the "low-end options" from the very beginning of its design.

This sounds very counter-intuitive.

Isn't America a nation that preaches freedom?

But you must know, many US communities have extremely strict Zoning Laws and ubiquitous HOAs (Homeowners Associations).

All these rules are like a system administrator with supreme privileges.

They regulate how big your house must be, that your lawn must be watered daily and how green it must be.

They regulate that under one roof, you cannot have too many unrelated people living together.

In the past, the US also had very cheap single-room hotels (SROs).

Poor people could spend very little money to have at least a place that shelters them from wind and rain.

But later, for the gentrification of communities, to maintain high property prices, these low-end businesses were all completely banned.

This led to an extremely terrifying consequence: The violent raising of the survival threshold.

So in the US, you either pay $2,000 a month for a compliant apartment and be a respectable "paid member," or you can only sleep on the street.

The middle option, for example, spending $200 to rent a shabby single room, or building a shed on an empty lot, has essentially been removed by the system.

Because that violates building codes, violates health regulations, or devalues the property of a wealthy community, lowering community prices.

So the reason there are so many homeless in the US isn't just because they are poor, but more because "living indecently" is illegal in this very exquisite Western social system.

And this is the real Kill Line.

When you cannot afford the expensive full subscription fee, the system does not provide a downgrade service, but directly cuts off your connection.

This explains why you see even cashiers with jobs or even some newly divorced teachers can only live in their cars.

Not because they don't work hard enough, but because they can't reach the survival threshold that has been artificially raised.

The media likes to portray homelessness as due to laziness or drug addiction.

But research from the University of California tells us a colder truth: Homelessness rates have an absolute positive correlation with local rent prices.

People don't wander because they take drugs— of course, we can't rule out individual cases— but because they can't afford that expensive entrance ticket.

After being kicked out of the server, in extreme cold and despair, they chose cheap chemical anesthetics to shut down their sensory systems. In 2024, the US Supreme Court's ruling in the Grants Pass case allows local governments to impose criminal penalties on people sleeping in public places, even if there are absolutely

not enough shelter beds locally.

What does this ruling mean?

It means poverty itself has been criminalized.

If you don't have a house— that is, if you haven't subscribed to the housing service— your existence is a crime.

And in the US medical system, this manifests as "Patient Dumping."

Some hospitals, to clear out "bad debt users," will force homeless patients who haven't fully recovered to discharge, stuff them into taxis, or even dump them on street corners or in front of shelters.

On a cold winter night, this kind of behavior is tantamount to a death sentence.

Honestly, writing the script to this point, I feel a bit depressed myself, hard to breathe.

I'm very sorry to bring you such a heavy topic.

I certainly know the US has a beautiful side, and many very kind Americans.

Undoubtedly.

It's just that in this video, what we are digging deep into is the dark side itself.

To summarize the "SaaS-ification" of US society, it is a structural transformation from asset ownership to subscription-based survival.

In this process, the middle class has been proletarianized.

Their wealth, through education, housing, and high medical subscription fees, is continuously funneled to the upper asset-owning administrator class.

This creates an extremely fragile social ecology.

Federal Reserve data shows that 37% of US adults cannot even come up with $400 in emergency cash.

The entire society is actually tensed on the edge of breaking.

Once society's fault tolerance is pressed extremely low, the threshold for triggering systemic conflict drops.

This is why many institutions predict that the future will be a high-risk window for US social unrest.

When the "wealth pump's" excessive extraction causes the social foundation to completely collapse, any tiny spark could ignite systemic conflict.

Why does US society have a Kill Line?

We asked this countless times in this video.

Because the system knows endless SaaS extraction will inevitably lead to accumulated pressure at the bottom, until a destructive blowout occurs, which is social unrest.

And facing a blowout, the system chooses not to stop drilling, not to stop exploitation to try to reform society, but presses the Kill Line button.

It injects high-density barite mud.

The existence of this mud is to suppress those ejected from the system, ensuring the platform can continue providing decent, tidy services to paid members.

As long as this Kill Line is still operating, US society looks like it can still sing and dance in prosperity.

Again emphasizing: Essen's video today isn't to see who has it worse, and it's not just telling a story about the US itself, but telling the future of human techno-capitalism.

Once this SaaS trend spreads, every single one of us could become just a data point in the system.

Understanding this mechanism today is so that in whatever society we are in, we strive to increase our system fault tolerance.

Do not let your life become a subscription service that zeroes out once payments stop.

In this world, the only thing you can do is try to hold and increase your "source code," meaning your core assets and skills, instead of obsessing over just being a "premium user."

Seeing clearly the Kill Line, this underlying logic of Western society, is not to mock those who have fallen, but so that on the edge of the cliff, we can not only save ourselves but also, when others fall, truly reach out a hand to help them.

Because a civilized society shouldn't just have skyscrapers reaching the clouds, but should also have a safety net to catch every falling person.

Thank you very much for watching.

If you don't want to become a user cancelled by the system, please stay awake.

In this SaaS-ified world, wish you a happy subscription, and never go offline.

See you in the next episode.