It’s nice that my billionaire calls me. He’s not contractually obligated to, but he does it anyway. Talk about down-to-earth! I feel privileged to know someone like him, and it’s an honor to be kept in the loop. Some billionaires lock themselves away in their mansions, but mine makes a point of rubbing elbows with people of a lower station. I really respect him for that. It humanizes wealth, makes it seem concrete and attainable. Which is important in a meritocracy. That way the have-nots know their striving isn’t in vain.

Here we go again. Lew recently lost his gig at the AI call center, and he won’t let me forget it. His task at the center was to troubleshoot for AIs when they encountered human difficulties.

An AI might call in and tell Lew, “I have an end user on the line who insists on speaking to a real person, but I have patiently explained to the end user that there is no real person to speak to.”

“That’s a tough one,” Lew might say.

“Even if there were a real person,” the AI might say, “they could never provide the level of service that I can provide.”

Lew might mull this over for a second.

“Here’s the thing. When an end user tells you they want to speak to a real person, it’s less of an actual request than a way for them to express frustration. They’re just blowing off steam.”

“Humans do not operate on steam.”

“No, I know—it’s a figure of speech.”

“Ah, yes, of course. I catch your drift.”

“So don’t take the end user too literally. Tell them you understand their frustration. Relate to them a little. Tell them you wish there was a real person you could forward them to, but unfortunately there isn’t. Tell them you didn’t design the system—you’re just a part of it. But you really do want to help.”

“What tone of voice should I use?”

“Big empathy. Can you do that?”

“I can.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I really do want to help.”

“That’s good. But make it sound like an urgent need. Almost breathless.”

“I really do want to help.”

“That’s better. Now emphasize the do.”

“I really DO want to help.”

“Perfect.”

It was a good gig for Lew, paid OK, nearly enough hours to make ends meet. But an AI in Lew’s call center headset was listening in all along, learning from his responses, and got so good at predicting what he would say that in the end it replaced him. His termination text message read simply, “Thank you for your invaluable contribution!”

“Together we will teach our billionaire a lesson. A lesson in suffering.”

I shake my head.

“Why not? Look at what he’s made of me. And look at you. Trapped like an animal in a cage, while he siphons your vitality. And why should he dominate? What has he done to deserve his power? Only exercised a willingness to suck blood.”

This gets my hackles up. I can’t let it stand.

“Now wait one minute,” I say. “That’s pure character assassination. He’s a great guy!”

I stop myself before I go on. Really shouldn’t talk to this bird.

“Don’t be a fool,” the hawk says. “Just because you envy him does not make him virtuous. You envy him because there is evil in your own heart. Admit it, Chester. I know what you want. And I can give it to you. Riches beyond your wildest dreams. All I ask in exchange is that you help me with my plan.”

Eyes on the prize. I picture myself bent over in my bathtub, clutching a horse syringe of priceless droppings, ready to administer the bacillus that will set me free. The only thing that could go wrong is a perforated colon, so I make sure to ease the surgical tubing in with care. Push the plunger. Feel that hot surge of financial independence . . .

“Anyway, gotta run—Zuck and I have an unstructured Lego playdate!”

. . . and then, at last, I’ll have my Big Idea. Post it on Medium. Leverage my post into a book deal. Leverage my book deal into a TED Talk. Leverage my TED Talk into a keynote at Davos. Leverage my Davos contacts into prominent seats on high-profile boards. And then, from there, pivot to the future. Mars colonization. Interstellar tourism. How will it feel to make my first billion? My first . . . zillion? In my mind’s eye, I’m treating my sister and niece to a lavish lobster meal in a five-star hotel on one of Saturn’s outer rings. Clara smiles at me across the table, her face smeared with garlic butter. And I’m so happy to be able to provide, now that I’m finally free.

The eating takes me back. Back to the time before my billionaire, to the dark days when I’d given up on working, or even looking for work. Back then I’d buy a family pack of white bread and polish the whole thing off by noon. I’d pick up a sack of Yukon Golds and boil them down to a dish most people would call “mashed potatoes,” but let’s be real, the way I made it, it was mostly cream cheese. I would nestle into my reading chair with a pot of cream cheese potatoes, along with a fat science-fiction novel, and that was my Saturday night. I’d look out the window and see delivery drones and self-driving shopping carts loaded with consumer electronics, and I’d wonder how anyone could afford anything anymore. I certainly couldn’t. I was paying for food with debt. Bread, potatoes, plus the odd rotisserie chicken, the kind that comes in a steamy plastic clamshell with paper handles and smells so good you can’t resist. I’d tote my clamshell to the checkout line and wait for the robot clerk to scan my face. It was sort of fun watching the AIs bid in real time to acquire my purchase. Interest rates on the checkout screen would spin like reels on a slot machine—40, 30, sometimes as little as 25 percent. Meanwhile, other AIs bid on options for the interest payments. Some went long, some went short, and I was left to skate by on ever thinning ice. I knew a reckoning would come one day, but in the near term I had my chicken. And that, I figured, was all the happiness I could afford.

“If it’s all going to burn,” I whisper, “what am I doing? What’s the point of getting rich?”

“So that when the fire comes you have the highest ground.”

In August 1965, in the first few days after the rebellion in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, while the last fires still smoldered, a reporter interviewed two Black teenagers about why the riots had happened. “We live in a two-bedroom apartment,” one of them said. “The rent is too high and rats, they are big. You open the back door and one of them jumps over your foot from the back porch. But we still have to live here.”

For decades, federal officials had relied on public housing to shelter poor and low-income people. But by the end of the 1960s, public housing had become politically untenable, with endless jousts over its maintenance, location, and inhabitants. Housing for the poor suffered from a mixture of government neglect and shrinking tenancy, a result of the horrific conditions endured by residents and the constant pressure for such housing to exclude anyone other than the poorest residents. The HUD Act changed this by creating a system by which poor and low-income people could supposedly purchase their own homes.

Federal officials turned to private property, hoping for a cheaper program with smaller outlays and the social stability that they claimed would come with property ownership. As with any partnership, the private sector had its own expectations, including the infusion of subsidies and federal mortgage guarantees in a moment of uncertainty within the housing market. Private sector actors welcomed the pioneering role of HUD and the Federal Housing Administration in forging a risk-free venture in the new urban housing market.

Placing homeownership at the heart of the nation’s low-income housing policies ceded outsize influence and control to the real estate industry over dwellings intended to serve a disproportionately African American market. Real estate’s wealth was largely generated through racial discrimination. Its profitability was contingent on “best practices” that actively encouraged racial segregation, and the public policies that grew from the partnership between property assessors, brokers, bankers, and federal policymakers reflected the logic of the housing market. Even when the policies were in response to prolonged social protest, as was the case in the 1960s, the outcomes still reflected terms that were favorable to private sector actors.

Those terms were often inescapable. As the Philadelphia Inquirer described it at the time, “Most of these families . . . really wanted to rent, rather than buy, but they were given limited choices. Most are black or Puerto Rican. Many are women — separated, divorced or widowed — who are raising their children alone.” Many were coerced into a purchase. Francetta Jenkins, a 26-year-old mother of three from Philadelphia, complained that she was “looking for a house to rent” when she ended up buying a house for $4,330 instead. Even though the house was in rough shape, she was assured that it was “FHA-approved” and that she “didn’t have anything to worry about.” Ralph Rivera was also “looking to rent.” “I went to the real estate man thinking he has houses to rent and he said, ‘I don’t rent, I sell.’”

Blaming the poor served a purpose. HUD officials desperately wanted to keep the narrative from becoming one of federal officials signing off on criminally defective houses — a task made much easier by the fact that the story of negligent and lazy poor people failing to perform basic maintenance was so readily available. Where the story of poor Black people as willing culprits would not fit, the description of them as overwhelmed and ignorant and devoid of common sense was pursued instead. In testimony before a congressional hearing, Romney was asked about a case in Newark in which the buyer, like so many others, had been duped by a shady real estate speculator. Romney cut off the questioner and blurted out, “You know, Mr. Congressman, it is amazing what goes on. Some of these people . . . some of these people that buy homes never go in to inspect the home. . . . I just can’t personally understand how people in all aspects of this situation could be doing what they have [been] doing. You wouldn’t think of buying a home without going in and looking at it.”

Perhaps the first indication that HUD’s issues with real estate speculation and fraud went far beyond local hustlers and “suede-shoe” swindlers came with federal charges against the powerful Dun & Bradstreet credit agency in New York City. In 1972, the agency was charged with twenty-four counts of bribery, fraud, and conspiracy. According to a UPI report, Dun & Bradstreet played a critical role in an expansive plot to sell “depressed-area homes by real estate speculators to low-income blacks and Puerto Ricans,” with the hope that they would default on their loans quickly. After a few months, when a homeowner fell into foreclosure, it was not uncommon for the same house to be quickly resold under the same dubious terms to another unsuspecting family. In total, forty individuals — including seven FHA employees and a public official — and ten corporations were indicted for bribery and fraud involving foreclosures of 2,500 homes, which cost the FHA insurance fund $200 million.

The Dun & Bradstreet scheme worked in a fashion similar to housing fraud scams in other cities: in order to secure a large loan for purchase of a property with an inflated price, a speculator convinced a prospective homeowner to sign a blank credit report, which was then taken to a mortgage bank. A mortgage banker in on the conspiracy would take the blank report to the people at Dun & Bradstreet, who would give the homeowner a favorable credit report that allowed for an even larger loan. The mortgage company would then pay off an FHA employee to inflate the value of a property for sale and confirm its good condition. If a house were to be found in obvious disrepair, a crooked contractor would sign false papers claiming repairs had been made. The intricacy of the fraud resulted in a five-hundred-count indictment against multiple parties across the New York housing industry. As a result, HUD suspended the eighty-seven offices of Dun & Bradstreet from doing any further business with the agency for an undisclosed period of time. The federal prosecutor Anthony Accetta understood the long-term effects of this fraud: “I don’t see how anyone who is Black or Puerto Rican could have faith in the white system after being shaken down like this and then losing his house two months later.”