Cities used to grow artists the way certain dirt grows mushrooms. You didn’t need much. A cheap room, a cheap drink, and a few other cranks who cared about the same peculiar things you did. You could fail at this for years and still feel like a citizen of something enormous, which is a neat trick when you think about it. That was the soil. It’s gone now. Most good soil eventually is.

What grew in its place was a theme park. Same neighborhoods, same walk-up buildings, same buzzing neon in the windows. Only now the ticket cost actual money, and a lot of it. No password required. Nobody’s permission needed. No years of paying dues to anybody. Just a bank balance, thick enough.

The old machinery that used to turn talent into a living – publishing houses, galleries, small film outfits, the whole scruffy underbelly of media – mostly died, or got swallowed whole by three or four distant corporations that trust an algorithm’s taste over a human being’s. What work is left for the people who still want to make things, they do for nothing, or they do it for a nonprofit, which pays about the same as nothing, only with a nicer newsletter.

So the artists got evicted from the very cities that used to make their lives make sense. Their social standing fell out of the sky like a piano. The lawyer still had rent money. The bond trader still had rent money. The product manager at the software company still had rent money, and cocktails, and the pleasant sensation of being at the center of the universe. The painter did not. The poet did not. The theater kid who used to feel faintly superior to all three of them did not, either.

Here is a fact worth hanging onto: not everybody was built to trade bonds or bill their soul in six-minute increments. Hand that other kind of person a little money, a little community, and a little talent, and every so often they will make something that makes the rest of us feel less alone in the universe. That is worth keeping around. At the moment, nobody is keeping it around.

Into the empty lot walked the Democratic Socialists of America and a whole family of cousins, offering the one thing everybody actually wants, which is somewhere to belong. They brought a social life built entirely out of shared grievances, and a political program promising, above all, that somebody would finally pay for what happened. That is a hard offer to turn down when you are broke and unfamous.

Darializa, Zohran, Claire Valdez, and plenty like them are what that offer produced: a new professional class of people whose art, or their considerable brains, got flattened by forces bigger than themselves, who then remade themselves into full-time radicals. It isn’t hard to see the appeal. Failure, done alone in a room, is one of the loneliest jobs there is. Politics, especially the theatrical kind, is not lonely at all.

Here is the trouble. What is being sold is not a diagnosis. It is revenge, wearing a lab coat and carrying a clipboard.

The actual problems are real: the rent, the hoarding of culture by a handful of platforms, the quiet disappearing of all the little institutions that used to prop up work nobody could yet afford to pay for. Serious stuff. The cures on offer are not serious at all. They are loud, they are total, and they show almost no curiosity about what conditions might let the next batch of artists actually survive long enough to make anything. You start to wonder if the point was ever to grow the mushrooms back, or if the point was just to make the people who paved over the dirt feel terrible about it.

None of which means the sympathy runs dry. It shouldn’t. Technology and money got together and did real damage to a whole species of human temperament, and that is a genuine loss, the grieving kind. But grief does not require handing over your judgment along with your sorrow.

Most of what this wounded class is demanding these days is, not to put too fine a point on it, out of its mind. Anybody who still believes politics is supposed to build something, rather than keep score, has a job to do, and the job is saying so, plainly, out loud. Otherwise the last rooms where anything worth calling culture might still happen get handed over to people who have quit making culture, and taken up making war instead.