Coinbase’s 60-second spot, “Your Way Out,” drops viewers into a low-resolution video game world where everyone moves in a loop: commuting, working, spending. The protagonist is an NPC, a non-playable character, stuck inside a system he didn’t build and can’t control, until he strains against his preprogrammed slumped over state and breaks free. The environment shifts from pixelated game world to the full color of reality as he gains agency, set to Sammy Davis Jr.’s “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” The ad only reveals itself to be about Coinbase at the end, with a single tagline: “Your way out of their system.”
The ad is extraordinary for what it captures in the culture: an ever-gnawing desperation to escape what’s become known as the “permanent underclass.” The phrase, once niche Silicon Valley gallows humor, has become a genuine cultural fixation. As leaders of AI companies boast that their technology will replace most jobs within the next decade, people are worried they’ll be sorted into a category Karl Marx once called the lumpenproletariat: the lowest stratum of the industrial working class itself.
Only it’s 2026, and the word for it is the permanent underclass, a world with no upward mobility. Online, the term is lobbed at people who aren’t heeding AI’s headwinds, the kinds of FOMO-stoking posts that happen to work very well for selling. Which, of course, is what Coinbase is doing.
