In a perfectly modelled and optimized world, consistency is law. Variance is error. But what if the errors are the only places left to be free? What if the glitches are the new wilderness? This is The Privilege of the Glitch. In a society where every preference is predicted, every path is pre-simulated, and every behaviour is optimized for systemic harmony, the only authentic act is the one the system cannot categorize. The glitch.But glitches will be rare. And they will be patched. The system’s self-correcting algorithms will hunt them down. To be a glitch will require immense skill—you’ll need to find a loophole in the reality-code, a blind spot in the predictive panopticon. This skill won’t be evenly distributed. The rich, the clever, the well-connected will be able to afford “glitch consultants” or bespoke algorithms to find temporary pockets of unpredictability for them. They will experience “authentic surprise” as a luxury service.Meanwhile, the poor will live in a perfectly optimized, glitch-free hell of predictive efficiency. Their lives will run on rails, because rails are safe and cheap. Their music will be algorithmically generated for maximum productivity. Their social interactions will be nudged toward maximum cohesion. They will never be surprised, never lost, never confused. They will be perfectly managed, and utterly barren.The fight for the future, then, is not for resources, but for the right to malfunction. For the legal guarantee of a certain percentage of unpredictable, un-optimized, "wasted" time and space in every life and every community.My controversial take is this: The ultimate class divide will be between those who live in Version 1.0—the stable, bug-free, "official" release of society—and those who can afford to live in the Beta Realms—the intentionally unstable, glitch-rich, experimental patches where anything might happen, for a price. Rebellion won’t be tearing down the system. It will be crowdfunding enough to buy a temporary exploit that lets you see a different colour of sky for five minutes. Freedom will be a subscription service, and the most expensive plan will be called “Chaos.”This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just fix errors—we must fight for the right for reality to have a few bugs, for they might be the only features that make it worth living in. Subscribe now.