To quote the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, the trucker protests have sharpened a division between “Virtuals” and “Practicals” — meaning the people whose professional lives are lived increasingly in the realm of the “digital and the abstract,” and the people who work in the “mundane physical reality” upon which the virtual society still depends.

This division is not always one of money: Plenty of Practicals do very well for themselves while plenty of Virtuals scrape along on, say, graduate-student stipends or middling think-tank salaries. But the class divide between the two categories is clear, and so is the gap between their respective influence over the central nodes of Western power. And their simmering conflict is most likely to flare up when plans devised by meritocrats create problems in the physical dimension — whether it’s a gasoline tax increase devised by French technocrats touching off protests among French drivers, or just an accumulating exhaustion with Covid restrictions among Canadians who work in the real world rather than on Zoom.

Moreover, as Lyons points out, in the Canadian clash each side has used the weapons appropriate to its position.