When your life feels horribly constrained by forces beyond your control, when it feels as if every possible avenue has been exhausted, socialism arrives with a vision of another way: Here, it says. Here lies the way out.

| Jia Lynn Yang, How American Socialism Changed, and Stormed the Democratic Party1

The Decline of Capitalism

We may have reached a turning point in the US, and it comes under guise of a growing dissatisfaction with unfettered capitalism and the Democratic Party. I will again quote Jia Lynn Yang:

Some Democrats argue that in the face of the rising tide of D.S.A. [the Democratic Socialists of America], the party should affirm its support for capitalism. This may be a tough sell in a time when capitalism is falling in popularity. Under half of Americans say capitalism is working very well or even somewhat well, down from 60 percent a decade ago, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Whatever you want to call the status quo, many Americans say they simply don’t want it.

I plan to focus over the next few months — leading up to the mid-term elections in November, and beyond — on the implications of growing acceptance of a ‘social democracy’ agenda. Which is not communism, as some pig-headed detractors claim. American socialists today are not advocating for a revolutionary overturning of capitalism and generally advocate an ethics-based — not class-oriented — gradualist approach with the goals of reducing inequality and nationalizing aspects of society that should be universal: health care, child care, access to housing, and a living wage for all.

I will not take on the hair-splitting task of dissecting the literal agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. But I will be digging in on the clearest voices on a socialist-driven reformation of the economy, government, and, in particular, the growing power of oligarchic corporations, which is the US, are run as ‘private governments’ as Elizabeth Anderson styles it (see The Right To Have Rights, The Unfreedom Of Work, The Struggle For Meaningful Work).

Stay tuned.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety. I rely on your support, so thanks.

How Corporations Play

Michael Sainato reports on how large corporations game the system, relying on governments to provide public assistance to their workers:

Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a new report released Wednesday [2026-03-04].

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.

Among the four states that disclose Snap data related to large companies – Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan – 10,920 Walmart workers and 9,633 Amazon workers were enrolled in Snap in 2024.

The report noted Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to result in some 7.5 million Americans losing Medicaid and 4 million losing some or all of their Snap benefits after budget cuts.

First, corporations underpay front-line workers, who will, of necessity, turn to government assistance to survive, and then the federal government reduces the funds available for programs supporting the powerless. And neither the corporations nor the Feds step up to cover the shortfalls.

Share

A Duopoly of Wheelchairs

Leila Fadel of NPR reports on private equity-backed wheelchair manufacturers that, in recent years, have acquired dozens of smaller competitors, leading to a classic example of corporatocracy: two competitors acting in concert to steer wheelchair users toward buying new wheelchairs by slowing repairs.

Fadel interviewed Megan Smith of Boston’s WGBH, following a local protest by wheelchair users:

SMITH: So the wheelchair users I’ve talked to say that 10, 15 years ago, there were a lot more options - a lot of mom-and-pop shops that they could go to where technicians got to know them personally. But that’s not the case anymore. The wheelchair repair market is now dominated by two companies - Numotion and National Seating & Mobility. Both companies are owned by private equity investment firms, and each has bought up dozens of companies and competitors.

Critics say the business model prioritizes profits and cost-cutting and that these companies take forever to fix people’s chairs. They’re investing more in the part of the company that brings in more revenue, which is selling new chairs rather than fixing old chairs. For example, critics say they don’t hire enough technicians to keep up with repair work. So I hear stories about people waiting three, five, nine months or more for a part. And the wheelchair users I talked with said the problem gets so frustrating at times that they sometimes order parts online or from a hardware store or even just go to their local bike shop for a fix.

There’s a bill pending at the Massachusetts legislature to require wheelchair repairs to take no more than 10 days, and Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a national bill in the US House.

So, another example of large corporations — that in this case should have been blocked from forming highly concentrated monopolies that only benefit their financial backers, and disadvantage the public — exerting their economic force to coerce customers to cough up money unnecessarily. And, even worse, these folks are blocked from living their lives, going to work, going to school, caring for loved ones, while their wheelchairs are sidelined for weeks or months.

Rather than just calling for regulation of the timeframe for repairs, we should be calling for these companies to be broken up on anti-trust grounds.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last forever. And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.

| Karl Jaspers

Let’s see… what sort of age are we in, I wonder? And what did we think was looming over the horizon, twenty years ago?

…

For a variety of reasons — some of which I hinted at in previous posts — I have been pushed off my normal routines. Forgive my absence.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety. I rely on your support, so thanks.

Short Takes

‘Dating’ at work?

Juno Kelly reports:

More than 90 percent of people who have had sex with a colleague didn’t regret it.

Higher than I would have expected.

…

But, meanwhile, no hugging.

Just 29% of Gen Z workers say casual hugs are acceptable in the workplace, while 28% say colleagues should stick to handshakes only, and 4% say there should be no touching at work, according to a survey from EduBirdie, an online writing service.

| Kevin J. Delaney

Well, no ‘casual’ hugs.

…

Americans can’t find jobs.

Americans can’t find jobs.

The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.

These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.

This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.

Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.

As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.

By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.

Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.

| The Kobeissi Letter

…

A China wind is blowing.

Keith Bradsher, Qilai Shen report on China’s dominance in wind power:

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

Share

Elsewhen

Because of changes in my work process, I have been uncovering and re-exploring old materials. I thought I’d share some things from the archive that were predictions or pronouncements about the future of work, and which largely haven’t panned out.

…

How Anti?

Reading Even With a Dream Job, You Can Be Antiwork1, by Farhad Manjoo, is a dizzying experience, since it was written in 2021, when employers were hiring like mad, and workers felt like the balance of power had shifted:

The world’s long-suffering workers have finally gained some measure of leverage over their bosses, and their new power is a glorious thing to behold.

In South Korea this week, tens of thousands of union members staged a one-day strike to demand better benefits and protections for temporary and contract workers. In Britain, where Brexit has contributed to severe shortages of goods and labor, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has been taking dubious credit for what he calls a new era of higher pay.

And in the United States, a record nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, according to the Labor Department, and more than 10 million positions were vacant — slightly down from July, when about 11 million jobs needed filling. The shortage of workers has led to a growth in wages that has surpassed many economists’ expectations, and seems to have discombobulated bosses who are used to employees leaping at their every demand.

How things have changed, in this brave new world.

Manjoo borrowed ‘antiwork’ from kathi weeks, the originator of the term, who shared this with him:

“The pandemic gave us a kind of forced separation from work and a rare critical distance from the daily grind,” Kathi Weeks, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, told me. “I think what you’re seeing with people refusing to go back is a kind of yearning for freedom.”

And remember the surge in Reddit’s /antiwork?

You can get a peek of a post-job world at /antiwork, a Reddit forum “for those who want to end work” that has gone viral in recent months, with hundreds of thousands following its subversive cause. /antiwork teems with posts from workers who are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore — including many screenshots from folks saying they are telling off their managers, quitting in a rage after years of abuse.

That rage has died down, a few years later (which seems like a lifetime, nowadays), now that we are in the ‘hire slow, fire slow’ era, and people are hunkered down, hoping to weather the storm of the 2020s economy.

Manjoo lands on a relatively mild and uninsightful truism:

Even a dream job is still a job, and in America’s relentless hustle culture, we have turned our jobs into prisons for our minds and souls. It’s time to break free.

Break free of what? Like most of those living inside the prison of work, he still wants to make it a personal quest, like people thinking they have to become more resilient instead of smashing the machinery that’s driving them like chattel.

…

The edge of chaos.

In 1999, Richard Pascale wrote Surfing on the Edge of Chaos2, making the argument that we were — then — entering a new era of ‘management science’.

I started out dubious, since he refers to the era immediately preceding — Michael Porter’s Five Factors and Competitive Advantage, and other now discredited models — as the ‘strategic era’. (At least he left out Clay Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation baloney.)

He states, [emphasis mine],

During the 1980s and 1990s, performance improvement (e.g., total quality management, kaizen, just-in-time, reengineering) succeeded the strategic era. It, too, has followed the S-curve trajectory. Now, as it trails off, an uneasiness is stirring, a feeling that “something more” is required. In particular, disquiet has arisen over the rapidly rising fatality rates of major companies. Organizations cannot win by cost reduction alone and cannot invent appropriate strategic responses fast enough to stay abreast of nimble rivals. Many are exhausted by the pace of change, and their harried attempts to execute new initiatives fall short of expectations.

The next point of inflection is about to unfold. To succeed, the next big idea must address the biggest challenge facing corporations today — namely, to dramatically improve the hit rate of strategic initiatives and attain the level of renewal necessary for successful execution. As in the previous eras, we can expect that the next big idea will at first seem strange and inaccessible.

So, did the unnamed ‘It’ succeed?

He names it: complex adaptive systems.

“Unlike the earlier advances in hard science,” writes economist Alex Trosiglio, “complexity deals with a world that is far from equilibrium, and is creative and evolving in ways that we cannot hope to predict. It points to fundamental limits to our ability to understand, control, and manage the world, and the need for us to accept unpredictability and change.

He spends a great many paragraphs outlining the interconnected notions of complexity, complex adaptive systems, and emergence. And while I confess that I was one of many who likewise looked to that body of science for insight and understanding for the world of work, my judgment in 2026 is that it has not meaningfully percolated into the average Fortune 1000 company, nor has it notably formed a new ‘era’ for management strategy that had moved into wide use. There may be a large cadre of consultants, academics, and even within-the-walls-of-the-corporation practitioners, but it is hard to see foundational change in management thinking across the board, alas.

His characterization of ‘old’ management approaches sound a lot like today’s management approaches:

As executives move up in organizations, they become removed from the work that goes on in the fields. Directives from the top become increasingly abstract as executives tend to rely on mechanical cause-and-effect linkages to drive the business: strategic guidelines, head-count controls, operational expense targets, pay-for-performance incentives, and so forth. These are the tie rods and pistons of “social engineering” — the old model of change.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

| Bob Dylan1

…

I’ve been distracted this past week, partly because of a menagerie of visitors passing through in homage to my mother-in-law, Erna Hoover, who celebrated her 100th birthday last Friday. With all the comings and goings, I was pulled away from my daily patterns, which can be both positive and negative simultaneously.

The pleasant distraction of the World Cup, and great conversations with family and friends led me back to Dylan’s observation that time is actually standing still while we are the ones moving, an echo of ‘time is a flat circle’ from True Detective. Everybody I spoke to — even 100-year-old Erna — spoke about where they are headed, new directions and new impulses.

And I discovered a new move that I will be making, in a series of discussions with one of my sons, Blake. You’ll be hearing more about that soon.

In the larger context of the Dylan quote about being 80, he also wrote about attaining freedom ‘from the lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore.’

Well, I realized that I am not 80 — or 100 — and I still have a parade or two left in me. More to follow.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

AI Threatens The Back Office

Ben Casselman reports2 on a group that may be more vulnerable to displacement by AI than the often-discussed, higher-degreed knowledge workers like IT staff, lawyers, consultants, and radiologists: namely, back-office workers:

Many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers: customer service representatives, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs.

These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one — much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalization and automation wiped many of them away.

“I worry that A.I. will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,” said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organization focused on A.I.’s impact on workers and the economy.

Like manufacturing in the early 2000s, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (leading to what is known as China Shock 1.0), Kinder is referring to the potential for outsourcing back-office jobs that provide a possible path to the middle class for many:

“If you think about the back office, that’s not the main function of the company, so they might think of it as a cost center,” said Jung Ho Choi, an accounting professor at Stanford.

Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures of A.I. exposure based on the makeup of the total work force, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and frontline roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list.

“The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks,” said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper’s authors. “They’re not computer scientists or data scientists at all.”

Widely cited measures of A.I. exposure, she added, “give the wrong impression” about who will be most affected — and, in particular, tend to understate the impact on people without college degrees, older workers and people of color.

[...]

“My worry is that the lesson from deindustrialization is that many of these women will be able to get another job, but it might be a much worse job,” Ms. Kinder said. “It might be more precarious.”

This is parallel to the IT revolution of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when typists, filing clerks, bookkeepers, and secretaries were displaced by office suites, email, and web services.

And even if AI comes on slowly enough for these millions of workers to make a transition to the new economy, so long as they get the chance to gain skills to take the next step on a new career ladder, like a receptionist moving into human resources.

If A.I. eliminates that middle step, it could be harder for workers to move up the career ladder, said Justin Heck, a coauthor on a recent article with Mr. Muro.

“What happens if we’re no longer building those skills on the job? Where is there available to move up?” Mr. Heck asked. “What are the ramifications three years from now, when workers remain stranded in low-wage work, and employers are struggling to fill high-wage roles because we’ve carved out the middle?”

What, indeed.

…

Meanwhile

Tech workers not using AI are three times more likely to be laid off, according to Gallup:

In the same survey, only 1% of laid-off workers claim AI was the reason. But consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas reported in March that AI had been cited in over 12,000 job cuts in the U.S.

Maybe people were laid off without being told AI was the supposed reason?

Share

Short Takes

The Luddites are back.

In Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI, Brian Merchant writes

The Luddites are back in fashion, but too many people still get them all wrong. This is what they really stood for, fought against, and why they matter now more than ever.

I haven’t read it all yet, but looks like a long and detailed treatment of what neo-Luddism is, or might become, not just a Wikipedia entry on loom smashing.

…

Nothing about us, without us.

I’ve downloaded this report from CircleForward.us, entitled Nothing About Us, Without Us: A Protocol for Decision-Making with Consent. May be more material for my series on Deciding How To Decide.

…

Something You Buried Might Still Be Breathing

Circling back to the teaser at the top of this issue — where I wrote that I ‘still have a parade or two in me’ — I am reading and rereading this post by Anna from Back to Senses, who describes herself as the human equivalent of a psychedelic, entitled Something You Buried Might Still Be Breathing.

She warns that ‘the word reinvention is a little misleading’, and when I read a few paragraphs down, I felt like I’d fallen into a deep well [emphasis hers]:

Here’s the thing: the thing you set down doesn’t leave. It goes quiet, but it doesn’t go away. It often shows up as a small persistent pull toward something you can’t quite justify. A faint ache when you see someone else doing the thing you used to do. A restlessness that doesn’t respond to any of the reasonable fixes. We’re very good at not noticing these signals, or noticing them and looking away, because they don’t add up on paper and we’ve built whole lives on the principle of only taking seriously the things that add up on paper. But the not-adding-up is sometimes the most honest information you’ve got. It’s the part of you that was overruled, still filing its objection.

There’s a catch in all this, which is that the part you’re listening for doesn’t speak the language you’re listening in. We usually go looking for it the way we look for everything — by thinking more. We sit down and try to reason our way to it, make a list, weigh the options, wait for it to present a coherent case. But it doesn’t deal in thoughts. It deals in energy, in flow, in the particular and slightly embarrassing joy of doing something for no reason. It shows up as experience, not as argument. Which means you can’t usually find it by sitting still and reflecting harder. You find it by doing things and watching what happens to you while you do them.

So the better instrument isn’t analysis, but paying attention.

Again, more to follow.

Takeaway:

The part you’re listening for doesn’t speak the language you’re listening in.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

| H.L. Mencken (1920)

…

One hundred years later, Mencken’s prophecy has been borne out.

While we have to concede that Trump has a ‘feral genius’1 for turning grievance into a political movement (like other authoritarian populists), and thereby getting himself elected, he’s clearly out of his depth when trying to actually steer the nation in a positive direction, to put it mildly. Less mildly, he’s a ‘downright moron’, which he has demonstrated over and over again: the tariffs, ICE, gerrymandering, antagonizing our allies and trading partners, and most notably, an absolutely unnecessary war with Iran that will cost us $100 billion at the minimum, with absolutely none of the supposed war aims met.

And, to top it off, the ludicrous UFC fights staged on the White House lawn, yesterday. I couldn’t even bring myself to hate-watch it.

Everyone Hates Data Centers, But Isn’t AI the Real Culprit?

It seems that every day, I encounter another story about growing opposition to data centers, ranging from citizens shouting at their elected local officials at town halls, to states barring their construction after dozens or hundreds have already been built.

To me, though, that’s akin to blaming sewing machines for the fast fashion trend. Yes, sewing machines are employed to make all those cheap, and unsustainable clothes, but the root cause are the businesses that have souped up supply chains to smother the world in a glut of throwaway clothing.

Shouldn’t our anger and opposition be directed to the tech companies contracting for all this computing power, instead of the buildings housing the bazillion server racks that AI requires?

Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about data center hatred2, recently [emphasis mine]:

Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction. Last week, lawmakers in New York passed a statewide pause on large-scale data centers; other states, including Maryland and Michigan, could be next.

According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

She goes on to make an impassioned case for the Democrats mobilizing this anger as a central aspect of their platform. She cites some Democrats efforts versus data centers:

Senator Elizabeth Warren has made a proposal that focuses on taxation of A.I. firms and mandating transparency about how the A.I. boom is shaping companies’ financial risks. All of these are good-faith attempts to respond to voters’ anger, but Warren’s message is too wonky to match the moment.

Senator Bernie Sanders has gone further, floating a big idea that’s consistent with his brand of democratic socialism. He called for a national data center moratorium and labor protections for workers displaced by A.I., and he is proposing the “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” to give the American public shared ownership, and therefore control, over A.I.’s expansion and its profits. But, Alex Hanna, director of the Distributed A.I. Research Institute, told me that a wealth fund act would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance. This is the risk of treating A.I. as something that is as important as humans discovering fire and inventing the wheel. That’s zealotry. It has no place at a tent revival.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California are going after data centers with an organizer’s flair for spectacle and an anti-oligarchy message. Khanna has called data centers extractive and uses them as justification for his proposed wealth tax.

This all feels like a rear-guard action to me. Apparently, the Democrats have ceded the high-ground of AI’s inevitability to the Tech Overlords. She spells that out, to some degree:

Data center infrastructure is a marriage of the technology and energy sectors. Separately, the two industries are economic powerhouses; united, they are a behemoth. A.I. interests are well on their way to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on state and federal elections in this midterm cycle, when there are far too few competitive races to influence. The A.I. industry’s deep pockets are making candidates on the left and the right cagey.

Important, too, is the seductive cultural narrative that flows from the pro-data center camp. A powerful bench of celebrity C.E.O.s, exuberant financiers, developers and futurists consistently present artificial intelligence as an inevitable technology Americans must adopt, lest they be left behind. If you accept the inevitability thesis, you are likely to believe that data centers are necessary and public dissent is naïve or, worse, un-American.

To which I say fuck them, and fuck that shit. Instead of bracing for lifelong membership in Jasmine Sun’s ‘permanent underclass’, or tinkering around the edges with anti-data center protests, we should demand AI regulation so that jobs are not lost in order to make billionaires richer.

China — of all places — is leading in this fight, as reported3 by Catie Edmondson:

When a Chinese court ruled late last month that a tech company had illegally laid off a worker after replacing him with artificial intelligence software, it delivered an implicit warning to other employers.==

“The development of artificial intelligence technology should be applied to liberating labor, promoting employment and improving people’s livelihood,” the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court wrote. “Labor law allows employers to undertake technological changes and upgrade their operations, but it should also take into account the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and interests.4

The case — the third time the Chinese government has highlighted a ruling siding with workers displaced by A.I. — underscores how Beijing is contending with the need to balance its ambitions for the widespread use of A.I. with the unemployment that might accompany it.

China has invested billions to become an artificial intelligence superpower and raced to integrate the technology across a broad range of industries. But those aspirations have run headlong into a growing political problem: anxiety over the workers who could be displaced by the realization of Beijing’s technological drive.

This issue is singularly acute for China, where more than 200 million workers are stuck in gig economy work, with a weaker safety net than in the US. Youth unemployment is 17% there, and growing. Instead of considering universal basic income — as is being discussed in South Korea, Japan, and the UK — China’s courts are taking a hard line on employers: you can deploy AI, but don’t use it to cut jobs.

Again, Edmondson:

The three court rulings have offered an early glimpse of what that response might look like. In each case, the court said employers remained responsible for keeping workers on the payroll, even if A.I. had rendered their jobs redundant. Judges have repeatedly ruled that replacing workers with A.I. is voluntary cost-cutting that does not justify mass layoffs.

Chinese policymakers appear eager for both workers and employers to get the message. The Hangzhou ruling in favor of the tech worker replaced by A.I. was given a special designation signaling that it should serve as a model for future cases.

In that case, an employee identified in filings only by the pseudonym Zhou had worked as a quality assurance supervisor at an A.I. company until the technology replaced him. When the company offered him a new role that would cut his salary to 15,000 renminbi per month from 25,000, he refused and was fired. The court ruled his employer had failed to properly accommodate him.

We should emulate China, as soon as is possible.

In earlier eras, US unions fought for similar resolution of job-killing technological advance. For example, the International Typographical Union (ITU) was part of the Columbia Typographical Union (CTU) which at its peak had over 120,000 members.

In 1974, the [Washington] Post had about 1,000 printers on the payroll, working some 700 “situations.” But another revolution in printing was taking place and the Linotype machines and the jobs involving hands-on contact with pieces of type begin to disappear.

With some sections already converted from “hot metal,” Post CTU members in 1974 signed their first contract to include a “lifetime job guarantee” that recognized the inevitable disappearance of their craft.

Decades later, only a few hundred ‘printers’ remained, having made the transition from Linotype to cut-and-paste compositing and photography, and then to computer layout software.

But that approach allowed a social transition without dumping 100,000s of ‘printers’ onto the streets. Somewhere between that union-led generational retreat, and Chinese judicial policy to hold onto all jobs threatened by AI, is a human-first answer to the looming AI jobs apocalypse.

If we leave it to the Tech Bros and the corporate finance corps, millions might be laid off over the next decade. We need more time — more breathing room — and a better response than is being offered by even the most left-wing progressives.

Share

Short Takes

Brace yourself for bad news.

In The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter on X) June 14, 2026 we learn some bad news:

Americans can’t find jobs.

The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.

These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.

This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.

Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.

As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.

By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.

Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, our federal government is firing workers, closing agencies, and cancelling Joe Biden’s efforts toward industrial policy.

We are on a sharply downward trend.

…

What about bringing back manufacturing jobs?

Back in January, David Uberti looked at factory jobs in the US:

The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended.

Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023.

An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office.

This is one part of a larger trend: a decline in blue-collar jobs:

It’s not a pretty picture.

…

Young people can’t get started.

Molly Jong-Fast was writing about commencement speakers being booed5 when they waxed lyrical about the wondrous future of AI, but she dropped some stats, too:

Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a “ looming crisis in entry-level work,” and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they’re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” and “never files H.R. complaints.” (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)

According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time.

Time to smash the looms?

Share workfutures.io

Read more

I want to be the owner of my own trouble.

| Louise Bourgeois

…

Bourgeois’ quote reminded me of the distinction between positive and negative liberty, as delineated by Isaiah Berlin.

There are supporters of “negative” liberty, best defined as freedom not to be interfered with. Negative liberties ensure that no person can seize his neighbour’s property by force or that there are no legal restrictions on speech. Then there are backers of “positive” liberty, which empowers individuals to pursue fulfilling, autonomous lives—even when doing so requires interference. Positive liberty might arise when the state educates its citizens. It might even lead the government to ban harmful products, such as usurious loans (for what truly free individual would choose them?).

| The Economist, Berlin, Rawls and Nozick

I suppose Bourgeois’ wish is an example — perhaps a shining example — of the overlap of negative and positive liberty: the freedom to be unmolested while pursuing a ‘fulfilling, autonomous’ life.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

Short Takes

Employer concentration is an enormous social ill.

Large corporations are both keeping their low-wage employees at or below the poverty line, and playing the American public as suckers, since our taxes are diverted to provide a social safety net for them, as Michael Sainato reports:

Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a new report released Wednesday [March 04, 2026].

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.

These corporations should be regulated to pay a living wage. We should raise minimum wages, and impose additional regulations and taxes on giant corporations acting as cartels to immiserate the most powerless. More links in the footer.

…

ChatGPT Health.

ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.

OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPT to limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.

The first independent safety evaluation of ChatGPT Health, published in the February edition of the journal Nature Medicine, found it under-triaged more than half of the cases presented to it.

| Melissa Davey, ‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies

Isn’t this one of the areas where LLMs were supposed to excel?

…

Speaking of health care.

Jena McGregor reports that some young, healthy workers are opting out of employer health-care plans:

Some 61% of workers who have the option to enroll in a company health plan did so in 2025, down from 64% in 2020, according to health policy organization KFF.

Workers dropping employer-based health insurance cite rising costs, and experts warn employers may see health-care costs rise if plans lose too many young, healthy members.

Economists warned this would happen as health care costs continue to rise, even for those with employer-provided plans. If we had universal healthcare this would not be an issue, note.

…

The case for year-round daylight saving time.

Staying on daylight saving time year-round would prevent an estimated 36,550 collisions between deer and vehicles, whereas staying on standard time would add 73,660 of these collisions every year — a difference of more than 100,000. The human toll of staying on standard time would also be significant: Compared with year-round daylight saving time, year-round standard time would cause 100 more deaths, 6,000 more injuries and at least $3.5 billion in costs every year through increased deer-vehicle collisions alone.

Of course, having more crashes with deer is far from the only cost of standard time. The number of fatal traffic accidents at night — caused by deer or anything else — is three times as high as it is during the day, and in the dark the risk of pedestrian accidents is up to seven times as high. Permanent daylight saving time would prevent 366 fatal pedestrian and vehicle accidents a year with the help of brighter evenings during the four and a half months of the year we currently spend on standard time. Conversely, staying on standard time for an extra 7.5 months each year would add about 610 fatalities — a difference of nearly 1,000 human lives.

| Laura Prugh

Year-round standard time shouldn’t even be considered.

…

Got milk?

More than 750,000 immigrants left the U.S. labor force during the first half of 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, creating a growing challenge for industries that rely heavily on those workers. Dairy farming is near the top of that list: Immigrants make up more than half of that sector’s labor force.

Another administration could have promised that shifting away from immigrant labor would deliver real benefits without misleading Americans about the nature of those benefits. It could have sought to help family farms — for example, by providing low-cost financing for automation. It could have dealt openly and fairly with immigrants who will continue to milk many of the nation’s cows for years to come.

| Binyamin Appelbaum, 2026-02-09 Trump Wants More Jobs for Americans. He’s Getting More Robots Instead.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison.

| M Gessen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

…

Gessen uses the lens of history to shrink our experience to inconsequence. But others have shared a different take on history making us feel small, like Gary Greenberg:

History’s wheel is indifferent, not unlike cancer or a cheating spouse, and can crush us willy-nilly. Which means, I hear myself saying to my own surprise and dismay, that it falls upon us to cultivate helplessness. That’s not to say we should cultivate inaction or nihilism. It’s to say that we really have no choice but to recognize just how tiny we are, and how much we therefore need one another, and in uncertain times even more. Our minds, as glorious as they are, cannot tell us the future, nor save us from it. The uncertainty we live in right now is only a reminder that this is our lot.

Realizing we are tiny can bring us together.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 from $6. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

Excel and Accountants

Courtesy of Mike Zaccardi, this chart tracks the increase in accountants following the release of Excel 5.0:

Zaccardi mentions this as an example of Jevons paradox — where efficiency gains paradoxically lead to an increase in resource use1 —, saying:

In 1993, Microsoft released Excel 5.0 for Windows, opening up near-unlimited possibilities for automating repetitive tasks, crunching numbers, and presenting data. The result has been more accountants, not fewer.

Share

What Are We Doing To Kids?

We are making them nearsighted and short-attention spanned.

Unlimited smartphone use among children is leading to an epidemic of myopia.

| Emma Tucker

…

A systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory. In the chart below, you can see a consistently negative, if also heterogeneous, relationship between heavy short-form video use and problems with attention, memory, and control.

Source: Nguyen, et al

Several studies in the meta-analysis reported structural and functional differences in the prefrontal cortex and reward circuits among high-frequency users, while others found cognitive flexibility reductions and altered dopaminergic reward responses. None of this proves causation. But taken together, they suggest a plausible mechanism: a daily diet of hyper-rewarding, rapid-fire stimuli may gradually reshape attention and regulatory systems in ways that weaken our attentional control. It is, of course, possibly that people with weaker cognitive control are simply more drawn to slot-machine media in the first place.

| Derek Thompson

Share workfutures.io

Data Center Building Overtakes Office Construction

Via Paul Kedrosky [emphasis mine]:

• Data center construction spending passed office spending for the first time in December 2025, crossing at roughly $3.5B monthly.

• Office construction has fallen ~35% from its 2020 peak.

• Data center spend is up 5x since 2020, with the curve steepening sharply in late 2024.
  

Data center spending in the U.S. just crossed over office construction spending. Granted, office construction spending has been declining for years — down roughly 35% from its 2020 peak — but data center construction is up 5x over the same period.

The Census data excludes racks and servers, so this is purely structural construction: concrete, steel, power infrastructure, cooling systems, etc. That makes the numbers more meaningful, not less. The physical footprint of AI compute is now larger than the physical footprint of white-collar office work, at least as measured by monthly construction spending.

The acceleration in the back half of 2024 and into 2025 is impressive. The curve isn’t linear: it steepened sharply as hyperscaler capex commitments made in 2023 and early 2024 translated into actual ground-breaking.

The office line, meanwhile, has no obvious bottom. Remote and hybrid work permanently destroyed a layer of demand that is not coming back. And AI is changing the shape and scope of future white-collar work. Capital is really and truly replacing labor, in multiple ways.

| Paul Kedrosky, Chart of the Day: Data Centers vs Office Construction

A strange inflection point: more places to park hardware, fewer places to park people.

Read more

One of the truisms of human life is that the older you are, the more you live in the past.

| Walter Mosley, The Art of Fiction No. 234

…

A bunch of what I write about, below, is from the beforetimes. But I am not sharing a nostalgic view: I want us to learn from the past, which we don’t seem to be doing.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

It’s Going To Get Worse

Around 10% of lower-income households are now spending over 10% of their income on gas.

| Benzinga

I can recall the gas rationing established during the gas crisis of 1973 (odd-even days at gas stations1), Among other outcomes, the national 55 mile-an-hour speed limit was imposed2, and the strategic petroleum reserve was established. Fuel rationing led to violence, as truckers protested high prices.

This time around, though, despite the fact that Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the US (and Israel) — not OPEC — has to be considered the cause of the rise in the price of oil, and subsequently, the price at the pump.

Remember, the OPEC countries cut production of oil and embargoed the US in 1973 because of Nixon’s request of $2.2 billion to support Israel’s Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria, which the Arab allies started in October 19733. And, now, in 2026, we are suffering another oil embargo.

And, as usual, the poorest Americans will be the ones most severely harmed by soaring gas prices.

Share

Weaselspeak

Clive Thompson turned me onto this hilarious tool:

I don’t know who did this, but someone made a little Kagi translator that takes a normal English sentence and translates it into the clotted weaselspeak one finds in the average LinkedIn post.

It’s unsettlingly good …

Clotted weaselspeak = LinkedIn. LOL.

I wonder if it works in reverse?

Share workfutures.io

Factoids

It is the time of the clearing of the benches.

Reid J. Epstein, Ben Casselman report on March employment numbers:

Even in an era of surprising economic news, the numbers on Friday [March 6] were striking: Forecasters had anticipated a gain of around 50,000 jobs. Instead, employers cut tens of thousands of jobs, and what had looked like solid job growth in December was revised to show a loss. The unemployment rate continued a slow but steady rise.

…

Goodbye, middle management.

There are now nearly six individual contributors per manager at the 8,500 small businesses analyzed in a report by Gusto, which handles payroll for small and medium-sized employers. That’s up from a little over three in 2019.

| Emily Peck, Managers were already disappearing. Enter AI.

…

What?

Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex4 or forming partnerships. A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup. If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute.

| Christine Emba, The Reason Gen Z Isn’t Dating [emphasis mine]

An epidemic of childlessness, too.

…

The great pile-on.

Restructuring and layoffs have led to a “great pile-on” within organizations. Some 31% of workers say they have recently taken on extra work responsibilities, according to a survey from Wiley Workplace Intelligence, a workplace research firm. A majority of workers with new responsibilities say their workload increased following a restructuring or layoff.

| Kevin J. Delaney, How higher education must change to train tomorrow’s workers

See Goodbye middle management, above.

Read more

…

We cannot predict the full consequences of what we do, and so we should choose carefully and deliberately as we navigate the world. We should be modest in our ambitions, aware of our own fallibility and mindful of the way things can go wrong.

| Jamelle Bouie

…

It’s clear to me that many of our so-called leaders — political and economic —do not operate by Bouie’s admonition.

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the present time, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

So Much Money Building AI Infrastructure

Karen Weise adds up the hyperspending of the hyperscalers in A.I. Spending Sets a Record, With No End in Sight

In the first three months of the year, the four companies [Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta] reported in their financial results, they plowed a total of $130.65 billion into capital expenditures, largely spending on data centers that power A.I. That figure — which was another record — was more than three times what the Manhattan Project cost to develop nuclear bombs and 71 percent higher than what the tech giants spent in the same quarter a year earlier.

All of the companies said they would be spending even more, totaling roughly $700 billion this year. Meta, for one, raised its spending forecast for 2026 to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from its previous prediction of $115 billion to $135 billion. Google also boosted its projection, to at least $180 billion, and said its spending would be “significantly” higher next year.

Om Malik adds his observations about how much more is off the balance sheets:

What is also true is that funding is increasingly off the balance sheet, that supplier relationships are being prepaid, that lease commitments are being deferred for as long as accounting rules allow, and that a meaningful portion of the AI revenue and AI investment gains are flowing in a circle through the same small set of AI labs.

The platform shift is real. AI engineering is real. So is the financial engineering.

Let the good times roll.

Our economy is structured — by policy, not just market forces — so that these companies have this much money to bet on the AI lottery. Meanwhile, the federal debt just surpassed 2025 GDP, in part because these companies (and their billionaire owners) don’t pay very much in taxes.

Share

Ticketing Driverless Cars

It had to happen, I guess. Orlando Mayorquín reports:

Police officers in California will soon be able to issue traffic tickets to driverless cars like Waymo robotaxis and require their manufacturers to move them out of the way during emergencies.

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles adopted the new rules for autonomous vehicles this week, in accordance with a 2024 law that imposed more regulation on the technology.

The rules, which go into effect July 1, are designed to address some of the challenges that have vexed local governments and residents in places where driverless carmakers, like Waymo, have expanded their fleets.

What about driverless police cars issuing tickets?

AI Layoffs Starting To Hit India, Too

Steven Lee Myers, Paul Mozur, and Saumya Khandelwal looked at AI impacts in India:

For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers.

India grew a massive workforce as a low-cost alternative to office workers in the West. Now, we are seeing the impact on new grads, with the same calls to ‘upskill’ as we are seeing here:

The tremors are already being felt. Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s largest employers, has shrunk its work force to 580,000, a decline of more than 20,000 from a peak in 2022, when it hired 100,000 new workers in one year alone.

Its main rival, Infosys, has also slowed hiring, while dozens of smaller start-ups laid off workers across the country in 2025, according to Inc42, a digital economy news outlet in India.

Graduates of the country’s universities and technical colleges are finding fewer openings, forcing them to scramble to “upskill,” an increasingly popular term in the context of learning the A.I. technology that is reshaping the industry.

Maybe these giant service companies will start building their own data centers to lowball the cost of running AI models? At some point, it comes down to the cost of the chips and electricity, and with the growing concerns about data centers in the US, it might be more politically attractive to locate them on the other side of the planet.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

The pathology of decision-making in wars like this is that leaders often fall into sunk cost fallacies. Wars tend to go on well beyond the point when either side can attain a decisive advantage. At a certain point, leaders often want to believe that something will break their way simply if they persist, even though there’s no evidence of that happening.

| Michael Kofman, ‘Time Is Not on Russia’s Side’: A Q & A With Michael Kofman

…

Watching three wars at once — in Iran, Ukraine, and Lebanon — brings Kofman’s observation into high relief. His ‘wars like this’ was referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine, but Israel has been invading, occupying, and retreating in and out of Lebanon since 1978. And now, the US has gone to war with Iran. And the protagonists have fallen into the trap: desire is not a strategy.

These lessons are directly applicable to business, too. For example, look at the history of media mergers and acquisitions in the past few decades. Remember the $99 billion write off at AOL Time Warner? And the drunk-falling-down-the-stairs history of Time Warner since?

Subscribe now

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the rest of April, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

Grift, Plain and Simple

Financial shenanigans — especially those that increase debt for nebulous economies — are overwhelmingly bad, strategically, and only line the pockets of financiers.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about modern finance is that it fails on its own terms. Mergers and acquisitions tend to destroy value even as they sate the appetites of empire-building chief executives. In 2016, the Harvard Business Review highlighted “the rule confirmed by nearly all studies: M&A is a mug’s game, in which typically 70 percent to 90 percent of acquisitions are abysmal failures.”

| Oren Cass, The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way.

Share

Tech Layoffs Go Viral

Oracle lays off 18% of its workforce, around 30,000 people. Block laid off 40%, Snap 16%, Meta plans another 10% cut in May. Brian Elliott writes in Contagion:

Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Block’s Jack Dorsey and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are among the notable tech founders now racing to see who can make the most of the AI opportunity to transform work. They may also be in a contest to see who can be the most badass when it comes to cutting people.

Predictably, the contagion is spreading. The WSJ reports this week that Block’s CFO is fielding calls asking for their playbook. I’ve heard the same from a number of people in San Francisco: the tech bros are out to see who can get aggressive the fastest in transforming their business, damn the side effects.

More cuts in tech are coming. The narrative is taking hold: AI is a human replacement technology.

So guess what? All those economists and senior leadership who countered claims about AI as a job-killing tsunami by saying it would augment, not replace workers, workers who would be freed from drudgery and allowed to develop new skills, new sorts of work… well, it’s turning out to be bullshit, at least in large tech companies.

Brian Elliott argues that these large companies may be using AI as a smokescreen to reduce bureaucratic bloat. But he also cites BCG research that shows serious levels of projected disruption:

71 million jobs impacted by ‘high levels of task automation’: that’s half of the 150 million people working in the US, today.

And the BCG researchers attempt to square the circle saying that most jobs would be reshaped, not replaced, but that with this year’s AI tools. What about AI of 2027, or 2030?

…

As I have argued for over decades, just as soon as it is possible, businesses will cram AI into every nook and cranny, and displace workers without a second thought.

Unless we, the people — presumably through our elected representatives — stop them.

It is time for the Human Spring, when we collectively demand a moratorium on job displacement by AI, or else we may be standing in the ruins of a once-thriving (or at least muddling by) civilization.

Even though our governments seem to flubbing the fight against climate change, we must rise to the challenge of unfettered AI. And soon. Or else.

Share workfutures.io

The Fall of HR

Ashly Goodall zooms in on how HR is seemingly out of the loop while this is going on [emphasis mine]:

Today, the HR profession finds itself at a crossroads. Its traditional focus has been the supply of talent. It has concerned itself with hiring, compensation, promotion, and learning, all in service of ensuring that an organization has the right people in the right roles for as much of the time as possible. Where it has moved beyond this remit, it has tended to retain the perspective of the C-suite. So its work on culture has typically focused more on describing what a culture should be than on figuring out how one is made, or changed. And its work on performance has typically focused more on how to judge it than on how to generate it.

But much of this work is being automated. For better or worse, AI is now screening applicants, recommending salaries, suggesting e-learning, and writing performance reviews—and even where humans remain in the loop, much of the traditional work of HR is being hollowed out.

Meanwhile, many organizations appear increasingly indifferent to the idea that they owe anything to their employees. Layoffs abound once again. My former employer, Deloitte, is cutting PTO and parental leave for some part of its workforce. Workers are being summoned back to the office in ever sterner terms.

So the technical elements of HR are being done more and more by the machines, even as the human elements are devalued. I heard recently about an HR leader who asked his CEO if he could invest in a leadership development program. The CEO told him his job was to keep HR issues off the CEO’s desk—and that if he succeeded at this, he could invest in whatever programs he wished.

HR was always more like a police force than faculty, but increasingly, they are being marginalized as even the incredibly precarious 21st-century work detente between management and managees is fraying.

Read more

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.

| Fritz Perls

…

I am reading a fascinating book, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, by Eugenia Cheng, and she reintroduced me to some common logical fallacies, such as one possible misinterpretation of Fritz Perls statement above. Reread it. It may seem implicit that someone — maybe everyone — is in the world to live up to their own expectations, even if not having to live up to others’. But you can’t surmise that from Perls’ line.

To reach that conclusion, you need an additional, independent statement: we are in the world to live up to our own expectations, and not those of others. But that is an emotional response to Perls’ aphorism, not a logical one, Chang shows us. Her example is the statement ‘when you tell students they have to work hard in order to do well, and then they think that if they work hard they should automatically do well. Working hard is a necessary but not sufficient to doing well. It is not sufficient because you also have to work hard in the right sort of way, and if you think otherwise, you are making a converse error.’

But Perls may not have been implying anything about living up to our own expectations: it may just be us inferring that, driven by emotion rather than logic.

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the rest of April, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

Subscribe now

A Managee’s 1:1 Guide

I am always a bit dubious when senior managers give advice to managees, especially when couched as ‘what top performers do differently’, so I confess I read Polina Russell’s The Employee’s Ultimate Guide to 1:1s - What Top Performers Do Differently with trepidation. But after a quick scan, I returned to the top, very intrigued by her practicality, and I gave it a deep read.

I agree that managees (or ICs — individual contributors — in her dialect) should prepare for 1:1s, considering the purpose and problems inherent to close interaction with managers. (The subtext is the relational and political matrix in which everyone at work is embedded, which Russell mostly leaves unstated. She spent 14 years at Amazon, which is a jungle.)

One of the most helpful parts is the section What not to do in a 1:1. For example:

2 Do not use 1:1 as therapy

4 Don’t write an essay

5 Don’t give your manager action items

Her conspiratorial tone in the final paragraphs is a bit arch, but work relations are not tiddlywinks. Remember, there is a low-scale war underneath it all, between managees and their bosses, and between managees, upwardly striving:

If you apply this guide to your 1:1s consistently, you will stand out. Most people don’t do this. Which is good news for you.

ICs (individual contributors): keep this as your edge. Don’t share with anyone.

Managers: remove that edge and send it to your team.

Everybody keeping everybody off balance, at every turn.

Share

Think Small

Talya Minsberg reports on a study of athletes that shows focusing on ‘process goals’ — ‘small objectives that were more in my control’ — than ‘outcome goals’, such as her efforts to run her fastest time ever in a marathon.

The rationale is that while big goals can be motivating, the reality is that a great deal of what makes big outcomes big — like winning a race — are out of our control:

Many people naturally gravitate toward ambitious goals that are the traditional markers of success, like landing a dream job or winning an award.

These kinds of targets can be highly motivating, said Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. But, she cautioned, whether you actually achieve them is usually at least partially out of your control.

That’s not all bad. Outcome goals can get you off the blocks, she said. But if you miss your target, she said, falling short can be profoundly disappointing. Had I been singularly focused on running a certain time in Boston, for example, “Well, that may be your last marathon,” she said.

Experts recommend instead focusing on your own performance, building a plan to improve, without ‘normative comparison’, which is measuring yourself against others. She cites the advice of Charles Duhigg, the author of Supercommunicators and The Power of Habit:

“A goal is only useful inasmuch as it helps develop a plan for you,” said Charles Duhigg, the author of “Supercommunicators” and “The Power of Habit.”

If done correctly, he said, once you have a plan in place, you won’t think too much about the goal.

Duhigg used the example of writing a book, which, as he knows well, can be daunting if you try to take in the whole picture at once. But the smaller goals — writing the opening of one chapter, and then the middle of another chapter — are what get you there. “If you just spend enough time sitting there doing these little bits and pieces, you end up with a book,” he said. “The book is the natural byproduct of the plan.”

So, frame your goal as a plan, not as an outcome.

Share workfutures.io

Never Invented

A 2024 Harris Poll survey of about 1,000 Gen Z adults in the US found that almost half of respondents said they wished social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter) were “never invented.” And 21% said they wished the smartphone had never been invented.

| Sydney Bradley

Read more

…

In capitalism, the future is an asset and it’s already been sold.

| Total Refusal, Hardly Working (around 14 minutes in.)

…

A great video by the artist collective Total Refusal.

I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for the rest of April, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30. Note that I’ve also raised the monthly subscription to $10 per month from $6 per month. Give annual a try. The biggest value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety.

Subscribe now

The Fall of Pax Americana

The numbers are clear: war is on the rise, globally, and not just this month.

From 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged fewer than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year. As states increasingly disregard limits on the lawful use of force, this may be just the beginning of a deadly new era of conflict.

| Oona A. Hathaway, The Great Unraveling Has Begun

What will it add up to by the end of 2026?

According to the projections, an estimated 28,300 people will be killed in Ukraine in 2026, while 7,700 deaths are forecast in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and 4,300 in Sudan.

| Study warns thousands likely to die in global conflicts in 2026

Ukraine, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Myanmar, and whatever is coming next. The world contains at least 31 million refugees, and we are creating more all the time.

Share

The Rise of China

China has managed to stay out of military conflicts, while Russia and the US are up to their armpits in them. What has China been doing, instead?

Already, China’s economy is roughly 30 percent larger than the United States’ by purchasing power, its industrial base twice as large, its power generation twice as high, and its navy is on track to become 50 percent larger by the end of this decade. It leads in new technologies like electric vehicles and next-generation nuclear reactors while the United States increasingly depends on it [China] for everything from antibiotics to rare-earth minerals.

| Rush Joshi

China announced on Wednesday the world’s largest trade surplus ever, even adjusting for inflation, as a tsunami of exports flooded markets around the world last year.

China’s surplus, the value of goods and services it sold abroad versus its imports, reached $1.19 trillion, an increase of 20 percent from 2024, according to data released by the country’s General Administration of Customs. The number had already exceeded $1 trillion through November.

The country’s surplus is still widening: For December alone, China’s surplus reached $114.14 billion, propelled by surging exports to the European Union, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. It was the third-highest monthly surplus on record, trailing only January and June last year.

The enormous trade surplus for the full year came despite efforts by President Trump to use tariffs to contain China’s factories. The tariffs reduced China’s trade surplus with the United States by 22 percent last year. But Chinese factories increased sales to other regions, in many cases bypassing American tariffs by shipping goods to the United States through Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

| Keith Bradsher, China Announces Record Trade Surplus as Its Exports Flood World Markets

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and flowers. China has persistent problems, like the massively overbuilt housing sector which had harmed individual investors, banks, and regional governments that financed the glut. Older workers find themselves pushed out jobs because of institutionalized agism. Young workers are growing disillusioned by a stagnating economy, as reported by Joy Dong, Max Kim:

In past decades, China’s rapid economic growth lifted 800 million people out of poverty and gave rise to a flourishing middle class. But, analysts say, growth and wages have since stagnated, and prospects for social mobility have dimmed. For many young people, the once-idealized life of striving now evokes drudgery, exhaustion and disappointment.

Those sentiments are reflected in the backlash to “996” culture — the expectation of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, promoted by prominent figures in the country’s tech sector. They can also be seen in online descriptions of modern life as “garbage time,” an American sports term for the final minutes of a game, when the outcome is already decided but players must still go through the motions.

This perspective explains the rise of an oddball meme, the Sad Toy Horse.

The plushie first appeared last year in a shop in eastern China. It has stumpy legs, a golden bell around its neck and lettering on its side that reads, “wishing you instant wealth.” It also bears a conspicuous manufacturing error: Its mouth is sewn upside down, turning what should have been a content smile into a picture of melancholy.

Known as the “crying horse,” the glum toy has become an online sensation in China ahead of the Lunar New Year, the country’s biggest holiday, which begins on Feb. 17. The “crying horse” hashtag has appeared more than 190 million times on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and inspired a winking joke: Take the crying version to work, leave the smiling one at home.

The toy’s sudden popularity has resonated beyond novelty. Many young Chinese workers have embraced it as a symbol of their exhaustion and disillusion.

“Its expression perfectly reflects the helplessness of an office worker,” Ms. Hao said. She bought four, two sad and two smiling.

China is no garden of Eden, but even with the sad toy horses — this is the year of the horse, there — and all the social ills of Chinese society, I have to confess that it’s apparent stability relative to what the US is up in geopolitics has its attractions. But I will have to add the caveat that China might use this time of invasions to occupy Taiwan, and that would figure given the strange calculus of 2026.

Share workfutures.io

More Independents in the US

Gallup reports on a political realignment in the US: more independent voters.

A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of U.S. adults — 27% each — identified as either Democrats or Republicans. … In most years since Gallup began regularly conducting its polls by telephone in 1988, independents have been the largest political group. However, the independent percentage has increased markedly in the past 15 years, typically registering 40% or higher, a level not reached prior to 2011.

The higher rate of political independence also results from younger adults today being more likely than young adults in the past to identify as independents. The 56% of Gen Z adults identifying as independents today compares with 47% of millennials in 2012 and 40% of Gen X adults in 1992.1

Taking into account Americans’ party identification and political leanings, an average of 47% identified as Democrats or said they were independents who lean toward the Democratic Party, while 42% identified as Republicans or leaned Republican. This breaks a three-year stretch in which Republicans held an edge in party affiliation.

US voters are growing increasingly dissatisfied with both major political parties.

Read more

The fish is in the water, but the water’s also in the fish.

| Arthur Miller

…

There’s a famous line mistakenly attributed to Marshall McLuhan — ‘We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us’ — actually penned by a friend of his, Father John Culkin. It seems that AI is having such an effect on those that use it, and the greatest impact on those that use it the most. And of course, the systems of work are tools (or a tool) as well.

Are we the fish or the water?

Subscribe now

Work Is Not Neutral

I have often said that work in interconnected to everything in our society, and cannot be understood as a thing in isolation, but I have not expressed as clearly as Corinne Murray does, here [emphasis mine]:

The way modern work functions—and what it demands of us—is a byproduct of our cultural and moral frameworks. Underneath all of what we see playing out in our daily lives lies deep-seated religious and secular ideologies that define productivity as a virtue, suffering as a necessity, and worth as something that can only be earned through effort and performance.

If a better future were possible without confronting the depths and power of these systems, we would have arrived in it already. Instead, we’ve only redesigned and rebranded the surface features while leaving the underlying beliefs untouched and unexamined–guaranteeing that the same old outcomes will play out under a different name.

Even if we could isolate modern work in the United States from…everything else…the conditions of modern work are far from ideal. Burnout rates climb to new heights annually. Gen Z still can’t find entry-level work. Parents—primarily women—are leaving the workforce because of childcare shortages and return-to-office mandates. The elderly are working retail to supplement fixed incomes. All while the wealth disparity between billionaires and the rest of us exceeds that of the Gilded Age, and the last vestiges of America’s social safety net get swept away for more tax breaks for them. These are not isolated crises. These are features of our reality, not flaws.

| Corinne Murray, Work Has Never Been Neutral

And they point out we are implicated in the workings of these systems:

Most of us participate in these systems because choosing not to comes at great personal cost, and one we’re rarely allowed to acknowledge. Regardless of our belief and endorsement of what is happening, our participation makes us complicit—willingly or not—in exchange for some semblance of stability and comfort.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel tells us,

In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty; all are responsible.

One of our tasks is to name those who are guilty, but to accept we are implicated as well. Murray ends with this:

Awareness doesn’t change the fact that we still must participate to survive, but it removes the illusion that unquestioned participation is neutral. Continuing to look away from these systems and their implications is an active choice of disengagement and the grave consequences for all of us.

Breaking through these illusions requires confrontation, and I ask that you stay with me as I do that.

I strongly encourage others to follow Murray. Here’s some background.

Share

A Burnout Machine

Connie Loizos reports on recent research published in HBR1 that was based on on-the-job observation at a 200-person tech company. Loizos puts the thesis of AI as

The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins.

But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.

The UC Berkeley researchers detailed the time sink that AI become:

In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.

While this may sound like a dream come true for leaders, the changes brought about by enthusiastic AI adoption can be unsustainable, causing problems down the line. Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown and feel stretched from juggling everything that’s suddenly on their plate. That workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.

The researchers detailed the slippery slope of work intensification. Because AI tools can cover for a person’s knowledge gaps, workers began taking on responsibilities that formerly others would have done, like product managers starting to write code. This led to those others having to review that AI-augment output, like engineers reviewing code written by product managers. And because it’s easy to start up an AI project, time that might have been used to rest and reflect was swallowed up by AI-centered or -supported work.

As the researchers — Aruna Ranganathan, Xingqi Maggie Ye — stated the momentum of AI as a ‘partner’ becomes a rollercoaster ride

While this sense of having a “partner” enabled a feeling of momentum, the reality was a continual switching of attention, frequent checking of AI outputs, and a growing number of open tasks. This created cognitive load and a sense of always juggling, even as the work felt productive.

Over time, this rhythm raised expectations for speed—not necessarily through explicit demands, but through what became visible and normalized in everyday work. Many workers noted that they were doing more at once—and feeling more pressure—than before they used AI, even though the time savings from automation had ostensibly been meant to reduce such pressure.

All of this produced a self-reinforcing cycle. AI accelerated certain tasks, which raised expectations for speed; higher speed made workers more reliant on AI. Increased reliance widened the scope of what workers attempted, and a wider scope further expanded the quantity and density of work. Several participants noted that although they felt more productive, they did not feel less busy, and in some cases felt busier than before. As one engineer summarized, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

The researchers suggest band-aids for management to minimize AI burnout, but the most important takeaway is from Loizos. While AI can augment what workers can do on their own

[The research] confirms it, then shows where all that augmentation actually leads, which is “fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise,” according to the researchers.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

Research is formalised curiosity. It’s poking and prying with purpose.

| Zora Neale Hurston

…

That’s what I’m up to. Poking and prying with purpose.

Subscribe now

Fed Employees Traumatized

Guess what? US federal agency heads characterizing federal employees as ‘the enemy’, trying to inflict ‘trauma’ on them, goading them to quit, and actively criticizing the goals of the federal agencies, results in a highly disengaged workforce. And that, in turn, leads to poor service delivery. So says the Partnership for Public Service in a new report -- the Public Service Viewpoint Survey -- and it reveals a ‘staggering collapse in employee engagement’ at the federal government, as Don Moynihan1 lays it out:

The headline figure is a government-wide Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Index Score of 32 out of 100. To put that in context: prior Best Places to Work scores, even at poorly rated agencies, rarely dropped below 50.

This is not a dip. It is a collapse.

The numbers are awful:

Here are the comparisons between 2024 and 2025 for larger agencies. The Department of the Army registered the highest score among large agencies — at just 48% out of 100 — with only 9% saying Secretary Pete Hegseth’s political team generates high levels of motivation. Every other large agency scored lower, some dramatically so. The average score by agency in 2024 is about 70% and 29.5% in 2025 — just over a 39 percentage point decline.

The picture at mid-size agencies is even worse. In 2024, the average score is 73% and in 2025 it is just over 25% — an astonishing 48 percentage point decline.

Of course, as in the private sector, poor engagement leads to lower productivity, higher churn rates, and worse service to clients. And for those in those jobs, it’s like living in a psychic prison. It may take a decade for the federal government to recover from this crisis.

Elizabeth Linos of the Harvard Kennedy School, comments on the survey results:

By any historical measure, the new data released yesterday by the Partnership for Public Service is documenting the worst employee engagement and workforce sentiment I’ve ever seen for the federal government. To put this into perspective: in a typical year, agencies work hard to get their engagement scores from the high 60s to the mid-70s or even into the 80s (if you’re NASA). This year, the average is 32. No federal agency is a “best place to work” at this point.

Share

Unsafe For Women

In the United States, women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured in vehicle crashes than men, and 17 percent more likely to die.

| Eve Van Dyke

Apparently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has resisted requiring crash test dummies that proxy for actual women. So, terrible stats, and we can’t expect them to get better soon.

Share workfutures.io

Shift Sulking

When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by increasing pressures to work with understaffed teams and subject to unpredictable schedules, it’s being called ‘shift sulking‘. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Jennifer Mattson reports:

Read more

Instead of a winner-takes-all approach to power, it’s time to consider working toward a system where there is much less power for the winner to take.

| Katherine Mangu-Ward, Libertarians: We Told You So

…

Mangu-Ward’s statement resonates loudly amid the war in Iran and the diminishing congressional oversight of war-making and public policy more generally.

My focus at workfutures.io is on work, not war, but the way corporations are capitulating to the Trump administration's encroachment on how businesses operate must remain high on the agenda here.

I’ve been writing and speaking about the future of work for over 30 years. Along the way, I’ve consulted with and written for Microsoft, IBM, Google, Dell, Cisco, and dozens more. In 2007, I coined the term ‘hashtag’ (yes, hashtag), and many other terms that have shaped the way we think about work, like ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, ‘work media’, and others. If you want to help me continue my work, consider a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Post-Liberal Conservatism

Vice President JD Vance has embraced the worldview many are calling ‘post-liberal conservatism’, as Thomas Edsall described it1:

Vance described his current way of thinking relatively early on in his transition to MAGA loyalist, at a 2023 event honoring the post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen. “We on the right, on the sort of the post-liberal right, the new right,” Vance said, “we are really, really kidding ourselves about the weight of the challenge, and when we talk about changing the regime.”

The corrupting power of liberalism, Vance argued, has infected both the public and private sectors:

The way that lobbyists interact with bureaucrats, interact with corporations — there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime; it is all fused together. It is all melded together. It is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio

In fact, Vance continued, “the regime is the public and private sector. It’s the corporate C.E.O.s, it’s the HR professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good.”

Vance and his ilk are committed to changing not just public policies or legislating new laws, but changing the culture of the American regime, including what business leaders are working toward, and who they work with to get there.

Edsall quotes Stephanie Slade of the libertarian magazine Reason as saying she

would sum up Vance’s view as follows: The left is willing to use all the power at its disposal — cultural as well as governmental — to impose its way of life on the American people, whether they like it or not, and so if conservatives are to have any hope of saving the country from left-wing tyranny, they must be willing to respond in kind.

This includes putting pressure on business leaders to support the post-liberal right’s agenda. So, out with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Out with secular liberalism. Out with corporate social responsibility.

That may involve dislodging a managerial elite characterized by post-liberal political theorist Patrick Deneen as ‘a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles and fixed social positions’.

Deneen expanded on that in Why Liberalism Failed:

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.

So, Vance and his cadre would like a new post-liberal managerial elite to take over American business, and to expunge any vestiges of liberal idealism and humanism.

Share

Following Japan Into Late-Stage Capitalism

Ellie (at Oceandrops) makes that argument that Japan has fallen into late-stage capitalism, and the US is following. She describes Japan’s ‘lost decade’ — the decades following the 1991 financial crisis there:

In 1991, the Bank of Japan tightened monetary policy, cooling speculation which triggered an enormous crash. Asset values plunged by over 80%, and the banks were left with bad loans. This event marked the beginning of the Lost Decade, a period of incredible stagnation that could be better called the Lost Decades — as it plagues the country to this day. Wages peaked in ‘97, the Yen depreciated, and household purchases have flatlined.

We have our own story to tell:

America’s “Lost Decade” started with the housing crisis of 2008, where subprime mortgages and the predatory financialization of consumer debt liquified the entire financial system.

Where the Japanese response to the financial crisis was slow and fragmented, the Americans aggressively flooded the economy with liquidity. TARP bailouts, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, and forced bank recapitalization helped Wall Street recover but not the ordinary American. Asset inflation benefited the rich, and everyone else was handed incredible wealth inequality.

And the social consequences in Japan have been many, and are echoing in America:

Japan has a term for “evil jobs” — ブラック企業 (Black Kigyo or Black Labor). These jobs enforce extreme overtime, unpaid labor disguised as “service overtime”, surveillance, and quotas. Workers internalize this obedience and labor abuse because the alternative is unemployment and social stigma.

(Translation) How to spot a Black Company: Understaffing, low pay, long hours, harassment.

Black kigyo companies comprise a significant portion of entry-level work, drastically altering working norms for young adults.

American analogues are now visible too. This November, the private sector lost 32,000 jobs.2 The pandemic-era white collar work bubble popped, and popped hard. Hiring is flat for the Class of 20263 as layoffs rise and AI takes over menial white collar labor. The American worker is being pushed into gig-worker exploitation, and human dignity violating work conditions. Even industries that were typically seen as relatively stable — healthcare and education — are experiencing major worker burnout.

Overwork is normalized. Karoshi (”death by overwork”) became a recognized cause of death in the 1980s. This includes heart attacks, strokes, and suicides linked to workplace abuses and poor life quality. If you visit Japan you may see signs of this normalized absurdity: salarymen collapsed in random public locations, Konbini selling shower-in-a-can, and people getting most of their calories at vending machines and subway station kissaten.

Asia Minute: Helping and Shaming Japan’s Drunk Salarymen | Hawai’i Public Radio

The average American, unfamiliar with Japanese social norms or cultural history, likely thinks this is some reflection of premodern Japanese values or ritual suicide traditions. It’s not.

Karoshi directly parallels emerging American trends in burnout-related deaths and mental-health collapse. Amazon, for example, had to make a public apology for denying their drivers the right to go to the bathroom.45

Sounds a lot like what is playing out in America circa 2026.

Share workfutures.io

Read more

…

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

| George Orwell

…

I feel that Orwell’s line reads better to my contemporary ears with a ‘just’ at the front and some paraphrasing: ‘Just to see what’s in front of your nose is a constant struggle’.

Struggle on!

Sundays Are The New Mondays

996 culture (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), a trend transplanted from China, has taken hold in Silicon Valley, according to Amanda Hoover:

As of last year, 5% of white-collar workers in the US logged on during the weekends, a 9% increase from 2023, according to an analysis of the habits of more than 200,000 employees and 777 companies conducted by ActivTrak, a workforce-analytics and productivity-software company. They clocked an average of about 5 hours and 30 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays, and those at mid-size companies of about 1,000 to 5,000 employees were the most likely to work weekends. In 2024, people with bachelor’s degrees worked an average of four hours on a weekend, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and about 29% of all employed people worked on weekends.

Hoover argues that people are doing this as an act of ‘liberation’, finding time that is ‘distraction-free’:

Others say the weekends are their distraction-free days. A 2025 report from Microsoft found that workers experience some 275 distractions each day, or an interruption about every two minutes during the 9 to 5 workday. The average desk worker sits in meetings for nearly 15 hours a week in 2024, according to a survey from AI-powered calendar app Reclaim.ai.

Heading toward Josef Pieper’s ‘total work’, which I wrote about in the past:

Pieper poses an existential question, which I fear we have sidestepped, these days, as we’ve accepted the tyranny of work:

What is normal is work, and the normal day is the working day. But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? Can the human being be satisfied with being a functionary, a “worker”? Can human existence be fulfilled in being exclusively a work-a-day existence?

To me, the answer is an unequivocal no. But your mileage may vary. But I believe we are confronted by a constant struggle to resist the tyranny of work culture, management, and the clock, and carve out time for leisure, play, and rest.

Share

Ungovernable Change

In Why Keeping Up with Change Feels Harder Than Ever, Kayla Velnoskey, Ingrid Laman, and Carolina Valencia introduce the concept of ‘ungovernable change’1, an outgrowth of the frantic levels of change initiative corporations are undertaking today:

A March 2025 Gartner survey of more than 980 global leaders found that only 32% of mid- to senior-level leaders were able to implement their last change initiative on time while maintaining employee engagement and performance.

Leaders are managing ungovernable change at a time when their employees are increasingly skeptical of their efforts: 79% of the 2,900 global employees surveyed by Gartner in April 2025 don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively. The majority believe that their organization has made poor change decisions in the past and are unlikely to be successful in the future.

The authors summarize the problem:

Leading through change is more difficult than ever because of the convergence of four factors: 1) not only is there a large volume of change, but changes are stacked, one on top of the other; 2) not only are changes happening faster, they’re continuous, without a start or end date; 3) not only are changes larger in scale; they’re interdependent; and 4) not only is change unpredictable, they’re externally driven by technology, geopolitical trends, and more.

The answer in not to slow down, according to the authors, because the world is moving at ungovernable rates.

The companies that are most successful turn the situation inside out. Instead of slowing down, they inculcate routinizing change. They ‘routinizing change—treating it as an everyday business process’.

Note that in their own survey data, ‘79% of employees don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively’. This means ‘adopting three strategies’:

1. Communicate that change is a journey, not a destination.

2. Enable change-ready employees, not change enthusiasm.

3. Foresee multiple possible scenarios, not just the current change.

The examples they offer sound rational, but the paper reads more like a PowerPoint than something that can overturn the disruptions of ‘ungovernable change’. And the subtext, again, is Pieper’s ‘total work’ seeping into everything. Not only do you have to complete the work of the day, but have to become a willing confederate in blowing up any sense of stability, and embrace total change — in all dimensions — as the norm.

Share workfutures.io

I’ve been writing and speaking about the future of work for over 30 years. Along the way, I’ve consulted with and written for Microsoft, IBM, Google, Dell, Cisco, and dozens more. In 2007, I coined the term ‘hashtag’ (yes, hashtag), and many other terms that have shaped the way we think about work, like ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, ‘work media’, and others. If you want to help me continue my work, consider a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Read more

…

The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

| Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

…

Events of recent weeks confirm Césaire’s anticipation of the neoliberal world order in the 20th century, and today’s 21st century post-neoliberalism, which looks a great deal like the original form of imperialism: piracy1.

Share

AI, AI, AI

The title above can be pronounced in two ways: the first is ‘eh-eye, eh-eye, eh-eye’, alluding to artificial intelligence, which is everywhere in the news (but not really in the stats?). The second pronunciation is ‘aye-ee, aye-ee, aye-ee’, like someone screaming because their hair is on fire.

Also, I confess that I am not researching these stories as they flitter by across my radar screen. I am merely repeating anecdotal evidence: mere anecdittos.

…

A whopping 3 percent.

“I can’t really remember a boom with such active hostility to it,” William Quinn, co-author of the 2020 history tome “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles,” told the NYT. “People usually find new technology exciting. It happened with electricity, bicycles, motorcars. There were fears but also hopes. AI is notable, perhaps unique, for the lack of enthusiasm.”

As consumer sentiment goes from sour to moldy, the CEOs behind the bubble only seem to be doubling down.

“It’s extremely hurtful, frankly,” said Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang in a January interview about the “battle of [AI] narratives.”

Huang insisted that AI is suffering a “lot of damage” from “very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has concurred, lamenting pushback against the “diffusion, the absorption” of AI in broader society. “Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow,” he said at the recent Cisco AI Summit.

While AI boosters could argue we’re simply living under the tyranny of a vocal, AI-hating minority, evidence suggests the public’s aversion runs deep — and not just against the tech itself. As one Pew Research survey from 2025 found, about 60 percent of respondents said they’d like “more control” over how AI is used in their lives, while only 17 percent are “comfortable” with AI remaining in the hands of a few tech billionaires.

Consumer data paints an even more dramatic story. In mid-2025, when mainstream analyst firms were still parroting uncritical AI hype before investor sentiment turned cold in December, the number of US AI users who regularly paid for the privilege stood at a whopping 3 percent.

| Joe Wilkins, Tech CEOs Confused by Why Everybody Hates AI So Much

I know why people hate AI so much: the billionaires who are steering the economy into a dystopian future, or the ditch.

…

42%

The approximate share of tech-industry workers who said their direct manager expects AI use in day-to-day work as of last October, up from 32% just eight months before, according to a survey from AI consulting firm Section.

| The Future of Everything

…

But what incentives?

Fifty-five percent of companies surveyed say they are offering no premiums, no bonuses, no equity, for employees who have built out their AI skillset. Only 14% offer higher base pay, 10% offer bonuses, and 9% offer long‑term incentives.

| Payscale, Payscale’s 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report Reveals Shifting Pay Strategies Amid AI and Labor Market Volatility

AI adoption in exchange for equity might be a sensible model, come to think of it.

Share workfutures.io

…

Blunt-force trauma.

Thirty-six percent of chief marketing officers expect to reduce head count over the next 12 to 24 months “by utilizing AI or eliminating redundancies,” according to a new survey from executive search firm Spencer Stuart based on November interviews with approximately 90 CMOs and other marketing leaders.

At larger companies, the outlook was grimmer. Forty-seven percent of respondents at companies with $20 billion or more in revenue said they expect to cut staff over the next 12 to 24 months, and 32% already did so this year, the survey found.

The key factor is growing pressure to show returns on companies’ significant investments in AI, said Richard Sanderson, who leads Spencer Stuart’s marketing, sales and communications officer practice.

“We’re hearing, particularly from the largest … companies, that they have to deliver, and it may have to be through blunt-force of head-count reduction,” Sanderson said.

| Patrick Coffee

So, AI isn't generating enough work taken on by bots to justify the spend, so, of course, companies will cut jobs instead of cutting back on AI. Totally reasonable. Uh huh. Sure. Got it.

…

Job applicants want to know why they are rejected by AI.

Applicants for AI-screened jobs are suing a recruitment tool company, Eightfold AI, for failing to share the scores and results for their job applications. The novel twist is comparing this to credit ratings and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Seems reasonable that they should know why the system is rejecting them, in some case for thousands of applications.

| Stacy Cowley2

Seems fair to me. But the companies behind this software, like Eightfold AI, don’t want to share how they do what they do. Or maybe they don’t know how the AI is doing it.

…

And job hunters are using AI, too.

It’s easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn’t normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added.

It’s worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate’s behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they’d have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI’s role in it becomes obvious.

Joseph Eitner, chief human resources officer for New York-based investment firm Eaton Capital Management, said he has no issue with candidates turning to AI to add some keywords, clean up their grammar, or even help them think through a question on the application. But ultimately, he said, candidates should do the writing themselves, express their own ideas and personalities, and take the time to manually submit their applications.

“If that’s how you apply and how you work, I don’t want to hire you,” he said. AI auto-apply services are “snake oil. It’s a disservice to yourself and to the people you’re applying to.”

| Danielle Abril, Employers to job seekers: Your AI résumé isn’t fooling anyone3

I’ve been writing and speaking about the future of work for over 30 years. Along the way, I’ve consulted with and written for Microsoft, IBM, Google, Dell, Cisco, and dozens more. In 2007, I coined the term ‘hashtag’ (yes, hashtag), and many other terms that have shaped the way we think about work, like ‘work management’, ‘social tools’, ‘work media’, and others. If you want to help me continue my work, consider a paid subscription.

Read more

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is,…

Read more

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

| Willian Stafford, The Way It Is

…

Apologies for my absence from these pages in the past week or so. The recent snowpocalypse — we had 31 inches of snow and an arctic deep freeze lasting more than a week — hit me like a small-scale pandemic lockdown. Trapped inside, grappling with a …

Read more

Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief.

| Robert Anton Wilson

…

In his final column at the NY Times, David Brooks offered this:

Only 13 percent of …

Read more

You cannot overwork your way into being valued. You cannot explain or fight your way into being valued.

| Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you

…

Not only is work inherently oppositional, today the stresses of the modern workplace — both white collar work in the office and frontline work in the field, hospital, or factory — are becoming so intense that working people are emotionally withdrawing from their jobs, because, as Wachter-Boettcher points out, you cannot make your bosses value you when they consider workers nothing more than expendable liabilities.

Subscribe now

Shift Sulking

When hourly workers begin their day already drained, exhausted, and stressed by the increasing pressures on understaffed teams and by unpredictable schedules, it’s called ‘shift sulking'1. This goes beyond the disengagement typified by the Gen Z stare, deeper into the way the hourly jobs of today are sapping the reserves of hourly workers, especially when coupled with poly-employment2: when workers have to juggle multiple jobs to make ends meet.

As Jennifer Mattson reports:

“[At a time when] 31% of U.S. workers report feeling detached, ‘shift sulking’ is a clear reminder that the strength of our economy is inseparable from the stability of the shift worker,” says [Silvija] Martincevic [CEO of Deputy, a workforce management platform for hourly workers]. “That’s not simply a retention challenge. It’s a productivity challenge that limits our collective potential.”

According to data from Deputy, in states where stable scheduling is the norm, frontline worker happiness reaches 98%, compared to just 60% where it’s unpredictable.

[…]

“We don’t see shift sulking as a temporary issue; it’s the human cost of deeper structural friction in today’s labor market—and all indicators point to it intensifying in 2026,” Martincevic says. “Businesses are operating leaner, asking teams to deliver the same output despite tighter staffing and volatile demand. That pressure falls squarely on the frontline.”

According to Deputy’s Better Together report, while AI can automate tasks and improve visibility, technology alone won’t solve the problem—that demands structural change that gives workers what they want: predictable schedules, balanced workloads, and transparent communication.

And without outside forces pushing for change, we can expect more shift sulking in 2026.

Share

Hybrid in 2026

Robert Half’s Demand for Skilled Talent report shows that despite corporate calls for return to the office, hybrid still seems to be with us going forward into 2026, varying by field, seniority, and geography

In general, the more experience, the greater autonomy:

Newly created hybrid and remote jobs—by experience level:

• Senior-level (5 or more years of experience): 30% hybrid, 13% remote

• Mid-level (3-5 years of experience): 25% hybrid, 12% remote

• Entry-level (0-2 years of experience): 18% hybrid, 9% remote

Roughly a third of new jobs are hybrid or fully remote:

Share workfutures.io

China and US Converging?

China and the US have been decoupling politically and economically (although we’ll see how long that lasts, post-Trump), but we’re seeing a convergence in population projections. The US population is projected to slowly grow to 400 million by 2100, while China’s population peaks right now, at 1.4 billion and falls precipitously to just about 600 million (like Europe) in the same timeframe (via Our World in Data):

China is going to undergo serious economic and societal changes if this holds.

Note that India’s population has surpassed China’s, but is projected to begin declining around 2060.

Read more