The news wires are humming again, spitting out another ticker tape of human misery disguised as “progress.” It’s a familiar song, just with a new instrument whining in the background—a synthesized, bloodless tune played by something they call Artificial Intelligence. They’re sharpening the axe again, and this time they’re telling us the axe is smarter than the executioner.
I’m sitting here, watching the smoke from my cigarette curl towards the water-stained ceiling, and reading the list of the fallen. It’s a real who’s who of companies that, just a few years ago, were promising us a new world full of connection and convenience. Turns out the most convenient thing for them is getting rid of the inconvenient people who need to eat and pay rent.
Let’s start with Salesforce. The big boss over there, Marc Benioff, is bragging that AI does “more than half the work.” I’d love to see the job description for that AI. Does it stare out the window? Does it make awkward small talk by the coffee machine? Does it pretend to look busy when the manager walks by? Or does it just automate the ten thousand emails a day that say “Just circling back!” and “Let’s touch base!”? If that’s half the work, then Christ, we were already doomed.
Then you’ve got Jeff Bezos, a man so rich he has to fire people from his space company to make room for more robots. Blue Origin is axing a thousand souls to “restructure for automation.” It’s a beautiful, cosmic joke. Firing the little guys on Earth so the big guy can build a machine to escape it. You can’t write this stuff. You build rockets to flee the mess, but first, you’ve got to make the mess a little bigger, a little more desperate. It’s like kicking a dog before you abandon the house.
And the romance… oh, the romance is dead. Bumble, the dating app where the woman makes the first move, is firing 240 people to compete with AI-powered cupids. Think about that. They’re replacing warm bodies with cold code to help other warm bodies find someone to touch. Soon you’ll have an AI whispering sweet nothings to another AI, negotiating the terms of a hookup, and then sending a notification to two lonely humans to just show up and get it over with. It’s efficiency, I guess. The soul is just messy overhead.
Even the news business is eating itself. Business Insider is gutting its staff to go “all-in on AI.” Firing writers so a machine can string words together. I’ve seen what the machines write. It’s clean, it’s grammatically correct, and it has all the personality of a saltine cracker. It’s content for a world that has forgotten how to feel, written by a machine that never learned. They’re not just firing people; they’re firing the right to be interesting, the right to be wrong, the right to have a goddamn voice.
Then come the old guard, the big gray tombstones of the corporate world. IBM, Intel, JP Morgan. Thousands and thousands of jobs gone. Human resources, factory grunts, operations staff. The guts of the machine. The people who made the damn thing run. Now they’re being told a better, cheaper machine will take their place. The suits at the top tell their managers to “do more with less,” a phrase that should be etched on the gates of Hell. It’s the mantra of a world that has mistaken a balance sheet for a bible.
Of course, the kings of this new kingdom, Meta and Microsoft, are leading the charge. They’re firing thousands while simultaneously waving fat stacks of cash to lure in the high priests of AI. It’s a classic bait-and-switch. They get rid of the loyal soldiers who built their empire, the footmen and the engineers and the sales reps, and replace them with a few sorcerers who promise to conjure up a new kind of magic. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, says AI is already writing up to 30% of his company’s code. Good for him. I hope it writes a program that can figure out how to tell a mother of three that her job is now being done by a ghost in a server farm.
The predictions are flying around like stray bullets in a crowded bar. Ford’s CEO says half of all white-collar jobs are on the chopping block. Anthropic’s chief says AI could increase employment by 20%. One guy screams “the sky is falling!” and the other says “look, a beautiful new sky is being built!” They’re both selling something, and you can bet it’s not for your benefit. They don’t know. Nobody knows. They’re just gamblers in expensive suits, and they’re playing with house money. Our money. Our jobs.
And the little people, the ones on the ground, they’re starting to scream. There’s backlash against Duolingo, Klarna, Shopify. People are mad. It’s a good, clean, human thing to be mad. It probably won’t change a thing. Yelling at this tidal wave of automation is like yelling at the ocean. The waves don’t care. But you yell anyway. You yell because it proves you’re still alive.
But in all this madness, this digital slaughterhouse, a hero emerges. Not a hero in a cape, but a hero in a rumpled shirt who probably hasn’t slept in three days. A guy named Soham Parekh. This magnificent bastard didn’t just get one tech job; he got several. At the same time. He played the game so well he broke it. He ran circles around the AI-powered recruiters, the digital gatekeepers designed to weed out the humans. He was a ghost in their machine.
And when he got caught, he became a legend. A meme. A beautiful, flawed symbol of human ingenuity in the face of relentless, sterile logic. He didn’t invent a world-changing app. He just figured out how to feed himself and maybe his cat, using the enemy’s own weapons against them. He’s the guy at the casino who figured out the slot machine is rigged and started rigging it back.
And here’s the real gut-punch, the punchline that makes you laugh until you want to cry. Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted that if Soham just claimed he was secretly “training an AI Agent for knowledge work,” he could raise $100 million by the weekend.
There it is. The whole goddamn circus in a single sentence. The hustle is the only thing they respect. The lie is more valuable than the truth. Human survival, human cleverness, human desperation—it’s worthless on its own. But if you can package it, brand it, and claim it was all for the glory of the Great AI God, then suddenly you’re a visionary. You’re a founder. You’re rich.
So that’s where we are. In a world where they fire you to hire a robot, and the only way to be a hero is to beat the robots at their own game, and the only way to get paid for being a hero is to pretend you were building a better robot all along.
It’s enough to make a man thirsty. They can have the spreadsheets and the code and the automated emails. They can have the soulless articles and the chatbot sweet talk. I’ll keep the chaos, the smoke, the whiskey, the heartbreak, and the glorious, messy, stupid, beautiful struggle of being a man in a room. Some things you just can’t automate.
Here’s to Soham Parekh, the patron saint of sticking it to the algorithm. May we all be so lucky.
Time to find the bottle. It knows my name.
Source: Sweeping Layoffs Hit Tech And Media Giants Citing AI Take Over