Great essay and plenty of food for thought. I will witness to holding some bullshit jobs myself. They are, in effect, a jobs creation program for the PMC.
Nice article. One quibble - from someone who has been in and around government jobs for 20+ years - a good 30% are bullshit jobs. I’ve never been in an organization where we couldn’t do the same exact work with way fewer people.
And absolutely— there’s a whole bunch of actual waste in government jobs. I even know someone in that position. I was just trying to draw attention to the fact that there is more BS in the free market (which seems counterintuitive)
This was wonderful. Because of it, my subscribe was genuine, not reciprocal.
I would argue this is also a signal of the decline of U.S. productivity, and by extension, its decline as a global superpower as defined in Ray Dalio’s Principles of Dealing with the Changing World Order.
If you haven’t read it yet, check it out. Free audiobook on Spotify.
The middle class operates as a semi meritocratic pseudo universal basic income. It distributes economic stability through jobs that are often untethered from genuine value creation. This illusion is sustained by a blend of credentials, performance, and institutional inertia. It feels like merit but functions more like managed appeasement.
It won’t survive the shift from Software-as-a-Service to Employee-as-a-Service. That transition means more than automation. It marks a wholesale restructuring of how labor is extracted and compensated. AI systems don’t just replace tasks, they reconfigure expectations. When employees become API endpoints in a distributed cognition network, the buffer that sustained the middle class erodes.
Shadow IT and shadow AI are symptoms of this breakdown. Workers deploy unsanctioned tools to maintain productivity illusions, to protect themselves from visibility, to prevent being made redundant by the very efficiencies they rely on. This creates a precarious equilibrium. People are incentivized to preserve dysfunction because acknowledging it risks collapse.
So the bullshit continues. But it’s not waste. It’s containment. A delay mechanism. A soft barrier holding back systemic acknowledgment of the future already arriving.
Max, I love your style. Excellent read.
Thanks Walt, glad you enjoyed!
Great essay and plenty of food for thought. I will witness to holding some bullshit jobs myself. They are, in effect, a jobs creation program for the PMC.
Thank you! And yes, possibly the worst kind of jobs creation program that could exist.
Thucking good post acksually
Thank you friend! No one was more surprised than me
Nice article. One quibble - from someone who has been in and around government jobs for 20+ years - a good 30% are bullshit jobs. I’ve never been in an organization where we couldn’t do the same exact work with way fewer people.
Thank you, friend!
And absolutely— there’s a whole bunch of actual waste in government jobs. I even know someone in that position. I was just trying to draw attention to the fact that there is more BS in the free market (which seems counterintuitive)
This was wonderful. Because of it, my subscribe was genuine, not reciprocal.
I would argue this is also a signal of the decline of U.S. productivity, and by extension, its decline as a global superpower as defined in Ray Dalio’s Principles of Dealing with the Changing World Order.
If you haven’t read it yet, check it out. Free audiobook on Spotify.
Thanks Jon, appreciate that!
Yes, totally agreed--we are nothing if not a collapsing empire. Haven't read that yet but will add it to my list. Thanks for the rec!
The middle class operates as a semi meritocratic pseudo universal basic income. It distributes economic stability through jobs that are often untethered from genuine value creation. This illusion is sustained by a blend of credentials, performance, and institutional inertia. It feels like merit but functions more like managed appeasement.
It won’t survive the shift from Software-as-a-Service to Employee-as-a-Service. That transition means more than automation. It marks a wholesale restructuring of how labor is extracted and compensated. AI systems don’t just replace tasks, they reconfigure expectations. When employees become API endpoints in a distributed cognition network, the buffer that sustained the middle class erodes.
Shadow IT and shadow AI are symptoms of this breakdown. Workers deploy unsanctioned tools to maintain productivity illusions, to protect themselves from visibility, to prevent being made redundant by the very efficiencies they rely on. This creates a precarious equilibrium. People are incentivized to preserve dysfunction because acknowledging it risks collapse.
So the bullshit continues. But it’s not waste. It’s containment. A delay mechanism. A soft barrier holding back systemic acknowledgment of the future already arriving.