The biggest winners of the American economy fear they’re sinking fast - The Washington Post

So the "biggest winners" of the American economy—the tech elite, the six-figure-salaried, the stock-optioned darlings of venture capital—are apparently shitting themselves. According to the Washington Post, waves of layoffs and the relentless pressure to automate everything are creating "existential panic" in the very industry that was supposed to save us all. Tech has never been richer, yet its workers have never felt less secure—a contradiction so stark it would be funny if it weren't happening to the people who least deserve sympathy. How deliciously ironic: the builders of the machine that will replace everyone are the first to feel the cold blade at their own throats. They built this, and now they're scared. Good.

But it gets better. Economists, those cheerful purveyors of bad news, are already sharpening their pencils to inform us that other white-collar workers are next. Next for what, exactly? Next to join the ranks of the "biggest winners" who have suddenly become the biggest worriers? The automation they championed for the factory floor, the office admin, the customer service rep, is now coming for their own spreadsheet-juggling, meeting-scheduling, code-committing asses. It's almost poetic—a self-inflicted wound that they insisted was progress, and now they're shocked to find themselves bleeding all over their artisanal standing desks. The economists' warning isn't a prediction; it's an echo of the same logic tech CEOs used to justify every layoff round.

And the response? More panic, more layoffs, more "strategic realignments" and "synergy-driven transformations." The machine they built doesn't care about their stock options or their sense of entitlement. It's hungry, and it eats everything in its path—startups, scale-ups, FAANG behemoths, all of it. The biggest winners thought they were building a utopia; turns out they were just building the gallows, and the trapdoor is opening beneath their own feet. Maybe now the VCs and product managers will understand what it felt like to be a taxi driver in 2015, or a journalist in 2020. Cheers to the irony.