It Was Never About AI

Eric Markowitz on X:

AI didn't cause this. AI is just holding up a mirror, and we don't like what we see.

The whole piece is worth your time. Markowitz argues — persuasively — that the anxiety around AI isn't really about the technology. It's about decades of financialisation, short-termism, and the steady hollowing out of what makes work meaningful. AI just arrived at the moment when there was almost nothing left to hollow.

He's right about the diagnosis. Where the essay gets wobbly is the prescription. It lands on individual moral conviction — the owner who keeps her team, the manufacturer who stays in his hometown — and that's admirable, but it doesn't reckon with the systemic incentives it spent 3,000 words describing. You can't diagnose a structural problem and then prescribe personal virtue.

The harder, less shareable truth is that most professionals don't get to choose between "meaning" and "margin." They live in the middle, trying to do right by their teams while answering to people who read quarterly reports. That's the conversation worth having — not whether AI should replace people, but how the people making those decisions can make better ones, with clearer information and fewer illusions.

That's what we're trying to build here.