Third (this is my opinion and I would like to see this explored more), the shift to remote work makes it easier for corporate management to view employee output as more fungible.
Management views "work product" in ways increasingly divorced from the people and the team culture that produces it.
Management views "work product" in ways increasingly divorced from the people and the team culture that produces it.
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What's happening instead is that companies are experimenting with how much further they can degrade the already-degraded customer experience before it impacts their top line growth.
This *requires* them to make increasingly deranged and unrealistic promises about the disruption that AI will cause.
It is structurally the same hype cycle we saw with blockchain.
Blockchains enable you to solve certain classes of problems that historically required a trusted centralized authority.
But there was a vested capital interest in hyping blockchains as being FAR more broadly disruptive than they actually were.
If you have access to capital, you get in early, spend years hyping up "disruption", then time your exit before the bubble deflates.
(1) is that the tech bubble *requires* unhinged and unrealistic growth expectations, meaning endless hype.
(2) is that large tech companies are STILL over-hired relative to growth, so they're shedding jobs as the growth doesn't materialize
So, exceptions that effectively prove your rule.
Blockchain-based authenticated timestamps are super useful and they're being used to document war crimes among other things
In many industries the value of that labour is more than the sum of its parts but capital wants to believe we are just replaceable cogs.
It's easier for managers to feel valuable when they can walk into the office and bark orders than when they have to prove their value for their salary with remote workers.