Fantasies of automation and bullshit jobs

After the rise of Generative AI, business leaders and technology gurus started to envision a future in which peak efficiency would generate a vast displacement in the workforce. This comment argues that hollowing out the workforce is not an economic inevitability – or a temporary maladjustment – but a deliberate move towards a digital fiefdom in which sovereignty is uncoupled from the social contract. By mapping the techno-libertarian dream of the one-person unicorn (a billion-dollar company staffed by one person) against a century of literary and economic musings, this comment contends that when jobs vanish, they do not return as an optional, leisure activity, but as the pointless roles and shadow work required to maintain the status of the gilded few.