I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that lately seems to be seeping more deeply into the overall business climate. During this time of economic uncertainty, climate instability, and technological change the gap keeps widening between the haves and the have-nots. It was only a year or so ago that having a certain amount of experience in the digital tech sector almost guaranteed job security. While traditional businesses experienced a downturn during the pandemic, digital jobs soared. More and more people found refuge in digital/tech, especially as more traditionally offline companies started to feel the push toward an online presence.

Pairing with this trend came the rise of remote work. While I started my consulting business and moved away from the crippling rents of New York City before the pandemic, I saw many of my peers make this same transition once remote work seemed a more permanent state of affairs. Because these jobs had been focused mainly in San Francisco and New York City, the quality of life in those metros had been dwindling for some time. Remote work was a lifeline for many people, especially those with long commutes into the city.

Out of the Office … Oops, Workforce?

We had relocated to Austin from New York City in 2018 primarily because it was a smaller tech hub that ostensibly would offer other job opportunities in our field. However, soon after we’d arrived there, our 7-year-old at the time started to experience severe gender dysphoria. If you know anything about the current political environment in Texas you’ll understand that by 2022 it was no longer safe for our family to be there — and so we were forced to move.

When tech started to experience some volatility that year, I braced myself for a much larger impact. My family got an early warning signal as my partner’s entire content team at a global enterprise software provider got slashed in one fell swoop — and in the middle of our move. This company had been through so many wide-scale reorganizations and C-suite changes during the ten years he was there, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise. Still, it caught us off guard. My partner had previously survived through several such reorgs at this company, weathering the whiplash of leadership turnover and gaining stature and authority as a provider of organizational stability amidst so much tumult. He is a talented writer and an inspiring creative leader who cares about his team members. The irony was not lost on us, that it was during this layoff that we were simultaneously being forced to move out of the city we had thought would safeguard us in precisely this kind of situation.

We had chosen Eugene, Oregon because we needed to move somewhere both safe and relatively inexpensive. Once there, my partner found some contract work and things were starting to look up — until the larger tech market again began to show signs of instability in early 2023. The agency where he was contracted, with a small client roster comprising primarily startups, lost much of its business overnight. My partner was once again out of work — right around the time that generative AI became top of mind for everyone and the effect on writers seemed almost immediate. At the same time, our landlord told us we had to move out because he needed to move back into the house we’d been renting. We were relatively lucky as we quickly found another residence. After some serious networking, my husband found another contract, this one with an AI consulting firm. But that was only a six-month engagement that’s coming to its end just as once again, many tech companies are making drastic cuts. Meanwhile, because we were both self-employed we had to purchase catastrophic health insurance — then got hit with a near-40% tax rate on our meager earnings.

I share our story because I know we’re not alone. For the past several years I’ve seen marketing creative teams slashed to a bare minimum while those left behind are forced to take on an impossible workload. In some ways, AI has had a positive impact on those lucky enough to hang onto their jobs. But equally, I’ve seen people experience real pain from not being able to find sustainable work simply because of the mere promise AI holds. And artists are understandably outraged that the work they’ve promoted online is now being used as a creative palette for a machine to make other people money. In a job market and economic environment that had already demonstrated instability for employees, the most recent shifts have brought in an unwelcome chill.

Zero-Sum Gamesmanship

In light of this, you’d think we could at least have some empathetic conversations with one another without it becoming polarized. But I’ve seen the opposite. Just the other day I posted a question in the comments of an article on Medium, asking the author how he handled the ethical questions that inevitably come up when discussing an AI image tool like MindJourney. I got a lot of claps but there was one entrepreneur who was irritated by this question. He said he was tired of all the “complaints” he was hearing from artists who were likely mediocre because they couldn’t compete with a machine. He gloated that he was hiring at his company because of AI.

These times affect us differently. What is one person’s gain is another person’s loss. But to have such a lack of empathy to call people “mediocre” because they are raising concerns over this technology’s impact on people’s livelihoods is concerning. It could just as easily be him one day. As human beings, none of us are immune to being eliminated by a machine. What is a measure of someone’s worth anyway? Do we have such a limited vision of what’s possible, that our mindset is stuck in this pattern of winners vs. losers?

The same weekend, I saw a LinkedIn post from a talent recruiter who decided to pass judgment on a young woman who shared her experience getting fired from a technology startup. Critics of the company claimed they had overhired to ensure they’d attain some aggressive sales goals by the year’s end. She had barely started at the company and two holidays had negatively impacted her individual sales performance metrics. She was questioning the callous way they were firing her. She did so publically, and yes, that invites scrutiny. But for the recruiter to call her actions out as horrible, without acknowledging critique of the company that fired her, seemed particularly biased.

Moreover, the recruiter’s post reflected a calculated decision to court a specific audience, which as a marketer myself, in some respects I can understand. On the other hand, I’m astounded that there is this kind of archly cynical audience at all. This reflects a growing lack of trust and reciprocity between organizations and the people of those organizations. If it’s too far-weighted to one side or another, we all lose. I don’t want to buy from a company that treats their employees with such callousness. Do you?

Zero? Some Endgame!

As AI advances and the number of sustainable jobs gets smaller and smaller, I wonder how any company will survive. How does a business go on, when there’s a smaller and smaller pool of consumers who can afford their products? Ideally, technology should add value for all, not just the few at the top. It should contribute to our well-being and help foster community engagement. Instead, so far it seems to be hemorrhaging value, perhaps counterintuitively, as it hinders our connections with each other.

Aside from this, how can we keep turning our backs on our very own citizens who can barely sustain themselves? At some point, we have to face the very real issues that are tearing apart our country. More and more people are unable to afford their homes and are either forced to live with relatives or are out on the streets. Elderly and disabled people are fighting to survive. The center will not hold like this much longer. We need to do something that makes this country more equitable for all — and at the very least, to have more empathy towards one another.

People need decent jobs that pay them enough for life’s necessities, including access to health care. Too many people are overworked, and experiencing mental and physical health issues while only a few make astronomical amounts. It’s getting harder and harder not to question the sustainability of this dichotomy. It’s like we’ve all been brainwashed to live according to ridiculous rules that are not serving us.

I’m not sure who the business models are serving, either. Though I’ve had many rewarding work experiences in digital marketing, I’ve been growing more and more disillusioned with the way most companies are operating online. I see companies focused on aggressive tactics to get their prospects’ attention. They have grown less interested in authentically connecting and earning people’s trust over time. As much as people flock to new social platforms like TikTok and Threads, I have observed an overall malaise with their superficiality and frustration with the bombardment of ubiquitous advertising.

Social networks are becoming at best distractions from a growing disconnection from one another, and at worst an exacerbator. It has been personally painful to live through this evolution as I repeatedly found myself in polarized conversations, defending my perspective and the people I love. What started as a joyful way to get in touch with my friends and family across the country, became painful as the war between ideologies started to take root.

Yanking Light from the Void

Where there’s polarization, there is counterpoint. And in some counterpoints to these dominant trends, there’s hope. The first time I encountered reports like Pew Research Center’s As AI Spreads, Experts Predict the Best and Worst Changes in Digital Life by 2035, my tendency might have been to scroll quickly to the doom and find out what I was in for next. Revisiting this with a focus on the positive, there are predictions worth manifesting. For example, MIT scientist David Clark’s assertion that “to have an optimistic view of the future you must imagine several potential positives come to fruition to overcome big issues:

▪ “The currently rapid rate of change slows, helping us to catch up.

▪ “The Internet becomes much more accessible and inclusive, and the numbers of the unserved or poorly served become a much smaller fraction of the population.

▪ “Over the next 10 years the character of critical applications such as social media mature and stabilize, and users become more sophisticated about navigating the risks and negatives.

▪ “Increasing digital literacy helps all users to better avoid the worst perils of the Internet experience.

▪ “A new generation of social media emerges, with less focus on user profiling to sell ads, less emphasis on unrestrained virality and more of a focus on user-driven exploration and interconnection.

“And the best thing that could happen,” Clark concludes, “is that application providers move away from the advertising-based revenue model and establish an expectation that users actually pay. This would remove many of the distorting incentives that plague the ‘free’ Internet experience today. Consumers today already pay for content (movies, sports and games, in-game purchases and the like). It is not necessary that the troublesome advertising-based financial model should dominate.”

That advertising model is what’s enabled rapid scalability for many tech companies. The more those organizations have focused on scaling broadly, creating a “moat” or monopoly, the more opportunities there may be for the resurgence of local. There’s an increasing interest in human-centered technologies where the primary focus isn’t on scale or shareholder profit. Some companies have capitalized on our desire for community by buying up some of the local brands with a built-in customer base. But when they neglect the communities that rallied around these local offerings, there is a hole in that community that needs to be filled. For example, my husband is an avid cyclist and he’s found a great local community of bike enthusiasts that feeds his spirit. At the same time, he recently shared with me an article addressing the struggle of local bike communities, which the author, a former Olympian athlete herself, frankly addresses as a repetitive alarm bell. In some respects, large-scale products can be helpful for consumers who need affordable solutions to simplify this modern, hectic life. I’m hopeful that as AI makes it easier to build custom software solutions, smaller decentralized technology companies will be able to thrive. We need ways to distribute power and wealth across our country so more people can live sustainably as our population grows.

Most importantly, I’ve come to realize it’s beneficial to invite different perspectives even if I happen to disagree with them. I can understand the perspective of people and businesses prioritizing their bottom line. I have to understand this. That’s the age we live in, and in some respects, everyone does what they think they have to do to survive. I accept the software developer’s frustration with an equally polarized outrage about a technology that is benefiting his business. I understand and accept that we each take these stances because we have different value systems. I can’t control any of this.

The lack of compassion I see does weigh on my mind and is what first motivated me to write this post. However, by channeling my frustration into writing about it, I was able to start shifting my mindset toward what I could practically do to focus my efforts on productive outcomes. I allow myself to get angry but remind myself that it’s helpful to move that energy into something productive, lest it consume me and I accomplish nothing. These lessons have been hard won as it’s taken a lot of inner reflection to get here. I have observed my mind becoming more flexible through this work, which has led to powerful breakthroughs.

Breakthroughs are what innovation’s all about, right? It’s time to transform our mindset on innovation itself. If we can’t extract truth from complexities and find humane solutions while advancing technology, then that will only further serve to keep us locked into this destructive cycle of polarization — wasting vast amounts of resources that with a more open perspective, could be spent on providing long-term solutions for generations to come.