In today’s crazy economy, tech companies are red hot.

Scorching hot.

Molten even.

They are burning cash on AI like they’re pyromaniacs who just discovered gasoline comes. In fact, the companies immolating investor money with the greatest enthusiasm seem to be the only ones having a truly great time, even as the corporate rate of profit plummets throughout the U.S. and bubble-angst, and fear of recession loom.

One economist (not two, one) estimates that tech companies accounted for 92 percent of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025, which is quite hilarious, because you wouldn’t know it by looking at their staff rosters, which seem to be plummeting at an alarming rate.

Do you know the Marie Kondo method?

“Does this employee spark joy? No? Fire them”.

That’s Big Tech in a nutshell for ya.

Amazon recently laid off 14,000 corporate employees, despite posting billions in profits across numerous lines of business, because profits are for shareholders, and “job security” is an archaic medieval concept like leeches and public bathhouses. And Microsoft axed roughly 10,000 employees yet still they had the guts to brag about $211 billion in annual revenue, and Google, not wanting to feel left out, cut more than 12,000 workers while sitting on nearly $80 billion in annual profit.

PROFIT for Gods sake!

They are proving once again that being a trillion-dollar company doesn’t stop you from treating staff like bio-recyclable packing material.

Tech workers made up the highest number of layoffs in any industry in the month of October. They are leading the charge in one of the worst single months for furloughs since 2003. Yes – 2003, back when Myspace was still the hot new thing and Zucky hadn’t yet discovered the joys of empire building.

This is not only bad news, but it’s “the promise of AI” flipping you the darn bird.

All this carnage directly contradicts the AI industry’s sacred vows of ushering in – in the immortal words of OpenAI commandeur Sam ‘the Scam’ Altman – “a world in which humanity flourishes to a degree that is probably impossible for any of us to fully visualize yet”.

Ah yes, Sam, the man, the myth, the PowerPoint prophet. The same Sam who predicted AGI by 2025, then 2028, then “somewhere between now and the next heat death of the universe”.

Truly inspiring, my main man.

Sadly, the bloodbath is far from over.

On Tuesday, the AI grading company Mercor, which has massive contracts with corporations like OpenAI and Anthropic, suddenly announced that it was nuking a huge project with Meta. And that of course is leaving workers scrambling like someone turned off gravity. Their Meta project, called Musen or something like that, employed some 5,000 data labelers at its peak. It was previously expected to last until at least 2026, which is adorable, because nothing lasts until 2026. Not contracts, not optimism, not even your sanity.

“They kept stressing how happy the client was and how it got extended until the end of the year”, one poor contractor told. “So to then do this major switch up before the holidays took everyone by surprise”. Surprise? Honey, in this industry, “surprise” is the default setting.

If your badge still opens the door, that’s the surprise.

Luckily for those workers, Mercor is offering to hire them back, just not for Musen, but instead, they’ll have the opportunity to work on an extremely similar project named “Nova”, which sounds like something designed by an a corporate marketer, who wanted the name to be “exciting” but not so exciting it implies benefits or healthcare. The main difference though is the wage, Musen paid $21 an hour. Nova pays $16. So, same work, same tasks, same soul-snatching cognitive data labeling labor (try to pronounce that three times), but now with a 25 percent discount on your self-respect.

Two techs workers (that’s what I’m calling em) who got offered a Nova contract said the email explained the difference in pay is due to “steadier task volumes across multimedia content” and “higher hour caps, enabling greater weekly engagement”. Ok, that is corporate speak for “We get to work you like rented donkeys, but for less money, and you’re supposed to thank us for the privilege”.

One employee who accepted a contract to work on Nova said the work is functionally the same, “but for $5 less an hour”. To which management probably responded “um, uh, yes but the logo is different, and growth mindset y’all – growth mindset!”.

Intermezzo.

For people not acquainted with the concept of growth mindset, here’s the simple explanation, stripped of all HR perfume: Growth mindset = the magical belief that YOU must constantly “grow,” “evolve,” “upskill,” “adapt,” and “transform”… while the company stays exactly the same and keeps squeezing you harder for less money.

It’s HR’s favorite spell.

Say it three times and suddenly your salary stagnation becomes your fault.

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“It sounds like most of us are in the same boat,” the techs worker said, adding personal insult to his injury. “We wanted to boycott this but we are not in a financial place to do so. We needed to have the guaranteed income, even if it’s demoralizing”.

Of course it’s farkin’ demoralizing!

Everything in this industry is friggin’ demoralizing unless you’re a founder, an investor, or a CEO with a jet that has fewer ethics than its owner.

This whole happening highlights all the false promises beneath the AI boom. Jobs are being degraded, the number of “freelance workers” is soaring like seagulls at a landfill, all trying to “add value” and note become part of a cost center. The other thing is that AI-generated profit is nonexistent, despite what the slides tell you. Rising tides on Wall Street certainly aren’t raising all boats, nah, they’re lifting a few luxury yachts and drowning everyone else in wake turbulence.

And if this is how the most powerful companies in the world are treating workers now – during the supposed golden age of innovation – why TF would the AI “utopia”, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls it, be any different? Satya’s utopia clearly includes cloud contracts, corporate subscriptions, and Azure regions popping up like shrooms after desert.

Whether you get paid living wages in that utopia is… gently speaking… not his business problem.

What’s more, if the companies at the cutting edge of a supposed “technological revolution” can’t be expected to take care of their employees – the literal humans who are enabling their models to not hallucinate cats into microwave manuals – then what hope do the rest of us have?

Because the truth is plain and simple . . .

AI ISN’T REPLACING JOBS. AI COMPANIES ARE REPLACING JOBS. WITH MISERY. ON PURPOSE.

Here you have it.

Welcome to the future.

Please deposit your self-respect at the door.

And you, my dear well-above intelligent reader.

You already knew this. The rest of them are just now smelling the smoke.

Signing off,

Marco

I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins and clean up the mess.

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