I told you this was coming. On May 20, about 8,000 Meta employees will be told their jobs no longer exist, while 6,000 job listings have vanished. The reason? Redirecting funds toward AI. While Meta hasn’t directly acknowledged AI’s role in displacing workers, as so many others have done, the writing is on the wall: capitalism is eating itself. Tech and finance, two of AI’s biggest target industries, shed 13,000 and 11,000 jobs respectively last month — not in forgotten factory towns, but in the very knowledge corridors that power the modern economy.
Call it AI-washing if you like. CEOs worried about their own jobs certainly have an incentive to hide behind the narrative. You may also argue that AI will create new jobs — I’ve made that case myself. But the system is currently destroying value faster than it is creating it, and it is destroying it in precisely the places business can least afford: what I call the Wired Belt.
