The death of the middle

[ergophobe]

I was going to add just one quote to the Quotes thread, but this guy has a flair for a good rant with quotable quotes.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-188730540

Movies

In 1997 you could walk into a theater and accidentally discover a masterpiece that everyone would discuss the next morning, the next week, the entire month. In 2026 you subscribe to three services, follow four critics on Letterboxd, check the Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic score, and pre-select your experience before you sit down. Discovery died and curation replaced it

Restaurants

Nobody is crying over Applebee's because the people who ate there don't write essays. That's not a joke. That's the structural problem with every conversation about the death of the middle: the people who lost the most have the least access to the platforms where we discuss what's been lost.

Jobs

The same thing is happening to careers. IMHO, the popular narrative about AI and jobs is wrong. Everyone is worried about entry-level... But here's what nobody wants to talk about, because the people it's happening to are the people who post about resilience and sit on the panels: the middle is being gutted faster than the bottom... Economists call it job polarization: employment growing at the top, growing at the bottom, collapsing in the middle. The St. Louis Fed, Brookings, and the NBER have all documented the same U-shaped curve since the 1980s... According to Gartner, one in five organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management positions by 2026.

That's the first kill.

The second kill is quieter and worse. When you eliminate middle management, you eliminate the only people in the organization who had time to teach anyone anything.

[rcjordan]

Top earners are more afraid for their employment than lower income as AI threat increases

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/25/top-earners-are-more-afraid-for-their-employment-than-lower-income-as-ai-threat-increases.html