Finding broadly shared truths and convictions is becoming nearly impossible, and this has enabled the cultural rise of tech and finance, which are governed by a specific kind of quantitative thinking.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Despite Elon Musk’s efforts to turn the entire written internet into Stormfront, the conversation on Twitter and Bluesky still runs through the media and the academy. And the escalating nastiness on these sites comes in part, I believe, from the precarity increasingly felt by workers in what we’ll loosely and somewhat artlessly call “knowledge fields.” These professions weren’t doing particularly well before Artificial Intelligence, and employees in these fields are deeply worried now. The actual ability of Artificial Intelligence to replace such jobs almost doesn’t matter, because nearly every corporation or university will have someone on staff ready to convince a C-suite executive or a chancellor that, if they do not replace some of their fallible and whiny employees with robots, they will die a quick and humiliating death.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Relatedly, the media’s coverage of itself and the academy will become even more annoying, until it consumes much of the industry—soon, every other story will be about a woke professor who spent his department’s budget on the racial dynamics of Labubus or whatever. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do think that the humans left in the industry will only get more self-obsessed and cloistered as the shutters hit the ground.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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People like to go to work. They like to interact with humans. Many workers are older and have grown used to certain ways of doing business. That won’t all go away just because Claude is standing outside your office waiting for word to kick you out.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Although young college graduates still experience relatively low unemployment and make decent wages, they have clear and sound reasons to feel more financially precarious than one might expect. The most obvious and long-standing reason is housing: many young people measure their economic maturity through homeownership, and buying a house is becoming nearly impossible in many major metropolitan areas.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Life experienced on phones and through social media leaves us lonely and alienated from one another; this has led to an existence that’s somehow at once both intensely individual and intensely tribal.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Artificial Intelligence does not yet account for much job loss, but its arrival has magnified negative sentiments and has helped to create a collective despair, especially among the young and educated.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Artificial Intelligence won’t replace all entry-level white-collar jobs, but it will cause an extended period of pain, during which an increasing number of employers, wowed by new advances in technology, decide to quietly stop hiring many recent college graduates. This will accelerate the already widening unemployment gap between young, college-educated people and everyone else.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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