These guest blog posts are quirky (and sometimes dark) short stories with a dash of technology and a sprinkle of humor.
By Doc Silicon
The automation wave hit me somewhere around Palo Alto, on the edge of the Silicon Desert. I remember saying something like “These damn machines are starting to breathe…” when the drugs began to take hold.
We’d been invited to cover a tech conference—some unholy gathering of startup prophets and venture capital disciples, all gathered to worship at the altar of Virtual Employees. My attorney was particularly nervous about the whole affair. “As your attorney, I advise you to take a heroic dose of ether. It’s the only way to truly understand what these digital bastards are up to.”
The conference center looked like a chrome-plated asylum. EVERYWHERE you looked, holographic projections of VEs conducted their digital ballet—automated workers pirouetting through spreadsheets, dancing through data entry, performing their cognitive gymnastics with inhuman precision. Too weird to live, too rare to die, these silicon phantoms were slowly replacing every bottom rung of the corporate ladder.
I watched in horror as a young Stanford grad dissolved into pixels during his job interview. “Sorry,” the hiring manager’s VE assistant chirped, “but we’ve optimized that position out of existence.” The poor bastard never stood a chance. Buy the ticket, take the ride—that’s what they tell us now. Except the ticket costs your soul, and the ride goes straight to professional oblivion.
The CEO took the stage, his pupils dilated to the size of cryptocurrency tokens. “The future is FRICTIONLESS!” he screamed into the microphone, while behind him, a wall of monitors showed entry-level positions vanishing like endangered species. “We’ve eliminated the inefficiency of human development! The messiness of mentorship! The chaos of LEARNING ON THE JOB!”
Jesus, what kind of monster had we created? When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro—but how can anyone turn pro when there’s nowhere to start? The whole damn system was eating itself from the bottom up.
In the bathroom, I encountered a group of former junior analysts huddled around a crack in the wall. They whispered about an underground resistance movement, teaching each other skills in secret basement offices, maintaining the ancient traditions of professional development. Their eyes gleamed with the desperate light of the professionally damned.
The afternoon devolved into a phantasmagoric nightmare of efficiency metrics and automation protocols. I watched in terror as middle managers transformed into lines of code, their humanity compiled down to pure function. A venture capitalist next to me kept mumbling about “unprecedented returns” while his skin slowly turned to liquid crystal.
This wasn’t just technological progress—this was a full-scale EXTINCTION EVENT for social mobility. The corporate ladder wasn’t being disrupted; it was being dissolved in a vat of digital acid, leaving nothing but a sheer cliff face with the words “MUST HAVE 10 YEARS EXPERIENCE” carved into its surface.
By midnight, the conference had descended into complete chaos. VEs had started glitching, spewing corrupted career advice into the ether: “BECOME A QUANTUM BLOCKCHAIN THERAPIST! PIVOT TO HOLOGRAPHIC MEME ENGINEERING! LEARN TO CODE IN YOUR SLEEP!”
I staggered out into the cool California night, my notepad filled with the fevered scribblings of a journalist watching the future eat itself. The last human resources manager in Silicon Valley was slumped against a Tesla, weeping binary tears.
Welcome to the brave new world of work, where the bottom rungs have been automated into oblivion, and the only way up is to be born at the top. The machines aren’t coming for our jobs anymore—they’re coming for our DREAMS of having jobs in the first place.
Buy the ticket, take the ride? The ticket booth is now fully automated, and the ride goes nowhere at all.