Aaron Horwath’s essay in Noema Magazine is the most honest diagnosis I’ve read of the mood right now among knowledge workers. It opens with a commuter deep in a monotone work call about EBITDA and ARR, who then pulls out knitting needles — and his face lights up for the first time all morning. That image carries the whole piece. Horwath, a director of AI operations, argues that the real danger of AI isn’t replacement — it’s abstraction. When executives dream of replacing messy human collaboration with swarms of agents, they’re not just making work more efficient; they’re removing the very thing that made it tolerable. Drawing on Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and Derek Thompson’s concept of “Workism,” he traces how educated professionals made work their religion, and how AI is now pulling back the curtain. The cruelest irony: the most creative workers — the ones organizations actually need — are the ones most alienated by an AI-mediated, outcome-obsessed workplace. It’s a long, winding, occasionally self-indulgent essay, but it lands something real: what happens when an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers overnight.
Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? — Aaron Horwath
AI is accelerating an existential crisis among knowledge workers — not by replacing them, but by making the spectacle of Workism too visible to ignore.