I'm not worried about the AI turning on us, I'm worried about us turning on each other.
On Thursday 29 October 2026 I was at the Union Chapel in Islington watching The Wellerman, a lovely concert of sea shanties sung in a church. Shanties are work songs, every one of them written to be sung by a crew hauling on a rope, and there were enough crews, for long enough, that the songs outlived the work. I was listening to the songs and thinking about how many people the sea used to hire (the whalers the Wellerman song is about, the merchant crews, the people who built the ships and unloaded them) and how small that world is now. Nobody did this as part of a grand plan, it just happened, one business at a time solving its own problem and automating what it could. The engines got better and the ships got bigger and the crews got smaller, and the songs ended up being sung to people like me in Islington on a Thursday night.
I've been thinking about it since, about how the sailing industry went and about office jobs going the same way with LLMs, and it took me down a rabbit hole of jobs and how they've changed over the last two hundred years, which I wrote up for Anchor Terminal [1]. The one-line version is that the work moved from food to goods to services, the sea and the farm over about a century, the factory over forty years, and now the office in four, each move faster than the last.
> What I think is happening
What happened to the people the sea employed is happening to IT now, one person with good tools does what a team did, and I see it every week in my own work, and I'm part of it, because the tools I build are the tools doing it. It won't stop at IT, because every white collar job is someone reading, deciding and writing, and that is what the models do, so law, finance, marketing and admin get the same squeeze, in the same order IT got it, the juniors first and then a bit less work for everyone else. We Sold a Generation a Dream was about the juniors. Blue collar work has been squeezed for longer, and robots are the next turn of that screw.
I'm not worried about the AI turning on us, I'm worried about us turning on each other, because the tools do what we tell them and what we're telling them to do is the work that used to pay other people's wages.
> Why the office goes first
The corporate 9 to 5 is the thing I'd bet on ending first, and the return to office noise of the last two years hasn't changed my mind, because a lot of it was a way of getting people to leave without calling it a layoff. One in four executives have admitted they hoped the office mandate would make people quit [2], and by September 2025 the Federal Reserve was reporting employers using office mandates to get people to quit [3]. The loud five-day mandates are American [4] [5], and in the UK, and in London at least, it has been a lot less heavy handed, the big names went to three days and some of them pushed even that back [6] [7] [8]. What I see around me in London is a city that goes in three days and works from home the other two, with a lot less shouting about it. The big companies making the headlines are also the smaller part of the economy, with 40% of private sector jobs, and the other 60% work for small businesses that never ordered anyone back [9].
What I also see is that most of the devs I know are using LLMs to build cool projects outside of work, and they don't say it in those words, but they're getting ready to be laid off, and this isn't a forecast, because AI is now the most cited reason for job cuts in the US, given for about one in four of the cuts announced this year, and tech cuts are up two thirds on last year [15] [16]. Young people in the jobs most exposed to it already have about a fifth fewer jobs than they would have had [17]. The UK is slower and quieter, with fewer people on payrolls than a year ago and vacancies still falling [18], and the people who lose office jobs here mostly don't show up as unemployed, because they go consulting for less money, go part-time, or take a job that pays less.
> Where that leads
Fewer people earning wages means fewer people buying things, so the businesses that sold to them shrink, and the tax that both the wages and the businesses paid shrinks too, at the same time as the bill for keeping people fed and warm gets bigger. This has nothing to do with whether the rich share, less earned means less spent and less taxed, and I think we need to radically rethink our tax system over the next few years.
Put the office mandate next to the shrinking work and you get people called back to a desk five days a week to do a job that a model now does most of, with fewer people needed each year. A lot of them will leave white collar work, some because they choose to and some because the job goes, and I'd have done the same. The hard part is that the white collar life was built on a white collar wage, the mortgage, the rent, the school fees, and those bills don't shrink as fast as the job does. People with less money and the same bills stop buying things and stop paying as much tax, and that is how the problem reaches everyone else. Everyone complains about high taxes on the rich, but the high taxes are what keep everyone else appeased and fed, and when that is no longer enough it will get messy.
> What comes next
I think this one will be easier to live through than the ones before it. Our generation and the ones after us are used to change in a way the sailors weren't, because we've had the internet, the smartphone, the 2008 crash and the pandemic, all inside one working life, and we adapted to each one.
It's also the first move where the complexity drops instead of rising. Every earlier machine needed more knowledge to run, the tractor needed a mechanic and the telephone switch needed an engineer, and a model is the first tool that carries the knowledge for you, so you don't have to know how the parts work to use them. The complexity doesn't go away, it moves into the model, and nobody knows yet what goes wrong when a whole society runs on tools nobody fully understands. But what's left for you to do is the thing you'd do anyway, the rabbit hole you can't leave alone.
I think the time of the big company is ending, and enshittification ends with it. A big company has shareholders and debt to pay, so at some point it has to squeeze more money out of the product and the product gets worse. A small business run by a founder who cares about the product and lives off what it earns has no reason to do that. The founder won't make the billions you read about in the headlines, they'll make enough for a comfortable life, and I think that's what most people wanted from a job anyway. We already see this in the explosion of small companies advertising on social media and selling a few niche products. More than 300,000 UK small businesses now sell through TikTok Shop, up from 200,000 at the end of 2025 [19], and 815,277 new companies were registered in the year to March 2026, the register now at 5.5 million [20]. This isn't new, it's what has absorbed the job losses so far.
The same change is levelling the field between the rich countries and the rest, the global middle class catching up while ours stood still, which is what Caffeine and Spite was about. One person with a model has the same tools wherever they are, so you can live where you want to be rather than where you need to be for the job, and if where you want to be is a big city like London, that's fine too. It's hard on the gatekeepers and on the people who were a long way ahead and had to hustle less for it, but it levels the playing field, and that's good for society.
The biggest change is that you're not an employee any more, you're the boss, and in Britain that has been the direction of travel for fifty years, with 8% of workers self-employed in 1975, 12% in 2000 and 14% in 2019 [10], a peak of 5 million people [11]. The pandemic knocked it back, and it's 4.5 million now [12], because when things reopened small companies put the self-employed people they'd been working with on the payroll [11] and the big companies overhired. The models that let one person run a business on their own only arrived this year, so the number hasn't had time to move yet. Add the 4.3 million businesses that employ nobody but their owners [9], and the boss-of-one is already the most common business we have.
> Start exploring now
Start exploring now, while you still have the wage, and find the place where you're the expert, which doesn't have to be big and doesn't have to be in tech. A friend of mine makes a comic series about the dogs in his park, generated with LLMs from what the dogs get up to with each other, and the other dog owners love it and are chipping in to pay for the print run. People call that kind of thing slop, so is it slop if the people it's for like it? Is it slop if it wouldn't have existed otherwise? I don't think so, and one person obsessed with one small thing will do it better than any company, because the company has to spread its attention and the person doesn't, and they'll keep at it long after a company would have moved the team on. That's how LocalGhost's weather forecast and map came about, in Breaking Free, and One Bad Quarter explains why now is the time to start something.
Keep the life smaller than the wage, because if the wage pays for the mortgage, the car and the school with nothing left over, you're betting that the job stays the size it is, and I've just argued that it won't. Much easier said than done, I know, but try digital and analogue minimalism out before you're forced into it.
Own your story and own your life, and don't lease them to big companies. That is what LocalGhost is for, but you don't have to use LocalGhost to do it, and I'm aware that a man selling local AI boxes saying "own your tools" is not a disinterested witness.
> How the money works
The money comes from close to home, from local customers and local businesses paying someone they know for something made for them, which is how my friend's comic gets paid for, by the people in his park. The tools that let anyone build a worse version for free are the same tools that let you take something global and make it local, and we have the tech to do that now. The state and the big company both sink under their own weight once they're big enough, which is what The Bureaucracy Trap is about, and as they shrink, more of the money gets spent closer to home, which is the local economy I argued for in Caffeine and Spite and the opposite of the rent we pay to companies far away in The Integration Tax.
What I don't know is whether a community can pay enough of these people, where the community's own money comes from once the office wages are gone, and how long it takes to get there. The sailors who went ashore found wages somewhere, over a couple of generations, and two generations is a long time to be the one without them.
The shanties survived because the work was worth singing about and enough people kept singing them, and nobody is going to write songs about the office.
> REFERENCES
[1] Vlad Cealicu, November 2026, "Where the jobs went, and where they go next", Anchor Terminal. Source for the sea, farm, factory, telephone exchange and office timings, the sources behind each one, and the step up the ladder of needs each move made. anchorterminal.com/blog/where-the-jobs-went.
[2] BambooHR, 6 June 2024, return to office survey press release. Source for 25% of VP and C-suite executives and 18% of HR professionals admitting they hoped for some voluntary turnover during a return to office, and 37% of managers, directors and executives believing their organisation ran layoffs in the last year because fewer employees quit than expected. bamboohr.com.
[3] Jessica Coacci, 10 September 2025, Fortune, "Bosses admit they're using return-to-office mandates to trim down teams, without needing to announce layoffs". Source for the Federal Reserve's Beige Book published that month reporting that employers in multiple districts had encouraged attrition through return to office mandates. fortune.com.
[4] Computerworld, 17 September 2024, "Amazon CEO wants workers back in the office five days a week". Source for Andy Jassy's message to staff, the policy taking effect on 2 January 2025, and the previous three-day requirement. computerworld.com.
[5] Fortune, 10 January 2025, "JPMorgan tells staff to return to the office five days a week". Source for the policy starting in March 2025, the bank's roughly 300,000 employees, and more than half already coming in five days. fortune.com.
[6] Fortune Europe, 9 September 2024, on Santander UK's office mandate. Source for the memo to roughly 10,000 office-based staff requiring twelve days a month in the office from 2025, up from two days a week. fortune.com.
[7] Remote Work Europe, 30 September 2026, "Barclays delays three-day office mandate to 2027". Source for most UK staff moving from two office days to three and managing directors to four, the policy being due on 5 October 2026, and staff not having to meet it until the start of 2027. remoteworkeurope.eu.
[8] CIPD, 20 January 2025, "What are employers' return to the office plans for 2025?". Source for half of large employers having formal hybrid policies against 22% of SMEs, 25% of SMEs running hybrid informally and 26% unable to offer it, three days being the most common requirement, and 30% of large private sector employers with mandated days planning to increase them against 21% of SMEs. cipd.org.
[9] Department for Business and Trade, 2 October 2025, "Business population estimates for the UK and regions 2025". Source for SMEs employing 16.9 million people, 60% of private sector employment, large businesses the other 40%, the SME share remaining at 60% from 2024, and 4.3 million businesses, 75%, employing nobody besides the owners. gov.uk.
[10] Institute for Fiscal Studies, "Going solo: self-employment in today's labour market". Source for 8% of workers being self-employed in 1975, 12% by 2000 and 14% by 2019. ifs.org.uk.
[11] Office for National Statistics, 6 July 2022, "Understanding changes in self-employment in the UK: January 2019 to March 2022". Source for self-employment peaking at 5.0 million people in October to December 2019, 15.3% of total employment, and just over 4.2 million, 13.0%, in January to March 2022, and for the fall being "largely driven by people flowing out of self-employment to become employees", with net flows peaking at 165,000 in July to September 2020, most of them people reclassified in the same job. ons.gov.uk.
[12] House of Commons Library, 15 September 2026, "Employment in the UK: Economic indicators". Source for 4.53 million self-employed people in May to July 2026. The 34.6 million in work is the ONS figure for June to August 2026 in "Employment in the UK", 20 October 2026. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02796 and ons.gov.uk.
[15] Challenger, Gray and Christmas, August 2026, "Job Cut Announcement Report, July 2026". Source for 477,033 announced US job cuts in January to July 2026, down 41% on the 806,383 in the same period of 2025, AI cited in 112,713 of them, about 24%, as the top reason for the fifth month running, and technology announcing 149,023 cuts, up 67% on the 89,251 in the same period of 2025. challengergray.com.
[16] Layoffs.fyi, as reported by Fast Company and Attack of the Fanboy, 18 August 2026. Source for 122,606 tech workers laid off in 2025 and 125,759 in 2026 as of 6 August. attackofthefanboy.com.
[17] Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, revised 12 August 2026, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence", Stanford Digital Economy Lab, on ADP payroll data. Source for the 19% gap for workers aged 22 to 25 in highly exposed occupations as of June 2026 and the series starting in November 2022. digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canariesaug26.
[18] Office for National Statistics, 20 October 2026, "Labour market overview, UK". Source for 30.3 million payrolled employees in September 2026, down 66,000 on the year, vacancies at 691,000 in July to September 2026, down 21,000 on the quarter, and unemployment at 4.7%. ons.gov.uk.
[19] Retail Gazette, July 2026, "TikTok Shop hits 300,000 UK small business sellers as live sales surge", on figures confirmed by TikTok Shop, and NetInfluencer, 26 December 2025, reporting The Guardian on more than 200,000 UK small and medium businesses selling on it. Source for the two figures. retailgazette.co.uk and netinfluencer.com.
[20] Companies House, "Companies register activities, April 2025 to March 2026". Source for 815,277 company incorporations in the year, up 1.67% on the year before, and a register of 5,479,045 companies at the end of March 2026. gov.uk.