Swarm virtues
"The Death of the Corporate Job" went viral on Substack: 3.3k likes in a few days (eventually went up to 20k, I think). I am pretty sure this was AI-generated. I don’t feel like posting about it though. It’s clear to me that this is a kid in his 20s, building an AI tool for career discovery; he sees this essay as marketing. It will probably bring him a lot of customers. He might possibly help a lot people. I’m sure he believes in his mission.
What irks me is that the essay has been instrumentalized. There are fake I’s with vague personal details. Intellectually, it’s a ripoff of Bullshit Jobs. There’s no structural clarity, and it loops through the same points multiple times. No tension. Flat voice. Awkward repetition. I understand why the writer did this, but I’m more concerned about the state of readers, because this piece’s popularity is really a reflection of mass readers.
It shows that most people care about the topic, and barely notice or care about how it’s written. What thye care about is having their pain validated. To go viral, write about mainstream pain. So if this is what the masses want, shouldn’t we not care about composition and just write psychology-targeted think pieces? I mean, if you want to just build an audience at the expenses of your own satisfaction, then yes, possibility. But the quality of your thinking, and the friction to derive something original and independent, gives you something more than fleeting popularity, it actually shapes your lens for the longterm, and you earn something that is transferrable outside of narrow social status games.