Signals for what’s next – and what matters
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Hey Reader,
“Grammar creates a God.” — Wittgenstein
If you’re reading this on your phone, you fear being replaced
The irony is that we spoke the language of machines long before they learned to speak ours. Long before AI threatened to automate us, we had already begun automating ourselves. We didn’t just digitize our habits. We internalized a worldview—one defined by engineering metaphors, financial logic, and startup speak.
This is the bizarre, tragi-comic recursive loop in the code of modern culture – we increasingly act machine-like only to have the machines come replace us. Now what do they say? The only “last mile skills” AI can’t replace are truly human ones: ethics, creativity, EQ, social capital, taste + curation, story-telling. The existential crisis we have is because we have disconnected from what us human and unique in the first place.
Artificial intelligence does not pose an existential risk because it’s moving so fast. The deeper danger isn’t acceleration—it’s reflection.
Culture that has been rewriting its definition of humanity for decades long before ChatGPT has come. The danger is how severely we underestimated the power of this shift in lexicon. It has not simply chronicled market dynamics but rather our civic values, our interior lives, and personal worth.
The 4 Metaphors Destroying Knowledge Workers
1. Engineering/Optimization Logic
“Your body is a system. Your mind is a process. You are a machine to be debugged.”
Result: You begin treating your own soul like a productivity dashboard. Knowledge workers are treated like machines who manage other machines. Their internal world becomes instrumentalized mere inputs and outputs and can be flattened into UI flows and Notion templates. People self quantify but can’t truly self express. Intuition, beauty, and the ineffable are laughable concepts.
2. Data/Tech Language
“Bandwidth,” “data-driven,” “signal vs. noise,” “information hygiene”
Result: Anything that can’t be measured—grief, beauty, mystery—gets discarded. The knowledge worker is treated as a node in a cognitive network—a processor of information, not a maker of meaning. You are expected to be always on, always signal-optimized, always legible to metrics.
3. Market & Brand Thinking
“You are human capital. You are a personal brand. You are your own product.”
Result: Your identity becomes a marketing campaign, and rest becomes a liability. Your very self becomes a product: scalable, “on message,” emotionally tidy. There is no life beyond monetizable assets – with sometimes disastrous but insidious complications. We’ve traded soul for sales funnels.
4. Startup/Innovation Mindset
“Fail fast. Pivot your life. Build in public.”
Result: You start viewing your life as a product in beta and its goal is your personal IPO. You never arrive—you just iterate forever. You have either “launch energy” or nothing.
The Crisis of the Knowledge Worker
Michael Sandel has argued that the lexicon of the market has overtaken civic life in America. He’s right—but it goes further than civic life. The language of finance and tech has not only colonized our public discourse. It has invaded our inner lives.
No one has suffered this loss more quietly than the modern knowledge worker. Once imagined as creative professionals or intellectual explorers, knowledge workers are now compliance nodes in information pipelines. They’re encouraged to think like:
- engineers (optimize)
- marketers (signal)
- managers (scale)
- startups (pivot)
- platforms (personal brand)
The soul becomes a dashboard. The self becomes a slide deck.And the result? Years of growing disembodied burnout now compounded with the new fear of being steamrolled by AI.
How These Metaphors Took Over
After the Cold War, there was no compelling collective mythology—no shared story of virtue, sacrifice, or transcendence. In the vacuum, two sectors rose to dominance: finance and tech.
The market was god: efficient, wise and morally neutral (no one to judge our actions). Who would not love that? Social goods are cost benefit challenges. Effective altruism was the new philosophy of altruism. Money became our most accepted proxy for value, success and even truth.
Tech promises the patina of frictionless utopia—faster, smarter, better. It reframes every human problem as a software bug or data challenge. Identity is flattened into user profiles, algorithms, and metrics (don’t believe me that this is a massive problem – just see the widespread angst over the failure of dating apps and our impending fertility crisis).
- Finance tells us what’s “valuable”
- Tech tells us what’s “possible”
- Business tells us what’s “realistic”
- And AI now tells us what’s “efficiently human”
But none of them tell us what’s sacred.
Efficiency became morality. Innovation became spirituality.
This problem of lexicon creep already infiltrated medicine as Sontag pointedly noted (the “war on cancer,” “illness as a passport” to another land). Now the same problem is coming for all of us.
Together, these two sectors didn’t just shape economies—they shaped worldviews. Yes, they are powerful and backed by capital, but the true attraction of these paradigms is they are clean and measurable. They avoid the messiness of life. Things can be quantified and shipped and tracked. People are the messiest form of leverage (which is true), so why not bypass them entirely (wrong) ?
If can’t be tracked, then why are you even paying attention to it bro?
But these metaphors create blind spots. When you use the language of:
- Data → You overlook mystery
- Markets → You overlook grace
- Optimization → You overlook awe
- Productivity → You overlook presence
So we buried the mess. We buried the longing. We buried the community
And now we wonder why AI feels like a threat. It’s not just replacing our jobs. It’s replacing the part of us we’ve already disowned.
Postscript
I would be the first to admit I have used many of these terms and metaphors myself. Many are quite useful.
But there’s a difference between using language and not being able to see past it. Then it becomes not illuminating but obscuring. This is not a Luddite argument but a linguistic one.
We became like machines just in time for the machines to out-human us in our dehumanized roles. It’s not that AI is too smart (although it probably is or will be soon). It’s that we were too willing to reduce ourselves to what AI could do better :
- Information without wisdom
- Language without soul
- Speed without stillness
- Processing without presence
The AI revolution may be inevitable. But how we survive it depends on the stories and symbols we protect.
Metaphors aren’t the problem. Adopting them uncritically is. Life on your own terms is not simply having work-life balance and financial freedom. It has to mean being able to think for yourself and craft personal meaning without reflexing regressing to default or consensus worldviews. That means we have to reject some of the dominant cultural scripts that enshroud the modern knowledge worker.
That’s not just freedom but true professional sovereignty.
Tomorrow Cant’ Wait
