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The White-Collar Apocalypse is Now: How to Survive AI Doom

The White-Collar Apocalypse is Now: How to Survive AI Doom
Photo by A. C. / Unsplash


By Thomas Crown III

If one demographic had a moment in the pandemic era, it was the girlbosses.

A perfect storm emerged wherein media scaremongering busted up office spaces and work-from-home became a thing, while over at HR suddenly DEI reigned supreme.

The result? Thousands upon thousands of college-degreed women parlaying their humanities credentials into three hours a day of Teams meetings as Athleta replaced Ann Taylor as de rigueur business fashion for the 2020s.

As the workday became increasingly stacked with TikTok scrolling, Snapchatting or microvlogging meals for Instagram Reels, a mass corporate culling of these six-figure compensations was always an inevitability. Some referred to them as "lazy girl jobs," others as "woman daycare" noting that women were sacrificing fertility chasing careerism over motherhood—the irony being that their roles were essentially meaningless do-nothing make-work intended to feed consumerist lifestyles.

But as long as that direct deposit kept hitting, the girlbosses kept flexing their lifestyle inflation. That leased Audi Q3. The Equinox membership. One Postmates delivery from True Food kitchen, one Erewhon Hailey Bieber Smoothie at a time.


The corporate-issued MacBook might be festooned with stickers reading "feminist" or "plant mom" but the lid was seldom lifted past 3pm. For a while, it felt like a new normal—a truncated workday and a padded salary, without even having to show up to the office pretty and smelling like YSL Libre to uplift workplace morale.

a woman with a towel on her head using a laptop
"Average Six-Figure Salarywoman c. 2023, Colorized" Photo by Iryna Makarchuk / Unsplash


And then—on November 30, 2022—ChatGPT entered the chat.

At the time no one—certainly not your normie NPC "brand strategist"—understood its disruptive potential. But now that the dust has settled, the numbers don't lie. For the lazy girlboss (lazygirl boss?), it's unironically over.

The corporate guillotine has never been sharper. Swiftly, OpenText terminated 2,800 workers, Microsoft 15,000, Amazon 27,000, Meta 21,000. Salesforce shed 10 percent of its workforce and white-collar stalwarts like McKinsey, Deloitte, and Accenture quietly shed their bloated marketing and HR divisions, rebranded as “AI alignment.” The euphemisms may differ, but the reality remains stark: corporate America is dismantling its human overhead at scale.

The pattern was unmistakable: non-technical roles with bloated compensation were first to go. Brand strategists. DEI consultants. Content managers. All made redundant overnight by automation or exposed for never delivering ROI in the first place.

The personal fallout is sobering. Highly educated and formerly high-flying professionals now haunt LinkedIn with ghosted resumes, spinning shallow consultancies like "WordPress strategy" boutiques, funded by second mortgages, inheritance gambits and litigation-happy legal maneuvers.

Emanuelle—name altered to protect what little remains of her dignity—is a textbook example. She began her modest academic career at Cleveland State University, transferred to University of Missuori at St. Louis for English literature and then pursued an MA in International Journalism at City University London—chasing dreams of becoming the next Christiane Amanpour. Instead, she settled comfortably into content marketing, her career peaking in 2022 just as ChatGPT rolled out—enjoying a quarter-million-dollar annual compensation package working from home until her career became irrelevant overnight.

Suddenly, the pivot became unclear. "Just learn to code bro!" now read like an ancient trope, as lead developers stateside could deploy AI to generate lines faster and cheaper than a building full of software engineers in Bengaluru.


The moment ChatGPT entered the chat, the supply dynamics of creative brainpower flipped from scarcity to surplus. Suddenly, the labor of summarizing, emailing, scheduling, brainstorming, even writing, could be done by an unpaid ghost—faster, cheaper and with no PTO requests. The “strategic communications” career path that once shielded thousands behind vague titles and soft deliverables was now wide open to disruption. The tools weren’t coming for your job; your boss was already using them to do it without you.

For those caught in the crosshairs, there are two plays: level up or pivot out.

Leveling up means becoming AI-native, not AI-replaced. It’s not about resisting automation—it’s about standing atop it. If your writing job vanished, become the person who edits AI output for voice and tone. If you were a manager, become the operator who builds workflows using GPT prompts and Zapier integrations to do what ten interns used to. Learn enough Python to be dangerous. Learn enough branding to sell the results.

Pivoting out means trading your laptop-class status symbol for tangible leverage. Maybe you get a license: real estate, insurance, trades. Maybe you buy cash-flow from someone else’s burnout—an ice vending route, an eBay storefront, a laundromat. Maybe you film the process and turn your collapse into content—monetizing it through platform payouts, paid promotions, affiliate marketing or even mechandise sales. You do whatever it takes to exit the “inbox” economy and enter one where performance is visible, durable and hard to replace.

There will be no rescue packages for mid-level knowledge workers. Nobody is coming to save the girlboss, the content strategist or the DEI fellow. But there is a new aristocracy forming—one made up of execution-driven survivors who ditched the illusion of prestige and learned to thrive in a world run by machines.

All of which leaves us with the nagging feeling that perhaps we had it coming all along. Maybe a civilization of Zoom meetings and diversity workshops wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of Western achievement. Maybe chasing six figures to write unread newsletters and curate unreadable LinkedIn posts was never meant to sustain a free people in the first place.

Indeed, the whole spectacle resembles nothing so much as a booze-cruise shipwrecked on its own moral posturing—girlbosses and brand consultants tumbling off the deck into seas infested by merciless robo-sharks. The revolution wasn’t televised; it happened quietly in Slack threads and quarterly budget reviews, punctuated only by the sudden, deafening silence of all those vanished direct deposits.

So, fellow survivors of the white-collar apocalypse: embrace your newfound liberation. Go forth, armed with nothing more than an LLC, a tax ID and the shameless resolve of a used-car salesman. Become indispensable, irreplaceable and immune to automation. Because at this late stage, the only alternative is to pray the machines are merciful—and frankly, judging by their first victims, mercy ain't in the algorithm.

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Published by:

Thomas Crown III