I had sort of a weird realization lately. Once I lay it out, it’s so obvious that it makes me feel kind of stupid that it took me several months to realize.
Over the past few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about the approaching job crisis due to automation and AI. In recent months, it’s started to become apparent that this job crisis isn’t approaching: it’s arrived.
One of the voice that’s been ringing the alarm bells about this over the past few months is
, who recently appeared on The Majority Report to talk about it.Earlier this week, I was sitting at home after getting off work from my current job as a bartender, watching a few videos on YouTube before going to bed. Now, those who follow my podcasting or writing are probably tired of me saying this, so I’m sorry, but a quick refresher: I was doing a work-from-home email job for about three years until last November when my contract ended. After some soul searching, I decided that if the money was going to be roughly the same in service work as it was in soulless office work, I’d rather go with the service work. Thus, I ended up bartending.
The soulless job I had, which was honestly still much better than most soulless corporate jobs, was basic work with documents. I reviewed new business for an insurance company, made sure the paperwork was filled out correctly, and then issued those policies. If the paperwork was filled out incorrectly, I would reach out to the insurance agent and make them fix whatever they did wrong.
I started as a temp in 2021. The reason they were hiring temps was because they were planning to switch over to a new software and didn’t want to train a bunch of long term employees in the outdated software they’d be using for the next year or two. I was the last person remaining in that group of temps, and I was given some ambiguous indications that I could probably get hired on if I stuck with it long enough.
In 2024, the new software was finally rolled out, and they just went ahead and trained me on it, which I took as a sign that I could probably get hired on. This new software actually made my work more miserable because I did a lot less. The job was already a bit soul-sucking because, if things were going well, I literally would just be looking over documents, writing a short note that said “yup, everything looks good,” and then pressing the Issue button. With the new software, I would only ever look at documents if an error message popped up. If there were no errors, it would just get automatically accepted.
Those error messages were usually just bugs, so my job was just dealing with the occasional bug in an almost entirely automated system.
Abruptly, around the end of October or beginning of November, I was told that my contract would end sometime around the end of the year. The job I’d taken for granted was suddenly laying me off, and I’d wasted several years at a job out of a false hope they’d hire me. Again, I’m mostly glad I got out of that line of work because it was really damaging my mental health (of course, service work isn’t great for that either, but at least I’m doing something rather than sitting at home 40 hours a week). But it’s still hard not to be a little bit bitter with how things ended. I’ve also noticed that this type of work that used to dominate the job sites I’d look at—email jobs, data entry, document processing, etc.—are now slowly disappearing.
So as I sat on my couch watching that interview with Merchant, it all hit me and I felt like such a moron: I’m literally one of those people that lost their job to AI.
The precise term would probably be “automation” rather than AI because—as far as I know—the company isn’t using large language models, but it’s very much the same concept. I spent my last few months at that job double checking error messages on an almost entirely automated system. The robots took my job!!
I’m sure in the coming months and years, this will become an incredibly common story. I highly recommend Merchant’s Substack discussing this issue if you’re interested in this subject. What’s really strange to me is that this is something I’ve treated as a really abstract phenomenon that happens on charts and gets mentioned in big picture conversations about the capital-E Economy, but I hadn’t realized that it is already directly impacting me. It’s really easy to see your own fiscal situation as separate from the broader forces of economics and history; but each of our experiences are the particulars which make up these collective phenomena we witness in the news. I’m even more worried that this is happening now at a time when the federal government is captured by right wing forces that wish to cut any aid and support for those who are about to lose their jobs. Things are going to get ugly here soon.
Welcome to the media round-up, a newsletter where I (Josiah) tell you about everything I’m watching, reading, listening to, and writing.
New from me
I have three podcasts recorded right now, but none of them edited. I should be able to get one of them finished sometime tonight, so keep your eyes peeled for that, I guess.
I watched some more Final Destination movies
As I mentioned last week, Kelli is wanting us to watch all the Final Destination movies in preparation to go see the newest one which has been out for a week or two now and is getting a lot of praise. Over this last week, we were able to watch the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th films in the franchise.
These movies are sort of an endlessly interesting text. They sprung up in the Aughts and 2000s, sort of piggybacking off of the postmodern slasher birthed by the Scream franchise, and they’re sort of a perfect representation of that type of genre deconstruction: what if you had a slasher without a killer. There’s no Jason Voorhees, no Michael Myers, just the same gruesome deaths happening through a force of nature behaving like a Rube Goldberg machine. They’re nihilistic and mean-spirited movies in this sense. It’s funny that I think Roger Ebert’s famous moral objection to the Friday the 13th movies actually applies more aptly to the Final Destination movies:
“Just think of the message this film offers to it’s teenage audience. The world is a totally evil place, this movie says. It’ll kill you. It doesn’t matter what your dreams and hopes and ambitions are. It doesn’t matter if you have a new boyfriend or a new girlfriend or you’ve got plans for the future… you can forget those plans! Because you’re going to wind up dead. There is literally nothing else in this movie.”
In the Friday the 13th movies, there is a killer and you usually can escape the killer if you’re clever enough. But that’s not true in the Final Destination movies, for the most part. Almost every character that gets out of the previous movie, ends up dying in the next movie, and almost every happy ending is followed by a short epilogue scene where they all end up dead. Worse is that the bad guy here is just the vague concept of death and things entirely out of your control.
I don’t agree with Ebert’s moralism here, obviously. Even if that was all that was going on in Friday the 13th or Final Destination, I’d still be fine with it. I like plenty of nihilistic and mean-spirited movies, and I think teenagers can generally handle those movies fine. Plus, if you really hate a movie that deals with pointless and unexpected death, your beef is less with the movie and more with the real world—people die in unexpected and pointless ways all the time. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t understand wanting to prevent media from addressing themes like the unexpectedness of death. Even if we aimed this objection more at Final Destination and the horrible sense of fate around the death, a fate that doesn’t care about your dreams or ambitions or your new romantic partner, then your beef is more with one of the oldest concepts in Western storytelling and could also apply to Oedipus Rex.
The pointlessness of the death and the sense of fate around death, however, makes these goofy horror movies a really rich text to me. I think they are definitively the post-9/11 slashers. The first film having to do with a plane crash and being released a year before 9/11 was an accident, and it resulted more from deconstructing the concept of the slasher. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine 9/11 wasn’t vaguely on the mind in the following movies as the inciting incident behind every film is a giant, unexpected catastrophe: a plane explosion, a giant highway pile-up (that also includes an explosion), a roller coaster derailment, and then a crash at an auto race that explodes into the bleachers. In each case, one person has a vision of the approaching catastrophe and happens to save a few people before it happens. These people are marked for death and end up the fodder for a bunch of gruesome and highly improbable accidents that function like the kills in a slasher (sans masked killer).
There’s a pretty clear End of History thing going on here. The slasher used to represent a terrifying outsider intruding upon the suburbs and upon the American way of life. After the Cold War ended and American hegemony emerged triumphant, you get this postmodern turn, best captured in Scream where there isn’t one consistent killer. “It’s the millennium,” says one of the killers, “Motives are incidental.” There’s no narrative about America, no good guys vs. bad guys—just pointless, genre-referencing carnage.
The Final Destination movies build off that basic sentiment, but there is this ominous sense of intentionality behind everything. There’s a sense that you’re stuck inside a system and logic of death with no ability to really influence it outside of, maybe, understanding it. I don’t think anything in the franchise is a one-to-one parallel or metaphor, simply conjuring up the sense of fear around death in the Aughts. This is an era where teenagers are watching their former classmates go off to die in Iraq or Afghanistan. There’s constant fearmongering about a terrorist attack being around every corner. There’s an emphasis on survivor’s guilt for those who did live through events like 9/11, and maybe even a general acknowledgement that American culture had “premonitions” about 9/11 leading up to the actual attacks.1 I think part of the Final Destination movies’ success comes from the fact that they merge the Emmerich-style disaster thriller with a slasher.
As for the movies themselves, they’re all solid and fun little horror movies. The second one wants to hold onto the dark, mournful tone of the first movie while getting increasingly slapstick with the death scenes. This leads to a baffling amount of tonal whiplash like (SPOILERS UNTIL END OF PARAGRAPH:) the protagonist saving the day through a somewhat on-the-nose baptism metaphor where she sacrifices herself to save everyone and in the process is able to survive, only to be followed up by a mean-spirit final gag where a kid explodes when turning on a grill at a cook-out. Incredible.
The third film—the only one I’d seen before this recent viewing of the franchise—leans a lot more into the slapstick, Rube Goldberg machine death sequences. It’s a really fun movie. I think it’s probably my favorite of the three.
The fourth one, on the other hand, is just absolutely terrible. I have no idea what went wrong here. Part of it is that they lean into a bunch of 3D gimmicks that age horribly when you’re not watching it in theaters with glasses. The CGI is significantly worse than the previous films, the writing is incredibly wooden, and the acting is absolutely horrendous. Terrible movie.
Next up, I need to watch the fifth one and then, finally, try to catch the newest one in theaters.
Alright, on that note, I’ll see you all next week.
There’s a great scene in Adam Curtis’ documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head where he shows a footage from a bunch of pre-9/11 movies that showed similar images of urban destruction. We were watching movies about 9/11 before 9/11, to a point that watching 9/11 happen on the news sort of felt like watching a movie.
I haven't seen the new one yet but the fifth one is my personal favorite. Looking forward to reading your thoughts on it, as I think some of the themes you drew from the text are going to be extra potent in 5.