“The structure of industry and the balance of economic power matter. The worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution were eventually countered by a labour movement demanding that workers be treated better and receive more of the proceeds. Where employees have no power, they can expect to be squeezed or displaced. Where workers are more important and understood as essential and better represented, AIs may be deployed or developed in an augmentative fashion.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

This past week, Meta laid off another 8000 employees who found out via 4am emails. AI was cited as the reason. Yesterday, Webflow laid off a significant portion of their workforce, many who seem to report being locked out of their laptops with no explanation. Again, AI was cited as the reason. Cisco announced earlier this month that despite year-over-year revenue being up 12%, they were letting go of 4000 employees. Because AI.

The year isn't even half over and the tech industry has already seen around 150,000 layoffs in 2026. Amazon, Pinterest, Paypal, Intuit, Dell, Oracle, Cloudflare, Salesforc—the list goes on and on. And while AI might not have been the stated reason for all of these layoffs, it's certainly being used as a justifying reason for many of them. What was once thinly veiled as 'efficiency cuts' are now being outright touted as the result of companies going all in on AI. But whatever you want to call it, the point is that these companies do not care because they have no reason to. The only thing that matters to them is shareholder profit.

White collar workers have long resisted the idea that we need unions because we wanted to see ourselves as more important—more valuable to the companies we worked for. We told ourselves that we weren't just labourers, we were co-creators with the companies. It's all bullshit.

Tech workers need unionization and AI platforms need government regulation. These things need to be non-negotiables in our societal participation in AI.

“I would suggest that convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial." — Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction

This is an interesting argument about what is driving the takeover of tech in our lives. The platforms that win the attention game are the ones who make things easiest. Wu describes the concept of 'couch lock,' a stoner term for the inability to move once you get comfortable, as a way of understanding this. Shifting your attention off of a platform, let alone leaving it altogether, becomes a chore.

This makes me wonder about the things that are intentionally slower and more deliberate, things that maybe take a bit more effort. How do you get people to choose inconvenience?

"Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream... Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labour, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labour, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

"Perhaps the church is not so much the crumbling edifice we see but more a tent for the wandering people of God." (Soelle, Against the Wind)

I was reading a chapter this morning on Soelle's understanding of the church; and why she still feels apart of it. She references a conversation she had with Daniel Berrigan, who called the church a fairly inefficient umbrella. Despite getting a bit wet sometimes, 'it's there and I wouldn't want to do without it.'

She describes the necessary tension of holding the tendencies of the historical church towards both oppression and liberation, describing this as the tension between the church from above and the church from below. What's striking is despite the outright hate and dismissiveness that she personally received from the church throughout her career, she still sees a place within that tent:

“Now I feel much less alone in the church than I did some years ago… This momentum and its orientation carry me along, oriented toward reconciliation. My hope is for an end to the war between rich and poor that has shed and still sheds more blood than we can measure, and to the war between all of us and the earth who bears us. In this process I feel at home and borne by Christian tradition.”

As someone who has struggled to feel at home in the church for quite some time, I feel encouraged by this reminder that the church is not one thing and cannot be claimed by any one group. Yes, there can be hate and bigotry and selfishness but there is also love and kindness and self-sacrifice. The church holds both a history of oppression and liberation.

I am grateful for people like Soelle—and Berrigan—who spent their lives fighting for the latter even when the church itself turned against them.

"We need to remind ourselves that there was once a time when genetic technology did not determine the beginning—and nuclear technology the end—of life. People had a different relationship with pain and with themselves. They had fashioned a language which shared and made sense of pain." (Soelle, Against the Wind)

What do we lose if we lose our pain? This is a question that Soelle reflects on and positions it specifically in the history of the pains of birth. She reflects on the way that the technical world views pain as "an avoidable hazard," something that can be overcome or denied. For Soelle, this is a betrayal of what makes us human.

"We are neither machines nor beings domesticated to run the treadmill of consumerism. We are capable of suffering because we are capable of love. Activities like loving, suffering, giving birth, and dying are already a form of resistance against the imperatives of the economy under which we live." (Soelle)

What do we lose if we lose our pain? Our capacity to love, to hope, to fight for a better world? Perhaps.