Recently on LinkedIn, Senior AI Content Strategist Lena Großkortenhaus (formerly of BurdaForward) shared that despite eight years of expertise in SEO and AEO, she has been unemployed for seven months. Entire editorial departments are closing, teams are shrinking, and AI is taking over.
Lena Großkortenhaus—a very interesting family name, by the way—is just one of very many examples of people who have an academic education and, until recently, still had a guarantee that they would belong to the middle class or the upper middle class in the future too. That has now changed radically.
With Lena Großkortenhaus, I think you can see very clearly what happened: for a long time, so-called content marketing managers produced content mainly for search engines. That means they optimized the texts for algorithms—and above all, of course, for Google. Because in competitive thinking and in the logic of competition, only the top results count: only the top, the top one percent of the search results, gets clicked. And it’s similar in society, isn’t it: only the top can really live well, make decisions and is free. That is neoliberalism. For a long time, people like Lena Großkortenhaus were able to establish themselves quite well in this system, because they produced content for the top players that could achieve top results on Google.
Now, however, we are in a new phase of development. And in this phase, we no longer need people like Lena Großkortenhaus to produce content—because now, of course, AI, the algorithms, the software itself can write the best texts for other software. This is a new stage of what the anthropologist David Graeber already identified years ago, collected in his book and casually called “bullshit jobs”. Lena Großkortenhaus is a representative of the middle class who settled into such a bullshit job for a long time and probably lived in a bubble—believing that with this content marketing and the production of keyword-rich texts, she was making a meaningful contribution to society.
That, however, was an illusion, and now hard reality is setting in. The machines are now showing a large number of academics that in the end, it’s about completely different values—not just about the academic degree and great Google search results. Now it’s about listening more deeply within ourselves and asking what actually makes us human: Is it search results from algorithms for algorithms? Or is it perhaps things like flow, like connectedness with other people—not with AI—like truthfulness, empathy, critical thinking and many other things that make us who we are? It’s time now to remember what separates and distinguishes us humans from AI systems.
While the shrinking middle class on LinkedIn clings to vanishing careers, outside this bubble, single mothers and refugee women in particular are pushed into basic social security and old-age poverty.
My Ruhi course reminds me through Bahá’u’lláh’s words that a kindly tongue is "the bread of the spirit". So where is the constructive takeaway? The collapse of artificial corporate roles forces us to redesign work around human empathy and genuine social value aka T-SROI.
What small thing could this thought turn into today?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
